This post is inspired by a podcast episode (here) from Mike Bird’s Nazareth to Nicaea about the Christ Poem in Colossians 1:15–20. My apologies to Mike for (near-)plagiarism in places. He thinks this is one of the most important texts in the Pauline corpus, comparable to Philippians 2:6–11. The seven points below follow his.
The “poem” could be pre-Pauline, a hymn or an already existing tradition. We don’t know. In Bird’s words, “What makes this Christ Poem so profound is that it seems to put Christ at the very centre of the work of both creation and redemption.” The more I have read it, the more it has felt to me like Paul’s writing. But to appreciate it, we need to come to terms with some of its challenges.
First, v 15, The Son is the image of the invisible God.
In Greek the word eikōn ‘image’1 means ‘something that depicts the visual form of something else’. The way it’s used here is on the face of it self-contradictory: how can you have an image of someone who is invisible? Where else in scripture is this contradiction found? When Jesus responds to Philip’s request, “show us the Father…”:
John 14:7–9: “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him. …… Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
In the ancient Near East and also in the Greco-Roman world a king was thought to be the image of a god. So this is also royal rhetoric: Jesus is also a ruler, but the ruler who reflects the God. The invisible God is made visible and expressed in Jesus.
Second, still in v 15,
Paul says Jesus is the firstborn of all creation.2 This is a statement that gets Christians into trouble with Muslims, as Muslims reject the idea that God can have a son. It also got Arius into trouble. Arius (256–336) was a presbyter living in what is today Libya. He took “firstborn son” to mean “the first created thing” (like an angel). His position was that the ” Son of God ” came after God the Father both chronologically and in substance. This interpretation became known as the Arian heresy.3
If Arius had read a little further, he should have seen that his doctrine was not what Paul intended, since Paul writes, “For in him all things were created … all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Although it is hard for us to grasp that the Son who walked on this earth was co-responsible for creation, it does put paid to Arius’ view of the Son.
But I’m are getting ahead of myself. Back to verse 15. We tend to use the term “Son of God” without thinking about what it actually means, but we should have an answer in case we are asked. What does Paul mean here by the firstborn of all of creation?4 There is a clue perhaps in Psalm 89:27, where God says of King David I will appoint him to be my firstborn, the most exalted of the kings of the earth. In other words, “I appoint him as my heir”. So ‘Son of God’ alludes to the fact that Jesus is the image of God and that, like the Father, he is pre-eminent in the universe. If we try to push the meaning of ‘Son of God’ any further, we do so at our peril, as we are dealing with the nature of God, and that is something we cannot fully comprehend.
Third, in verses 16-17,
Jesus is depicted as creator and maintainer of the physical universe. Here Paul is addressing non-Jewish Christians and non-Christians too, because various schools of ancient Greek philosophy originating with Plato recognised a sort of deputy God (the demiurge, Greek dēmiourgos) who created and maintained the universe. Paul’s approach here reminds me of his debate on the Areopagus in Acts 17:19–28, where he tells the Greek philosophers in some detail that their “unknown God” is the God that he knows and worships and is indeed the creator who sustains everything and keeps it together. Bird says: “Jesus is the reason… why there is a cosmos rather than chaos. So these are big claims. Jesus is the chief agent of creation, the demiurge. He’s pre-existent to creation and he’s the glue holding the universe together.”
And Paul’s claim is larger still: he says the universe came into being for Jesus: 16 All things have been created through him and for him. All things exist for the purpose of Jesus. This is an astounding claim, with no parallel in either Jewish or Greek thought. What does this mean? Bird doesn’t say. To me it perhaps says that the universe was created by the Trinity for the Trinity in order to bring into existence human beings whom the Trinity can relate to in love.
Fourth, turning now to verse 18
And he is the head of the body, the church. Jesus is not just the cosmic Lord, but, closer to home, the Lord of the Church. In fact, the head of the Church, which is his body. And as the body of the Messiah, the Church is the physical representation of Jesus on earth. Again this is a metaphor, but a truly deep metaphor.
