Navigating Our Way between Exegetical Worlds: A Response to Michael Magree

Abstract Blowers's response begins by observing that Michael Magree's study of Philippians 2:7 in the work of Cyril of Alexandria provides an excellent exercise in creating ‘conversation’ between early Christian and modern critical approaches to biblical interpretation. Magree takes up the relation between two things that have not always sat easily together in interpretation: what ancients called theologia and oikonomia , and what moderns would more likely call metaphysics and history. In turn, a ‘literal’ interpretation of the kenosis in Philippians 2:7 presupposes a dimensional event, one in which the registers of metaphysics and history overlap. Cyril modeled the need to hold these together and to dramatize the paradox that an allegedly impassible God condescended to assume passible flesh. Magree reveals that Cyril's reading of Paul's notion of Christ's kenosis refused a purely ‘mythologized’ account while retaining still its dramatic mythos. Magree presents the possibility that Cyril directed this mythos of a loving God submitting to disgrace as a response to the honor/shame culture of Roman antiquity.