The Pulpit Commentary — Colossians — Section 111

Vers. 16-23.-Scct. 6. The claims of thefalse teacher. The Colossian error is the earliest Chriftian l,eresy, understanding the word in its stricter sense as denoting a move- ment in the direction ol e1Tor, originating within the Church itself. Itfirst answers to the terms of St. Paul's prediction in Acts xx. 29--31. 'l'he powerful J udaizina reaction with which St. Paul and the Gentile Church had previously to struggle, and which drew from him the Galatian and Roman Epistles, was negative and retrograde in its character, originating from without rather than from within the Church, and stimulated by the increasing violence and desperation of Jewish national feeling. Dut here we discern the rise of a heterodox school of thought within Christianity itself. At this point, first of all, were those elements. of error introduced, those seeds of division sown, which ripened into the wild and disastrous Gnostic apostasy of the second century ; and that may be said to have persisted to the present day. For our inveterate and multiplied ecclesi- astical divisions and our deeply rooted doctrinal differences, with the animosities and prejudices that attend them, show too plainly that the rents which then began to open in the Chnrch's unity are far from being closed. Accordingly, the Colossian error presents heresy in its germinal form. It contains and combined in itself the root- principles and incipient forms of those errors which have most widely prevailed in after ages. It unites evil tendencies which afterwards parted asunder and became oppofed to each other, which seem indeed to b6 radically inconsistent. Dut this was an age of eclecticism and amalgamation. Moreover, there is a latent contradiction inherent in falsehood and error. It must needs be inconsisteut and witnesses against itself. Its principles, when car1ied forward and pushed to their issues in logic and practice, become mutually destructive; and the system built upon them and the party which has espoused them of themselves break up into contending fragments. Hence the shifting phases and combinations of religious error-Protean, many-headed-under which the same elements constantly reappear, identical in essence, incessantly varying in form. "The truth as it is in Jesus" is alone self-consistent, harmonious, and enduring. Dut who will assure himself that he has in all things, so far as he might, truly ascertained aod followed it? Tm: FIRST HERESY. We have distinguished in the Colossian heresy four elements of error, which may be roughly designated under the names of rationalism, ceremonialism, mysticism, and asceticism. They are the heresies, respectively, of the intellect, of the religious instinct, of the spiritual consciousness, and of the moral will,-aberrations, each of them, of functions belonging to the highest and divinest part of man's nature. 1. The false teachers are evidently rnl ionalists. It is this characteristic which the apoEtle first expressly specifies (vcrs. 8, :.!3), and to which the whole tenor of the Epistle bears witness (see, especially, eh ) 9, 28; ii. 2-4; iii. 10, 16; and compare the introductory remarks in our homiletic~, 110ct, 2, I. and sect. 5, I.). 'l'hcy construed Christianity in terms of their preconceived pnilosophic theory. 'l'hey were philosophers first, and Christians afterwards, or only Chn~tiane so far as their philosophy permitted, Clirist waa not the centre of their thoughts, the Master of their intellect and heart (cL. ii. HI; iii. 11); but they made au idol of their intellectual B!fBltm, and ho must C1ll, II. 1-23.] 'l'IIB EPIS'l'LE TO 'l'HE COLOSSIANS. 10:3