A FIRST-CENTURY HERESY AND
ITS MODERN COUNTERPART
by T H E
V E R Y R E V . PROFESSOR
JAMES S. STEWART
p
late Professor T. W. Manson once observed that the only
X sensible examination question on the early Christian centuries would run: 'Give the heresies in order of merit, with
reasons for your preferences.'1 Just where the Golossian heresy,
which is the theme of this paper, would stand in such an order
of merit I should not like to say: though I imagine it might
have the vote and preference of not a few, as being akin to
certain well-marked trends in theological thought at the present
time.
Adolf Deissmann once described the letter to the Colossians
in these words: 'When I open the chapel door of the Epistle to
the Colossians, it is to me as if Johann Sebastian himself sat at
the organ.'2 A penetrating comment! It might indeed seem
astonishing that a letter to a Phrygian Christian community
nineteen hundred years ago should speak relevantly today. But
what gives this epistle its distinctive and permanent quality is
clear: it is its witness to the finality, adequacy and all-sufficiency
of the cosmic Christ—by whom and for whom all things were
made, in whom they cohere, and with whom in God the life of
the Christian and of the Church is hidden. This is what gives
the argument its abiding value.
W. L. Knox indeed suggested that what Paul was doing in
this epistle was simply a kind of situational.manipulation in the
field of theology. He was seeking to 'adapt the figure of Jesus
to the fashionable cosmogony of the Hellenistic world'.3 Surely
not! Surely it is simpler and far truer to say that to know
Christ, as Paul knew him, is to have not only an ethic and an
eschatology but a cosmology as well. You cannot have Christ
in the heart and keep him out of the universe. The only
1
Quoted by N. Micklem, The Box and the Puppets, 80.
* Paul, 107, n. 3.
8
St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles, 113.
420
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possible correlative to such a Saviour must be the cosmos itself.
It is well to remind ourselves that this is in fact the horizon
that apostolic Christianity opened up, not only for the souls,
but for the minds of men: a world whose thoughts—as James
Denney expressed it—'wander through eternity, back into an
infinite past and on into immortal glory, thoughts unmatched
for length and breadth and depth and height by all that pagan
literature could offer'1; yes, and one might add today thoughts
undaunted by the new discoveries of astro-physics and that
astonishing outreach into space which, apart from faith, could
easily generate the mental 'cosmic giddiness' of which Brunner
speaks.2
This age tends to be more aware of the achievements of man
than of the Word of God by which all achievements are judged;
and more intimidated by the pressure of inexorable forces than
emboldened by the exhilaration of the gospel. The current
question is: What is the relevance of Christ to the vast tremendous forces—social, physical, cosmic—which are now the setting
of human life ? Can Christ hold his own in face of the revolutionary issues raised by science ? What is man's destiny in the
cosmic order? Is he at the mercy of forces beyond his control?
These questions Colossians answers both theologically and
ethically. It answers them theologically with its christological
affirmation of Christ as the unveiled purpose of God, the cohesive force penetrating and supporting all creation. And it
answers them ethically and practically with the insistence that
life will ultimately work only one way—God's way made manifest in the humanity of Jesus once and for all.
Clearly at Colosse a crisis had developed which required such
a forthright exposition of the faith. The peculiar historical
interest of the epistle lies precisely in its rejoinder to the phenomenon of religious syncretism, threatening then to undermine
the church: the emergence of a heterogeneous hybrid faith, in
which the attempt was being made to gain adherents by
blending the basic Christian ingredients with Oriental, Stoic,
Jewish and other elements—as though Christ might be classified
as one in a series of intermediary powers between God and
man, perhaps even the chief of the cosmic powers; an attempt
1
3
TTussalonians, 348.
Man in Revolt, 422.
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SCOTTISH J O U R N A L OF THEOLOGY
which, had it succeeded, would have stifled the young church
in its cradle.
II
It would not be untrue to say that in the first and second
centuries of the Christian era syncretism was one of the most
characteristic features of the religious quest. Before exploring
the reasons for this development, I would remind you that this
is not ancient history only. The syncretistic heresy at Colosse
has had and still has its modern counterparts.
