Colossians: An Earth Bible Commentary

An Eco-Stoic Reading

Victoria S. Balabanski

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567693013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Vicky Balabanski analyses Colossians as a co-authored letter, written during Paul's Roman imprisonment by Timothy with the input of Epaphras, and sent with Paul's introductory and concluding greetings. Balabanski sees remarkable resonances between the cosmology of this letter and that of Stoic thought, the most widely held philosophy in first century Asia Minor. Drawing upon the way Stoic thinkers saw the divine Spirit permeating reality and sought to attune their lives to the Logos, divine reason, she argues that the Logos of Christ – the Gospel – was welcomed by small groups of people shaped by Stoic thought, and they experienced Christ as the visible expression of the One God who permeates reality. The Letter to the Colossians has the highest view of Christ of any of the New Testament writings, and its theology of divine permeation invites us to notice the ecological potential of this letter. This Eco-Stoic reading brings contemporary ecological questions into dialogue with the distinctive Christology and cosmology of the letter.

Chapter 1

Stoic philosophy: The ‘soil’ in which the Gospel took root

As a young person, I asked the well-worn question why God sent Jesus into the ancient world without all of today’s benefits of speedy travel and communication. The answer I got had to do with the Roman Empire: with its system of roads, the Pax Romana and the advantages of common languages (Koine Greek across the Empire and Latin for administration), it was the ideal time and environment for the spread of the Gospel. It was a good response and it satisfied me then, but it was only half of the answer. What I wasn’t told then was that in the first century CE, there was also a very widely accepted popular (Koine) philosophy – a way that people saw the world and their place in it – and it was common to many people across the Mediterranean world and beyond. That philosophy was Stoicism.

Stoic philosophy was widely known and discussed in first-century Asia Minor. In fact, according to David Hahm, ‘more people in the Mediterranean world would have held a more or less Stoic conception of the world than any other’ from the third century BCE to the second century CE.¹ Hahm argues that in this period, Stoicism was very likely the most widely accepted world view in the Western world, and ‘it appealed to all classes, attracting slaves and laborers as well as kings and emperors. Its ideals infiltrated religion and science, medicine and theology, poetry and drama, law and government.’² Unlike the later Neo-Platonism, which was within the purview of elite thinkers, Stoic ideas were generally known; they formed a sort of philosophical Koine or common understanding that crossed social and national boundaries.

This chapter is intended to introduce the reader to the popular Stoicism which served as this cultural Koine of the Roman Empire around the beginning of the Common Era.³ I also intend to show how Stoic ethics, world view and cosmology could provide a cultural and spiritual soil that was at least as important for the rapid, successful transmission and reception of the Christian Gospel across the Roman Empire as were the logistical advantages of its roads, common languages and stable administration.

Stoicism’s highest value – Virtue – is expressed most fully in a life that is in harmony with nature, being prepared for self-sacrifice, and prioritizing generosity of spirit. This Stoic world view was a perfect pre-evangelistic preparation for anyone hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the first time, even without the benefit of an association with a Jewish synagogue. Such an unprecedentedly widespread, common world view among the people of the Roman Empire – and one which shares some important parallels with the early Christian proclamation – made possible a more successful, widespread uptake of the Gospel than could have happened at any other time in history. And we know that this opportunity was something which Paul and his co-workers were well qualified and determined to bring to fruition. We will examine this later by way of a case study; Luke’s account of Paul and the philosophers in Acts 17.

First-century Stoic philosophy, with its ethic of a virtuous, altruistic life, and its understanding of the material world, offered a cultural scaffold which enabled people in remarkable numbers to comprehend and accept the Gospel of a Christ who could die for others, and rise again from the dead. Stoic thought, with its value of life lived in harmony with nature, offers something to our very different cultural situation today, namely a lens through which we might read the Letter to the Colossians ecologically.

Stoic philosophy: The ‘soil’ of an ecological reading

This ecological commentary is being written at a time when the consequences of our disharmony with nature are unfolding exponentially. Rainfall and weather patterns are changing, fire is ravaging regions in unprecedented ways, and ecosystems are collapsing. It is no longer possible to deny that human disharmony with nature has set these things in process. Our world is experiencing the consequences of economic and political opportunism, the outsourcing of the real costs of our decisions to other places or future generations, and apathy and inertia in addressing these issues. Learning to live in harmony with nature has never been more pressing than it is today.

The Christian faith can be a pathway of learning to live in harmony with nature, as we are learning to live in harmony with God. So often, however, we read the biblical sources of our faith in ways that assume that the natural world is peripheral to God’s purposes. We also assume that the early Christians shared this attitude to the natural world and pinned all their hopes on a heaven that was disembodied and disconnected with reality as they knew it. Recovering the substratum of Stoic ideas can enable us to read our sources in ways that are closer to the original hearers, and in ways that recover the ecological perspective and potential of the Letter to the Colossians. Stoic philosophy, as refracted through this Letter to people who had placed their hope in Jesus Christ, can be the ‘soil’ of an ecological reading of Colossians.

