Logos – Greek: λόγος – 1. Communication whereby the mind finds expression, – word – of utterance, chiefly oral.  2. Computation, reckoning.  Reason for or cause of something, reason, ground, motive. 3.  Independent personified expression of God, the Logos (BDAG). John 1:1-14.

Kenosis – Greek: κενόω – to empty. A divestiture of position or prestige: of Christ, who gave up the appearance of his divinity and took on the form of a slave, εαυτόν εκένωσεν [eaftón ekénosen] (BDAG). Phil. 2:5-11.

Excerpts below from John B. Heard, Alexandrian and Carthaginian Theology Contrasted.  T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh. 1893. pp. 266-274:

But it occurs to us that the Kenosis doctrine, which relieves much of the mystery on the subject of the human and Divine in Christ, may also throw light on the subject of inspiration… It was assumed (as all Deists must do) that the nature of the Infinite must be incommunicable to the finite. Between Creator and creature there is much more than disparity, there is a gulf fixed which no theory can bridge over. The Incarnation, in a word, from the Deistic point of view, becomes an unthinkable mystery- it goes farther back still, since, in fact, creation itself must be unthinkable; for how can the Creator, if Infinite, pass out of Himself into the finite and conditioned? Hence, we have to fall back on such senseless phrases as that He made the worlds out of nothing, and creation at last becomes a bald affirmation of a fact for which reason by itself can offer no explanation which is not merely verbal. The early Gnostics felt this difficulty, and so they set to work to invent a Demiurge, a Bathos, a Pleroma, and other hypotheses which as hypotheses have gone the way of all brain cobwebs. The orthodox East clung, however, to the conception of the Logos either as ἐνδιάθετος, as before creation, or προφορικός, as going forth in creation. It was this Logos doctrine which carried the East safely through all the labyrinths of thought, as well on the subject of creation as of redemption. Thanks to the preface to St. John’s Gospel, that most precious jewel of God’s word, the arcanum of arcana, all was explicated, and the bald dualism of God and matter bridged over, or rather absorbed in that higher Monism in which the Eternal is ever proceeding forth through the Logos and entering into time relations, and so delighting in the habitable parts of the earth.

The Kenosis, then, which is the key to the Incarnation, is also the key to our conception of God in creation. The Eternal Father is ever communicating, in condescending love through the Son, some of His perfections to those lower orders of being whom we call His creatures. It is His nature and property so to create in condescension or self-emptying, much in the same way as it is the nature and property of the sun to shed his effulgent beams out into space. Kenosis, then, as much in creation as in redemption, at once suggests the key to what we go on to describe as the self-effacement of the Divine in a human consciousness. God spoke by the prophets so the Creed affirms; but we are nowhere asked to define the mystery, or to go into psychological puzzles as to the meeting point of human and God consciousness; nor does the Divine imply a temporary suspension of ordinary self-consciousness. We find in Christ the human was so absorbed by the Divine, that on one occasion when the disciples said, ” Master, eat,” His reply, was ” My meat is to do my Father’s will, and to finish His work.” In His case we must assume perfect simplicity and entire transparency of character. Hence, that He should forget hunger and thirst in the absorbing spirit of His work, is what much lower minds than the Christ attain to every day. But the Kenosis goes farther than this; it implies that He emptied Himself of His glory, and took a servant form. If this had been only in His Incarnation, and for three short years, then it would seem a unique, perhaps incredible mystery. But the Logos has been ever so emptying Himself. It is self-abasement, exinanition of the full glory of Godhead, when He paints the lily, and fits an insect’s eye to the tiny operations of the insect world. Hence it is that, to mere Deism with its design and argument, it seems perplexing to find perfection from the least to the greatest of God’s works. The notion of condescension in the Most High, that He ” humbleth Himself to behold the things which are done in heaven and earth,” seems strange to Deism, to whom humility seems only the shadow of the cross; and that is ” foolishness,” as we know, to the mere natural man. On these grounds we see that unless we set out with this key-word Kenosis, we shall never unravel the mysteries either of creation, redemption, or of that mode of communicating the mind of God to men which we define as inspiration. But this one master-key opens all these three locks. It is the same Logos who is the link in creation between the finite and Infinite, whose goings forth in redemption are that He has become one flesh with us that we may become one spirit with Him, and who is also the source of the old prophetic fire, the one fountain of light and love in inspiration.

The mistake in theology has been the same as in science, by isolating a single truth, and then to try and wrestle with it as with Proteus, and to wring its meaning out in single-handed fight. The sciences will not thus be won by direct assault. Their flank must be turned. In laying a subject aside and in thinking of some other thing, a side light will sometimes enter the mind, and one theory thus open the door to another. So Newton found it, as he passed from one theory of physics, where his calculations had failed him, to another theory of optics; and, after exploring the one domain, he was able to re-enter the other as conqueror, and to hold his ground there. It is the same in theology. Inspiration and the Incarnation throw light on each other; and now that we have got hold of the Incarnation by the right aspect, in the phrase of the Kenosis, it will be strange if we cannot use the same conception to lead us on to the right meaning of inspiration. In the Kenosis of Christ’s person we hold that the wisdom and goodness of God dwelt in Him bodily. In no mere Apollinarian sense (though Apollinarianism is not such a heresy as it seems) the wisdom and goodness of the Logos dwelt in the man Christ Jesus, and were to Him His Pneuma. When we speak of a human pneuma we are using words with no meaning; we are like the disciples on the Mount, not knowing what we say. The Pneuma itself is the Divine inherent in the human; it is itself a prophecy of the Incarnation – the ground and sufficient cause of the Incarnation becoming credible and intelligible, and not a mere mystery jarring to all our sense of truth. In our Lord Jesus the Christ, a Messianic element was the plenary indwelling of the Holy Ghost, not given to Him by measure as to other sons of men. But this does not imply either omniscience or omnipotence. These are attributes of pure Deity, which must be, and were, laid aside when He emptied Himself of His glory; and if equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, He became inferior to the Father as touching His manhood. Under false reverence to shrink from this frank confession of the Kenosis, is to fail to grasp the true meaning of the Incarnation. This is why, as observed already, the popular orthodox view is still Eutychian, and explains the outcry of some hyper-orthodox champions of the old school at the measured and well-weighed words of Mr. Gore in the Lux Mundi on the subject. That they were an offence at all, is an index of the depth of popular ignorance of the true Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. Till the Kenosis is understood, the Incarnation must remain an unassimilated dogma.

It is the same with inspiration. It also stands apart among unassimilated faith formulas until we see that the Divine can only enter the human by some act of condescension. Accommodation is the old phrase. Men say that God accommodates His teaching to the imperfect faculties and immature judgments of men. At a low stage of culture He meets them with animal sacrifices and rites and ceremonies which to us seem burdensome. As the ages advance, He lightens the burden of ritual-teaching, becomes more oral and less ocular, and at last the prophet and scribe supersede the priest altogether. Even Judaism had reached the Rabbinic stage before Christ’s coming. And how strange a decline it was when Christ’s religion sank back again into the beggarly elements, and the commemoration of His death in the Eucharist feast was lowered again into a repetition of the type after the antitype, and described as the sacrifice of the Mass! We must go on to see in inspiration these advancing stages through accommodation, or else we shall never understand the Bible as a book human and Divine. To throw all the books into pie, so to speak, and read them in a lump, finding the Trinity in Gen. xix. and the doctrine of the Mass in Malachi, this is that kind of uncritical use of the Bible which we need not waste time in exposing. It is too out of date to find excuse for it in the uncritical use of the Old Testament by the Fathers of the early Church. Inspiration, in a word, is the unfolding purpose of God for the education of the race through a chosen people, that people themselves only learning the mind of God through an elect race of prophets and teachers. Thus, within the election there is an election, and the prophets themselves had to search what and what manner of time the Spirit of God which was in them did signify. They had to grope, in a word, after the meaning of their own sayings. They uttered dark sayings of old, because God-consciousness always enters in at first to dim self-consciousness, and a man inspired must be for that very reason in a sense beside himself, though always ” sober for your sake.” Inspiration was always much more than mere mantic phrenzy, we admit, though it often seemed to approach the dangerous limits between sanity and insanity.

