作者：嘉理陵 年份：1979
The Gospel, whether received as kerygma or as didache, is of its nature the demand for a response. While that response will be yes or no for the one who, because of his situation within the present order of creation, finds himself the recipient of the Gospel as kerygma, for those of us who have already said yes, and for whom the Gospel is thus to be received as didache, the response is somewhat different from the clear dichotomy of yes and no: it is, rather, a further decision to confirm our yes, and by implication deepen it; or the further decision to deny it, and hence to contradict the tenor of our existence. For the response demanded cannot be merely notional, since creation is act, and the creative word of God must achieve its purpose. If we believe, it is not merely to admit that we have heard "the message of the truth and the good news of our salvation" (Eph 1:13, cf Col 1:5), for salvation is existential and the news of it must be realized in a new creation, a creation of which Christ is the first-born (Col 1:15). In entering the truth we enter the realm of divine reality. For if Christ is our life (Col 3:4, cf Phil 1:21), it is so that as he lives in the presence of the Father in love, the communication of that love to us will enable us to live in the presence of the same Father, who has chosen us in Christ before the world began, to be holy and spotless (Eph 1:4, Col 1:22).
This counterpoint of faith and love has always been a central theme of Christian thought. It has, however, been left to recent times to recover that other dimension of New Testament and early Christian thought, the dimension of hope. In a world in which the present seems ever more illusive and the past seems irrevocably past, the future crowds in upon us at an ever increasing pace. If man is still to be master of creation in compliance with the divine command (Gen 1:28-29), that future must not be allowed to assume the form of an idol commanding man's submission. Nor may the Christian simply reject the future in a mistaken loyalty to the past and the present. In the face of the dilemma there is only the answer of Christ and the relationship which, through him, we have with the Father and the Spirit. While all schemes are only partial elucidations of the truth, there is a certain relationship between faith and the past, love and the present, hope and the future. In a theological climate now marked by the emergence of a greater awareness of the value of hope in our Christian lives, it is necessary that we return to the Scriptures in order to recover from them the certainty that Christ is our hope.
The basis for a Christian's hope in God is fundamentally his being a member of the "holy and faithful brothers in Christ" (Col 1:2) for this holiness is that which in the Old Testament was given to Israel - the privilege of being chosen by God to be his own special possession (seghullah : Ex 19:5f etc). Christians are God's new miqra, qodes (Ex 12:16 etc; Col 3:12), his children as he is their Father (Col 1:2). In his Letter to the Colossians, Paul's usual religious greeting links together the three theological virtues of faith, hope and love (Col 1:4; of also 1Cor 13:13; 1Thes 1:3; 5:8 for the triad). The fact that they are so fervently lived out in Colossae is the reason for Paul's constant prayer for the community and his thanksgiving to God. While it is, of course, certain that Paul is not schematizing these three virtues in this passage, there is still a certain relationship set up between faith and the past, love and the present, hope and the future. For the faith of Christians looks to all that has happened the man Jesus, who is now Christ - and more, is now Lord, Kyrios (Col 1:3). The consequence of that faith is the abiding concern with the contemporary Christ - the Christ who not only has ascended to the right hand of the Father as Kyrios but who lives here and now in the brothers who form the Christian Community. Hence it is that faith overflows into the present as communitarian and ecclesial love. Nor does this love in the present exhaust the totality of the Christian commitment, for there is the time of the Church, stretching between the ascension of Christ and his parousia, to be lived out; and since there is still a future dimension to the resurrection, faith must transcend the present and take in the full sweep of human history. Hence there is a hope, for faith projected into the future is hope. Yet the hope that Paul speaks of here is not simply the attitude or virtue of hope (spes sperans) but is an actual gift which will be presented to the Christian (spes sperata) in heaven (Col 1:4). That hope is a motive for our love in the present - not simply in the sense that we love our brothers in order to attain a reward in heaven: the interrelation between love and hope goes much deeper here - the reality and the certainty of that hope which is laid up for us becomes a ground and basis of love in the present, just as faith in the past of Jesus is also its ground. Faith, hope and love are the essential content of the "message of the truth" (Col 1:5, cf. 1:21), and the firmness of faith maintaining us in hope is what lies at the basis of the holy and unspotted nature given us in the reconciliation Jesus won for us in his mortal body on the Cross (Cor 1:21-23). This new election, the objective correlative of the eschatological nature of the Community, is further emphasized in the use of the word kleros (Col 1:12), especially in its relationship to phos. For the kleros of the Old Testament was the land of Israel, but now the heritage or inheritance has passed to the Christians, the new company of the Saints - and it is specified in terms of revelation (phos ), the revelation which was incarnated in Christ, the light of the world (Jn 1:4:9; 8:12; 12:46 etc). This light and its bestowal on the new people of God by the Father are a further basis for a Christian hope, since it dispels that darkness which threatens man, more menacingly from an unknown future than from a conquered past.
