This is the eighth in a series in a collaborative reading of Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7.

You see, paths require choice. Choosing one path invariably requires rejecting other paths, and it is impossible to walk on more than one path at once if you are actually trying to get somewhere.

p.170

In this final post in this series I’m summing up three chapters (10-12) on Walsh & Keesmaat’s take on how we should live out the theology of Colossians. Paul is writing to a church being formed in the face of empire, the Roman empire. We too are forging and forming communities in the face of Empire, they argue, but this time the empire is not nationalistic but capitalistic or as Paul Kingsnorth might say, it is the empire of the Machine.

The authors then begin to paint a picture of the kind of community, the kind of church that can both subvert and thrive under the oppressive gaze of the empire. The first challenge for contemporary readers is that this forces upon us that most uncomfortable of things and that is a choice. There must, ultimately, come a commitment, a decision, a choosing of the path ahead and with that the willingness to walk it fully and wholeheartedly.

Choices are by their very nature excluding, whatever new horizons they may open up there are also things it means turning our backs upon. Following Christ repeatedly calls upon us to make such choices.

The authors remind us that Colossians 3:12-17 needs to be read and understood communally. Kindness and humility are community traits as well as individual characteristics. Not only that they contend that they are also political traits because these virtues are never constrained inside the community but bear fruit in the world as the church practices them in the wider community. Justice within the church, for example how slaves are treated, will inevitably cause ripples outside the church. In that sense as the church defines itself against the empire (secession), it builds a community of love and compassion (community) it cannot help but be a force for liberation of the oppressed (liberation) but this in turn will bring opposition (suffering).

Walsh & Keesmaat argue that the church should shop at farmers markets, buy organic veg, support cycling, promote homeschooling, oppose McDonalds and multinationals and be more environmentally friendly. They are careful to say they don’t think Paul is arguing for such things but that they are arguing for such things based on a logical outworking of the values Paul is espousing. For them this is what a community of the peace of Christ would look like.

I’m not actually knocking any of those things per se but I just wish there was an equal interrogative approach to these political solutions as there was to the political problems. I agree with most of their diagnosis but there needs to be a greater evaluation of the prescription. In a globalized world working out whether an economic purchase is good or not is extremely complicated and the simplistic idea that multinational = bad, local = good is not always helpful or true and it is certainly more nuanced than presented here.

However it is true, that there is a continued need for the church to remember that personal virtues must also be community virtues, that under the Lordship of Christ the church should seek to bring ‘peace to the social, economic, political, racial and ethnic divisions that sin has caused in the world. In proclaiming and living that gospel, this community will begin to take on the empire.’