The author revisits Crispin Fletcher-Louis’ analysis of Philippians 2:6, exploring whether it critiques rulers who sought divine honors. Fletcher-Louis notes that while Christ’s humility contrasts with self-exalting emperors, the key term harpagmos doesn’t match conventional Roman language for divine self-promotion. Instead, the author argues that Jesus’ rejection of Satan’s offer of kingship in the wilderness fits the idiom of seizing opportunity—divine honors following political power. This act of refusal reflects Jewish monotheism and underpins the humility praised in Philippians. The passage thus presents a political-religious, not merely theological, stance on divine status and ambition.
The last time I wrote about Crispin Fletcher-Louis’ “monster book” The Divine Heartset: Paul’s Philippians Christ Hymn, Metaphysical Affections, and Civic Virtues I got a ticking off for not having read the whole book. I have since ordered the whole book—all 954 pages of it—but it’s lost in delivery, so I am still dependent on the 20% that can be previewed on Google Books. I need to get a book chapter finished this month and I would like to address a couple of issues that he raises. The question about the acquisition of divine honours is one of them, because it is a key part of my argument that Philippians 2:6 is a political-religious statement, not a theological statement.
It has sometimes been argued, Fletcher-Louis observes, that the assertion that Christ Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Phil. 2:6 ESV) has in view the practice of Hellenistic or Roman rulers who either sought or declined divine honours. Samuel Vollenweider is quoted, translated from the German: “The self-humbling Christ is portrayed in Phil 2:6-11 as a counter-image to the type of the self-exalting ruler” (78 n. 63).
So, on the one hand, bad rulers thought that “they could assert for themselves a divine identity or status”; on the other, good rulers were commended because “they did not aggressively seize a divine status” (78).
Fletcher-Louis recognises the force of the argument. It makes good sense in a letter written to a church in a Roman colony at a time when Augustus’ policy of refusing “state-sanctioned divine honours” (recusatio) was being flagrantly disregarded by some vainglorious emperors. We might then think that
Christ is praised as one who did not grasp at a divine identity (that which is “being equal with God”), but he received it from God after a life of humble service and obedience, in fulfillment of his contemporaries’ expectations of legitimate “divine” rulers. (79)
However, he makes the point that although the harpazō word group appears frequently with reference to the general rapacity of tyrannical rulers, “such words do not appear in any of the texts that criticize rulers, or other mortals, for their inappropriate claims to divinity” (his italics). Kings will “seize” all sorts of things—their subjects’ property, for example—but they do not “seize” equality with a god.
Instead, we typically find reflexive expressions: Caligula “likened himself” to the gods, “began to deify himself,” “deemed himself” to be worthy of divine honours; Heraclitus says that he has been accused of “making myself” into a god. And when good rulers refuse divine honours, they say something along the lines of Claudius’ response to the citizens of Thasos:
I approve the […] of your zeal and devotion, all of it in common but, considering that the temple befits only those who are gods, I decline (paraitoumai) it; though admitting other honors which are suitable for the best leaders. (81)
Fletcher-Louis says that the verb paraitoumai was “conventional in such contexts and may have followed a diplomatic formulation created by Augustus.” So why don’t we find this sort of language in Philippians 2:6? He concludes:
…Phil 2:6 lacks first-century language that was employed to speak to the question of whether or not (and in what ways) an individual ruler should rightfully be accorded a divine identity or status. The absence of such language and the author’s choice of another, rarer, word (ἁρπαγμός [harpagmos]) should cause us to wonder whether, after all, the point of verse 6 is really to say that Christ refused to snatch at divine honors, as if he were, at last, the ruler for whom the world had long been waiting. (81)
So where does this leave my argument that behind the harpagmon clause lies the story of Jesus’ rejection of Satan’s offer of a god-equal kingship in the wilderness? Well, I’m pretty sure I can dodge this.
First seize kingship, then receive divine honours
I would point out, first, that it is people who are already kings or emperors who either arrogantly seek or politely refuse divine honours. Jesus in the wilderness is not a king; he is the anointed Son or servant of YHWH, empowered by the Spirit. At this stage, Satan may well have imagined that Jesus would seize at political power, for which harpazō would be a fitting verb. For comparison: Antipater complains that Archelaus is seeking the “shadow” of kingship, the substance (sōma) of which he has already “seized (hērpasen) for himself” (Josephus, War 2:28).
But then in the apocalyptic worldview already evoked by the demand to do obeisance before Satan, to possess all the political power and glory of the kingdoms of the oikoumenē (Lk. 4:5-7) meant also to receive honours equal to those accorded to the gods. First seize kingship, then receive divine honours.
Jesus refuses—in apocalyptic effect—to become the “man of lawlessness,” whose parousia is “according to the working of Satan in all power and with signs and wonders of falsehood,” who “opposes and exalts himself: against every being called god or object of worship, with the result that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming that he himself is a god” (2 Thess. 2:4). Here we have exactly the reflexive language that Fletcher-Louis identifies: this blasphemous ruler exalts himself and proclaims himself to be a god.
The case of Heraclitus is different. He is not a king wanting to deify himself. He set up an altar and inscribed on it, “To Heracles the Ephesian.” Euthycles misread it as “To Heraclitus the Ephesian” and so accused him of having written his own name on the altar, thereby making himself a god. The circumstances are so irregular that there’s little we can draw from it beyond the reflexive verb (theopoiōn… emauton).
First seize the opportunity to become king…
But then the argument needs to be nuanced slightly. I agree with Roy Hoover that “did not consider… something to be seized at” (ouch harpagmon hēgēsato) reflects an idiomatic usage—for that matter, something of a romantic Hellenistic trope—that strongly suggests opportunism, especially in narrative and dramatic contexts. I know Fletcher-Louis has a rather different take on the meaning of the expression (something to do with ”erotic abduction”), but I think that there are good linguistic and literary grounds for postulating a scenario in which a person must consider whether or not to seize an opportunity presented in the moment.
So the question is not whether Jesus would seize divine honours directly; it is whether he would seize an opportunity presented to him that would result in the reception of divine honours. It is not a problem, therefore, that we do not find here the language conventionally associated with the theme.
Now when might that have happened?
If the author of the encomium knew of the story about the testing of Jesus in the wilderness, we have a straightforward way of filling out the highly compressed argument of Philippians 2:6.
Jesus is the anointed Son of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit to do marvellous things (Lk. 3:21-22)—a person “in the form of a god,” in the eyes of the Greeks. Satan determines to test the boundaries of this newly acquired status: “If you are the Son of God…” (Lk. 4:3, 9). He offers Jesus supreme rule over the nations of the empire, with all the honours—divine or otherwise—that came with the job.
But Jesus does not consider this opportunity something to be seized at, because what is written is clear: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve” (4:8). What prevents him from taking up the Satanic offer of empire-wide kingship and receiving cult worship is loyalty to the fundamental Jewish-monotheistic confession, articulated in the wilderness, of which the shemaʿ is the principal expression (Deut. 6:4, 13).
Here, finally, is the confirmation that through the extreme asceticism of the wilderness experience he has emptied himself of the sort of “selfish ambition” and “vainglory” that were undermining the integrity of the community in Philippi (Phil. 2:3).
He refuses to take kingdom without fulfilling the priestly role. The kingdom He refused was based on satan worship — Adam failed to do this, grasping at something that wasn’t his and refusing to trust God. Adam received kingly wisdom by failing his priestly task, not trusting God. This failure resulted in exile to the land and then the the world. (Garden, land, world = Trinitarian from the start. The world sin was the sin against the Holy Spirit which resulted in the flood since it couldn’t be forgiven. Same as in the 1st century (ad70) ) After fulfilling the priestly role, Jesus is given a kingdom. Not sure if you’re disagreeing with this biblical pattern. Our natural sonship does give us a starting point to understand Jesus’ sonship but ours is as created beings.
@A:
I don’t see any basis for your trinitarian interpretation of the movement from garden to land to world. And I don’t think we get to the “world” in the main biblical storyline—only as far as empire. I agree that the priestly role precedes kingship, but that sounds more like Hebrews. Where would we find it in Philippians 2:6-11? If Adam is there at all, he is very much in the background, lurking in the intertextual shadows behind the prince of Tyre, who is a type of blasphemous kingship:
Moreover, the word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him, Thus says the Lord GOD: “You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God…. (Ezek. 28:11-13)
The argument advanced in the article attempts to frame Philippians 2:6 not as a Christological statement about the intrinsic nature and pre-existence of Christ, but as a political-religious narrative rooted in anti-imperial polemic and Second Temple Jewish monotheism. The author, following Fletcher-Louis, contends that harpagmos should be read as “seizing an opportunity” or “grasping at divine honors,” with the wilderness temptation as the backdrop: Jesus refuses Satan’s offer of kingship and thus divine glory, thereby presenting a model of humility for his followers in contrast to self-exalting Roman emperors. The passage is thus seen as an idiom of ambition and self-promotion rather than a theological affirmation of Christ’s equality with God.
