¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶ for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and
invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things
have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ He
is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn
from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and
through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether
on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

I spent a while today reading around this passage. It's probably a hymn, composed by Paul, or borrowed by him and edited to fit the theme and argument of his letter. Even in English translation the rhythm, images and rhetorical impetus are felt when it is read with care. Seven times the universal "all" is used. The ultimacy and particularity of Christ as Lord of the universe could hardly be more exclusively claimed.

One of the most intriguing articles I've read is Morna Hooker, "Where is Wisdom to be Found? Colossians 1.15-20", in Ford, D., and Stanton, G., (eds) Reading Texts, Seeking Wisdom, (London: SCM, 2003) 116-128. Nearly as good, in the same book with the same title and on the same text is Richard Bauckham's essay. But it's Hooker who shows how the Hebrew scriptures extol Wisdom and Torah as pillars of creation and active agents of God's essential being – and that is Paul's background as he writes. The hymn doesn't mention wisdom – it describes the creative power by which creation and renewal of creation are fully expressed by Christ in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. It doesn't mention wisdom – it describes Wisdom's accomplishments. Hooker shows how the theme of wisdom is a connective thread in elsewhere in Colossians, and finds its focus on the apostolic aim to lead Christians into wisdom and understanding and to "present everyone mature in Christ". This is Christology as the basis of hopeful Christian existence, looking for the reconciliation of all things by the only One able to fulfil such a redemptive reversal of creation's brokenness. Christian maturity is to live within that ethos of conciliatory wisdom, vulnerable love and hopeful trust.

Why is this important enough for a blog post? Here's a few sentences from Hooker's concluding pages. In them she takes with utmost seriousness, in a way many fear to do, the absolute priority of Christ as the interpretive key to Scripture. As a Baptist committed to communal discernment, her words affirm the radical freedom of the gathered congregation to seek the mind of Christ in Scripture:

"The text does not mean what you think it means, because it witnesses to the one who is behind the text, namely Christ. For Paul the 'canon' is not Scripture itself, but Christ, which means that Scripture  must be read in the light of Christ. Where is wisdom to be found. Notr in the written Torah – not even in the epistles of Paul – but in the living Christ.

How do we interpret Scripture? How do we distinguish between and ethical and an unethical reading? Between a reading that is legitimate and one that is illegitimate? Between one that is right and one that is wrong?  Between one that is wise and one that is unwise? …For Paul the answer is: look at Christ, and at what he reveals to us of the love of God; interpret Scripture in the light of Christ." 

Where is wisdom to be found? In Christ, crucified, risen, living and present in the church and the world, amongst his people as they gather with Scriptures open, hearts receptive, minds alert and hopeful in trust, with fear and faith that the Lord of creation awaits our obedience as discerned in the words that bear witness to the Word.

Here is a paragraph that gives New Testament theology and exegesis a good name. It comes from a lecture later published as an essay by J D G Dunn. It is worth reading slowly, and twice – as biblical exegesis, this is faith seeking understanding.

So too with our hope of Christ's coming again. There is an uncertainty about it which pervades all human prediction about God's future purpose. It is the language of vision and metaphor. It is therefore, strictly speaking, inadequate to the task, as is all human speech about God. But it is the best we have and we should neither be embarrassed about it nor should we abandon it. For it tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future is not random and pointless; God's purpose still prevails and drives forward to the climax of his-story. It tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future has a Christ-shape and a Christ-character. The future will not come to us as a total surprise. For the God we encounter at the end of time will be the God who encounters us at the mid-point of time, God in Christ. And the Christ we encounter at the end of time will be the Christ we encounter in the Gospels, the Christ we encounter in our worship, in the Spirit, in Christ and through Christ to God the Father. We believe that this Christ will come again. "Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus."

I've read J D G Dunn's work on the New
Testament since his first book, The Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It's one
of the great blessings of my life and times that I have lived when some
of the finest New Testament scholarship has been producing such
original, high quality studies in the New Testament, and that so much of
it is so readily available. Dunn's new book, a major study of Oral Tradition and the Gospels is published in a few weeks. In a month or so N T Wright's two volumes
on Paul will be published – I've waited a long time for this (1680 pages!) instalment of his Christian Origins and the Question of God.

