The understanding of the heresy necessary.
Without the preceding investigation the teaching of this epistle would be very imperfectly understood; for its direction was necessarily determined by the occasion which gave rise to it. Only when we have once grasped the nature of the doctrine which St Paul is combating, do we perceive that every sentence is instinct with life and meaning.
The errors though twofold sprang from one root.
We have seen that the error of the heretical teachers was twofold. They had a false conception in theology, and they had a false basis of morals. It has been pointed out also, that these two were closely connected together, and had their root in the same fundamental error, the idea of matter as the abode of evil and thus antagonistic to God.
So the answer to both is in the same truth.
As the two elements of the heretical doctrine were derived from the same source, so the reply to both was sought by the Apostle in the same idea, the conception of the Person of Christ as the one absolute mediator between God and man, the true and only reconciler of heaven and earth.
But though they are thus ultimately connected, yet it will be necessary for the fuller understanding of St Paul’s position to take them apart, and to consider first the theological and then the ethical teaching of the epistle.
1. The theological teaching of the heretics.
1. This Colossian heresy was no coarse and vulgar development of falsehood. It soared far above the Pharisaic Judaism which St Paul refutes in the Epistle to the Galatians. The questions in which it was interested lie at the very root of our religious consciousness. |Its lofty motive,|The impulse was given to its speculations by an overwhelming sense of the unapproachable majesty of God, by an instinctive recognition of the chasm which separates God from man, from the world, from matter. Its energy was sustained by the intense yearning after some mediation which might bridge over this chasm, might establish inter-communion between the finite and the Infinite. Up to this point it was deeply religious in the best sense of the term.
but complete failure.