§ 5. CIIARACTER OF TIIE EPISTLE. The novel character of the Colossian heresy accounts in great part for the number of new and peculiar words, occurring especially in the polemic part of tho Epislle. 1 The obscure and seemingly embarrassed style of some passages in the second chapter, with the absence of Old Teatament citations, and the rarity of St. Paul's favourite logical formulre and conjunctive par- ticles, may be due to the same cause. However thoroughly master of his position, we can hardly expect the apostle to move on this new ground with quite the same ease and freedom with which he combats hi,i Pharisaic opponents in the Galatian and Roman Epistles, with the weapons sharpened in the schools of rabbinical dialectic. He was himself by training a rabbi, and not a philosopher. Moreover, the system he is dealing with was but loosely coherent, being speculative rather than argumentative in method, and not based, like the legalistic Judaism of Galatia, on scriptural authority. And the false teachers ( or teacher) of Colossre did not, we should gather, assail the apostle's personal authority; but may have rather claimed, in com- petition with Epaphras, to be the true exponents and completers of Pauline doctrine. Hence the apostle asserts and denounces, and no longer argues and appeals as in the Epistle to the Galatians. The Divine glory and sufficiency of Christ he sees to be at stake; and he applies the whole force of his mind and the weight of his recognized apostleship to the vindic<J.- tion of that principle in its commanding grandeur and simplicity and in its instant appeal to the loyalty of the Christian heart. From this lofty height he rejects and casts down, now ou this side and now on that, the speculations and pretensions which so insidiously trenched upon the sove- reign completeness of Christ, and endangered the citadel of the Church's faith. The doctrines of salvation retreat comparatively into the background here; but they are by no means absent, and are expressed in a thoroaghly Pauline manner, and sometimes in language that puts them in a new and striking light (eh. i. 12-14, 21-23; ii.11-14; iii. 12-15). But tbe doctrine of the person of Christ is " all and in all" in this Epistle. E,cry part of the Jetter directly or indirectly pays its tribute to this theme, and "acknowledges" him "to bo the Lord." This sublime and all-pervading thought gives a unity to the Epistle which defies every attempt at dis- integration, and suffuses it with a sustained loftiness and devotional 1 Of the thirty-four Pauline hapaz legome-na of the Epistle, the second chapter contains ho.If, o.nd nmongst them such words o.s "persuo.sivenoss-of-speech," "me.king-(one)-a-spoil," "philosophy," "Godheo.d," "bodily," "new-moon," "investigating" (or "inll:uding-iuto," /µ./3aTEl,ow), "will-worship" (or, "devotion-to-worship"), "unsparingness," "surfeiting," whose use is obviously due to oontroversiul cxigenoy. In other instances, as Alford well remo.rks (in his• Introduotion • to this Epistle, § iv. 3), " It is the 1T•µvOT1Js of controversial tone, even more thrm tho necessity of the subject handled, whioh co.uses our Epistle to abound so muoh with poouli11r words nud phrneee." X INTRODUCTION TO
inknsit., of feeling peculiar in its ]dnd to St. Paul. "Non est cujusvis h0mi11is Paulinum pectus cffingere" (Erasmus). flut. the Rpostle's Christology here is no mora than the complete n.nd ckliberatc statement of what is virtually contained, by wny of implication nnd incidental reference, in the earlier Epistles. It is the necessary dirt- kctic development of the Christology of Romans and Corinthians brought into conflict with Gnosticizing theosophy. "The most advanced formulm that we shaH find in the Epistle to the Colossians," M. Renan justly says, "erist already in germ in the older Epistles" (' St. Paul,' p. 275); see Rom. i. 4; ix. 5; riv. 9; 1 Cor. ii. 8; iii. 22, 23; viii. 6; xv. 24-28; 2 Cor. iv-. 4-6; v. 15, 19; viii. 9; Gal. iv. 4. That sovereignty of Christ which the apostle had previously asserted as extending over the in- dindual life and the relations of man1dnd to God, he now victorio11Sly carries forward into the transcendental sphere, into the world of angels and the constitution of the created universe, the ground from which it was being assailed by the new philosophic teachers. He is thus kd to give his teaching respecting the person of Christ its ideal completion. He sets forth the unity of the earthly and the heavenly, the moral and the natural, the Church and the universe, in "Jesus Christ and him crucified." (' All things,'' he declares, "consist in Christ: through him were all things recon- ciled unto him" (compare introductory note to Sect. II. in the Exposition). From the nature of its subject it arises that, while the Epistle to the Romans, for example, is predominantly psychological and historical in its treatment, this Epistle is metaphysical and transcendental. The logic of the former is mainly inductive, of the latter deductive. • It is due, partly perhaps to the requirements of the more advanced Christian life of the Church, but chiefly to the ascetic and moralizing character of early Gnosticism, that the moral teaching of Colossians and Ephesians is more full and systematic than that of St. Paul's earlier Epistles'. The sacredness of family obligations and their relation to Christian doctrine now come into prominence in the apostle's teaching, in opposition to the universal tendency of mysticism and asceticism to disparage and undermine the natural order of life. In these respects the letters to the Asiatic Churches constitute e. middle term between the four great, specifically evangelical Epistles, and the Pastoral Epistles with their concern about "good works." Necessarily, as time went on and the Churches grew out of tlieir infancy, and as new dangers assailed them, St. Paul became more of a "pastor and teacher," and less predominantly an "evangelist." In this Epistle, as still more markedly in Ephesians, and to ::i, less degree in Philippians, we find a cumulative fulness and roundness of expression, a fondness for compound terms and phrases, and a habit of extending sen- tences indefinitely by participial and relative clauses, that do not appear, at any rate to the same extent, in the apostle's former writings. .And we miss something of the glow and vehemence, " the powerful step and claricing spring'' (Ewald) of his earlier style. But we must remember THE EPISTLE TO TUE COLOSSIANS. xi
that the writer is now "snch a one as Pnnl the aged" (Philem. 9), worn and broken by harclship and imprisonment. These letters belong to tb0 mollow afternoon rather than to tho heyday of the apostle's vigour. The difference is not greater than often appears in the same writer at different periods and under a ohange of circnmstances. There is nothing stereotyped about St. Paul.