2. But the philosophic Judaism with which he has now to deal requires him to insist more strongly on the immediate revelation of God himself to the world that is made in Christ. Now that One has been "manifested at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself" (Hebrews 9:26; Isaiah 59:2), it is possible to behold God by a nearer vision. With the revelation of his pardoning mercy and sin-avenging justice in Christ, "the Son of his love" (Ephesians 2:4; Romans 3:26), he makes known his inmost name and nature. To Israel, in comparison with other nations, "God was nigh" (Deuteronomy 4:7; Le 20:26); and yet even Israel complains, "Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself" (Isaiah 45:15). He "came with ten thousand of his holy ones, and from his right hand went a fiery law for them" (Deuteronomy 33:2); and "the earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God" (Psalms 68:8). "He made the clouds his chariot; "his" way was in the sea, and his path in the great waters, and his footsteps were not known" (Psalms 77:19, Psalms 77:20). The mystic veil that screened his presence was as splendid as the law by which he ruled the consciences of men was stern and terrible. But in Christ, he "laid his glory by." God appeared in the Babe of Bethlehem, in the Man of sorrows, in Christ crucified, as the Father of the children of men. He bids all his angels worship and wait upon the lowly form of the Son of man, and the elements of nature (more closely linked with the angelic powers, perhaps, than we can imagine) are made to do his bidding, "that all may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father" (John 5:23). "They shall call his name Immanuel, God with us" (Matthew 1:23). None had "seen God at any time;" the angels that had been his ministers, the glories of the created world in which he robed himself (Psalms 102:26; Psalms 104:2), these could not utter his Name: "the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, the Word made flesh, he declared him" (John 1:14, John 1:18). "The veil is done away in Christ." But "the same veil," which in St. Paul's day hung between the Jewish mind and the true knowledge of God, "remaineth unlifted" for those who will not behold "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 3:14; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6). God at once "reconciled the world unto himself" and unveiled himself to the world in him. This is the sum of these two verses.
Colossians 2:16-23.—Sect. 6
The claims of the false teacher.
The Colossian error is the earliest Christian heresy, understanding the word in its stricter sense as denoting a movement in the direction el' error, originating within the Church itself. It first answers to the terms of St. Paul's prediction in Acts 20:29-31. The powerful Judaizing 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. But 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 ecclesiastical 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 Church's unity are far from being closed. Accordingly, the Colossian error presents heresy in its germinal form. It contains and combines 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 opposed to each other, which seem indeed to be radically inconsistent. But this was an age of eclecticism and amalgamation. Moreover, there is a latent contradiction inherent in falsehood and error. It must needs be inconsistent and witnesses against itself. Its principles, when carried 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. But who will assure himself that he has in all things, so far as he might, truly ascertained and followed it?
THE 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 rationalists. It is this characteristic which the apostle first expressly specifies (Acts 20:8, Acts 20:23), and to which the whole tenor of the Epistle bears witness (see, especially, Colossians 1:9, Colossians 1:28; Colossians 2:2-4; Colossians 3:10, Colossians 3:16; and compare the introductory remarks in our homiletics, sect. 2, I. and sect. 5, I.). They construed Christianity in terms of their preconceived philosophic theory. They were philosophers first, and Christians afterwards, or only Christians so far as their philosophy permitted. Christ was not the centre of their thoughts, the Master of their intellect and heart (Colossians 2:19; Colossians 3:11); but they made an idol of their intellectual system, and he must perforce be made to pay homage to it and fit himself into some limited and vacant space where it might he able to make room for him! Not in Christ, it appears, but in themselves and in "the tradition of men," were "the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," out of which the Christian teaching, in its uncultured crudeness and poverty of thought, must have its errors corrected and its deficiencies supplied! But the philosophy of these Colossian illuminati was clearly wrong in its views both of the world and of human nature; and no one would be found now to advocate it. Their attempts to recast and rationalize Christianity proved an utter failure, and bore fruit in the next age only in immorality and schism. Their wisdom was but a "wisdom of words" (Acts 20:2, Acts 20:3); they were "ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth" (2 Timothy 3:7). Every system of philosophy, every scheme of human life, which attempts to patronize and to pervert to its own purposes the Christian teaching, has, we may be sure, a like doom awaiting it. St. Paul does not seek to check the rationalistic movement at Colossae by mere repression, by discouraging intellectual inquiry. On the contrary, he impresses on his readers again and again the necessity of a better understanding, a deeper knowledge of "the mystery of God" (Colossians 1:6, Colossians 1:9, Colossians 1:10, Colossians 1:15-23; Colossians 2:1-4; Colossians 3:10, Colossians 3:16). It was their slight and imperfect Christian education which laid them open to the attacks of sophistry and a shallow philosophy. The letter is one that appeals to and stimulates Christian thought in an extraordinary degree, and is itself a theological discipline. The spurious and plausible guests, "the knowledge falsely so called" (1 Timothy 6:20), which was fascinating the Colossians, could be cast out only by the epignosis, the advanced and perfect knowledge (compare homiletics, sects. 