Awareness & our Earliest and Natural Obligations of Love

Colossians, Colossians 1:1-29

Post last updated on August 29, 2024

 Image credit:  RAH

This post begins a partial survey of the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, mainly to serve a few subsequent articles to come, highlighting a point that Paul eventually makes in the epistle’s second chapter and what it tells us about identity and its recognition.

Paul begins his epistle to the Colossians by addressing its first recipients as “saints and faithful brethren in Christ” (Colossians 1:2). In this way, he names his readers with respect to their identity, but one that is resolutely confirmed in relation to others. If some people tend to think about identity in reference to their independence and rights—a sequence of soliloquies in a crowded cast of actors, the scripture reminds us that a conception of identity not only includes, but also requires, that we understand ourselves in proper relation to others, and that in love. This fact is demonstrated to us in the ways that scripture causes the reader to think about righteousness: It is, in part, described in connection to the proper display of our affections, evident when Jesus spoke to man’s obligations to love God with all of one’s heart and to love his neighbor as himself (Matthew 22:37-39). That particular summary, though given in respect to the Sinai law, nevertheless highlights and extends the general teaching of scripture: Every one of us is made to understand love by its appropriate expressions to others, and our individuality requires that we acknowledge the many associations in which love is displayed.

* * *

This recognition begins in the acknowledgement of what stands prior to it, that we are creatures, born among men as the ongoing display of God’s creative work. In turn, this forecasts the way that all of us first become aware of ourselves: The confirmed connection of the individual person to others is first and most easily comprehended in the family, where understandings of authority and responsibility are, ideally, exercised in mutual displays of love. In other words, awareness is not a psychological reflection—there are other words for that; but it is an account of ourselves in reference to other objects and persons. “Objective truth,” writes Oliver O’Donovan, “is the condition of all moral awareness, for moral awareness is the demand that the world lays on my inner self without being my inner self. To be morally awake is to be ‘invested’ or ‘taken over’ by reality from beyond myself.”¹Oliver O’Donovan, Self, World, and Time, vol. vol. 1, Ethics as Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), 10.

Awareness, then, eventually and increasingly admits to the world as it is, that we might act within it as we are required. From its vantage point is a near horizon, from which rises the light of our obligations and the evening of their refusals. As such, the family is, at the least, the first society in which the tangles and tensions of human love are felt—and this has its own significance, for we are there, too, quite in the middle of a family.²I am indebted to Oliver O’Donovan’s casting of awareness for the presentation of it here. I didn’t have O’Donovan’s book opened nor in mind when I recently wrote this section, and only added the quotation that is included above in a later, final draft of this post; but when rereading this section before publication, I recognized the similarity of my phrasing to what he has written in Self, World, and Time, vol. 1, ff. 1-3., which is also transcribed here and translated into Nepalese here, with the permission of the publisher. Our desire for love is also there, already seated within us, and constantly up against the fact that we sometimes refuse love to others, choosing to love ourselves, instead. The reflection upon these facts comes some years later, when we search for the cause of accumulated disappointments, or recall the reason for gratitude. In the meantime, the normal course of life is one of contingent relations, and continues that way in one form or another. The orphan, for instance, may be adopted into a family; but if not, some other society will initiate him into their midst, but not without obligations of its own.

Of course, because each member of a household is, broadly speaking, related to one another by marriage, birth, or adoption, a contrary argument might go something like this: that families are merely the habits of tradition, such that the institution, itself, doesn’t reveal anything about love’s inherent and binding obligations; but here, the point about love is that it regularly, most easily, and first appears among most people within a family, and there attached to real and deep expectations. To dissolve a family is not the same thing as to remove one’s membership from a civic organization. Expectations, arising as early and naturally as they do, require and say something more than traditions and convention. What, then, might be said about the dissolution of a particular family? Nothing more than has always and often been said, connecting those occurrences to sin and its effects.