Fifth, still in verse 18,
he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, in order that in everything he might have the supremacy. The word “beginning” is an obvious echo of Genesis 1:1. It also reminds us of John 1:1 (it seems more likely that John was reminded of this by Paul than vice versa): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Greek word arkhē had several different meanings, including ‘first in order’, or ‘ruler, head’. Bird writes that it can also be translated as ‘first principle’. So it could be saying, “Jesus is the first principle and the firstborn from among the dead”. Bird says he doesn’t know of anyone taking the word this way, but he thinks it makes sense, if Paul is addressing people familiar with Greek philosophical traditions. Jesus is, so to speak, the starting point for a theory of everything. I get this, because when I was baptised in the Holy Spirit I immediately understood a lot about the world around me that I hadn’t understood before.
Then comes that word “firstborn” again, but in a new context. Paul seems to be hammering the word home so that his readers grasp that Jesus is pre-eminent in everything. “Jesus is the firstborn from among the dead” in the sense of the first to be resurrected, the first to have a glorified body. The same is promised to other human beings too: to believers in Jesus, to the church. In 1 Corinthians 15:20–23 Paul writes:
Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.
Sixth, moving to verse 19–20
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him. As I read it, this extends the idea of Jesus as the demiurge. Although the demiurge of Greek philosophy was responsible for the creation and for holding together the physical universe, he was only a deputy god. Here Paul tells to his Greek readers that Jesus is no deputy. He is fully God. Bird thinks that Paul has in mind the Roman concept of auctoritas, which is ultimately authority, honour, power, all rolled into one, with the Emperor as “the very pinnacle” (Bird’s words) of the authority pyramid. But the Roman concept is one of earthly authority, Jesus also has authority over every being in the universe.5
Seventh, in the last verse of the poem,
Paul talks about reconciliation:
through him [God was pleased] to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
This presupposes a previous state of alienation and hostility between the creator and the creation, which has now been restored. This verse is somewhat different from the way many Christians think. We understand well enough that the offended party, God, takes the initiative in reconciliation, in order to remove the hostility separating us from him, so that those who believe may have a relationship with God through Christ (Romans 3:22–25).6 But the poem refers to the restoration of the entire cosmic order, all things…whether upon the earth or in the heavens, not just individual human beings. If we are to live restored, renewed lives, we need a restored creation to live them in (Romans 8:19–21).7 This is the Christian hope.
Bird concludes by quoting from the theologian James D.G. Dunn (1939-2020):8
The vision is vast, the claim is mind-blowing. It says much for the faith of these first Christians that they should see in Christ’s death and resurrection quite literally the key to resolving the disharmonies of nature and the inhumanities of humankind, that the character of God’s creation and God’s concern for the universe in its fullest expression could be so caught and encapsulated for them in the cross of Christ. In some way, still more striking is the implied vision of the church as the focus and means towards cosmic reconciliation, the communion in which that reconciliation has already taken place, or begun to take place, and whose responsibility it is to live out as well as to proclaim its secret.
Footnotes
- From which we get the word icon. ↩
- The NIV has ‘over all creation’. ↩
- On the other hand Athanasius of Alexandria (298–373) argued that the Son was like the God the Father, and with God the Father. This trinitarian position does not regard Jesus as God’s Son in a literal, physical sense. There is some evidence that Athanasius wrote the so-called Athanasian Creed, or the earliest version of it (look it up on the web: it asserts the trinitarian position very boldly). The emperor Constantine, having made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, wanted to put an end to this controversy (among others), and convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 to establish a single, imperially approved version of the faith. Constantine chaired this council of church leaders himself. Athanasius, then a young deacon (later Pope) argued for a trinitarian doctrine. The Council produced the Nicene Creed, which is still repeated in many Christian churches today (and itself isn’t completely unambiguous). ↩
- Paul uses the word firstborn (prōtotokos) of Jesus in other contexts, but with different senses. These include verse 18. ↩
- The Greek word for ‘fullness’ was at the centre of Valentius’ gnosticism in the early second century. ‘Fullness’ in this gnostic sense referred to the Creator and all other heavenly beings taken together. It’s not clear to me whether this concept of fullness was around when Paul was writing, or whether Valentius misunderstood its use here. If Paul was aware of this meaning of the word, he opposes it outright here, as he says (i) fullness belongs to God and (ii) Jesus shares God’s fullness in its entirety. ↩
- This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. ↩
- For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. ↩
- James D.G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon (New International Greek Testament Commentary (NIGTC)). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1996, p. 104. ↩