Definition (house style)
Humiliatio Christi (Latin: “the humiliation of Christ”) is the dogmatic term for the lowering of the eternal Son in his incarnation, earthly life, suffering, death, and burial — the first phase in the twofold state (status duplex) before the exaltation (exaltatio) in resurrection, ascension, and enthronement. The term originates in Lutheran and Reformed dogmatics but functions more broadly as a description of Christ’s descent into the human condition.
On apokatastasis.wiki, humiliatio Christi carries a distinctive weight through Warnock: the humiliation is not merely a soteriological event but the ontological self-revelation of who God essentially is. Through the humiliatio, God discloses his true character — meek, lowly, and compassionate.
Usage per author
Warnock
Warnock devotes the central chapter of The Hyssop — “Incarnation — The Humiliation of God” — to the thesis that the incarnation is God’s greatest act of self-emptying. The hyssop (a low, ordinary herb) serves as a christological symbol:
“True greatness does not stand apart, above and beyond the ordinary. True greatness is always identified with humility and weakness and insignificance and lowliness. That is why the great and mighty God of the universe who created all things could not for ever remain high and lifted up in the heavens… He must come down and show Himself as He really is: for God the Father, living in His own Son in all His fulness, truly revealed Himself as He really is: meek, and lowly, and compassionate.”
[Warnock, The Hyssop that Springeth Out of the Wall, hyssop2.html]
Warnock places the humiliatio within a series of divine weakness-strategies (Noah’s ark, Moses in the basket, Gideon’s three hundred). The crucifixion is its climax:
“What a stench it has been in the nostrils of men as they behold the Son of God dying the death of a criminal on Calvary’s brow! But God looked down that day and smelled a ‘sweet savour’ from this the only burnt offering that ever really delighted His heart.”
[Warnock, The Hyssop, hyssop1.html]
The humiliatio is for Warnock not an anomaly in God’s ways but his most authentic self-disclosure: God is always the God who achieves the great through the lowly.
Jones
Jones approaches the humiliatio through the type of Judah: the Lion had to die to earn his throne. The death-work of the first coming is the necessary path through humiliation to the glorification of the second:
“He sold everything He had — that is, He laid aside His heavenly glory and came to earth as a simple man, and ultimately gave His own life to save His people from their sins.”
[Jones, The Laws of the Second Coming, ch. 11]