It can be seen among the younger churches. In China, in
the pre-Communist revolution period, an association had been
formed entitled the 'Examine All Religions Society': the aim
of the exercise being to fashion an amalgam of Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity, by taking elements out of each and
glueing them together. In India, similar experiments have
appeared, and have been described by Bishop Stephen Neill,
D. T. Niles and others. In this connexion, I quote a couple of
sentences from a letter I received from one of our missionaries
with the South India Church: 'In India Hinduism is not only
strong and self-confident, but it has undergone a profound
moral renewal which makes it by and large a force for good.
The appeal of the tolerance and syncretism of Hinduism is tremendous, and provides a difficult context for the proclamation
of the exclusive claims of Christ.'
Coming nearer home, too, one is aware of a recrudescence
of the syncretistic spirit. This sometimes takes a more philosophical form, as in the Gifford Lectures of Dr Arnold Toynbee:
there he prophesied the coming of a time 'when the local heritages of the different historic nations, civilisations and religions
will have coalesced into a common heritage of the whole human
family. The missions of the higher religions are not competitive;
they are complementary.'1 Dr Visser 't Hooft has said: 'Syncretism is the secret religion of many intellectuals in the West.'2
Sometimes the syncretism is less reflective and more popular: a
vague theism, plus a liberal humanist picture of Jesus, plus a
dash of Judaic legalism, the whole being compounded with a
certain culture consciousness, a considerable infusion of hu1
a
An Historian's Approach to Religion, 296.
Quoted by D. T. Niles, Upon the Earth, 121.
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manitarian benevolence, and perhaps even a secularising of the
biblical theology of the Kingdom of God. This is what the late
Principal John Baillie once described as 'a sort of Esperanto
religion'.1 And perhaps President John Mackay was not being
too critical when he wrote: 'The Christian Church, were it to
admit syncretism as a religious ideal, would lose any compelling
sense of missionary obligation.'2
But I must avoid a possible misunderstanding here. So let
me say that of course there is a kind of syncretism that is inevitable. It is only too obvious that down the centuries 'Christianity has been set forth in the terms of many philosophies,
Platonic, Aristotelian, Hegelian and the like': in that sense Dr
Nathaniel Micklem's comment is correct that 'it resembles a
man who has always to appear in someone else's clothes'.3 But
what I want to suggest is that sometimes, through the Holy
Spirit, the Church becomes suddenly aware that those alien
forms—in spite of elements of truth in all of them—have been
tending to inhibit the good news, aware that the borrowed
clothes are graveclothes. Then it is that the Church may hear
again the command of the Lord of life, 'Lazarus, come forth!'
—with the subsequent injunction, when the man came out
bound with the clothes hand and foot, 'Loose him, and let him
go.' So the gospel, set free from cramping concepts of human
construction, goes to work in the world again.
But to return. Underlying the modern syncretistic attitude
is the argument that Christianity, if it is to continue to commend itself in the pluralist society of today, must learn to be
accommodating, and must purge itself of anything savouring of
exclusivism or of a claim to a monopoly of truth. In particular,
so runs the argument, it must purge itself of the threefold offence
of supernaturalism, historicism, eschatologism. It must softpedal its emphasis on the transcendental, free itself from the
entanglements of history, and cut out all crude apocalyptic
eschatology. This is tantamount to saying it must begin by
being Unitarian, substituting immanence for incarnation, evolution for redemption, psychological subjectivity for the Holy
Spirit, progress for the Kingdom of God—which is practically
1
2
The Sense of the Presence of God, 202.
Theology To-Day, Jan. 1951, 433.
» The Box and the Puppets, 133.
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what the philosophers of the Areopagus said to Paul when he
was so misguided as to preach Jesus and the resurrection and
the day ofjudgment, or what Alexander Pope desiderated when
he composed what he was pleased to call his 'Universal Prayer':
Father of all! in ev'ry age,
In ev'ry clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
Not much there of the ancient word—'I the Lord thy God am
a jealous God'!—a divine logion which the Christian revelation
has illuminated but certainly not displaced.
Ill
But to come back to our epistle. The Colossian church had
not been founded by Paul—it was indeed known to the apostle
only by hearsay. It had been founded by Epaphras, a Colossian
convert of Paul's great Ephesian mission. It was he who brought
to Paul in his imprisonment a report on a perplexing situation
which had emerged, the appearance among members of the
church of a somewhat strange theosophy, neither Jewish nor
Greek nor Oriental in character but a mixture of all three. Our
epistle was the result. The occasion of its writing explains its
controversial tone.
