The NIV translates morphē theou in Philippians 2:6 as “being in very nature God,” assuming morphē means essence or nature. Yet classical sources consistently show morphē refers to outward form or appearance, not inner being. Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Philo all distinguish morphē from eidos, which denotes true essence. Morphē describes how something appears, not what it is. Therefore, Philippians 2:6 should not be read as a claim about Jesus’ divine essence, but as stating that he appeared—visibly and recognizably—to resemble one of the gods, behaving paradoxically in contrast to expectations of divine power and status.
The NIV is unusual in translating en morphēi theou hyparchōn in Philippians 2:6 as “being in very nature God,” but the translation nevertheless reflects a widespread and longstanding assumption that to be “in the form of God” means to share in his nature or essence or being.
Scholars know that this is problematic. The difficulty has been handled in different ways. For example, Vincent recognised that morphē would normally mean “shape” or “sensible appearance,” which cannot be applied to God, but argued that in this case it must mean “that expression of being which is identified with the essential nature and character of God, and which reveals it.”1 Jervell said that morphē “means the essence or substance of the deity. The classical Greek meaning ‘shape, external form, etc.’ has been stripped off.”2
So either the “form” is an expression of the essential nature of God, or the external aspect must be stripped away, like the husk of a seed, to disclose an inner essence of deity.
Support for the idea that morphē points to the inner reality of God has sometimes been found in Greek philosophical writings. Lightfoot said that morphē “must apply to the attributes of the Godhead. In other words, it is used in a sense substantially the same which it bears in Greek philosophy.”3 But when we examine the passages commonly adduced in the commentaries and dictionaries, which I will do here, the conclusion hardly seems sustainable.4
So I hold that there is no evidence that morphē ever means or stands for the nature, being, essence, or “essential mode of being” of what has the form; it always signifies the outward appearance of the thing. But I am neither a classicist nor a philosopher so my interpretation may be open to challenge. Let me know.
Plato, Phaedo 103e
It turns out, he said, that in the case of some such things, not only is the essence (eidos) itself always worthy of its own name forever, but also something else, which, although it is not that thing, nevertheless always has its form (morphēn) whenever it exists. (Plato, Phaed. 103e*)
Socrates is discussing the difference between “hot” and “fire” and between “cold” and “ice.” Snow will cease to be what it is when hot approaches, fire ceases to be what it is when cold approaches. In the explanation, it is the abstractions hot and cold that have the eidos—the type, nature, idea, essence; and the tangible phenomena, snow and fire, have the morphēn. So morphē is used not for the nature of anything, for which in this context eidos would be the appropriate term, but for the visible things that may be either hot or cold. There is an obvious relationship between the idea and the form, but the term morphē is used precisely to differentiate between the abstraction and the perceptible form it may take.
Plato, Republic 381c
The argument here is that when a body or object is in its best or ideal state, any change of form must be a degeneration. A god is “in excellent condition in every way,” but in that case a god “would be least likely to have many forms (morphas)” (381b). Any such change would entail a loss of excellence.
This is very clearly a conversation about whether a god would make himself “visible sometimes in one form, sometimes in another, and then again becoming himself, changing his appearance into many forms (morphas), then deceiving us and making us believe he has done so” (380d).
So it is impossible for a god to want to change himself: “but, as it appears, being the best and most noble possible, each of them always remains simply in his own form (morphēi)” (381c*).
Here, there can be no doubt that morphē refers to the external appearance of a god. The morphē may be a true representation of the god, but it may also be a false representation. The argument depends on there not being a necessary equivalence between form and reality,
Aristotle, Metaphysics 11.2.13 1060b
Further, is there anything apart from the whole, or not? I mean the substance (hylēn) and that which is together with it. For if not, then all things in substance (hylēi) are perishable; but if there is something, it would be the appearance (eidos) and the form (morphē). Now, it is difficult to determine for which things this is so and for which it is not; for in some cases it is clear that the appearance (eidos) is not separable, as in the case of a house.
Here Aristotle differentiates between the matter or substance (hylē) of a thing and its eidos and morphē. Substance is not a universal thing; it is a “particular and separable thing,” the stuff from which an object is made. Perhaps eidos is to be distinguished from morphē as the “idea” of a thing and its external “form,” as in Plato, but it seems more likely that they are roughly synonymous in this argument: they are what make the object recognisable as a house, for example. They signify outward appearance, functionality, etc.
Aristotle, Physics 2.1 193b
Therefore, nature would be, in another way, the form (morphē) and the shape (eidos) of things that have within themselves the principle of motion—not as something separate, but only in terms of definition.
In this case, Aristotle has differentiated between nature as the underlying “substance” (hylē) of “all things that have in themselves the principle of movement and change” and nature as the “form” (morphē) that a thing has—“the ‘kind’ of thing it is by definition” (193a). He compares this with the distinction between the physical material that is potentially a “bedstead” and the “outward appearance” (eidos) that the formed object has. In other words, morphē refers to the outward or perceptible appearance of the natural object.
Aristotle, Parts of Animals 2 646a-b
For everything that comes to be comes from something and comes to be something, and the process goes from a starting point to an end point—from the first mover, which already has a certain nature, to some form (morphēn) or some such end; for a human begets a human, and a plant begets a plant, from the matter underlying (hypokeimenēs hylēs) each. Therefore, in terms of time, matter and generation are necessarily prior; but in terms of reason, being (ousian) and the form (morphēn) of each thing are prior.
The same distinction between “underlying matter” and “form” is found in this discussion of the process of generation. The morphē is what distinguishes the end product (a house, a person, a plant) from the material out of which it is generated. In this argument there is a close relationship between the “being” (ousia) and the “form” (morphē) of each thing, because logically they precede the process of generation from matter. But they are not synonymous terms. The thing has its being as the product of generation, but it is the morphē—the outward appearance, structure, design, functionality—that marks it out as a house or person or plant.
Plutarch, Platonic Questions 4 1003a-b*
Plutarch argues that intelligent soul gives shape to the “amorphous (amorphon) body” of the cosmos: “the formless (amorphos) and indeterminate matter (hylē), having been shaped (schēmatistheisa) by the soul that is present, acquired such a form (morphēn) and disposition.
Plutarch, Obsolescence of Oracles 35 429a*
Similarly, Plutarch says that the “shape” or “outward appearance” (eidos) of a thing is “not the elimination of the substance (hylēs) but a form (morphē) and order of what underlies it.”
Philo, Special Laws 1.328*
The sacred pillars of the law declare these people to be ‘broken.’ For just as what is broken has been deprived of its quality and form (eidos), and is nothing other than, strictly speaking, formless matter (amorphos hylē), so too the opinion that destroys the Ideas confuses everything and reduces it to the higher substance of the elements—that formless (amorphon) and quality-less substance.
When a thing is broken, it loses its “form”; it becomes “formless matter.” The form is the particular shape or appearance of the thing. So in the allegorical interpretation, when ideas are broken, they are reduced to a substance that has neither form nor quality.
Conclusion
For Plato, the chief distinction is between the idea or ideal state (eidos) of a thing and the particular “form” that it may take in the physical world. The discussion of the many forms that the gods are thought to take directly supports my argument that to the Greek mind Jesus would have appeared to have been “in the form of a god” (Phil. 2:6)—but he behaved counter-intuitively.
For Aristotle, Plutarch, and Philo, the distinction is between the underlying and inherently amorphous material of a thing and the external or perceptible form that is given to it by nature or by craftsmanship.
In every instance, morphē denotes the shape or appearance that the god or person or object has. That form may or may not conform to—be consistent with—the underlying or intrinsic nature or character of the god or person or object. But we cannot strip away the reference to outward appearance to leave only the inward aspect. The meaning of the statement depends on morphē not referring to the underlying nature, essence, or being of whatever it is that has the form. So the use of morphē forces us to consider how Jesus appeared to observers.
- 1
M. R. Vincent, Philippians, 57-58.
- 2
J. Jervell, Imago Dei. Gen 1, 26 f. im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und in den paulinischen Briefen (1959), 228.
- 3
J. B. Lightfoot , Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (1878), 167.
- 4
See also Andrew Perriman, In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul (2022), 74-82.
The sting of the objection rests on a single lexical claim: in pagan and philosophical Greek, morphē designates only the visible contour of a thing, never its inward constitution; therefore Paul, by writing ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων, meant that Christ merely “looked like” a god. A closer audit of both diachronic usage and Pauline style shows that this premise is philologically precarious and that the common trinitarian construal—namely, that morphē theou here denotes the mode of existence that is proper to God himself—is not only possible but demanded by the syntax of the hymn and by the semantic development of the word-group in Hellenistic Greek.