I was perhaps a bit hard on 'spiritual reading' and 'spiritual writing' in the previous post, not much though. My own alertness to the presence of God is more often heightened when I too wrestle with the text and theology of the New Testament, and read a paragraph like that one above by Dunn. It is a conclusion to an academic essay, a conclusion securely tied to critical scholarship applied by one whose own faith is rooted in the text of the New Testament, and to the experience of God in Christ through the Spirit to which the New Testament bears witness. Dunn, in his preface to Jesus, Paul and the Gospels is up-front honest about this, speaking of "[my] conviction both that recognition of a vital religious experience was an important way in to understanding how Christianity flourished and that one's own religious experience was a vital part of critical interaction with these ancient scriptures".

That is such a heartening sentence, and places first class biblical scholarship not over and against, but alongside a faith that seeks understanding. In such an hermeneutic the text is allowed to interpret the interpreter. The same convictional foundation underlies N T Wright's work. Mind you I smile when I think that the first book of N T Wrght's which I read in 1986 was a slim, elegant and exciting Tyndale Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, total 190 pages!  

The row between the Daily Mail and the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is a telling example of the nastiness of innuendo, the damning of people by association with deliberately caricatured ideas, the grievous sin of claiming the high moral ground by appealing to the lowest moral common denominator. When a newspaper uses terms such as 'hated Britain' and 'legacy of evil' and 'poisonous creed' as ways of describing an academic Marxist who was a Jewish refugee from Belgium, fleeing to escape from the consequences of National Socialism's military aggression, who served in the Royal Navy, and whose contribution to the cultural, intellectual and social life of our country has been adversarial rather than confirmatory, then I smell a rat, and perhaps a bloated disease ridden one at that.

That a man who fled Nazism as a terrified teenager, having experienced German right-wing exteremism in its most destructive and evil manifestations, and known at first hand an ideology with a powerful capacity to reconfigure morals and social engineering to suit its own evil ends, that such a man should be damned, and his children attacked for being his children, makes me wonder which of the descriptors of Ralph Miliband has so infuriated the Daily Mail. Was it Belgian, Jewish, Marxist, Socialist, or academic? The paper claims it is the word Marxist they wanted to highlight, and they did so with all the lethal ambiguity loaded into such a word by a paper which stands at the ideologically opposite pole. Was it Socialist, a word clearly so repulsive, it  was used as a sick joke with a photo of Ralph Miliband's grave, headed 'Grave Socialist'. (The belated admission it was an 'error of judgement' makes it sound as if the wrong font was used in the insult). I don't think it was the word Belgian that triggered this landslide of insinuation and hermeneutic malpractice. That he was an academic, who lived in an environment of contested and debated ideas, and whose role in a democarcy is precisely to engage with ideas critically and with intellectual integrity, cannot surely have so offended a newspaper which claims it is defending the integrity of Britain's institutions by allegedly exposing someone who 'hated Britain'. Was it the word Jewish, something Ed Miliband himself mentioned in two consecutive Party Conference speeches, a fact noted in the daily Mail's defence of the original article, and noted with editorial precision linked to a rather wooden allusion to 'the jealous God' (note the negative pejorative) of Deuteronomy (note the cherished words of the Torah).

My problem in deciding which of those words launched the article – Belgian, Jewish, Marxist, academic – is that whatever the motives any journalist claims, whatever the public interest a paper says it is defending, they write in the murky unhygienic waters of diverse prejudices and dirty politics. The ambiguities of words that have cultural resonances far deeper than their surface dictionary meanings, the suggestiveness of what is said and what is omitted, the bias and blindness of a paper's ideology, right or left, the toxins thrown up by social insecurity, economic panic, and the survival instincts of a culture in moral and existential disarray, – these require of responsible interpreters an hermeneutic of suspicion. No I don't know with certainty what underlies such an attack on a senior politician's father; but neither will I exclude the possibility there are underying agendas that it may be too dangerous to state openly.

One further thought. There is something intellectually naive about an article that quotes one sentence against the English and their nationalism as proof of lifelong hatred of the country where he found safety, when that sentence was extracted without context from the diary of a 17 year old refugee from Nazi Europe still trying to find a standpoint from which to view his broken terrifying world. Ralph Miliband's ideas and political views, and his view of the world and of Marxism in particular, could hardly be further from my own; likewise the policies and ideas of his son hardly commend themselves to me as the most ethically sound, economically feasible or politically promising. But they should be judged on their merits, not caricatured as Marxist bogey men resurrected to sinister purpose. History is not a predictable catena of causal connections, whatever a tabloid newspaper would like us to believe.