Colossians

Here is the last in the course, Re-reading the Bible. Thanks for following the series!

Capping off the Re-reading series we take a look at Paul to the Colossians. A high point in New Testament thought, parallel to John's gospel. It shows a final God-filled end to the whole biblical journey. With Colossians we have re-read the bible from God invisible and remote to God here and fully present.

Did Paul himself write it? Scholarship is divided. Whether or not Paul did, it is a vital piece of Christian teaching based in Pauline principles.

First thing to grasp is the situation to which Paul is responding. The towns he mentions, Colossae, Laodicea, Hierapolis, were important commercial and industrial centers located on the river Lycus and sitting on busy trade routes running toward Greece and Rome. They seemed to have acted as bubbling points of religious speculation derived from Judaism, Eastern religions, the new message of Christianity, and a general Greek philosophical mindset.

In these circumstances Paul is not arguing with people who want to return to the Law but against a free-floating "secular" speculation that would place Christ as just one of multiple agencies, spiritual practices and experiences that communicate with the divine (see 2:8 & 16-18). Sound familiar? Yes, in many ways the context of Colossians is similar to our own new-age, plural, cafeteria-style religiosity. (See 2:23, ethelothreskia, "self-chosen religion").

Paul's response is not to argue from the Hebrew scriptures, proving salvation through faith in Christ. Rather he asserts a new universal truth, the primacy of Christ in all things.

A key sentence is: "See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ." (2:8)

"Elemental spirits" in the Greek is stoicheia which literally means "rods" or "strokes" and specifically the division of hours on the sundial. The word implies the primary matter or order of the world and in Paul's world has a personified spiritual dimension as in "rulers and authorities" (2:15). In our time the word could be interpreted anthropologically as "the way humans put the world together", i.e. its structure out of elemental human violence. Everything has been structured along the "lines" of violence but Christ sets us free from this world into something dramatically new, non-oppositional and whole.

In the setting of the letter Jesus may not have seemed elevated or "other-worldly" enough to satisfy religious longings, and that may have been why "worship of angels" (2:18) was attractive. At the same time, in order to communicate with these elevated beings "self-abasement" and strict taboo regulations (2:21) were necessary. Instead Paul claims that in Christ "the whole fulness of God dwells bodily and you have come to fulness in him" (2:9-10).

It is a startling claim and it is the radicalism of Christianity: that all religion and authority are found in this man. It inverts the apparent natural order of truth from "up" to "down" and from spiritual lack to spiritual fulness.

The reason is that in the cross and resurrection Christ has caused to "die off" the past human order including every violent "legal demand" against us (literally the "written down orders" 2:14). 2:10-13 uses the image of circumcision to present this "die-off" of the flesh (i.e. of the whole human system). 
 

What is natural about this "body of the flesh" is that it is a system of death. But then what is systemically dead becomes dead explicitly with Christ, in order to be co-raised with him into true life.

All of this plays out the core statement of the letter at 1:15-20, perhaps an original liturgical hymn used or expanded by the author. "He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross."

Taken in one spoonful this is far too much. But if we begin from the last two sentences as the real formative experience of the early Christian community then we can see how everything that comes before makes sense. In other words, because the direct communicated event of the Crucified and Risen One changed every aspect of violent human experience, both relationships and transcendence, then this man was immediately felt to contain the fulness (pleroma) of God. The experience was organic and neural before it was metaphysical. But, against the background of Hebrew Wisdom thinking, it did naturally expand to a cosmic stature, and so the first two sentences follow logically.

Because of the cross and resurrection Christ remakes the whole of the human cosmos as if for the first time, and so claims preeminence.

But those who have only half-received the message are willing to fit Jesus in a scheme below the angels. In which case they need to have the full significance of Christ restated as a matter of principle. Every power or principle is subordinate to Christ. Why? Because he redesigns the human reality which projected these powers and principles in the first place.

Paul says this in so many words. "...you have stripped off the old humanity (anthropos) with its practices and you have clothed yourself with the new humanity (anthropos) which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image (icon) of its creator.." (3:9-10). Clearly this is a cultural event--putting on clothes--and one dependent on imitation of the image of the creator which is Christ (1:15).

The results of this renewal is a humanity without boundaries, without exclusions, with only the fulness of Christ that remakes everything as endless love.