And Can It Be? (iii)

Verse 3
He left His Father's throne above
So free, so infinite His grace --
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam's helpless race:
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
For O my God, it found out me!

Here we have Charles' beautiful lyrics of kenosis, Christ's humbling and self-emptying of himself. Many point to the Christ hymn of Philippians 2.5-11 (esp. verse 6 - "emptied") as the key Scriptural text for kenosis, although others read the passage through the lens of Christ as Second Adam. I don't see why both can't be at the heart of the passage. Kenotic theology maintains the full divinity of Christ though he suspended certain attributes from his conception to his ascension (see, for instance, Mark 13.32, which conveys that Jesus is unaware of when the final judgment would take place). To read Philippians 2 through the lens of Christ as Second Adam is to affirm his full humanity, his obedience in undoing the sin of Adam, which had 'grasped at equality with God' through disobedience. One of my favorite quotations comes from St. Irenaeus' On the Apostolic Preaching where he interprets the significance of the cross, and he seems to suggest the combination of these two themes:

And the transgression which occurred through the tree [of knowledge of good & evil] was undone by the obedience of the tree [the cross]--which [was shown when] the Son of Man, obeying God, was nailed to the tree, destroying the knowledge of evil, and introducing and providing the knowledge of good.

...of all but love. Again we see that love is God's reigning, his "darling attribute" as we saw in verse 1. Charles is obviously engaging in a bit of hyperbole, for he certainly didn't mean to imply that Christ let go of attributes such as justice, holiness, righteousness, and so forth. The point is that love (and we should couple mercy with it, seeing it at the heart of this verse) is the chief motivation of God's redemptive action in Christ. I say we should couple 'mercy' with love because the Wesleys saw them that way. In a letter to William Law, one of John's mentors, John stressed as much when he said that "love and anger [are] the passions (speaking after the manner of men) which correspond with the dispositions of mercy and justice." Mercy also belongs here because of what we find in the next line of the hymn: that we, Adam's race, were helpless. Christ bled and died to bring us to a helped state. It takes humility to recognize that the only way to life is to admit our own helplessness. It's no accident that it took Christ's humility to lift us out of helplessness.

I have the image of a lost sheep in my mind here. That is the image of helplessness. 'Tis mercy all! that Christ would enter into harm's way to find a stupid sheep like me, who brought this own helplessness upon myself. That mercy has found me! This was at the heart of the Wesleys' experience(s) and evangelical manifesto in 1738. Christ died for the world and is the savior of the world. They knew that! But they'd never personalized it the way St. Paul had in Galatians 2.20, where he affirms that Christ loved me and gave himself for me!