A discussion of the Christological hymn of Philippians 2

Continuing my habit of posting whatever I have to write for my New Testament as literature class.

The prompt:

One of the most important features of Paul’s letter to the Philippians is the christological hymn, located in Philippians 2:5-11. Raymond Brown dedicates a sizable section of his chapter on this hymn, underscoring its genre, features, and importance in early Christianity.

One of the logical conclusions to make about the hymn is that it acts as a major blow to the argument that Paul is literally the first Christian, or that he invented christology wholesale out of thin air.  In your conversation paper, consider Paul’s letter in the context of early Christianity and what we’ve already read of the gospels.

How do we know that this is a hymn? What do we know about its authorship?
What is the significance of this hymn? What doctrines are contained within it?
What does Paul’s inclusion of this hymn possibly tell us about early Christian doctrine?
Is it possible that Paul wrote this hymn? If he did write it, what could that mean?

The response:

The Christological hymn found in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (2:6-11) plays an important role in placing the high Christological views found therein- i.e. “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name..”- into a historical context that is difficult to establish elsewhere. In considering this matter it would be instructive to investigate the hymn’s possible connections with the account of the establishment of the Philippian church found in Acts, and we will see that much can be learned about the significance of the hymn and the doctrines within.

The Acts narrative indicates that the Philippian Church began with the conversion of Lydia in chapter 16. Sometime after this conversion of her and her family, Paul and Silas are arrested for disruption of the peace because they cast out a demon from a slave girl who “had a spirit of divination”. In the next scene, perhaps one of the most famous of Acts, Paul and Silas are “singing hymns to God” while the other prisoners listen. Suddenly there is an earthquake, their chains fall off, and the jailer is converted along with his entire family.

Although the genre of the Acts narrative as a recounting of history for the purpose of advancing a theological agenda implies it should not be considered historically unassailable, it is clear from the unified attestations of Acts and Philippians that there was a church established by Paul in Philippi, and that the timeline regarding the progression of Paul’s journey is at least accurate to some unknown degree of detail; for example, Paul seems to have gone on to Thessalonica directly after his release from prison (Acts 17:1, Phil 4:15-16). For this reason, it is not wholly ludicrous to give some degree of credence to the details surrounding the Philippian Church’s establishment. There were, then, at least two pieces to the Philippian church: the Lydia group, and the jailer group. We know that Paul and Silas spent a moderate amount of time among Lydia and her family, but the jailer’s wing was established in quite a hurry over the course of an evening; the very next morning, we are told that Paul and Silas are released, after which they drop in to say their farewells to Lydia, and then depart. It is interesting to note that, although the jailer was asleep when the earthquake occurred, Paul and Silas were singing hymns. This is the only mention of an opportunity for the jailer to have heard the word of the gospel, and presumably, they were singing hymns about Christ which they had just taught to the Lydian wing. Could they have been singing the very hymn that we find in Philppians 2:6-11? We cannot know that for certain, but it is clear that hymn singing was at least part of the establishment of the Philippian congregation. It would make no sense for Paul to quote a hymn in his letter that the Philippians would not recognize; we can imagine it to be one with which they are familiar. Since Paul seems to have spent only a moderate amount of time in Philippi, and specifically with the jailer wing, this hymn must have been one of the tools with which Paul taught to them the high Christological truths; after all, at this early date there was little in the way of New Testament scripture (with the possible exception of Mark and a Q gospel). Hymns would have played an important part in establishing good doctrine among the churches.

This has interesting implications for the history of Christological doctrine; assuming the ideas above are reasonably construed, there is therefore good reason to think that the truth-claims found within the hymn are at least as old as the Philippian church. The hymn teaches that Christ was “in very form God”; some translations render the Greek word morphe to mean “nature” instead of “form”. This is important to note, since it has large bearing on the meaning of the hymn: is it saying that Christ was in God’s image in the same way that man was created in God’s image, or is it establishing a high Christology where Jesus is, like God, uncreated? A New Testament critic cannot say for sure without more information about the Greek meaning. However, if it is teaching a high Christology, an even more interesting question becomes whether or not Paul wrote the hymn himself, but unfortunately I cannot see how one can confidently know the answer one way or the other apart from the tenuous practice of stylistic analysis. It is difficult- perhaps impossible- to ascertain authorship of musical verse when we do not even have any other concrete examples to which we can compare it. As much as I’d like to aver that this hymn provides compelling evidence that the ideas of high Christological prominence were not distinctly Pauline inventions, I cannot make a compelling case for either eventuality. However, it is clear that if a good case can be made that Paul did not write the hymn himself, combined with the knowledge that the hymn comes probably earlier than almost anything else we have surrounding the doctrinal development of the first century church, this would then effectively obviate what Raymond Brown refers to as the “crude” ideas of modern critics who assert that Paul- not Jesus (or Peter or anyone else) – is literally the founder of the Christian religion.