Classical Greek indeed contrasts morphē and eidos on occasion, but the distinction is neither rigid nor uniform. In the Metaphysics Aristotle can write that “the form (morphē) and the essence (eidos) are the same” (Met. 1032b1–2), while in Physics 2.1 he twice defines nature as “the morphē and eidos according to the logos” (193a30–b8), treating the terms as virtual synonyms for the inner organising principle that makes a thing what it is. Aristotle frequently employs morphē to signify not merely external form but the essential actualization of potentiality—what makes a thing authentically itself rather than superficially appearing as such. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, morphē is integral in describing an entity’s identity, reality, and definitional nature, thus implying a more profound ontological dimension than mere externality. Plato likewise blurs the boundary: in Republic 381c, the god is said to remain ἀπλῶς ἐν τῇ αὑτοῦ μορφῇ, “simply in his own morphē,” precisely because the form is intrinsic to divine identity. In Plato’s usage, although morphē often contrasts with eidos to differentiate particular visible instances from universal forms, this does not inherently restrict morphē to superficial or deceptive appearances. Rather, it can indicate a legitimate manifestation consistent with intrinsic identity. The category is not a husk that can be stripped away, but the stable configuration of qualities by which a being is itself. To read morphē as a mere optical façade is, therefore, to impose upon the corpus a neatness that the corpus does not sustain.
Moreover, the analysis provided inappropriately generalizes the classical distinction between morphē and eidos. It neglects contexts where morphē denotes essential defining characteristics integral to a thing’s identity and existence. Philo’s allegorical interpretation, cited within the argument itself, indeed underscores this nuanced usage. He describes morphē not simply as external appearance imposed upon matter but as the meaningful structuring that gives shape and definition to otherwise amorphous substance. Thus, morphē, even within classical sources, is clearly capable of connoting inherent, defining essence, rather than merely superficial form.
When we leave the Attic canon and move into the koine, the semantic centre of the field shifts still further from “shape” and nearer to “status, condition, mode of existence.” BDAG notes for Philippians 2:6 that morphē means “the distinctive nature or character of something,” citing exactly our verse; LSJ, supplementing earlier printings, now records “the form proper to a thing, its nature.” This extension is not late Christian innovation; it is already visible in Plutarch, who can speak of the soul imparting morphē to amorphos hylē in order that it might become cosmos (Plat. Quaest. 4 1003a–b). Nor is such usage limited to philosophical prose. In the LXX Job’s theophanic visitor has “the morphē of a man” (Job 4:16), yet the context makes clear that what is perceived is no ordinary silhouette but a self-manifestation of supernatural reality. Morphē, by the first Christian century, had come to carry a breadth of reference wide enough to include both aspect and ontological quality, depending on context.
Nothing in Philippians 2 invites the narrowest sense; much argues against it. First, the participle ὑπάρχων presents Christ as already and continuously being “in morphē of God” before the act of κένωσις. A merely external semblance would be narratively pointless, for what would it mean for the pre-existent Son to relinquish only a pretence? Secondly, the hymn’s antithetic parallelism demands that morphē be read with semantic parity in the two cola: Christ is first ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ and then λάβων μορφὴν δούλου. No one imagines that in v. 7 he only appeared to be a slave while secretly retaining high social status; the morphē doulou denotes a real condition of servitude, enacted in life and death. Unless Paul is guilty of a glaring shift of sense within two lines, morphē theou must signal an equally real mode of being—one appropriate to God.
When contextualizing morphē theou within the theological framework of Philippians 2:6-7, the inadequacies of interpreting morphē as mere appearance become starkly evident. The Apostle Paul’s rhetorical purpose in the Christological hymn explicitly contrasts Christ’s pre-existent state of divine exaltation (morphē theou) with his incarnate state of humility (morphē doulou). If morphē theou indicated merely an external resemblance to divine beings, Paul’s rhetorical point regarding Christ’s humility and self-emptying would collapse. Genuine humility requires the relinquishment of real, substantial status—not the mere alteration of outward appearance. Paul’s theological argument about Christ’s kenosis (self-emptying) is predicated upon Christ authentically possessing divine nature and willingly laying aside divine prerogatives to adopt human nature genuinely and fully.
Further linguistic evidence within the immediate Pauline context supports the ontological significance of morphē. The parallel use of morphē doulou in verse 7, indicating Christ’s authentic human condition, strongly suggests a parallel understanding of morphē theou as indicating Christ’s authentic divine condition. To maintain interpretative coherence, morphē in both phrases must denote authentic ontological states, rather than mere external appearances. Paul’s deliberate parallelism between divine and servile forms underscores his theological intent to emphasize the profoundness of Christ’s humility precisely through his genuine possession and voluntary surrender of divine nature.
