The Prototokos Paradigm: A Biblical Response to Pagan Spirituality- Part 2

By Rev. Ted Hamilton
TruthXchange Fellow

The Creed of Christ’s Preeminence: The Substance

Moving from the form of the creed to its substance, we see that the two main stanzas present distinct but complementary perspectives on the person and work of Jesus. The first stanza (vv15–16) presents Jesus as the Lord of Creation. The second stanza (vv18b–20) presents Jesus as the Lord of Redemption.[1] The Lord of both spheres—creation and redemption—is celebrated in the poetic climax of verse17b as the one in whom “all things hold together,” including the realities of creation and redemption.

The gospel message with which Paul confronts paganism does not begin with salvation, but with creation. Creation precedes the cross, which cannot be rightly understood apart from an understanding that the One who died on it is the transcendent Lord of Creation.

The Prototokos Paradigm

To illuminate the truths in each stanza, Paul gives Jesus a title:  in the first stanza, it is “the firstborn (prototokos) over all creation” (v15), while in the second it is “the firstborn (prototokos) from among the dead” (v18). Of the numerous threads in Paul’s creed, the prototokos thread is the one we will follow. Paul uses prototokos only three times (twice here and once in Rom 8). This word unveils a Jesus who is both radically transcendent and radically immanent—a God who is unimaginably far above us, yet a God who has come close and entered our lives, our stories. As we trace this prototokos thread, theology begins to intersect worship,  for Paul’s presentation of Jesus as the cosmic prototokos is no cold, analytical presentation of truth. It is, rather, deep and ancient truth conveyed with passion, awe, wonder and gratitude. “Our creed is never to be a mere code of propositions in the abstract. It is to breathe and glow, even where it is most systematic, with the Christian’s own experience of worship, rest, and joy, in full sight of the glory of him who has loved him and has died for him.”[2] Paul is certainly speaking in Colossians out of his own experience of worship, rest and joy in Jesus, and what he has to say not only deepens our knowledge of Jesus and strengthens our faith in him, but it also exposes the pathetic smallness of paganism.

The Firstborn over All Creation

In giving Jesus the title “firstborn,” Paul is mining a rich Old Testament vein. Used in the Septuagint 130 times, prototokos often “denote[d] one who had a special place in the father’s love.”[3] So in Exodus 4:22 God calls Israel, his chosen people, “my firstborn son” (uios prototokos mou). But more concretely, primogeniture operated in the Old Testament to make the firstborn son of the family the heir of the lion’s share of the father’s property (see, e.g., Dt. 21:17) and ruler of the family itself. When Jacob deceived his blind father Isaac into giving him the blessing of the firstborn (Esau’s by right), Isaac pronounced the blessing with these words: “May nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you” (Gn 27:29). The ruling rights of the “firstborn” are further seen in Psalm 89:27 where God gives such authority to the lastborn son of Jesse, David: “I will also appoint him my firstborn (prototokon), the most exalted of the kings of the earth.” 

So when Paul, steeped as he was in the Old Testament, identifies David’s greater son, Jesus, as the “firstborn over all creation” he is effectively saying that Jesus is the ruler of all creation and the heir of all creation. Jesus is the exalted king and the one who, as exalted heir, shall come to possess and own everything that exists.

Paul unpacks what he means by “all” and “all creation” in verse16:  “all things…things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities.”  An unlimited rule over an unlimited dominion!  Jesus’ supremacy is not only over the visible world, but also over the invisible world, specifically over the spirits operating behind the Colossian paganism and behind the Neopaganism that still lures victims today. Jesus is superior to all lesser spiritual entities, good or bad, because he created them. Accordingly, the right Christian response to Neopaganism is not to question, deny or ignore the reality of the pagan spirits, but to appeal to the greater and deeper reality that is Jesus, the very ground of being for those spirits.

Paul grounds Jesus’ status as ruler and inheritor of all things in the breathtaking cosmic truth that Jesus was God’s agent in the very process of creating those things. Twice in verse 16 Paul says that all things were made “through him,” that is, through Jesus. At the end of verse16, Paul goes further to say that all things were not only made “through him” but “for him.”  Jesus is not just the beginning of creation; he is the end of it, the goal of it. The stars, the sun, the moon, the mountains, the oceans, the trees, the animals, the rocks, the people, even the invisible rulers and authorities worshipped by the pagans—all exist for Jesus!  They will, in the end, all glorify him. Doxology to the Father and the Son overlaps here: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever”! (Rom 11:36). At this point we are, like Moses before the burning bush, standing on holy ground. The implications of everything being for Jesus extend beyond our finite powers to imagine. No adherent to paganism, in Paul’s day or ours, would dare claim that all of creation exists for his particular deity.[4] This is a transcendent claim, unique to Jesus.