In Colossians, we are exploring a letter written to people living in a philosophical environment where the highest value in life is Virtue – which, as noted earlier, is measured as a life lived in harmony with nature, being prepared for self-sacrifice, and prioritizing generosity of spirit. By contrast, we are reading this Letter in a world which has little time for Virtue, and which teaches us to be pragmatic about what we offer of ourselves to others, and what we expect in return. Even our Christian faith is viewed pragmatically, as an assurance of eternal blessedness, while the natural world around us disintegrates. Now more than ever, our world needs Christians who perceive our call as a call to Virtue, living our lives in harmony with nature and God, who are willing to relinquish some of our privileges and prioritize generosity of spirit.

To this end, the Letter to the Colossians can be a bridge between two worlds – our present-day world and the world which received this text. Stoic philosophical ideas can help us read this Letter with greater clarity, so that we can recognize the consequences of our dominant, present-day culture’s poverty of spirit, and learn ways of living in harmony with nature and with God.

Thinking about philosophy

Philosophy literally means ‘love of wisdom’. Philosophy encompassed a great deal more in the Greco-Roman world of the first century than it does today. If one entered a philosophical school or academy, one might expect to hear rigorous discussion and debate not only about logic and ethics but about physics as well.⁴ ‘Love of wisdom’ in that era was not partitioned in the same way as university faculties are today. Philosophy sought to establish first principles, upon which sciences such as geometry and mathematics could proceed. Seneca put it this way: ‘Now philosophy asks no favours from any other source; it builds everything on its own soil’ (Epistles 88.28, LCL 76: 364–7). Logic, related as it is to Logos, or reason, was understood to be core to all philosophical and scientific endeavour, not so much as a field or component of a field, but as the means through which the world and all its parts could be explored rationally and consistently.

Philosophers debated what areas of discussion rightly belonged to the ‘curriculum’ of philosophy, and in what order. One early Stoic philosopher of the third century BCE, Cleanthes, claimed that it has six parts: dialectic, rhetoric, ethics, politics, physics and theology (quoted by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives 7.41, L&S 158). More common was a tripartite division into logic, ethics and physics, although even then, theology was understood to be an integral part or goal of these studies. Plutarch cites the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus who, after reviewing the different fields of study, calls theology ‘the fulfilment’.⁵

It is apparent that philosophy and theology were understood to be closely linked fields of study in the ancient world. Yet according to Col. 2.8, philosophy and theology are not necessarily seen as useful partners:

See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. (Col. 2.8 NRSV)

Is this a warning to avoid philosophy as a pursuit that is incompatible with Christ and that it is closely aligned with ‘empty deceit’? I think not. It is more accurate to translate this passage as a warning against particular types of philosophy rather than as a blanket condemnation of philosophy itself:

Be careful not to allow anyone to captivate you through an empty, deceitful philosophy that is according to human traditions and the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. (Col. 2.8 NET Bible)

In fact, the Letter to the Colossians is very positive about the ‘love of wisdom’ (= philosophy!):

For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. (Col. 1.9)

It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. (Col. 1.28)

I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Col. 2.2-3)

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom. (Col. 3.16)

Wisdom is something worth striving for, and ‘all wisdom’ continually indicates the breadth of this quest. It is only those things that have the appearance of wisdom, without true foundation, that are rejected in this Letter:

All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence. (Col. 2.22-23)

From all these passages in the Letter itself, it is clear that the recipients were keenly interested in cultivating a love of wisdom and knowledge. Their interest was so keen that they seem to have been in danger of being misled by some traditions that the writer names as ‘empty and deceitful’ (Col. 2.8). One focus of this commentary is to identify and examine the strands of philosophical thought that the recipients of the Letter may have known and embraced, including those which the writer may ultimately have needed to refute.

The early believers in Christ in Asia Minor participated in and were shaped by their context. We are at a much greater cultural distance from the Letter’s original recipients than they were from their pagan neighbours, whether or not we share their faith in Christ. If we explore their frames of reference, particularly how these could have shaped their ideas, it will help us to understand the Letter more accurately. Philosophy embraces such questions as how to understand existence, substance and perception, all of which form a basis for being able to embrace a crucified and risen Lord, who is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1.15).

What do we know about Stoic philosophy?

Answering this question is not as easy as it was back in Paul and Timothy’s day. Only a few of the writings of Stoic philosophy which existed in the first century CE − perhaps 1 per cent − have been preserved and passed on into the present. Some of what has been preserved is embedded in the writings of others who did not share the Stoics’ views, and who wished to refute them. For this reason we rely on collections of sources. An important collection was made by the German philologist Hans Von Arnim (1859–1931), whose three-volume collection Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, (SVF) with a supplementary index in a fourth volume is still use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• CONCLUSION
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources
• Subject Index
• Copyright