Paul was indeed always a controversialist: but all his different
controversies can be reduced to two types—that which dominates Galatians-Romans, and that which appears in Colossians.
All his other controversies are varieties of these. This is a real
clue to the interpretation of his epistles. One could simplify
still further, and say that behind both types there is one basic
question having to do with the essence of Christianity, namely,
Is Christ the whole of Christianity, or is he not? Is faith in
Christ sufficient, or is something else required ?
The Judaising Christians at Galatia said: 'Something more
is required. Christ requires to be supplemented by the Law.
The gospel of redeeming love is not indeed false—but by itself
it is incomplete.' To which Paul's blunt answer was—'To talk
of supplementing Christ is treason to the gospel. He fills the
whole horizon. If righteousness comes by the Law, Xpiords
Swpeav diridavev—Christ need never have died.1
1
Gal. a.ai.
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A FIRST-CENTURY HERESY
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Similarly, the syncretising Christians at Colosse said: 'Something more is required, a liberating esoteric gnosis, and the
mediation of angelic hierarchies. Jesus may indeed have redeemed from sin, but not from suffering and corruption and
death and cosmic powers. How could he be an all-sufficient
Deliverer, seeing he had not even been able to deliver himself
from suffering and fate—any more than he had delivered Paul
from stoning and from prison?' Against all such specious
claims, Paul reiterates that Christ is the fulness of the Godhead
bodily, the Alpha and Omega of the whole creative process,
standing alone, unique, final and compelling.
IV
Before attempting to determine the precise elements which
went to make up the complex of the Colossian heresy, it may
be well to notice some of the factors accounting in that first
century for the appearance of syncretism in general. I think
we can discern four such factors—and this can be important
in view of the fact that they all have parallels today.
The first factor was historical: the unification of the world.
Alexander the Great had set himself the task of unifying the
nations, and to a large extent had succeeded, breaking down
innumerable walls of partition, establishing pan-Hellenism and
cosmopolitanism, and making the whole world one neighbourhood. Orientals flocked westwards towards Rome. The acuteness of the immigration problem, with its consequent blending
of once alien cultures, is reflected in Juvenal's caustic comment
in one of his satires—'Iampridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes.'1
This unifying of the world was the historical factor facilitating
religious syncretism. It is hardly necessary to underline the
parallel today, when the secular unifying of mankind has proceeded with giant strides.
The second factor was psychological. It was an age of experiment. It was not only the philosophers of the Areopagus
who were anxious a/coveiv TI Kaworepov and to welcome the
intriguing talk of any KarayyeXevs £ev<Dv Saifiovtcov.2 The spirit
of experimentation was rife not only in politics, economics and
social structures but predominantly in religion. Thus when
strange cults from Persia, Egypt, Phrygia began to make their
1
iii.6o.
• Acts 17.18-21.
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appearance, the western world wondered—'Gould we not perhaps combine these with our traditional forms of worship?
Why should we not retain the strength and solidity of our
ancestral religion, and add on the excitement and stimulus and
romanticism of these new movements out of the east?' Certainly there was no lack of faiths to choose from, all of them
with their own peculiar fascination and appeal—an appeal
that was due (this is important to remark) not primarily to their
emotional and ritual elements, but far more to something
deeply and truly spiritual, one might almost say evangelical:
their offer of redemption, their promise of deliverance from
fate and misery and death.
dappelre, fivarai, rov deov aeawafievov,
eorai, yap r/filv ra>v ITOVCOV oamjpia.1
'Rejoice, initiates, now that the God has been brought back to
life; for ours shall be salvation from our distresses.' The cults
themselves were avowedly syncretistic. To take but one striking
example: the cult of Isis, 'first-born of the ages',2 as her devotees
called her, had coalesced in different localities with the worship
of Diana, of Demeter, of Minerva, of Aphrodite, and no one
knows of how many more. Indeed, it was fashionable in certain
circles to be initiated into a number of different cults, as
though one were to join several churches, supposing there was
safety in numbers—which may incidentally account for the
surplus and redundant altar at Athens whose inscription gave
Paul his text for his Areopagus sermon: dyvajcrrw 6eu>.3 Nor was
syncretism merely the refuge of the untheologically minded.
