Nielsen’s Nook

Commenting on Colossians 3:1-4, Farley writes of the parallels between the Gnosticism of the Lycus Valley during the time of the Apostle Paul and the theological novelties of today:

The many forms of theosophy, anthroposophy, and other variations of the New Age spirituality still offer a potent and heady mix to those seeking a spiritually more exotic than what they think they know as the traditional Christian Faith. … The Church will always have to contend with those who falsely claim to offer a more “spiritual” approach. And its answer will always be the same — to reveal the ultimately earthbound nature of such “spiritualities” and our transcendence of them through our union with Christ. ¹

There is not an expression of Christ’s Church on earth that finds itself exempt from this statement. What has struck me about Farley’s comment is the way it speaks to the individuals and the corporate body in one stroke. One the one hand, it asks the individual to consider the desire to make the Church and worship of God after her own image. In chasing after the so-called spiritually more exotic experience, in making what religion does for us the measure, do we not remove ourselves from the self-evident course of Christ’s Church through the experiences of history? In other words, it is not novelty that has endured over millennia in the context of Christ’s Church, but the tradition (i.e., the deposit of faith) that has been faithfully handed down from the Apostles and Prophets. Paul’s words then, when applied to us post-modern persons is as a two sided coin. On the one side is the face of encouragement, pierced hands extended, bidding us to progress patiently and faithfully in the faith to which the Scriptures bear witness. However, upon turning the coin over our eyes would fall upon a great and vicious beast that warns us of the fate of all who would presume to worship God after their own image.

Corporately, this passage gives warning to the Church on how to persevere through the ages. During the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that plagued Protestantism at the turn of the twentieth century (and perhaps the controversy that plagues the Episcopal Church USA today), the Church was faced with modernists, on the one hand, who sought creative, rationalistic, and sophisticated ways to throw-off the deposit of faith handed down to them in their age, namely to divorce themselves from the yoke of scriptural-authority that this deposit necessitated. Fundamentalists responded ultimately by remotion. That is, when the Fundamentalist saw the spiritual rebellion happening in modernist circles, they became anti-modernists, which also misses the deposit of faith that the Apostle Paul has handed down to us in Colossians 3:1-4. It is not in being an anti-modernist that demonstrates the Church’s essential mystical union (hidden with Christ in God), but in being unswervingly focused upon the Christ, beholding His glory, exalting His Name, and being faithful to pass on the tradition and scriptural-authority that has and will continue to be the way that Christ sustains His Church hidden with Him in God.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 179.