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57
58 THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF CHRIST
one. The amazing fact is the end of the verse where Paul
62 THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF CHRIST
ears. But this in no way alters the fact that ears are also
of highest importance for the life of the body. For, argues
Paul, what would a body be, if consisting exclusively of
an eye? It would simply be an abortion, a spectacle to be
vine and the human world, the area of heaven and the
area of earth. Probably the resurrection of Christ was
understood as a physical ascension which reunited earth
and heaven and removed all obstacles on the way to
heaven, similar to the way in which the fiends, according
to the Hellenistic world view, are standing guard in the
intermediate sphere of the air, hindering all earthly be-
ings attempting to secure access to the heavenly reaches.
At any rate, Easter was considered as a physical or meta-
physical event opening the way to heaven. The impor-
tance of Christ for the world was thus seen in two physi-
world had been created through Christ
cal facts: (1) the
and was therefore physically his body, and (2) it was
reunited with heaven by his physical ascent.
This reinterpretation is not surprising; it is exactly
what we should expect when we know all the Hellenistic
ideas about the divine Wisdom figure. The really amaz-
ing and stimulating thing, however, is the way in which
the author to the Colossians took up and corrected this
view. Not being a modem who
has the means of
author
footnotes at his disposition, he inserts first some small
comments into the original hymn. They have been left
out in the preceding reconstruction of this passage. The
fact that the phrases disturbing the perfect parallelism of
these verses manifest also a distinctly different theologi-
cal point ofview gives some probability to such a separa-
tion of the original hymn from the additions by the au-
thor of the letter. The same theology appears secondly
in the commentary which he gives at the end of our
passage and in some later paragraphs of his letter. Even
scholars who are more skeptical than I regarding a re-
construction of an original hymn would agree that there
68 THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF CHRIST
is a mixture of a strictly Hellenistic-Jewish background
with some definitely Pauline ideas.
The author to the Colossians certainly does not totally
oppose such a reinterpretation of the body of Christ con-
cept, as it had been shaped in Colossae. Indeed, Christ
is of importance not only for the church, but also for the