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Except you enthrall me, never shall
We’ve been studying Colossians over the last five weeks. We
first looked at the problem that prompted the writing of the letter;
troublemakers who were cajoling the Colossians into practicing a religion from
below, into reliance on their own efforts to divest themselves of the influence
of the flesh and to appease spiritually superior and potent forces (I referred
to this as ‘buying the stairway to heaven’). Paul wrote the Colossians to
remind them of what it means to believe in Jesus Christ. The first thing he
does is to recite the Song of Christ (Col 1:15-20), effectively a beautiful
hymn that expresses the sweeping grandeur of Christ’s relationship to God and
to creation as well as the surprising and radical humility of his humanity,
where the fullness of God reconciles and pacifies the universe through a bloody
death on the cross. Paul then highlights how, instead of climbing a spiritual
ladder, we’ve been transported directly into Christ via our baptisms. Baptism
is God’s work where we receive his judgment on us through the death of Christ
to the end that we share in Christ’s resurrection life. That resurrected life
is mysterious in that we are hid with Christ at God’s right hand and yet still
live here on earth. Paul encourages us to discover this new life we’ve been
given through stripping off sinful vices and to embrace new humanity which
renews not just us but all humanity sot that Christ is all and in all. We
highlight this new humanity through putting on the attire of Christ, the
Christian virtues and especially love. And this new life transforms every
aspect of our lives, including our familial and social relationships, which we
now live ‘as is fitting in the Lord.’ Hopefully my blog posts have illuminated
these different features of Colossians.
As we finish the season of Lent by making our way through
Holy Week, I want to offer six ways that this understanding of Colossians
informs my own life (or ways I believe it should, even if I fail to let it).
Today, I want to focus on Paul’s warning in Col 2:8, “Look out, lest someone
take you captive through philosophy and empty deceit according to human
traditions, according to the elemental forces of the universe and not according
to Christ.”
Paul has me at ‘philosophy,’ since, as an academic and especially
as one who researches the relationship between early Christianity and the
Greco-Roman world, I want to know how philosophy positively and negatively
affected Christian thought and living. But Paul writes not to titillate my
research fancy but to wake me up to those who would lead me astray and, more
frighteningly, whisk me away from Christ. He uses ‘philosophy’ because it
sounds so reasonable, so thoughtful. And he throws in some technical language, ta
stoicheia tou kosmou, because philosophers always have their jargon.
But his point is to wake me up lest someone delude me by means of persuasive
language (Col 2:4).
My fellow ‘academic elites’ may point out that this sounds eerily
like ‘fundamentalist religion’ which encourages people away from reasoning and
toward blind fideism. I share their prejudice; I value critical thinking,
rigorous analysis, and questioning the status quo and am skeptical that simply
clinging to long-held beliefs is beneficial to human thriving. Still, just
because I hold a doctor of philosophy degree doesn’t mean I am not susceptible
to empty or deceitful philosophy. It may even mean that I not only am prone to
it, but I may–in my role as teacher–be at risk of becoming one of the deluders,
one of the troublemakers.
Paul’s warning does not call me to quit the life of the mind
or to choose faith over reason. But it does call me to make a choice; do I
cling to a way of thinking that tells me I’m free but leaves me no ability to
overcome the imprisonment of my sin and mortality, let alone the forces of this
present darkness; or do I let go of all pretense and accept the captivity of
Christ. After all, Paul says ‘do not let anyone take you captive…according to
human traditions …and not according to Christ’ in Col 2:8, seemingly implying
the right choice is to be taken captive according to Christ. This might not be
what he’s saying, but it is not opposed to it. Elsewhere, he identifies himself
as a ‘slave of Christ’ (Rom 1:1, Titus 1:1) and he points out that all of us
who are in Christ are “enslaved to God” (Rom 6:22).
The myth of our age is that we can stand on our own,
thinking and acting for ourselves, and it is a myth held up by just about every
institution of our culture, including higher education. But the myth isn’t
true. We are not free. Or rather, we are not free by ourselves. The captivity
of Christ is a captivity of generous love, a passionate enthrallment where our
creator takes us to himself (via his own arrest and execution) to set us free,
to make us more freely ourselves then we could ever be on our own. What looks
like capitulation, is. But it is capitulation to the one alone who can help me
become truly and fully human, the Image of God himself.
Should I claim freedom and remain in chains? Or should I
accept captivity and discover freedom?
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