Those who felt the need of an intellectual basis to their faith
could argue that what the diversity of the cults represented was
different aspects of one fundamental religion, and that all the
separate gods were manifestations (inufuweuu) of one ultimate
divinity, an all-inclusive Oeds vdvOeos—the concept from which
modern pantheism derives. Just how far the spirit of experimentation could go in the direction of an eclectic syncretism
might be illustrated from the days of the Emperor Alexander
Severus in the third century: his private chapel contained
1
From the liturgy of the cult of Attis: quoted by Firmicus Maternus, De Errore
Profanarum Religionum, 22.
2
Apuleius, Metam. xi.5.
:
•
3
Acts 17.23.
''
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A FIRST-CENTURY HERESY
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shrines of Orpheus, Abraham, Apollonius of Tyana, and Jesus
Christ.1
We have seen, then, two factors accounting for theocrasia:
historically, the unifying of the world, and psychologically, the
urge away from conservatism and exclusivism towards experiment and innovation.
The third factor was philosophical—or perhaps I should say
philosophical-mystical—and was represented mainly by the
later Stoicism. It was one of Paul's greatest contemporaries,
the philosopher Seneca, who, looking out upon the created
universe, could say—'All this which thou seest, in which are
comprised things human and divine, is one. We are members
of a vast body. Nature made us kin.'2 'Members of a vast
body'—is this perhaps, however remotely, a contributing influence to the Pauline doctrine of the new humanity, the body
of Christ ? I do not myself think so: but the apparent parallelism might lend itself to curious speculation. What is important
to remark is that the later Stoicism, unlike that of Zeno and
Cleanthes, did not hold aloof from popular religion, but actively
sought an alliance, fostering a union of the philosophical
thought of the west and the religious sentiment of the east.
This was not an anti-intellectual compromise: it was a recognition that the average man requires an anthropomorphic faith,
and that these cruder ideas, properly allegorised or demythologised, could be important channels of higher truth. In this
syncretising development of Stoicism, perhaps the most significant figure is Posidonius (135-50 B.C.), one of the greatest
Platonists who ever lived, and withal scientist, astrologer,
mystic. Like Paul, he too claimed to know—not indeed by
historical events, as with Paul, but through trance and ecstasy
—of a power, a Logos, in whom the whole universe cohered;
and on this basis he sought to fuse together the highest elements
of all contemporary philosophies and faiths in a profound
religious mysticism. Thus again the syncretistic process was
helped upon its way.
The fourth contributory factor was theosophical—and in
particular, the rise of gnosticism from which all modern theo1
Angus, Mystery Religions, 192.
• Ep. Mor. xcv.52. 'Omne hoc quod vides . . . unum est; membra sumus corporis magni.
Natura nos cognates edidit.'
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Sophies are in direct descent. Here we have to be careful, for
'gnosticism is one of the most flexible designations in the
vocabulary of the history of religion'.1 By the second century,
it is true, it is possible to speak of gnostic systems; but initially,
it was not so much a programme or a religious system as a
religious attitude, representative of an intellectual oligarchy
whose quest for God avoided the old crude methods of paganism and polytheism, and preferred the pathway of a superior,
esoteric wisdom. Thus Kasemann has maintained that the
great christological passage in Col. i began as a non-Christian
gnostic hymn, which was christianised only in a subsequent
redaction by the interpolation of certain phrases.2 And H. J.
Schoeps, the Jewish scholar, holds that Paul himself had been
so infected by the syncretising fashion that his Christology is
simply a combination of gnostic and traditional Jewish ideas.3
Certainly gnosticism at its best was possessed by a sense of the
unapproachable majesty of God, and addressed itself to the
basic problem of Hellenistic metaphysics: how can the absolute
and the eternal come into touch with a material universe and
all its evils? It is this basically religious motive in gnosticism
which explains why it could seek—as it did so often seek—a
synthesis with nascent Christianity. The trouble was its radical
dualism. The gnostic held that in matter there was an antagonistic principle thwarting the divine purpose; and the question was how this dualism could be overcome. The problem
was resolved by a doctrine of graded emanations, the angels or
aeons of the gnostic hierarchy. Between God and the created
world, it was held, there existed a whole chain of intermediary
powers, the effluence of deity, and at each link in the chain—as
it approached the world of men—the element of deity became
weaker, more diluted, until at last contact was possible. Such
a view inevitably carried with it significant ethical consequences.