The appeal to ἴσα θεῷ, rendered “equal with God,” as though it spoke merely of two “forms” fitting together, ignores the idiom of isos plus the dative in contemporary literature, where it regularly marks parity of rank or honour (cf. Josephus, Ant. 19.343: Herod being accorded timēn isēn theō). The point is not geometrical congruence but status equivalence. Paul’s argument, therefore, is precisely that Christ, though enjoying parity of dignity with God, refused to treat this as a prize to exploit.
Nor can the rhetorical texture of the hymn be divorced from Jewish monotheistic discourse. The “name above every name” (v. 9) alludes to Isaiah 45:23, YHWH’s self-oath that to him “every knee shall bow.” By quoting that doxology and applying it to Jesus, Paul locates Christ within the unique kyriotic prerogatives of Israel’s God, not alongside them as a secondary deity. The morphē theou is the narrative premise that underwrites the audacity of that quotation; it is a claim about the Son’s inclusion in the divine identity, not a claim about spectacular theophany alone.
The broader Pauline corpus corroborates the traditional interpretation. Paul’s consistent presentation of Christ as authentically divine (Colossians 1:15-20, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13) underscores the necessity of understanding morphē theou as inherently indicative of essential divine identity, rather than superficial resemblance. Moreover, Paul’s Jewish monotheistic background, which unequivocally affirmed the uniqueness and indivisibility of God’s nature, renders the notion of Christ as merely appearing “godlike” untenable. To claim Christ existed en morphē theou necessarily implies authentic divine nature within Paul’s monotheistic theological framework, not merely external similarity to divine beings.
Finally, the early reception of Philippians 2 corroborates the Trinitarian reading. Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 110) can speak of “our God Jesus Christ…who was in the Father’s form (morphē)” (Eph. 7.2), a witness far earlier than the fourth-century councils. No sub-Nicene writer treats morphē theou as a mere semblance; all assume it denotes the pre-incarnate glory that the Son relinquished in taking flesh.
In sum, the lexical data do not confine morphē to outward show, and the literary logic of Philippians 2 makes that narrow restriction impossible. Paul confesses that Christ, eternally subsisting in the mode of being that is proper to God, entered the contrary mode of existence proper to a slave, and by that voluntary descent revealed the character of true deity. The trinitarian interpretation is thus not a post-biblical accretion but the most coherent account of the text’s grammar, semantics, and theological horizon.
@József X.:
I’ll stick to the matter at hand.
You are right to point out that in an idealist Platonic metaphysics morphē is differentiated from eidos as abstract idea or ideal. In an empiricist Aristotelian metaphysics morphē is synonymous with eidos but differentiated from hylē, matter, instead. In both cases, however, morphēsignifies the particular form that a thing takes. It is simply being contrasted, in these different philosophical systems, with different things—the abstract idea of the thing on the one hand, the substance of which a thing consists on the other.
Aristotle frequently employs morphē to signify not merely external form but the essential actualization of potentiality—what makes a thing authentically itself rather than superficially appearing as such.
Explain how that works in a particular instance. The external form of a bed is not a superficiality. It is essential to what a bed is as distinct from a heap of timber, but the form is not the timber.
Jesus was not “merely” in the form of a god. That is, I argue, a Greek way of assessing what is integral to the Gospel narratives: that there was an air of divinity about him, that he performed miracles, that he spoke with extraordinary wisdom, etc. That is all profoundly significant as far as the early evangel went.
You keep using words like “mere,” “superficial,” “façade,” but that misses the point. There is nothing intrinsically trivial or deceitful about the form that a person or thing has. It’s just that the creator God does not have a form.
Plato likewise blurs the boundary: in Republic 381c, the god is said to remain ἀπλῶς ἐν τῇ αὑτοῦ μορφῇ, “simply in his own morphē,” precisely because the form is intrinsic to divine identity.
The god certainly has a true form in Plato’s argument—one that is intrinsic to his or her “divine identity.” But that form is still the outward appearance or display of the god. The gods of Greece and Rome all had forms. The God of the Jews had no form for Jesus to be in.
You say that Philo “describes morphē not simply as external appearance imposed upon matter but as the meaningful structuring that gives shape and definition to otherwise amorphous substance.” I’d agree with that, but I would point out that he uses morphē metaphorically or allegorically. We might talk about the form of an argument with reference to the particular order or structure that has been given to the underlying “matter” or “substance”—again, a metaphor.
So is “form of God” a metaphor? Well, if we say that Jesus was metaphorically in the form of God, we would have to assume that God has a perceptible form, and outward appearance, that has been transferred to Jesus as the more abstract object. That simply doesn’t work.
