Hyper-kenosis

Hyper-kenosis (an extreme reading of Christ’s self-emptying in Philippians 2:7) and Nestorianism are connected through how each handles the unity of Christ’s person and whether Mary can be called Theotokos (“God-bearer”). They approach the same problem from opposite sides and both risk undermining the claim that the one who was born of Mary is the eternal Word.

Nestorius rejected Theotokos in favor of Christotokos because he wanted to protect divine impassibility and immutability. God cannot be born, suffer, or change; therefore Mary bore the human Jesus, who was united to the Word by a moral or “prosopic” union rather than a hypostatic one. The result was widely judged to be two subjects: the man born of Mary and the divine Word who indwelt him.

The Council of Ephesus (431) condemned this and affirmed Theotokos precisely because the subject of the birth is the one person of the Word who assumed flesh.

Cyril of Alexandria answered Nestorius by appealing to kenosis. The Word did not cease to be God or lose divine attributes; He emptied Himself by adding humanity, remaining the single subject of all the actions and experiences of the incarnate life. Because that subject is the Word, Mary is Theotokos. Kenosis here is condescension and assumption, not depotentiation of the divine nature.