It could be claimed as justifying either of two diametrically
opposed courses of moral action, ascetic or antinomian. The
ascetic would maintain—'You must avoid infection by abjuring
things material.' 'Touch not, taste not, handle not.' 4 The
antinomian would retort—'You cannot avoid evil whatever you
1
H. A. A. Kennedy, Mystery Religions, 26.
'A Primitive Christian Baptismal Liturgy', in Essays on NT Themes, i4gfF.
4
' Paul, ch. iv.
Col. 3.91.
8
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A FIRST-CENTURY HERESY
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1
do, therefore you can ignore it.' Gnosticism in Colosse as
elsewhere was a strange mixture, springing from a real theological concern and a worthy motive, but tending towards a
theosophy romantic, nebulous and superficial. Three things
there were that brought Paul into the field against it: its
assumption of a superior gnosis, denying the universality of the
gospel; its ethical adaptability, elusive and chameleon-like;
and above all, its cavalier treatment of history, displacing ret
/xeyaAeia rov deov by yvajais rtov UTTC/J/COO/XICOV, as though the death
and resurrection of Jesus were mere symbols and illustrations
of general religious truths, and as though ivXpiarw and Xpurros
ev ifwi were nothing more than pictorial expressions of a divine
immanence, essentially abstract and remote. In all this, the
modern counterpart is not far to seek. As Dr Eric Mascall has
pointedly expressed it: 'In the reduced, secularised, demythologised Christianity which we are being offered in place of the
historic faith of Christendom the most striking characteristic is
its narrowness; there is in it nothing of the cosmic breadth of a
religion which sees the whole universe as held in the loving
hand of a God who created it and redeemed it.'2
V
From this analysis, then, of these major factors—the historical
the psychological, the philosophical-mystical, and the theosophical-gnostic—accounting for the rise and prevalence of
syncretism, we come back again to the situation at Colosse.
Reading the letter, it is not difficult to disentangle the sources
—Greek, Oriental, Jewish, Christian—from which the composite teaching derived. The basis, of course, was Christian.
In other words, the movement was not a non-Christian attack
on the Church—it was a Christian heresy. Among the Greek
elements are the emphases on rhetoric (mOavoXoyla)3 and metaphysics (<f>iXoaro<l>ia KAI Kevrj amiT^).4 Incidentally, this last phrase
is not to be taken as implying any disparagement on Paul's part
of <f>i\oao(f>ia as such: it was the adulteration of true love of
wisdom that he rebuked. Among the oriental elements are the
worship of angels,5 dualistic asceticism,6 and all the paraphernalia of mystic vision and esoteric initiation: this is certainly
1
8
Col. 3.5.
Col. 2.4.
2
E. L. Mascall, The Secularisation of Christianity, 271.
6
* Col. 2.8.
Col. 2.18.
• Col. 2.21.
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the likeliest meaning of the notorious crux interpretum, 2.18, a
eopaKev ifx^arevcov. Among the Jewish elements are circumcision1 (interpreted at Colosse, it would appear, not in the
orthodox sense of entrance upon a new race, but as a mark of
an ascetic life—clearly a heretical Judaism); also the observance
of sabbaths, new moons and festivals2; and perhaps most of all,
the pervasive influence of concepts from the Wisdom literature.
It is important to observe that these disparate elements—
Greek, Oriental, Jewish—had been fused into one. Paul is not
addressing two or more different sets of people with a variety
of deviations from the faith—one Jewish, another Hellenistic,
another perhaps Iranian—he is concerned with a single complex heresy.
Attempts have, of course, been made by almost every commentator to define more precisely this new theology current at
Colosse. Three of these let me mention quite briefly. First, we
must reject the view of Hort and Peake and others that Galatians gives the clue, and that the question at issue was basically
the familiar Judaistic legalist controversy. This is clearly an
undue simplification, which fails to do justice to the HellenisticOriental elements already noted. Second, Bishop Lightfoot in
a long and still impressive dissertation identified the Colossian
heresy with a form of Essenism. If the Dead Sea Scrolls had
been discovered when Lightfoot wrote, they would have added
a whole arsenal of ammunition to his argument. There is indeed
a question as to the geographical extension of the Essene sect.