While this reading reflects a growing trend in recent scholarship to contextualize Pauline texts within their Roman imperial milieu, it ultimately fails to do justice to the deep Christological intent of the hymn and misconstrues the language and theological categories employed by Paul. The crux of the issue rests on three interrelated pillars: the linguistic and conceptual force of harpagmos, the function of the Christ hymn within the Pauline corpus, and the logic of early Christian worship and confession.
First, the article’s contention that harpagmos refers to “seizing an opportunity” for political or cultic ambition is linguistically possible, but the attempt to root the phrase exclusively in Roman imperial practice is highly reductionist. The Pauline hymn is written in Greek and reflects Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian theological categories more than those of the Latin West. The semantic range of harpagmos and the related verb harpazō certainly includes the sense of seizing by force, but the key to the Pauline usage lies in the logic of possession and non-possession, not mere ambition or opportunism. Most modern exegetes, including those outside traditional Trinitarian commitments (e.g., N.T. Wright, Larry Hurtado, Ralph P. Martin), acknowledge that the phrase is best rendered along the lines of Christ not regarding equality with God as something to be exploited, clung to, or used for personal gain. The contrast is not between an unworthy creature grasping at godhood (the sin of Adam or the hubris of emperors), but between One who already is “in the form of God” and has an inherent right to divine prerogatives, yet chooses not to assert them for Himself.
Second, the article’s attempt to reduce the Christ hymn to a political narrative of anti-imperial subversion flattens the high Christology embedded in the text. The hymn begins with Christ “being in the form of God” (en morphē theou huparchōn), a phrase that is neither an empty idiom for status nor merely a reference to appearance or function. In Hellenistic thought, morphē often denotes the essential form or true nature of a thing, and in Second Temple Judaism, to bear the form of God or image of God is to participate in divine majesty and attributes. The ensuing actions—self-emptying, taking the form of a slave, becoming obedient to death, and subsequent exaltation to the “name above every name”—are not simply the rejection of worldly ambition but the unfolding of a divine condescension and glorification that echoes the great theophanic narratives of Israel’s Scriptures (cf. Isaiah 45, Daniel 7). The logic is not one of merely refusing blasphemous ambition, but of a unique divine person voluntarily laying aside rightful glory for the sake of redemption, only to be universally acclaimed in the end.
Third, the article’s narrow focus on anti-imperial humility ignores the cultic and doxological climax of the passage. The exaltation of Christ to the divine throne and the bestowal of the divine Name (to onoma to huper pan onoma) result in the universal confession and worship of Jesus as Kyrios—a title reserved for YHWH in the Greek Scriptures—“to the glory of God the Father.” This is not a posthumous honor granted to a worthy human king, but a divine vindication and sharing in the divine prerogative of universal lordship, worship, and cosmic sovereignty. The bowing of every knee and confession of every tongue is a direct allusion to Isaiah 45:23, where the same is ascribed to Israel’s God alone. Early Christian worship, as attested throughout the Pauline corpus, consistently ascribes to Jesus prerogatives, honors, and worship that are reserved for God Himself, not merely as a reward for exemplary humility but because of His divine identity.
Moreover, the Christ hymn’s central role in Pauline theology is as a model of kenosis—the self-emptying humility of God Himself for the sake of humankind. The ethical call to humility in Philippians 2:1-5 is grounded not in a generalized principle of anti-ambition, but in the radical humility of the pre-existent divine Son, who, in becoming man and dying on the cross, reveals the very character of God as self-giving love. The attempt to sever the hymn from its ontological claims and recast it merely as a narrative of political virtue betrays a failure to grasp the logic of Pauline theology, wherein the imitation of Christ is inseparable from His unique, divine person and redemptive work.
In sum, the article’s attempt to de-theologize Philippians 2:6-11 by rooting it in anti-imperial polemic and the wilderness temptation fails to reckon with the passage’s high Christology, its scriptural allusions, and its liturgical function in the early Church. The refusal to grasp at equality with God presupposes the possession of that equality; the subsequent humility and exaltation reveal, not the rejection of divine status, but its true nature—a nature revealed as self-emptying love, worthy of the worship due to God alone. The Trinitarian reading, far from being an imposition on the text, is the most adequate account of its grammar, context, and theological depth.
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