The Christ encomium in Philippians 2:6-11 is usually divided into two parts: humbling in 2:6-8 and exaltation in 2:9-11. But here I want to suggest that once it has become apparent to onlooking Greeks that Christ Jesus, for all his god-like wisdom and powers, was human, no more remarkable than a slave (2:6-7), the thought from verse 8 to 11 can be seen as a meditation on or reworking of Psalm 137 LXX (138 in English translations).

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.

There are three main interpretive paradigms for understanding Paul’s writings available today within mainstream, predominantly Protestant, scholarship. The diagram below names the paradigms, briefly notes the defining characteristics, and mentions some of the major exponents. It also highlights the significance of the boundaries between them.

Here is the question. When Paul says, “for us one God the Father…, and one Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 8:6), are the terms “God… Lord” between them a reference to the shemaʿ: “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 8:6 LXX*)?

It has become a stock argument of those holding to an Early High Christology that Paul has assimilated Jesus into the divine identity by reassigning to him the designation kyrios in the shemaʿ. So, for example, Gordon Fee….

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.

My argument about the other encomium, in Colossians 1:15-20, is that it makes Christ Jesus the beginning of a new political-religious order, in which government in heaven and government on earth have been reconciled.

Hitherto the rule of God and rule over the nations of the Greek-Roman world have been in conflict, at odds with each other. God is king in heaven, but pagan kings rule on earth. That fundamental division will—sooner or later—be overcome in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom has been given the authority to rule over the kings of the earth from heaven. This will be such a far-reaching transformation of the ancient world that it is described as a new creation. We have come to know it as Christendom—for all the problems, historical and theological, which such a hermeneutical leap backwards produces.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis has written a monster book—nearly a thousand pages—about the Christ encomium in Philippians 2:6-11: The Divine Heartset: Paul’s Philippians Christ Hymn, Metaphysical Affections, and Civic Virtues (Wipf & Stock, 2023). About 20% is available on Google Books. We get a pretty good idea of the thrust of it from the blurb: