Proclaimer Blog
Notes on Colossians part 1
[Editor's note: starting today we have a two week set of posts from the pen of Dick Lucas based on work he prepared for a conference in Scotland. Enjoy this rare treat!]
My overall title is The Colossian Error: Confronting Elitism in Today's Church
Preamble
- Researching the ‘Colossian Heresy’ has occupied scholars for over a century, with little, if any result. Most likely it was a futile exercise.
- In a famous essay (1973) Dr Morna Hooker ‘demolished’ the notion of false teachers in the Colossian Christian community. But her view does not really account for the language of 2:8-23 (Oxford Bible Commentary).
- Heresy, that is teaching contrary to Christian orthodoxy, probably opened up a false trail. In this study, the trouble makers will be presumed orthodox in the fundamentals, but influenced strongly by the currents of thought around them (of course). Such would include Jewish and pagan pressures, as well as that incipient gnosticism that remains with us to this day. Comparable pressures today can be hedonistic, therapeutic, utopian, conformist etc.
- Moule writes of a Colossian ‘Error’, sufficiently serious for Paul ‘to describe adherents as detached from Christ’ (2:19). Similarly, he speaks of the Colossian ‘Mistake’, that ‘completeness’ was not to be found in Christ alone ‘but must be sought by additional religious rights and beliefs’. Paul’s medicine for both ‘Error’ and ‘Mistake’ was not denunciation, but solid instruction of the great Christology (1:15-23). In Colossians, positive teaching comes first.
- The position taken here is that all we can know of what was going on in Colosse is to be found in the text of the letter itself; and this not by the ‘warning passage’ alone (2:8-23), but by the part each and every section plays in what is a coherent, integrated and carefully structured presentation.