Josephus indicates that their itinerant monks carried their
doctrines and way of life far afield; but had they penetrated to
Asia Minor? Perhaps they had—especially if one were to accept
Cullmann's view3 that the people called 'Hellenists' in the New
Testament were not just Greek-speaking Jews, but syncretistic
members of the Church, and that the Fourth Gospel with its
Ephesian background came from circles close to these Hellenists. Third, and perhaps least open to objection, is Lohmeyer's
theory that the theology that had been dividing the Colossian
church was a local phenomenon, a Phrygian-Christian synthesis
of Hellenistic gnosis and Jewish praxis. Behind the gnostic
element in this synthesis there probably lay the old Persian
1
3
Col. 2.11.
"Col. 2.l6.
The Early Church, 191.
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A FIRST-CENTURY HERESY
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mythology of angels and spirits, with their threefold function in
relationship to God, man, and the universe: a mythology which
had spread throughout the orient, and had come to have a
special vogue precisely in Phrygia.
VI
But much more important than these rival reconstructions
of the Colossian theology is the answer Paul gave to it. He
answered it both negatively and positively.
Negatively, he answered it with the explicit warnings of
chapter 2, verses 4, 8, 18. He begs his readers not to allow
themselves (this is verse 18) to be disqualified by the specious
teachings of those who delight in self-mortification and the
worship of angels and esoteric ecstasies. Indeed, throughout the
letter his attitude is—'No terms with syncretism at any price!'
Not that Paul was guilty of the closed mind or the false authoritarianism of which he has sometimes been accused. He knew
that if the Church had to be open to God it had also to be open
to the world. He was ready to enter into genuine dialogue with
anyone and everyone. Did he not himself declare—'I have
become all things to all men, that I might by all means save
some'? 1 Did he not quote approvingly from pagan authors,
Aratus of Cilicia,2 Menander of Athens,3 and was he not versed
in the culture of the day and the theology of the schools ? Was
ever a man less introverted ecclesiastically or more concerned
for those outside the Christian fellowship, more determined to
go all lengths in involvement and self-identification in order to
offer them the friendship of God for Jesus' sake ? The idea of
the Church as a theological or cultic ghetto was utterly alien to
the apostle's mind. Yet with it all, there was a superb intolerance, specially towards the easy-going moral broadmindedness
and religious assimilation that were then rotting the world. The
cults would have welcomed Jesus as a syncretistic ally, but to
Paul this would be treason. If this indifferentism was the spirit
of the age, he would stand against it in direct opposition. Perhaps we need to be reminded of this today, when the idea has
gone abroad that because the dominant theology of one generation tends to become the idolatry of the next it is no longer
possible to proclaim with indefeasible certainty and assurance
1
1 Cor. 9.22.
2
Acts 17.28.
8
1 Cor. 15.33.
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the absolute finality of Jesus, nor to speak of God revealing
himself in terms of authentic, unconditional demand.
The fact is that the real danger for the Church today is not,
as we are so often told, that it should arrogantly give the impression of knowing all the answers to the problems of life and
history and destiny: that time—if it ever existed—has long been
past. The real danger now is the opposite of that. It is that the
Church should be so self-consciously eager to plead 'Not guilty'
to the charges of dogmatism in theology and censoriousness in
ethics, so anxious to make due concession to a pluralist society's
diversity of views, that it deliberately soft-pedals the distinctive
apostolic note—what Paul in this epistle calls irXrjpofopla, a
fully assured certainty and conviction of the solitary, unsupplementable sufficiency of Christ.
We have seen Paul's negative reaction to the Colossian
heresy. Positively, his answer was still more challenging. He
assured his readers that the very problems they were concerned
about had already all been answered in Christ. Here he carries
the war into the enemy camp, by taking their favourite watchwords—yvcbois, [ivar^piov, TrAiJpco/xa, oo<f>la, reXeioT^s, the whole
range of them—and claiming them all for Jesus. It is good
strategy, this meeting your opponents on their own ground—
like David somewhat ironically using Goliath's own sword to
cut off the giant's head. Paul saw that what the Colossian
propagandists, in their fantastic way, were seeking was a cosmology to support their theology. To the questions 'How is
God related to matter, eternity to time, redemption to creation ?'
