Preface

This study began with a sentence. The sentence is not even a complete one in its English form, but it has a power that does not depend on its grammar: Christ in you, the hope of glory. Paul writes those seven words in the middle of a longer paragraph, near the end of the first chapter of his letter to a congregation he had never visited, in a city he would never see. He is in prison when he writes them. He is not preaching to anyone with his voice. He is dictating, through a secretary, to a church that depends on him at the moment more than he depends on them, and what he sends them is this. Christ in you. The hope of glory. Seven words for a letter, and a letter for a series.

This is the third volume in The Pauline Captivity Letters, a four-volume confessional Lutheran study of the four New Testament epistles Paul wrote from prison. The first volume took up Ephesians; the second, Philippians. Each of those letters has its own atmosphere (Ephesians the panoramic vision of God’s purpose in Christ, Philippians the personal warmth of a partnership in the gospel), and each engages the apostle’s chains in its own way. Colossians has an atmosphere too. It is the letter of the fullness. In him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, Paul says, and you have been filled in him. The two clauses are doing the same work. They make a single argument that runs the length of the letter. Christ is enough. He is more than enough. You do not need anything added to him.

That argument has a particular target. The congregation in Colossae was being unsettled by teachers, whom Paul does not name, who were promising something more than the simple gospel the church had received. The exact shape of their teaching is hard to reconstruct. There were elements of Jewish ceremony in it (festivals, new moons, Sabbaths, food regulations); there were elements of ascetic discipline (unsparing treatment of the body; do not handle, do not taste, do not touch); there were claims of special wisdom and visions; there may have been some form of veneration of angelic powers. Whatever the exact mixture, the effect was uniform. The Christ the Colossians had received was being treated as a starting point rather than as the all in all. Something more was being suggested as necessary. Paul’s letter is the answer to that suggestion. The answer is Christ. The answer is not Christ-plus.

The letter therefore moves in two great motions. The first is the confession of who Christ is. The Christ-hymn of chapter one, very likely material the early Church was already singing when Paul borrowed and reshaped it, names him as the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the one in whom and through whom and for whom all things were created, the head of the body, the church, the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, the one in whom God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell. This is not poetry decorating a letter. It is the theological floor on which the whole letter stands. The second motion is the working out of what this Christ means for the new life of the believer: for baptism (which Paul calls a circumcision not performed by human hands), for the canceled certificate of debt, for freedom from human regulations, for the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new, for the ordered life of the Christian household, for prayer and conduct toward those outside. The pattern is the pattern Lutherans know: the indicative grounds the imperative; what Christ is for you grounds what you are now to be.

What follows is a ten-session Bible study designed for use in adult Sunday school classes, small group settings, or personal devotion. Each session opens with the assigned Scripture passage, walks through it as the apostle’s pastoral word to a young congregation under pressure, and closes with discussion questions and a prayer. The study is unapologetically confessional in its theological commitments. It treats the Lutheran reading of Colossians (Christ as the fullness of God, baptism as the new circumcision, the cross as the place where the certificate of debt was canceled, the Christian life as the simultaneous reality of being raised with Christ and still putting the old man to death) as the reading the letter most rewards.

What This Letter Has Meant to Lutherans

Colossians has been quietly indispensable to the Lutheran tradition. It is not the letter most often quoted from Lutheran pulpits (that honor belongs to Romans and Galatians), but its fingerprints are everywhere in the Confessions, the catechisms, and the hymnody.

Three texts in particular have done sustained work. The first is the Christ-hymn of chapter one, with its remarkable line that God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son, and its echo in chapter two: in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. Lutheran Christology has always pressed these verses hard. The Formula of Concord’s eighth article, on the person of Christ, leans on Colossians to confess that the fullness of deity is not partially or remotely present in the man Jesus but bodily and wholly present, personally united with his humanity, so that the Son’s majesty is communicated to the human nature he assumed: hidden in his humiliation, fully displayed in his exaltation. The Church’s Christmas hymnody, from Prudentius’s “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” to Luther’s own “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come,” sings what Colossians confesses. Take Colossians seriously and a great deal of Lutheran Christology stops looking strange.

The second is the baptism passage in chapter two, the verses in which Paul says the Colossians were circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands, having been buried with Christ in baptism and raised with him through faith in the power of God. Reformed and Baptist traditions have, for different reasons, tended to soften this text. Confessional Lutherans have not. Colossians 2:11–12 is one of the most direct New Testament statements that baptism does something: that it is not a sign of what has happened elsewhere but the place where the burial and resurrection with Christ are actually given. The Small Catechism’s question on baptism, What gifts or benefits does baptism grant?, has Colossians 2 in its bloodstream. So does the Apology’s treatment of the sacraments. And because Paul sets baptism beside circumcision, which was given to infants on the eighth day, this is also one of the passages that stands behind the church’s baptism of infants. This is a text that Lutheran readers have a peculiar capacity to hear, and the study takes its time with it.

The third is the verse near the end of chapter two that says God destroyed the certificate of indebtedness that stood against us, taking it away by nailing it to the cross. The image is striking: the indictment against us, the bill of charges, nailed to the wood. Apology IV, in its long treatment of justification, argues again and again what this verse pictures. The cross does not merely make forgiveness possible; it actually cancels the debt. The believer who looks at the cross is looking at his own indictment, signed and canceled. Lutheran preaching of justification has always preferred verbs of finished action (it is finished, the debt is paid, the bond is canceled), and Colossians 2 is one of the wells that preaching draws from.

Beyond these three, Colossians has been a steady source for the Lutheran teaching on Christian freedom. The verses on festivals and new moons and Sabbaths, on do-not-handle and do-not-taste and do-not-touch, on the self-imposed religious disciplines that have an appearance of wisdom but no true value against the indulgence of the flesh, were quoted at length during the controversies of the sixteenth century over human traditions binding the conscience. The Augsburg Confession and its Apology rest on the conviction that the gospel frees the Christian from regulations that men have layered on top of Christ. That conviction was not invented at Wittenberg. It is read off the page of Colossians 2.

How to Use This Study

Scripture quotations in this online edition are from the NET Bible. (The printed edition of Christ in You quotes the English Standard Version, so wording will differ in places.) Where the study comments on a Greek word, it gives the Greek alongside the English so that readers using any translation can follow. Participants are encouraged to keep their Bibles open, to read each passage carefully before the session begins, and to return to it during the discussion. The aim is not that participants come away from the study having learned about Colossians, but that they come away having heard the apostle Paul himself speaking to them, and through him the Christ in whom all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, and in whom they have been filled.

Most of all, come to the study as Paul wrote his letter: from prison, on behalf of a congregation he loved, with the single confession that Christ is everything. That is where the letter does its work. That is where it will do its work in you.