While a biblical theology of hope would be more than an examination of words, one must centre it on the text of Scripture. Much light would be derived from that cluster of words which occur at the end of Paul's greeting and prayer for the Colossians: dynamis, kratos, doxa, hypomone, makrothymia and chara (1:11-12) - each of these terms is important in any theology of hope. While much might be said about each one, it will have to suffice here to recall the whole tension of chara-lype which characterizes the Gospel, especially and expressly so in the Farewell Discourse of the Gospel of John. The theme of joy which runs through Luke's Gospel gathers to a climax in the last verse, with the disciples in the Temple eulogountes ton Theon. Apart from the relationship of eulogeo and eucharisteo (the latter occurs in the present context Col 1:12), there is the Temple theme, that centre of the presence of God and the focus of Old Testament hope. The finding of Jesus in the Temple is accompanied by Mary's "odynomenoi ezetoumen se" (Lk 2:48), and we find that in general in the New Testament odynaomai is an eschatological word: it occurs in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Lk 16:24f ; it is probably also eschatological in Acts 20:38, where the Community's sorrow at leaving Paul is related to the certainty of his coming death; cf. also odune in Rom 9:2, and possibly also in 1Tim 6:10. There is also the concept of Christ's life as a journey to Jerusalem where the Temple was, a concept which is formative in Luke's Gospel: Jerusalem and its Temple, and the suffering it meant for Christ as well as the redemption it meant for us - these are to be related to the temple-body of Jesus in Jn 2:13-25, and the church-body of Christ in Paul, Col 1:24.
This leads naturally to a consideration of hope and suffering: Paul's doctrine of the relationship of his own (and hence of every Christian's) suffering to the sufferings of Christ is an import- and element in a theology of hope, for it is in the face of suffering and death that hope finds its severest test : we think of the poignancy of the elpizomen of the disciples on the way to Emmaus, Lk 24:21. It would seem to be important in considering Col 1:24 that we pay attention to the fact that the sufferings of Paul are pathemata while those of Christ which are to be filled out are thlipsis. This latter word is, in general, eschatological in the New Testament (it is not used for the Passion of Christ in the Gospels). Even though the sufferings of the Christian may be denominated pathemata just as Christ's are (Col 1:24; 2Cor 1:7; 1Thes 2:14 in comparison with 2Cor l:5f, where thlibometha also occurs for Christian suffering), it would seem to be clear that there is no question of their supplying any lack in the pathemata of the Passion of Christ but are taken up into that eschatological suffering which is the continuation of Christ's Passion and which is in fact one of the clear promises that Jesus makes to his disciples when he is about to leave them (Jn 16:33). This is further em- phasized when we contrast Col 1:22 with 1:24. For while Christ's sufferings were en to somati tes sarkos autou, Paul's sufferings are en te sarki mou and are hyper tou somatos autou, which is the Church. While it is certain that Christ's sufferings were utterly human in that they touched his being (soma) through his humanity (sarx) and while it is equally certain that the omission of soma in reference to Paul's sufferings is not meant to indicate that they touched Paul's inner self to a lesser degree, it does seem that there is a certain intentionality in the different phrases, an intentionality which reveals the depth and the true nature of the relationship of Christian suffering to the Passion of Christ. Hence our certainty of victory, linked to that victory of Christ which is proclaimed en parrhesia (Col 2:15). Though the word is adverbial here and means little more, apparently, than "in public", the word itself, denoting as it sometimes does courage or bravery or boldness (1Jn 2:28 etc), is redolent of eschatological victory.
Though many themes might still be uncovered and indicated even briefly, we must finish with a consideration of the phrase which, along with 1:24, might be said to be the most important of the themes in Colossians related to a theology of hope: "Christ within (among?) you, your hope of glory" (1:27). Glory is the object of hope and, in a certain sense, is that hope itself (tes doxes as epexegetical gen.). For inasmuch as hope is a theological attitude relating us to God, its object is being-with-God in perfect fulness, that intimacy which only comes with the resurrection and is our glory. But inasmuch as hope is spes sperata, it is identified with glory, for that is what is laid up for us in heaven. Yet that gift is not simply future: here and now Christ, who in his own body is our salvation and hence our glory, is alive in us, whether in the individual Christian in a divine indwelling or in the Community as such. So Christ is our hope (1Tim 1:1): when Paul tells us that, in relation to the hope placed in annual festivals, New Moons and Sabbaths, Christ is the soma, the reality, (Col 2:16), he can only mean that Christ, both in his person and in his ecclesial body, has become our hope. If we appropriate that hope, if we are truly risen with him, then we are oriented towards the future, towards the ta ano (3:1) which will be given us fully when, at the appearance of Christ in glory, we too shall be revealed in the fulness of that same glory. (Col 3:4).