the gnostic would answer, 'Through the aeons, of which Christ
is one, perhaps even the greatest.' Not so, replied Paul: Christ
is not one aeon, lost in the crowd, he is -nav TO wA^pw/xa. He
alone bridges every chasm between God and man, heaven and
earth, creation and redemption—why? Because he is himself
the highest and the lowest, thoroughly historical, yet outside
all the normal categories of men: which is precisely the truth
for which at a later day and in a different form the Nicene
theologians so vigorously contended. No chain of intermediate
beings is required. The incarnation alone spans the gulf between man's desperate need and the unsearchable riches of the
eternal. It ends the intolerable dualism and breaks the enslaving bondage of the (rroi^cia: for the grace that operates
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A FIRST-CENTURY HERESY
433
redemptively in Christ is the same love that moves the stars and
leads the universe to its appointed goal. Of course Paul knew
—no one better than he—that this would be a stumbling-block
to the spirit of the age. After all, the Holy Spirit given by God
at Pentecost to interpret the things of Christ could not be other
than a stumbling-block to the system-builders of the day. Nor
can he even now. But stumbling-block or no, this was the
apostolic proclamation. And to faith—the Amen of faith being
the only proper response to the initiative of God—to faith this
gospel makes sense of life and of the universe as nothing else
can. In the words of Ernst Fuchs: 'Faith in the New Testament
sense means that God finally, once and for all, makes himself
heard in Jesus.'1
VII
Notice, finally, the urgency with which Paul stresses, as over
against the Colossian heretics, three aspects of the gospel: its
historicity, its universality, its ethical content.
Historicity. The gnostic vagueness of a timeless theosophy
he counters with those great resounding aorist tenses which are
a feature of the epistle, and which mean, This thing happened:
this is no speculation, but fact, beyond any peradventure. Here
are a few samples out of many, eppvaaro 17/zaj KO.1 /AeTeorrjcrev2:
'He rescued and transferred us into the Kingdom of the Son of
his love'—a clear reference to the baptism in Jordan, irpocn)Xwaas, Opiafifievoas3: 'He nailed it to his cross'—Christ as the
one who wields the hammer on Calvary—'He led them as
captives in his victory procession.' This essential historicity of
the faith, obscured by the Colossian gnostics, has been obscured
too often since. Within the Church at different times there have
appeared four major corruptions of the historic kerygma: the
theological corruption, which makes orthodoxy the norm, doctrine about the events rather than the events themselves; the
pietist corruption, which makes experience the norm, subjective
feelings and mystic states rather than objective facts; the
rationalist corruption, which makes reason the norm, man's
cognition rather than God's revelation; and the existentialist
corruption, which makes personal self-understanding the norm,
1
Studies of the Historical Jesus, 199.
8
1-13-
8
2.14. ' 5 -
SJT D
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as though the main object of the gospel were to supply the
individual with a meaning for his personal life, as though (for
example) the resurrection of Jesus were God doing something
for me, not primarily something for Christ. In fact, there never
has been a time when attempts have not been made to lift the
Christian religion into the atmosphere of universal and eternal
truth by the method of dismissing historical considerations.
Certainly such considerations are alien to the total tradition of
pagan philosophy. Did not Brunner observe that the blunt
historicity of John 1.18—'He has declared him'—'would make
every good Platonist's hair stand on end' 1 ? But the apostolic
emphasis remains. Sixty years ago P. T. Forsyth expressed it
thus, in words that are still worth pondering: Christ 'acts on
us through what he was and did in history, once for all. Our
real and destined eternity goes round by Nazareth to reach us.' 2
The second aspect of the gospel Colossians stresses as against
the false teachers is its universality. Just as in Galatians and
Romans Paul fought against a national exclusiveness, so here
he fights against an intellectual and spiritual exclusiveness. The
ILvorripiov the Colossian syncretists dealt in was an esoteric way
of individual salvation for the elect initiated few. Paul's
is the revealed divine purpose to reconcile all things
aAAa^at ra mura—in Christ.3 'We preach Christ,' he
writes, 'admonishing every man, teaching every man, that we
may present every man perfect in Christ'4—ndvra avOpajirov
three times over. The trouble with heresy, as Paul saw it, was
its dreadful provincialism. Over against the local aberration
threatening Colosse he sets the range and sweep of the true
gospel, iv ITOVTI TW Koofia) iarlv—'it exists in all the world'—
Kapnofopovpevov /cat avtjavonevov—'bearing fruit and increasing' 5 : which is Paul's vision of the Catholic Church and the
ecumenical horizon as over against the appalling smallness of
sectarianism, a kind of forecast of quod semper, quod ubique, quod
ab omnibus. I should indeed be prepared to argue that the kind
of narrowly individualistic interpretation of salvation that has
so often discredited the faith has its roots, not in the nineteenth
century, but away back in ancient gnosticism.