1, III. and 4, I., II.). What Lord Bacon said of atheism may apply with equal truth to heresy: "A little philosophy inclineth men's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
2. With their philosophical, a priori interpretation of Christianity, the false teachers of Colossae combined a love of ceremonialism and a devotion to the externals of worship. Here we note the Jewish element in their training, while their Greek sympathies and habits of thought betray themselves in their fundamental philosophic bias. The motive of their religiousness was, however, radically different from that of the traditional Jewish legalism, and St. Paul deals with it in quite another method from that which he follows in Galatians. The "philosophers" of Colossae valued Jewish ritual for its expressiveness and symbolic truth, and practised it as a means of spiritual self culture rather than in mere obedience to law. Hence they insisted much on the sacred seasons and feasts, on the distinctions of meats (verses 16, 17), on circumcision (verse 11), and studied greatly the art of worship (verses 18, 23); while, like the Essenes, they attached little importance to the sacrificial system of Judaism. So, at least, we should infer from the apostle's silence on these latter topics, as contrasted with the leading part they play in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Their system was Jewish in its materials, but wholly different from the Jewish in spirit and tendency. But their piety was wanting in spiritual depth and reality, or they could scarcely have failed to recognize in Christ "the Image of God" (Colossians 1:15), and the "new and living way" to the Father. God was to them so far off that they would not seek to approach him directly in the Person of his Son, but supposed a whole hierarchy of mediators necessary, to make worship possible. He was, in their view, a great abstract Infinitude, no "living Father," no listening, answering Presence. Their religion was an elaborate artifice, beneficial chiefly in its reaction on themselves; and their God was shrouded, like an Oriental monarch, behind a multitude of vague and fugitive mediators, whom practically they worshipped instead of him. A like result ensues wherever the idea of a personal God is obscured and weakened in the minds of men, whether by philosophical reflection making him a formula, or by superstitious ignorance treating him as a fetish. For true worship is the converse—"in spirit and in truth" (John 4:23, John 4:24), of the human children with their living Father in heaven. And this cannot well be maintained where an ornate ceremonialism overpowers the senses and fills the imagination with its external pomp; or where the living God "in whom we live," and Christ the "one Mediator" (1 Timothy 2:5), are so distant from the realizations of faith, that angels, or departed saints, or the blessed virgin mother, or earthly priests and confessors, are thrust in to fill the void, and are made in reality to intercept the soul's reverence and devotion. There may be a sincere "zeal for worship" in the anxious study of ecclesiastical dress and decoration, and under the sensuous impressiveness of a splendid and elaborate ritualism. But this is not what "the Father seeketh" (John 4:23, John 4:24), and such aids to devotion often hinder his children from seeking him. Our worship must, indeed, have its forms; and order and propriety (1 Corinthians 14:40) must he studied in their regulation, and in all the appointments of the house of God. And men of varying temperament and mental habit are aided by a greater or less degree, and by different kinds, of outward expression in their worship. But when the form is cultivated for its own sake, and the sensuous and the artistic predominate over and displace the spiritual, the end of worship itself is frustrated, and the service that professes to be rendered to the Most High becomes a mockery to him, and a blind to his worshippers that effectually hides him from them. Yet this tendency has often a strong attraction for devout and humble spirits, "delighting in humility" (verses 18, 23); who love to worship, and readily bow before any superior influence, but are not so anxious to "worship what they know" (John 4:22). A multiplying of the objects of worship (verse 18) very commonly attends the excessive elaboration of its forms; for both are due to the same cause, and are the manifestations of a religion weak in spiritual faith in God. The dissatisfaction and emptiness of soul which ensue on seeking God thus, lead to our making still more cumbrous and exacting the forms of devotion, and to our resorting to new mediators and new methods of approach to him, till Christian worship sinks into a round of ritual performance and semi-idolatry, and becomes an imposture in itself and an aversion to thoughtful, truth-seeking men.