* * *

Attempts to redefine the family, however, appear to us to be a different matter, an unprecedented phenomenon; but, it is more precise to say that recent efforts have but taken new and surprising forms; the effort is from old. Regardless, they remain particularly relevant to the question of love’s obligations. This is because immoral reconstructions of the family especially admit to some desires as expectations, for these efforts proceed even while their activists insist upon the name of “family.” The perverse searches for its justification in the name of the authentic thing. This, obviously, highlights the significance of desires, but also shows us that their fulfillment remains indelibly attached to the institution and its fundamental character—a set of relations with biblical definition and moral obligations that are part of desire’s fulfillment. In other words, expectations must be obliged in a society of people—for we are limited in our powers, created for mutual dependency; and then, mutual obligations are also demonstrated in our failures, felt as disappointments. Upon this proceeds the parade of ironic, modern confirmations of love’s obligations: Lawsuits and countersuits follow in the course of people’s failures to love one another, seeking to break the bond that they could not do without. The marriage vow was needed to distinguish love from lust; conversely, divorce proves that the expectations attached to love were always real and important. If there were not expectations attached to marriage and the family, discord and divorce would not follow infidelities: We recognize hatred because we first and intuitively comprehend something about love. The number of divorces continues to rise in many places, but only because love is ever what it has been.

The better consideration of our obligations, then, is not far from the honest confession that we have expectations in respect to our most intimate relations, as do our family members in respect to us. Of course, there are other examples of love’s association with responsibility. For example, its satisfaction is also easily understood in our interactions with neighbors and nation. Regardless of our eventual and changing opinions about politics, patriotism, and what is required of citizens, we, nevertheless, recognize our individual place in a nation of people because there is some larger set of facts that binds the different parts into a common and shared identity. In Romans 14:7 Paul puts it all very simply: “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.”

* * *

Each claim of identity, then, requires the consideration of the larger fact that binds individuals together in their associations, and this brings us back again to the way that Paul begins his letter to the Colossians. Jesus Christ is the person, and his death and subsequent resurrection are the facts that unite this congregation’s members to one another—some men and some women, some citizens and others not, some masters, and others their servants, etc. This conception of identity and relation, rooted as it is in their common apprehension of the believers’ savior, both widens and restricts our understanding of faith among those who contemplate its meaning. Rootless, weak, and wandering sentiments—by which mere feelings can be mistaken for either faith or faithlessness—are brought back under the domain of God’s person and his integrity. Consequently, neither is such identity subject to changes of feeling: Christians are united by someone other than their individual identities, forming a new, stronger, and more enduring relation than any natural and civil bonds that otherwise exist between them. Feelings of patriotism are easily endangered by the actions of both leaders and citizens; trust within a family might be destroyed by the sin of a single member. Here in his epistle, however, Paul addresses his readers by that one person who, now exalted in the heavens, excites individual trust and affections unto a bond of many and disparate people. All believers, beholding the same Lord, are, consequently, united to one another.

Accordingly, Paul writes to the Colossians of their faith in Christ Jesus, and the love they have for one another (Colossians 1:3). Faith, then, is not the ultimate substance of the union, but creeps upon a man as an awareness that precedes his confession of its source: Faith recognizes the will of the Father, achieved by the Son on the cross; love is the Spirit’s work, extending a believer’s individual knowledge of the Father unto his necessary recognition of other believers as brothers and sisters. The power of the believer’s union resides in the work of the Triune God. Each believer possesses the same honor as the other because he receives the same kind of salvation, regardless of his other identities. God has begun his work in them, according to the work of Jesus Christ; he will conclude that work in them, by the might of the Holy Spirit (cf. Philippians 1:6).

Paul calls his readers “saints” because they belong to God by virtue of their faith in Christ; he addresses them as “faithful brethren” because they are related to one another by the same faith, which is accordingly expressed among them in love. As such, Christian faith first draws upon its source in a common Savior; love thereafter proceeds among believers as the palpable expression of their affections. Later, in Colossians 4:16, we note Paul’s request that this letter to the Colossians be read in Laodicea, such that we understand there is something other than familiar or civic ties that unite the readers of this epistle to others of the same confession. Unprecedented and improbable relations are created by believer’s mutual union with Jesus Christ, hereby recalibrating expectations and obligations in a believer’s growing awareness of the church and its created character.

The post, The Time & Space Between Faith & Love is next in this series.