To my fellow bloggers, here’s a short apologia for my absence online.
I recently (a month or so ago) left my cushy engineering job and have been working 2 part time gigs locally, while continuing my seminary studies. I also moved apartments this summer and no longer have internet access at home. Further, my wife is 1 week overdue w/ our first child.
So, somewhere between working two jobs, learning more greek and starting hebrew, and prepping the house for the first child, I have haven’t found time to write. I hope you haven’t been heartbroken without your (bi?) weekly dose of Chesterton. 🙂 But here’s something that is encouraging that I read for class last night:
E. Earle Ellis in his contribution to Interpreting the New Testament Text (eds. Bock, Fanning), Chapter 23 on Colossians 1:12-20, says the following regarding the corporate and individual visions of redemption in the New Testament:
“Col. 1:12-14 sets forth the same present eschatology [as other corporately salvific passages in Paul], but does this not, as in Romans 5-8 and in Ephesians 2, in terms of a corporate inclusion of all God’s chosen ones in Christ’s death, resurrection, and exaltation in AD 33, but in terms of an individual incorporation into him at one’s conversion. (footnote to O’Brien, Colossians…pg. 27)… In God’s gracious purpose the individual actualization, although temporally separated, does not exclude the prior corporate reality. Nor is the prior corporate reality independent of the later individual actualization. Both are complementary parts of one inseparable whole whose fulfillment is as certain as the character and the word of God himself.”(pg. 424)
I don’t know if anybody else will dig this quote, but Ellis’ exposition in Interpreting was 13 pages of dynamite. If you’re preaching on Col. 1:12-20, check this chapter out. 🙂
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