High views of inspiration are generally assumed by devout people to indicate high views of God and His glory. In reverence for His word written our views cannot be too high, just as our reverence for the person of the Lord Jesus. Only in both cases we are to avoid the Eutychian extreme, much more common among the orthodox than the Nestorian. Two natures exist in one person; but the natures are, since the Incarnation, so fused and intermingled that He is no longer twain but one Christ; this is orthodox theology with regard to our Lord Jesus, who objects to the expression the indwelling of the Eternal Word in the man Christ. For the same reason we should be content to speak of the book as ” containing ” the word of God. By that expression we mean that in that library which we call the canon, every book has its place and purpose: each is part of a whole; and if, to us, some part seems insignificant, it is because we fail to see organic unity. It is as with our body, in which some members seem more honourable than others, but all are tempered together and bear reference to the whole. Such is inspiration. As to the literature of the canon, there are certain rights of criticism which have their place, but they are quite subordinate to and apart from the spiritual use of the Bible as a book of devotion. On that point Canon Driver has taken his stand on strong ground. He is within his rights as a Canon of Christ Church and Hebrew Professor to discuss and to deal with the Palestinian as much as with the Alexandrian Jew’s revision of the canon. He may show grounds, if there are any, why the most negative German critic may be in truer touch with the spirit of the old book than the Masoretic or any other Hebrew school of the older criticism. But he must not forget, as the negative school too often do, that the onus of proof lies with those who advance novelties. Presumption is always in favour of the occupying holder, since possession is nine points of the law. Some of our younger critics, in the first flush of excitement, forget that it is easier to assert than to prove. Negation becomes thus quite as dogmatic and far more offensive than the old traditionalism, which maintains that a position must be true because it is long established. There is, we admit, an immense presumption in its favour, since the general shut up in a garrison with ten thousand men may expect to hold his ground till another with twenty thousand men comes against him.

But, like Canon Driver, we draw our line at the literature of the Bible. Libros Canonicos ad leones is a modern version of the Christianos ad leones. Let the young lions of criticism work their will on the letter of the record, and we fearlessly say that what remains after negation has done its worst is that ” word of the Lord which liveth and abideth for ever.” To us, for instance, this new phrase, the Hexateuch, is as unimportant as the old phrase Pentateuch: it seems like pulling down one house of cards to set up another. If the orthodox had not been so ill-advised as to fall into Bibliolatry, this kind of attack would have never been made. It was the same when the old orthodox school were Creationists, and evolution seemed to set aside the hand of God and the necessity for a first cause. But as soon as the defence ceased the attack died down; and so it will be with much of this itching ear for the last novelty of negative criticism. As soon as it ceases to alarm by our taking higher ground of inspiration than the old school did, so soon will it sink into the contempt it deserves. The archives of Israel are historical documents, and therefore must go to the school of history there to be tested in the usual way. To fear the result is to show very little faith. If the New Testament canon has come out of the fires of criticism, what have we to fear for the Old? We shall no doubt have to give up something, especially the uncritical order and ground on which Jerome arranged the Vulgate, borrowing partly from the Hebrew and partly from the Greek arrangement of the books, putting them out of their true order, which was mainly chronological, and so giving fictitious importance to some semi- canonical books, such as Daniel and Koheleth, which were probably of later date than their eponymic authors, and among the Antilegomena.

All this will soon be over, and then inspiration will be seen to be a growing truth; and that as Jesus increased in body, soul, and spirit, so there is harmonious orderly growth of the letter and spirit of the Bible. In all the books there is a theopneustic element, the test of which is that it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. The Didaché, in a word, is elenchus, or evidence internal of its truth; this leads on to Paideia, or education, and that established state which he fitly describes as ἐπανόρθωσις, or maturity in the faith.