Colossians Overview

From Peter Kreeft’s You Can Understand the Bible:

Colossians is simply colossal. It is about how big Christ is.

Whereas Ephesians is about the greatness of the Body of Christ, Colossians is about the greatness of the Head.

The key passage in 1:15-20 says that Christ is no less than the full and complete expression of God, the source and purpose of the whole universe, the Savior and center of all things in Heaven and earth.

Colossians is divided into two parts: first doctrine (ch. 1 and 2), then practice (ch. 3 and 4).

The Church at Colossae was infected with an early form of Gnosticism, the popular Greek philosophical religion of the day that became the source of just about all the heresies in the early Church. Gnosticism displaced Christ from the center and replaced Him with 5 small things: speculation, legalism, mysticism, occultism, and an anti-Incarnational asceticism.

All heresies deny or reduce something about the complete Christ or the Christian’s completeness in Christ.

After refuting Gnosticism doctrinally, he refutes it practically, showing that Christian doctrine and practice, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, are inseperable.