Finally, there is a third aspect of the gospel our epistle stresses
1
3
Man in Revolt, 49.
1.20.
2
Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 18.
6
* t.28.
1.6.
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A FIRST-CENTURY HERESY
435
against the heretics: its ethical content. The only true yvwais
6eov, declares Paul, is iiTiyvcjois rov deX^fiaros avrov, 'knowledge of his will'.1 No spurious intellectualism this, but an active moral dynamic. The secret of the good life lies not in ascetic
codes and rigid prohibitions,2 but in union with Christ. 'You
have put off the old nature, and have put on the new.'3 'If you
were raised to life with Christ, seek the things that are above.'4
What makes this possible is that the irXrjpcjjfMa, the fulness of
God, which resides in Christ, has through him in some measure
overflowed on to his people: 'you are iv avru> Tre^A^/sco/ieW6—
'in him you have your own TrXrjpco^a, you have attained to fulness of being'. And as Paul goes on to show in the 'household
code' of 3.i8rT, this applies to all personal relationships—husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants.
It is only when all such relationships are seen eV Kvpiip, 'in the
Lord', that the true ethical energy of the gospel is released, the
fulness of God, life that is life indeed.
We may sum it up by saying that to be a Christian in the
Pauline sense is to be saved from two opposite errors: from an
unethical mysticism on the one hand, and from an unmystical
ethic on the other. There are the two dangers—the blasphemy
of an unethical mysticism, and the impotence of an unmystical
ethic. The one, the blasphemy of an unethical mysticism, can
be seen alike in the Hellenistic cults and in some present-day
theosophies: the spirit which is great on subjective experience,
and weak in SiKeuoowq and aydnr). The other, the impotence of
an unmystical ethic, can be seen in Stoicism, both ancient and
modern: the spirit which is strong on duty and determination,
and defective in the dower of eager energy and impassioned
desire. eV Xpiorw is mysticism, but it can never become an
unethical mysticism, for it is union with the Crucified, peace at
a great price, incorporation into One who in our very flesh and
blood gives his life for love. So, too, on the other side, vo^os
Xpiorov is ethic, but it can never become an unmystical ethic,
for it is christocentric, focused on One who is the way, the truth
and the life, the native air of the soul; so that thus there becomes possible the refashioning of our ethical nature on supernatural levels.
1
1.9.
* 3.1.
a
2.21.
*
2.10.
3
3.9.
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SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
So I end with two tiny phrases which stand side by side in
the first sentence of the epistle: iv KoXoaaals . . . ev Xpurrui.
If one is to speak of 'situation ethics', it would be well to remember that this—nothing less—is the total situation of the
Church, the true locus of the Christian: 'in Colosse, in Christ'.
Paul knew what he was talking about—Paul who said both 'I
am a Roman citizen' and 'my citizenship is in heaven'. Some
would deny the simultaneity of the twofold environment. They
would say: 'Either you can be in Colosse but not in Christ—
which is secularism; or you can be in Christ, but not in Colosse
—which is monasticism.' Paul would say it is precisely because
you are in Colosse that you need to be in Christ; and that it is
precisely by being in Christ that Colosse comes to have new
meaning. The real objection to much that is being said and
written today about situation ethics is not that it goes too far,
but that it does not go far enough. You must take the total
situation, not just a fraction of it; and certainly for the Church,
and for each individual Christian incorporated by baptism, the
major part of the situation is that contained in the words iv
XpiaTw. At any given moment in the life of the Church, in
every single instant in the life of the believer, this is the situation—surrounded by, immersed in, the same energy of life and
light and love which penetrates and sustains the whole vast
structure of creation, and in which the unthinkable immensities
of the universe cohere. This is the situation—'your life', as Paul
puts it here, 'hidden with Christ in God'. 1 This is what the
gospel is about: each tiny cell of the Body of Christ filled with
the TrXrjpcjfia of the life eternal, each microcosmic existence
penetrated by 'the love that moves the sun and all the stars'.
3-3-
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