Being Human

Paul’s appeal in Philippians 2 rests on conditions the community has already met: encouragement in Christ, comfort from love, participation in the Spirit (2:1). These are not aspirations but realities Paul assumes are present. Since they are real, his conclusion follows: “complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love” (2:2). The unity he calls for is a shared orientation, a common way of moving through the world.

Its shape is grounded in a person. “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” (2:5). What follows is the Christological movement: the one who existed in the form of God did not treat equality with God as something to exploit but emptied himself, took the form of a servant, was born in human likeness, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (2:6–8). God then exalted him and gave him the name above every name, so that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord (2:9–11).

Gregory of Nyssa, reading Paul’s kenosis, pressed into the logic of this movement precisely. The Only-begotten, he argued, came to be in “that which is mutable” not by diminishing his divine nature but by mingling it with ours, and by that mingling, transforming it from within (Against Eunomius V). The emptying is not loss. It is the immutable entering the mutable in order to lift it from within. The condescension is purposive: the divine nature descends not to become less but to transform what it enters.

The mind Paul calls the Philippians to share follows this same pattern. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (2:3). What looks like descent, attending to others’ interests before your own, is participation in the only movement that actually transforms: the movement of the immutable into the mutable, the strong toward the place of the weak.

This is what Christian men are called to imitate, not Christ as a masculine exemplar, a model of strength and decisiveness mapped onto a gendered ideal. We are called to be conformed to Christ as the paradigmatic human: the one in whom God fully dwells, and whose life shows what human beings become when the immutable is at work within the mutable. The standard has never been masculine performance. It has always been full humanity under God.