All the Fullness of God: The Christ of Colossians by Bonnie Bowman Thurston (review)

Thurston's latest book is, above all, a love letter to Colossians—which she considers a love letter from its author to the Christians of Colossae. Like all sincere love letters, T.'s is characterized by compelling insights about the beloved. Also in the way of such missives, it tends toward the impressionistic rather than the polemical, and its tone toggles from earnest to enthusiastic. The result is a delightful but at times disorienting excursion—one that flirts with several attractive lines of argument but commits to none.

Thurston's admiration has three main objects: first, the letter itself, which she celebrates as the rhetorical realization of a christology only alluded to in earlier Pauline works; second, the person of the author—both his expansive theological intellect ("What an extraordinary mind composed this letter!" [p. 28]) and his fleshy relationality (he "had real people around him for whom he cared and who cared for him" [p. 53]); and, third, Christ, the subject of the letter and its cosmic context. Indeed, T. writes for a general audience in hopes of making Colossians' heady christology more comprehensible and its spiritual resources more accessible. To these ends, she ignores the speculative discourse surrounding Colossians—questions of authorship, the opponents' identities, the household code—and deals instead "with the text as text" (p. 5) and what it tells us about Christ and his earliest followers.

What it tells us, says T., is that, within one early Christian community, "there existed a lack of understanding about the completeness of Christ" (p. 75)—about him in whom God reconciled all things to himself, him from whom all things came and in whom all things cohere (Col 1:16-20)—and that "we can't think too expansively" about this divine force and substance (p. 76). In T.'s reading, the practices befuddling the Colossians are neither dangerous nor illegitimate on their own, but only insofar as they are deemed necessary for a life in Christ; the writer seeks not to attack the practices but to stretch cramped christologies that make one's Christ "too small, or, more darkly, . . . attempt to tame Christ's glorious wildness" (p. 79).

To expand the reader's own experience of Christ-in-Colossians, T. structures the book in two parts. Part 1 lays out the letter's major scholarly issues, including its historical context, its core teaching blocks, the operative network of Pauline associates, and the function of the letter as a prayer document. Part 2 offers a series of reflections on aspects of the text that have "spiritually practical relevance for contemporary readers" (p. ix), including the importance of praying for those we do not know, the centrality of Christ in our lives, gratitude as the appropriate response to Christ's peace, and our deep reliance on one another as communal creatures.

This two-part structure—one laying scholarly groundwork and the other mining the letter's spiritual riches—is counterproductive in several ways, however. First, it creates repetition. Needed context (e.g., the structure of a Pauline letter, the hymn's seven claims about Christ) is frequently rehearsed both at a relevant point in part 1 and again in the parallel part 2 reflection. Second, and more important, the structure works to diffuse T.'s most compelling christological insights. Because the book unfolds as a series of related observations rather than a sustained argument, these insights surface periodically and unsystematically, which leaves the reader craving their unification and development. They fall into three general categories: the letter writer's use of "dual-purpose vocabulary" to subsume variously understood words (mystērion, plērōma, cheirographon) under the ultimate meaning that is Christ; the hymn as the key to a more capacious understanding of Christ by both the Colossians and ourselves; and, most intriguing for me, the understanding of the body—the body of the letter; of sender, deliverer, and receiver; and of every Christian—as the site...