The Firstborn from among the Dead

Jesus is not only “the firstborn over all creation” and, therefore, the Lord of Creation. He is also celebrated in the second stanza of Paul’s creed as “the firstborn from among the dead” (1:18b), and, therefore, the Lord of Redemption.

The title “firstborn from among the dead” clearly refers to Jesus’ resurrection. This resurrection reference, following as it does the introductory statement that Jesus is “the head of the body, the church” (1:18a), and coupled with the statement that Jesus is “the beginning” (1:18b), describes the risen Jesus as the first and founder of a new humanity, a new race of redeemed people.[5] In the power unleashed in his resurrection, Jesus, Lord of the Old Creation, becomes Lord of New Creation—the head of the church. Paul developed this same truth in 2 Corinthians where he said: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…” (2 Cor 5:17–18).

Both in his identity as firstborn over all creation and in his unparalleled resurrection, Jesus, the firstborn from among the dead, now has God-ordained supremacy in everything (1:18b). Paul reinforces this supremacy of Jesus by asserting that “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him” (1:19). The one who creates, on the one hand, and the one who walks out of a grave, on the other hand, does so because he is fully divine. Only one who is truly God could do these things.

Paul’s exalted portrayal of Jesus shows us that there is no need to fear spirits and supernatural forces, and there is no sense in worshipping them—“God in all his divine essence and power had taken up residence in Christ.”[6] Since there is no divinity outside of Jesus, it follows that Jesus must be the one and only mediator between God and human beings. No other supernatural power or spirit being stands between God and humans that has any claim to deity. Deity is all wrapped up in Jesus, and he has come to his own.

The gospel remarkably reverses the whole trajectory of paganism. A person does not have to bow and scrape before spirits, angels or other forces in an attempt to reach the divine. The gospel is that God, on his own initiative, has reached into humanity in all his fullness and become accessible to us in the person of Jesus.

Paul’s creed does not stop here, though we sometimes do, thus truncating the gospel. New creation is not just about new people. God, through Jesus, as Lord of the New Creation, reconciles to himself not just human beings but “all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven” (1:20). Just as the scope of Jesus’ creative work was cosmic, so the scope of his redemptive work is cosmic. Paul wants to convey to those tempted to worship pagan spirits the truth that even those spirits, created through Jesus, are reconciled to God through Jesus.

The reconciliation of the spiritual forces opposed to Jesus is a very different reconciliation from the one we enjoy as believers in Jesus. For pagan spirits, reconciliation is better understood as pacification.[7] This is clear from what Paul says a little later in Colossians at 2:15: “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”  The reconciliation of all things, including us and the spiritual rulers and authorities, comes as a result of the cross. Jesus’ death both gives us life and defangs the demons “by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (1:20).

The intrusion of the cross, in all its bloodiness and shame, shocks us, coming as it does at the end of a creed that has fixed our gaze exclusively on the exalted and cosmic Jesus. Paul almost certainly wanted to shock us. By putting the cross in our faces, he is showing us at least two realities. First, at the cross, the radical transcendence (distance) of God becomes radical immanence (closeness) as the Lord of Creation and Redemption is pinned to a Roman cross to die the tortured death of a common criminal—for our benefit. And second, the inheritance of Jesus as the firstborn over all creation included, from all eternity, the tree from which he would hang. And yet Jesus willingly and knowingly accepted the cost of his inheritance “for the joy set before him” (Hb12:2).

The Firstborn among Many Brothers

Finally, the prototokos thread takes us out of Colossians 1 and into Romans 8—where Paul speaks of the cosmic effects of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Here Paul describes the sovereignty of God over creation, even over the pain and suffering and frustration in creation. In verse twenty, Paul says: “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will on the one who subjected it, in hope…”  Only God could have subjected creation to frustration in hope. Biblical hope is not wishful thinking, but a settled certainty in a future outcome. The frustration, groaning and suffering that the creation experiences and that you experience within creation are not just natural or random phenomena. Were such groaning natural, there would be no answer to it. Like the pagans, we would have to resort to hope in some vague disembodied future. But, in fact, Paul shows us in Romans 8 that the pain and suffering within creation is a judicial phenomenon. It is a result of God’s decree against sin in Genesis 3, where God himself, in response to human rebellion, specifically subjected the creation to frustration. The suffering that makes us groan is designed by God to show us just how horrible and repulsive and hideous sin against an infinitely holy God really is. The suffering is intended to drive us back to God, in whom the only hope of rescue exists. The hope, Paul tells us, is that “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).

