The year 2013 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Søren Kierkegaard's birth, and the array of bicentennial events being held across the world—from Japan and Australia to Denmark and the United States—underscores Kierkegaard's ongoing importance as a thinker. What draws people to Kierkegaard has always varied. For some it has been his critique of Hegelian Wissenschaft, for others his vigorous refusal to conflate Christianity and culture; still others have admired his literary flair and enigmatic use of pseudonyms. This complexity may account for the wave of introductions to Kierkegaard that have emerged in recent years: the survey has become the preferred commentaire on the Dane's work, providing a bird's-eye view of its unique problems and themes.

Into this situation steps David R. Law's new book, Kierkegaard's Kenotic Christology. By no means a précis, it homes in on a particular aspect of Kierkegaard's work, namely, his Christology and its relation to the kenotic Christology of the nineteenth century. The result is a distinct (and welcome) contribution to the secondary literature on Kierkegaard.

Law announces his thesis at the outset: “My contention is that Kierkegaard offers an original and significant contribution to kenotic Christology. … Like many of the kenotic theologians of the nineteenth century Kierkegaard argues that Christ undergoes a limitation on becoming a human being. Where he differs from his contemporaries is in emphasizing the radical nature of this limitation and in bringing out its existential consequences” (1). This argument is borne out over six chapters. The first two chapters—which, indeed, could be profitably read on their own, since they respectively serve as synopses of Kierkegaard's relation to Christian doctrine and of the development of kenotic Christology in general—lay the groundwork for an in-depth investigation of Kierkegaard's Christology. Chapter 3 examines Kierkegaard's familiarity with kenoticism, including a detailed examination of his understanding of the so-called kenotic hymn of Philippians 2:6–11, as well as an overview of his knowledge of the history of kenotic Christology. In turn, chapters 4 and 5 trace kenotic themes in two of Kierkegaard's own works, namely, Philosophical Fragments (1844) and Practice in Christianity (1850). These texts hardly exhaust Kierkegaard's writings on Christ—a quibble that might justly be raised—though it cannot be denied that they are central to Kierkegaard's Christological thought.

In any case, it is in chapter 6, “Kierkegaard's Existential Kenoticism,” that Law reaps what his historiographical and philological efforts have sown. Here he concludes that Kierkegaard “clearly belongs in the category of Chalcedonian kenoticism” (268). That is to say, Kierkegaard presupposes the Council of Chalcedon's affirmation of Christ's two natures, albeit, as Law goes on, with a dogged emphasis on the glorious lowliness or lowly gloriousness of the union of Christ's divinity and humanity. Hence, unlike many of his kenotic contemporaries, Kierkegaard is not interested in explaining the Incarnation. Rather, he endeavors to uphold the very paradoxicalness of Christ's person so as to underline that the “task is not that of understanding Christ but of emulating him in his lowliness and abasement” (287), indeed, in his self-emptying (kenosis).

One could argue that, impressive as it is, Law's exacting research is not needed to drive home this point. After all, Law himself notes that a kenotic Christology as such “was not [Kierkegaard's] concern” (281). Still, this book achieves a great deal. Not only does it help situate Kierkegaard in the theological context of his era, but, in doing so, it sheds light on just how rich and unique Kierkegaard's thinking is. Doubtless that is why we are remembering his birthday two centuries later.