The One Story
Kenosis in Creation, Redemption, and Discipleship
- Theology
- Publisher: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
FritzSearch.com earns a commission on purchases made through Bookshop.org links.
Publisher's Description
Our creation and redemption by God and our discipleship to Jesus are all one story, and it is an odd story. It is odd because the method God follows in all his actions toward us--and which we imitate in discipleship to Jesus--is characterized not by triumph, even paradoxical triumph, or by assertion of a hero's individuality and strength, but by weakness, submission, self-enslavement, and loss. God has followed this method in creating a universe to stand alongside and even challenge God's existence. God has also acted in this way in continuing to nurture the existence of the human rebels against God. So God has also acted in the incarnation, in, that is, the kenosis of Christ (his "self-emptying," Philippians 2:7), which provides us the sharpest delineation of the divine method. And so God has acted for our redemption and our creation as a people conformed to Jesus and giving testimony to the defeat--by his kenosis--of the powers that have enslaved humanity. The One Story fills out the progress of this one story of creation and redemption and speaks a challenge to how the church understands and lives out the victory, by kenosis, of Jesus.
Endorsements (2)
“In The One Story, John Simpson makes a sustained case for the thesis that Christian faith and life is rooted in the single story of creation and redemption, and that God’s self-limitation is the unifying theme of that odd story. With perceptive exegesis of biblical narratives and discerning engagement with theologians across church history, Simpson argues that kenosis is the keystone to the structure of Christian theology. This intriguing book deserves, and rewards, careful reading.”
“In his book, The One Story, author John Simpson invites readers to a ‘bottoms-up,’ story-based, upside-down, table-turning understanding of God defined by the biblical word kenosis, or self-emptying. The book may be unsettling to readers used to the status-quo, top-down, biblical, creedal, and systematic theologies of the past and present. Yet, it remains deeply resonant with the best of Christian understandings of the nonviolent, benevolent God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.”
See something wrong on this page? Report a problem