So I don’t think you have shown that “morphē, even within classical sources, is clearly capable of connoting inherent, defining essence, rather than merely superficial form.” If morphē tells us something about the ontology of God, it can only do so by way of reference to his outward appearance.
BDAG’s “distinctive nature or character of something” tells us nothing if the only instance is Philippians 2:6. In any case, I have discussed above all the passages I know of which have been taken as evidence for the ontological sense that you insist upon.
I discussed the Plutarch passage above. The distinction between morphē and hylē holds. The soul shapes (schēmatistheisa) the formless matter and gives it morphē—the perceptible, ordered, structured cosmos. Yes, there is a correlation between form and nature, but that is a correlation between outward appearance and nature. We can’t drop the outward appearance part.
In Job 4:16 LXX Eliphaz (not Job) says that a spirit came upon him. His hair stands on end, he gets goosebumps. He hears a voice but he sees no morphē. That is, nothing appears before his eyes; the spirit has no outward appearance. This confirms my argument. Morphē signifies the external, perceptible form of a thing. The Greek text does not say that he saw a strangely supernatural “form of a man.” The Hebrew text is different.
@Andrew Perriman:
Your recent reply is thoughtful, and I appreciate your insistence on engaging directly with the philosophical and lexical dimensions of morphē. However, your interpretation continues to rest on a reductionistic assumption that does not adequately capture the semantic development of the term in its Hellenistic and Pauline context. I will address your main assertions in order and show that your reading, while coherent within a limited classical frame, ultimately fails to account for the theological and literary logic of Philippians 2:6–7.
You maintain that in both Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, morphē consistently signifies the “particular form” or external appearance a thing takes—contrasted either with eidos (ideal) or hylē (matter). However, this distinction, while lexically plausible within specific philosophical systems, is neither exclusive nor stable across broader Greek usage. You yourself cite Aristotle’s Parts of Animals (2.1, 646a-b) as evidence that morphē may relate to the essence of a thing in terms of its formal cause. Aristotle writes there that “in terms of reason, being (ousia) and morphē of each thing are prior.” That prioritization is ontological: the morphē is what makes the product what it is—not merely what it looks like. This is not about mere “shape” as something visual or accidental, but about structure, identity, and definition. When Aristotle aligns morphē with ousia, he is not describing a facade, but the actualization of a thing’s essence.
You ask me to “explain how that works in a particular instance,” referring to the bed example. Indeed: the form of a bed (morphē) is not the wood (hylē), but neither is it a mere visual shell. It is the structured intelligibility by which we recognize the thing as a bed. It is what actualizes the material, what gives it its “bedness.” This is a classic Aristotelian notion: morphē is not “outward appearance” in the modern sense of an external casing but the internal configuration that determines identity. That is not superficial, and in metaphysical analysis, it is not separate from what the thing is.
You then pivot to Jesus, arguing that he was not “merely in the form of a god,” but had a divine aura—working miracles, speaking divine words, etc.—and that this visible manifestation sufficed for early Christian claims. This seems to reduce Paul’s Christological statement to phenomenology—Jesus looked divine to observers. But this explanation undercuts the kenotic thrust of Philippians 2:6–7. Paul is not commenting on Jesus’ impact on human perception. He is not saying that Jesus had the reputation of divinity but humbled himself. He is saying that he was in the morphē of God and did not consider equality with God something to be exploited. That is ontological language, not sociological observation. The morphē of God, in Pauline usage, precedes and grounds the voluntary kenōsis. Jesus does not merely “act” divine—he is divine, and precisely because he is, his humility is theologically meaningful.
Your assertion that “the Creator God does not have a form” reflects a theological assumption drawn from Jewish aniconism, not from Paul’s Christology. But Paul is not denying divine transcendence. Rather, he is asserting that whatever manner of divine existence can be analogically ascribed to the preexistent Christ, that is what he possessed before emptying himself. You suggest that morphē theou must refer to visible appearance, but the God of Israel, whom Paul worshiped, is never described in Scripture as having any visible form to begin with. Therefore, for Paul to say that Christ was in the morphē of God cannot refer to a perceptible shape, but to a manner of existence proper to God. This is a point where your reading breaks down: if morphē necessarily refers to perceptibility, and the true God has no perceptible form, then Paul’s statement becomes nonsensical.
You argue that Philo’s use of morphē is allegorical, and thus cannot support a real, ontological reading. But metaphor is not the negation of ontology. Philo often uses metaphor to describe real ontological relationships. His statement that morphē gives shape and intelligibility to matter confirms that the term was capable—within Hellenistic Jewish thought—of denoting more than mere shape. It was a category of intelligible structure and essence, not an optical illusion.
