Abraham Lincoln found in the natural-right principles of the Declaration of Independence the moral foundation of the American Union, worth of defending. Any regime needs some purpose to hold it together, else why found a regime at all?
What, then, is the foundation of God’s regime, according to Christianity? Obviously, God is, understood Christianly as the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But how does God want his consenting subjects to understand their union under Him, with one another, in their ‘called out’ assembly, their church? The Apostle Paul addresses this question in his Epistle to the Colossians, chapter 3, verses 1-17.
Paul begins by lifting the Colossians’ sights to “those things that are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.” The Ruler of the Christian regime lives above not only human regimes, but above any intermediary beings such as angels, of which the Colossians reportedly were making much. “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” This is the command Machiavelli and his followers have persistently attempted to reverse, charging Christians with dangerous neglect of their own lives here, of politics on earth. But Christians, Paul insists, should be ‘dead’ to the earth; “your life is hid with Christ in God.” When Christ returns to earth, He will return as its ruler, and “then shall you also appear with him in glory.”
Being ‘dead’ on earth has a rational dimension, then, in the sense that Paul tells Christians to shift their attention to the true Ruler and the true ruling structure of ‘Being.’ But life-in-death also has a moral-psychological dimension. “Mortify”—literally “deaden”—”your members, which are upon the earth; fornication [the root word is the same as that for prostitution], uncleanness, inordinate affection [emotion or pathos], evil concupiscence [desire], and covetousness [“wanting more’], which is idolatry.” These are the elements of the soul Plato’s Socrates classifies generally under bodily desires, powerful but low. Reason or logos rightly rules them, and in Christianity Jesus himself is the Logos. Indeed, the reason to deaden the body’s “members” is to avoid the indignation of God, which “comes upon the children of stubbornness—literally “unpersuadableness.” To be unpersuadable is to refuse to listen to reason, to authoritative, contradiction-free logos, which is both a natural characteristic of human beings but, in its perfect, ‘clean’ form, embodied in the Logos, or Christ, ruling at God the Father’s “right hand.” Unchecked, the bodily desires render the soul stubborn, turn reasoning into rationalization.
You have “walked some time” with these desires, “liv[ing] in them.” “But now you also put off all these”—the image is taking off a garment—namely, indignation, fury [thumon, derived from thumos or spiritedness], malice, calumny, and obscenity.” To leave the walk-way or regime of the desires means more than to get rid of the desires themselves; it also means to abandon rule of the desires when they are fortified by another element of the soul, as Socrates describes it: spiritedness. In order really to rule, the desires must enter an alliance with the stronger passions, the passions that generate self-assertion, the desire for dominance. Souls gripped by the alliance of desires with spiritedness will generate logoi or words, speech, consisting of calumny and obscenity—calumny, because they desire to dominate others by defaming them; obscenity, because they express the low or bodily desires in the most spirited, angry way.
Such souls will also seek to deceive others in order to satisfy their desires. “Lie not one to another, seeing that you have put off the old man”—the thumoerotic soul, the soul of the postlapserian Adam—”with his deeds”—typically violent, domineering, acts that would override reasoning souls. Rather, “put on” (again, as one would a garment) the “new man,” who is “renewed in knowledge”—more literally, “re-cognized”—”after the image of him that created him.” Since God created man in his “image,” in reorienting himself to his Creator man is turning away from his corrupted nature, back to his reasoning, logical, logos-nature, made by God in imitation of himself, the Logos.
This means re-entering God’s regime, because God did not make Adam a Greek, a Jew, a barbarian, a Scythian, a slave or a citizen. God’s regime, seen in His assembly, ‘called out’ from the regimes of this world, “neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” Christ is all, in the sense that He is the supreme object of the attention of renewed minds, by virtue of now being in all of those minds. Holy—separated, cleansed, transcendent—spirituality replaces spiritedness because God as Creator is separate from his creations. To renew our relationship with God is to partake, in some limited way, in that separation from the regimes of the world and our corrupted flesh with its thumoerotic passions, and then to unite with one another under His rule in His regime. “Put on, therefore, as the elect [the chosen] of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humility of mind, meekness, patience.” “Love” here means agapic love, the will to the good of the other person, from which those virtues flow. The old man is vengeful, not merciful, cruel, prideful of mind in rejecting logos and the Logos, self-assertive, and resentful. Christians forbear one another, forgive one another precisely because agapic love wants not to exact revenge but to help the other person achieve the good. Concretely, “If any man have a quarrel with against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do you.” Had Christ not forgiven you, you could not re-cognize Him, and therefore could not fulfill your God-given capacity to fulfill your nature as a rational person. Re-establishing the bond with Christ enables you to re-unite with others because you, like Him, are reanimated (literally re-souled) with the agapic love with which you were created and forgiven, the love that makes re-union as human, not as Greek, Jew, barbarian, Scythian, slave, citizen, both real and lasting.
“And above all these things put on”—again, the garment-image—”agape, which is the bond of perfectness.” The word translated as perfectness derives from telos, meaning the end of purpose of a thing. Human beings are ‘perfected,’ they achieve the purpose of the nature God intended them to have, in loving ‘agapically.’ This doesn’t mean they no longer experience thumoerotic desire or sin, but that through accepting the rule of Christ within their souls they become more nearly free from that desire, more fit to unify within their assembly, called out by the logoi, the words, of the Logos. That this is and must be a regime becomes clear in the following sentence: “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also you are called in one body; and be you thankful.” Agapic love ends or at least mitigates strife when it rules and forms the foundation of the unified ‘polis’ or assembly of subjects grateful to God for their liberation from the bondage and strife animating souls once ruled by thumoerotic desire.
Paul then returns to the mind, a mind now aligned with God, having re-cognized Him. “And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” Although Jesus commends wisdom in its practical form, phronēsis, to His disciples, here Paul commends wisdom in its higher form, sophia. A philosopher by definition loves sophia, but a Christian has found it in the logos of the Logos. This is why Paul elsewhere derides philosophers as seeking wisdom but never finding it. Without the agapic love of God, a Person, the love of wisdom understood impersonally as ‘theory’ or comprehension of nature will never find the source of nature, its Creator. And without the agapic love of God for his human creations, that ‘way,’ that path to wisdom would be blocked. Why songs instead of dialectical conversations? Probably because songs are right for assemblies of men; dialogues are for pairs, or small groups. Homer’s songs united Greeks; David’s songs united Israelites; Christian songs unite Christians. Among His disciples, Jesus dialogued and more often ‘monologued,’ but never sang. The words of Christian songs present the doctrines of Christianity to the minds of Christians assembled, in their ‘political’ condition. They open each mind to the meaning of God’s word, although some may advance farther into the meaning of those words than others, and so make better teachers—like Paul.
“And whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father through Him.” Gratitude to the Creator-God is owed to Him by those He created, inasmuch as he fashioned their original parents after His image. His Son, who ‘died for our sins,’ is now the indispensable mediator between Creator and created because that obedient “mortification” or “deadening” of God’s Son in atonement for the human refusal of God’s regime shows the path back to the path, way, regime of God, a way followed in words and acts alike. Hence “through Him.”
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