3. There was, in the third place, a strong vein of false mysticism in the Colossian heresy. This element, in the nature of the case, is more difficult to distinguish and to delineate than those already set forth. The mysticism of Greece was chiefly derived and fed front Oriental sources. Pythagoras, in the latter half of the sixth century B.C., founded a school of mystical and ascetic philosophy, whose principles were largely adopted in the comprehensive system of Plato. The Pythagorean and Platonic mysticism was at this time greatly in vogue, especially in Asia Minor and in Egypt, where it found a congenial soil. The Alexandrine school of Philo imported its principles into Judaism. The Neo-Platonism, in which, in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., pagan philosophy made a last splendid struggle for existence, and which has left deep marks of its influence on the development of Christian thought, was a revival of Greek mysticism in a more intense and religious form. The Montanism of the second century, a product of the same Phrygian soil on which the Colossian heresy sprang up, attested the persistence of the mystic tendency within the Church. Its later manifestations, as allied now with pantheistic rationalism, now with devout ceremonialism, now with rigid asceticism, we cannot endeavour here to follow. There has always been in the Church a mystical school, side by side with the rationalistic, and the ritualistic or sacerdotal. And, within certain limits, the mystic principle has its rights, and must be recognized as essential to spiritual religion. To mysticism, the spiritual consciousness of the individual is the source and the test of truth. God is to be reached by intuition. Meditative contemplation, aided by suitable initiatory and disciplinary symbolic rites, is the way of salvation, whoso goal is absorption in the Divine nature. Such was the teaching of ancient mystics generally; and the esoteric doctrines introduced at Colossae were, doubtless, of the same stamp. That God, indeed, reveals himself by his Spirit to the individual consciousness, is the teaching of St. Paul, and, as we believe, of the whole Bible (Romans 8:16; Galatians 1:16; Psalms 139:1-24., etc.). But when the inner consciousness, the spiritual reason, is regarded as in itself the primary source of revelation, then error begins and hallucination supervenes. The mind turns itself in upon its own self-generated phantasies, instead of fixing its gaze on the historical revelation of God and seeking to comprehend and mirror its glory (2 Corinthians 3:18; 2 Corinthians 4:6; Romans 1:20; Psalms 19:1-14., etc.). The Colossian errorist, walking in the light of his self confident, self contemplating reason, saw visions of angels as he imagined, and heard messages and teachings that were but the echo of his own speculations. With these deceived and deceiving subjective imaginings the apostle confronts the actual historic Person and work of Christ, as the supreme Object of contemplation and of trust (Colossians 1:13-15, Colossians 1:21, Colossians 1:22, Colossians 1:27-29; Colossians 2:6, Colossians 2:7; Colossians 3:11, Colossians 3:15-17). Only through "belief of the truth" come the testifying and sanctifying visitations of "the Spirit of the truth" (2 Thessalonians 2:9-14; Ephesians 1:13; 14; Acts 2:33; Acts 19:1-7). The objective revelation of God to the soul and the subjective attestation and experience of its power are reciprocally linked together, and advance pari passu. Compare the teaching of Christ in promising the Holy Spirit to his disciples (John 14:15-24). The doctrine of the Holy Spirit was indirectly but vitally affected by the Colossian error; and this topic, though not brought forward in this Epistle, is prominent in the Ephesian letter, which is in many respects a complement to this and, in our belief, is "the letter" to be sent "from Laodicea" for the perusal of the Colossian Church (Colossians 4:16). "Christ the Mystery of God," "Christ in you the hope of glory,"—this is the apostle's mysticism, the true mystery that is to expel the false, unhallowed mysteries, that seek by self-directed intuitions and self-invented lustrations and incantations to penetrate the secrets of the spiritual world and to enter into union with the Infinite.
4. In the sphere of morals and practical life, the Colossian, errorists inculcated a strict asceticism. This part of their system is consistent with each of the other three, though it proceeded rather from its philosophical and mystical than from its Judaistic and ceremonial constituent factor. In the early Christian ages, asceticism was frequently associated with theoretic rationalism; in later times, it has been more frequently the ally of a sacerdotal type of Christianity. Asceticism was a thing foreign to Judaism. It was a religion too healthy and practical for that. Psalm cxxviii, expresses what has always been the true religious feeling of Israel in regard to the blessings of this life. The Pharisaic yoke was indeed "grievous to be borne, and pressed on the externals of life with the weight of a slavery; but, after all, it concerned matters which habit makes comparatively easy, and its spirit was that of a formal legalism, aiming at precision in the performance of all external acts, and by no means valuing hard treatment of the body in itself. But the latter was the distinguishing feature of the new Colossian ethics, as of the ethics of Eastern mysticism and of Christian monachism, and, in some sort, of Puritanism too.
HOMILIES BY T. CROSKERY.