Your comments on Job 4:16 LXX are also misplaced. The Greek explicitly says that Eliphaz saw (eidos) but could not recognize a morphē—the morphē eluded his recognition. That is precisely the opposite of your conclusion. The word morphē is not used to describe a visible entity; it is what he failed to see, even though a figure passed before him. This only reinforces that morphē is not limited to visual contours—it is more elusive and essential than that.
Your final claim—that BDAG’s definition “tells us nothing” because it depends on this single passage—is incorrect. Lexicons do not fabricate definitions based on isolated texts; they aggregate semantic ranges across corpora. BDAG’s gloss of morphē as “the distinctive nature or character of something” reflects usage in Koine Greek broadly—not a doctrinal bias. LSJ, in its supplement, likewise includes “the nature proper to a thing” as a possible sense. The semantic shift from classical to Koine Greek must be acknowledged: by the first century, morphē had widened to include status, condition, and ontological reality.
More crucially, your argument continues to ignore the parallelism in Philippians 2:6–7. Christ was in the form of God, then he took the form of a servant. Unless Paul is engaging in rhetorical sleight of hand, the two uses of morphē must be symmetrical. Morphē doulou in verse 7 undeniably refers to real, embodied servitude. It is not a metaphor. It is not how Jesus “seemed.” It is what he became. To maintain parallelism, morphē theou must refer to what he was—not seemed, not resembled, not impersonated. The contrast, therefore, is not between appearing divine and appearing human, but between being divine and becoming human. Paul’s whole point is that Christ’s humility is anchored in real divine prerogatives being voluntarily renounced. That is the very core of the kenosis.
Finally, your suggestion that the morphē of God is a metaphor that cannot work because God has no “perceptible” form misses the doctrinal revolution that Philippians 2 articulates. It is precisely because the God of Israel is formless and unrepresentable that Paul’s claim is astonishing: that Christ, being in the morphē of God, did not exploit his equality but emptied himself. This does not imply that God has a body—it asserts that the Son possessed the mode of being proper to God and renounced its manifestation in order to assume the mode proper to a servant. That is not Platonic façade, but incarnational descent.
In short, your restriction of morphē to visible appearance cannot withstand the combined pressure of linguistic development, semantic parallelism, theological coherence, and early Christian interpretation. Paul is not merely recounting that Jesus looked divine—he is proclaiming that the one who was God emptied himself to become man. That is the scandal and glory of Philippians 2.
@József X.:
We will have to draw this to a close soon, but thank you for persevering. It’s helpful.
your interpretation continues to rest on a reductionistic assumption
Yes, that is the whole point. Theology has over-interpreted morphē theou. The argument we are having here is over whether there is any lexicological basis for the over-interpretation. I don’t think there is, therefore we need to reduce interpretation to the proper dimensions of the term as it was used before and around the time of Paul.
your reading, while coherent within a limited classical frame
But I thought your contention was that the ontological interpretation could be found in “elevated and philosophical contexts.” Now you are saying that my reductionistic reading is coherent within these classical contexts and “specific philosophical systems”?
You yourself cite Aristotle’s Parts of Animals (2.1, 646a-b) as evidence that morphē may relate to the essence of a thing in terms of its formal cause.
No, that’s not what I said. I said: “The thing has its being as the product of generation, but it is the morphē—the outward appearance, structure, design, functionality—that marks it out as a house or person or plant.” Aristotle differentiates both being and form from the process of generation, but he does not confuse the two. He does not align form and being.
I also made the point that you are unfairly reducing my argument to “mere” outward appearance, “façade,” etc. The “form of a house” consists in its outward appearance or structure, but that obviously entails its functionality—door, windows, roof, etc. Likewise for a bed. What makes it a bed and not merely a random aggregation of timbers is its form as purposeful structure. But in none of these examples is the thing that has form invisible or—obviously—amorphous. Form always exists in contrast to either unformed matter or an abstract idea of the thing.
and that this visible manifestation sufficed for early Christian claims
Again, this is not what I said. My argument is that the opening of the encomium captures rhetorically a pagan or post-pagan perspective on the Jesus presented in the Synoptic Gospels. Such a way of speaking about him would not have been “sufficient” for Paul as a Jewish apostle, but the encomium opens a window on how Greeks might have initially categorised Jesus—exactly as the people of Lystra initially took Paul and Barnabas to be the gods Hermes and Zeus. You can complain that this reduces the statement to phenomenology. I would say that it reduces theology to history. And that’s good.
this explanation undercuts the kenotic thrust
But only on the assumption that morphē means nature, or some such, and that “emptied himself” must be understood ontologically. But if morphē doesn’t mean “nature” and Jesus empties himself of selfish ambition and vain conceit, as in Philo’s use of the trope, then that assumption is nullified.