Paul’s Romans reference to the liberation of creation from its bondage to decay is another perspective on his Colossians truth that God is reconciling all things to himself through Jesus’ peacemaking crucifixion. The Christian rock group Rush of Fools sings of this truth when they sing about Jesus: “You’re the only one who can undo what I’ve become.”[8] C.S. Lewis poignantly communicates this Jesus-centered truth in fairy tale form. The resurrected lion, Aslan, explains that the witch who killed him did not know the “deeper magic,” or she would have known “that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead…Death itself would start working backwards.”[9] This is the gospel truth that J. R. R. Tolkien puts into the little hobbit Sam’s mouth when he sees a resurrected friend and asks: “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”[10]   

Because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, Lord of Creation and Lord of Redemption, the answer to Sam’s question is yes!  Undoing what we have become, death working backwards, things sad becoming untrue—these are all expressions of the cosmic effectiveness of Jesus’ work.

This happy outcome is a certainty. Paul describes the pain and suffering we know now in creation as “the pains of childbirth” (Rom 8:22). If you are in a hospital, and you hear groaning, it makes a big difference whether you are in the burn unit or in the labor and delivery unit. The groaning in the labor and delivery room signals a good outcome. There will be a birth. It will happen, one way or another. So it is with God’s creation. It groans now—in labor, but because of the power unleashed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, the creation that is now groaning (all of it) will be liberated and brought into glory. This has nothing to do with the evolutionary hope of Neopaganism, but it does speak to the utopian hope that Neopagans are vainly trying to find in the myth of evolution. It is the answer to evolutionary hope and the true story they must hear.

Finally, the one who will be the liberator of all of creation is described by Paul in Romans 8:29 as “the firstborn (prototokos) among many brothers.”  There is that title again!  Here, the cosmic Lord of Creation and Lord of Redemption, who has supremacy in all things, becomes the elder brother of the new race of people that he rules. We are elevated by the gospel to a new place of dignity and responsibility. Jesus makes us his brothers and sisters, sharers by grace of his inheritance as the “Firstborn over All Creation” and the “Firstborn From among the Dead.” 

Neopaganism attracts people today, because it promises a new dignity as individuals and caters to their legitimate concerns for the earth and its ecological wellbeing. They fail to understand, however, that the gospel of Jesus Christ makes the human dignity and ecological agenda promised by Neopaganism pale in comparison. The gospel says we will rule over a redeemed cosmos with our elder brother, the All-Ruling Firstborn, Jesus Christ. And even now, in the “not quite yet” of our faith journey with Jesus, we are his agents in bringing his cosmic re-creative power to our world, as we pray “thy kingdom come” and serve him to achieve that goal. Therein lie real dignity and responsibility.

The way for Christians to confront Neopagans today is, like Paul, to overwhelm them with the wonder, the beauty and the power of the gospel in all of its implications. Kill the fly with the sledgehammer of glory and love. We have a compelling story to tell. We have The Story. It speaks to the spiritual hunger and the deepest yearnings of the pagan heart, even as it speaks to ours. “It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16).

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[1] Other pairings are Creator and Redeemer or Lord of Old Creation and Lord of New Creation.

[2] Moule, Colossian and Philemon Studies, 75.

[3] O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon, 44.

[4] Baugh, “Poetic Form of Colossians 1:15–20,” 31.

[5] In the Septuagint version of Gn 49:3, both “firstborn” (prototokos) and “beginning” (arche) are employed in the same context to convey the idea of the firstborn being the founder of a people. See O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon, 50.

[6] Ibid.,53.

[7] Ibid., 54.

[8] “Undo,” by Rush of Fools (http://www.rushoffools.com). For lyrics, see http://www.anychristianlyrics.com/index.php?cmd=6&recid=47.

[9] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973 reprint), 148.

[10] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Del Rey/Random House, 1986), 246.