4 - The continuing influence of Colossians

Summary

In the history of Christian exegesis and thought the chief contribution of Colossians has been exercised through the Christological hymn of 1.15–20. As Gnilka notes, it is significant that two thirds of that section of Schweizer's commentary that deals with ‘the impact of Colossians’ is concerned with this hymn.

One can readily see the reason for this if one looks beyond the immediate impact of the letter, which Schweizer regards as having its most important result in the writing of Ephesians. For it set the course for early Christians who, like it, utilized the traditions of Jewish wisdom speculation in the development of Christology, but its text, particularly the phrase ‘first-born of all creation’, became a battleground in the Arian controversy in the fourth century: the Arians argued that ‘if [Christ] is first-born of all creation, then obvious he too is a part of creation’. To this the defenders of orthodoxy had to retort, often none too logically, that it meant no such thing, but that the ‘first-born’ differed in kind from creation. The hymn, and even more the more explicit language of 2.9, also became a locus classicus for the doctrine of Christ's two natures, the divine and the human. In the view of W. L. Knox this is hardly surprising: Colossians, in identifying the divine wisdom with Jesus ‘as an eternal truth in the realm of metaphysics’, ‘had committed the Church to the theology of Nicaea’.