That is ontological language, not sociological observation.
That’s simply not true. It’s historical language. The Greeks had plenty to say about the forms of the gods. Greeks and Jews had plenty to say about how kings in particular might attain honours equal to those enjoyed by the gods. This, and not the much later language of substance and being, was the natural linguistic environment of Paul’s mission.
This is a point where your reading breaks down: if morphē necessarily refers to perceptibility, and the true God has no perceptible form, then Paul’s statement becomes nonsensical.
Have you not been following? Morphē is never less than the outward appearance of a thing. The true God of Israel had no perceptible form. Therefore, we must translate, “being in the form of a god”—appearing to the Greek mind as the epiphany of a god or as a divine man like Heracles.
Philo often uses metaphor to describe real ontological relationships.
Of course, we all do, all the time. But it’s a mistake to read the ontology of the thing described back into the metaphor.
Here’s Job 4:16 LXX and how I translate it:
ἀνέστην, καὶ οὐκ ἐπέγνων· εἶδον, καὶ οὐκ ἦν μορφὴ πρὸ ὀφθαλμῶν μου, ἀλλ̓ ἢ αὔραν καὶ φωνὴν ἤκουον…
I stood up and did not perceive [the spirit]; I looked, and there was not a morphēn before my eyes, but I heard a breeze and a voice.
The morphē is something that he expected to appear before his eyes. But there was nothing to see, only a sound to be heard. There is no “figure” passing before him. There was no form, nothing to be seen.
Your final claim—that BDAG’s definition “tells us nothing” because it depends on this single passage—is incorrect.
I don’t trust lexicons that don’t provide the evidence. It’s all very well claiming that they “aggregate semantic ranges across corpora,” but there still has to be some reason for saying that the word sometimes means something other than the outward appearance or structure of a thing. Otherwise it’s guesswork. I have seen no evidence that in the first century morphē was used to speak of something intangible, abstract, and invisible apart from the outward appearance of the thing.
More crucially, your argument continues to ignore the parallelism in Philippians 2:6–7.
I disagree. Jesus appeared to people initially as a god in the way he spoke and acted; he then appeared to them in the form of a slave (not a servant)—not least in his utterly degrading death on a Roman cross. History, not theology.
Morphē doulou in verse 7 undeniably refers to real, embodied servitude.
No, Jesus was no more really or literally a slave than he was really or literally a god.
Finally, your suggestion that the morphē of God is a metaphor that cannot work because God has no “perceptible” form misses the doctrinal revolution that Philippians 2 articulates.
That just begs the question that I have been trying to answer.
@Andrew Perriman:
Thank you for the thoughtful reply and the tone of scholarly engagement. I respect your desire to “reduce interpretation to the proper dimensions of the term as it was used before and around the time of Paul.” However, your approach both misrepresents the semantic elasticity of morphē in its historical context and prematurely flattens a richly textured theological hymn into mere Hellenistic epiphanic language. Let me respond comprehensively.
You insist that morphē “is never less than the outward appearance of a thing,” and that any ontological reading is anachronistic “over-interpretation.” But this assertion overlooks the progressive development of semantic range in Koine Greek and particularly the rhetorical and theological usage Paul deploys here. Even in classical Greek—your baseline—you acknowledge that morphē refers not to mere façade but structured form with functional integrity: “door, windows, roof.” This already goes beyond visuality and into intelligibility and purpose. Yet you limit this intelligibility strictly to physical and functional configuration. The problem is, Philippians 2 is not discussing the “functional morphology” of beds and houses. It is speaking of Christ in pre-existence. What visible features or utilitarian structure, then, are you imagining? Paul is not describing a mythological deity with flowing hair and bronze skin. He is describing one who existed in morphē theou prior to becoming human. That morphē thus cannot denote perceptible visuality, since (as you rightly note) the God of Israel is not visible. You yourself collapse the sense by suggesting we should read it as “being in the form of a god”—but then this either clashes with Jewish monotheism (which Paul presupposes), or reduces Paul’s statement to a vague echo of Greco-Roman popular piety, which the surrounding hymn utterly contradicts.
Indeed, the fundamental incoherence of your reading becomes apparent when you affirm that Christ was not “really or literally a god,” nor “really or literally a slave.” But this fails to account for Paul’s structured antithesis. Christ is first in morphē theou, then in morphē doulou. These two modes of being are intentionally juxtaposed. If both are metaphorical, the contrast collapses. If neither is real, then no kenosis has occurred. If only one is real (servitude), then the narrative has no theological force. You claim Paul was not using ontology, but “history.” Yet history is precisely what makes Paul’s claim so striking: that the one who truly existed in divine dignity (whatever the visible or invisible form of that existence) entered into real abasement—even unto death. Your reading strips the text of its scandal, reducing it to a story about appearances and social perceptions, when Paul is at pains to emphasize the real descent from divine dignity to human abasement.
Your treatment of Job 4:16 LXX reinforces rather than undermines the broader argument. You say “there was no morphē before my eyes,” and conclude this proves that morphē refers to visible form. But what the passage indicates is not that morphē was a visible form, but that it was not present—that is, the thing lacked form even though some encounter occurred. The term is not equated with optical contours but with a fuller kind of presence that transcends mere visibility. Moreover, in Koine usage—and certainly in early Christian paraenesis—morphē had undergone significant expansion. Plutarch (as already noted) can refer to morphē as that which gives cosmos its ordered reality (Quaest. Plat. 1003a). In Paul’s contemporary world, morphē had moved from concrete to abstract—from structure to status, from outline to identity.
You argue that BDAG’s gloss “tells us nothing” because it does not give sufficient examples. But that is a misunderstanding of how lexicons function. BDAG reflects the work of multiple scholars tracking morphē’s usage across a wide textual corpus—from classical Greek to Hellenistic Jewish writings to Christian texts. When it defines morphē in Phil. 2:6 as “the essential form which truly characterizes a given reality,” it does so based not on theological bias but on accumulated usage. You ask for examples beyond Philippians 2—consider again Job 4:16; consider Philo’s discussion where morphē is the structuring principle imposed on formless matter (De opificio mundi 25–26); consider Plutarch’s morphē psychēs; or simply note the internal logic of the hymn: morphē theou parallels morphē doulou. If one is real condition, so must the other be. Your refusal to accept the symmetry is a theological judgment disguised as historical exegesis.
Regarding your historical framing: I find it implausible that Paul is here “echoing how Greeks might have initially categorised Jesus.” The immediate context of Philippians 2:6–11 is a call to Christian humility grounded in the incarnation, not a Greco-Roman misperception. Paul is not filtering Christ through the eyes of Lystra’s crowd but presenting him as the paradigm of obedience. The phrase en morphē theou hyparchōn functions as the theological premise from which kenosis proceeds. If this is just about pagan misidentification—Jesus “seemed divine”—then Paul’s entire argument is undermined: one cannot relinquish what one never possessed. The humility of Christ becomes merely theatrical. It is because Christ was truly equal with God (isa theō, idiomatically expressing status parity) that his self-emptying is meaningful.
The further claim that Paul’s use of morphē is historically situated within Greco-Roman categories of divine man or kingly epiphany does not rescue your reading. Those categories do exist—but Paul reconfigures them. He does not merely repeat cultural clichés; he subverts them. Greco-Roman divinity sought recognition, glorification, ascent. Christ, by contrast, descends—even unto death, death on a cross. This is the “doctrine revolution” you dismiss too lightly. Christ’s possession of morphē theou is not a badge of external display, but the ground from which humility is made possible. That is why God then exalts him and grants “the name above every name.” You reduce this to public perception and lose the theological weight of Paul’s claim: that Christ’s very identity was divine, and that divine identity was expressed not in display, but in descent.
In sum, your thesis is built on three unstable pillars: (1) a restricted semantic view of morphē drawn too rigidly from classical sources and insufficiently sensitive to Koine developments; (2) a denial of the parallelism between divine and servile forms in Philippians 2:6–7; and (3) a re-reading of Paul’s theology through the lens of epiphanic Greco-Roman tropes, which the text itself resists at every level. Theology, in your view, has “over-interpreted” morphē. I would suggest rather that reductionism here has under-interpreted the hymn’s richness and narrative coherence.
Philippians 2 is not merely a story about Jesus’ perceived divinity among Gentiles, nor is it a coded parody of hero cult. It is a bold and early confessional claim that the one who was equal with God became man, took the morphē of a slave, and by this act revealed the deepest truth about God himself—not as dominator, but as servant. That is not a façade. It is the heart of Christian confession.
@József X.:
Thanks, József. Let’s leave it there. I’ll only end up repeating myself. Others can make their own minds up.
Aristotle, Parts of Animals 2 646a-b is listed in the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek as an example of the philosophical use of morphē. I’ve added it to the article above.
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