(Colossians) Part Four - Col 2:6-23 — Douglas Moo

Well, I must say that I did sleep better last night, although I did, a couple times I did awake and I did sense a slight shaking of the building, you know, kind of when a freight train is on the tracks a little distance away and you can still feel a bit of the vibration, so I don't know.

But we're very frustrated, as I'm sure you are, at how little of Colossians I have done. But I must say I made the deliberate decision when I looked at the kind of time I had and looked at Colossians and said I'd rather work a little bit more carefully through a fewer number of passages and just sort of try to skate over too much.

So that was a deliberate decision for good or for ill and there we are. So I would like to, I think we can continue our study of 2 .6 to 2 .15, complete that and then maybe jump ahead a bit into Chapter 3 here and there to see where Paul is taking some of this from an ethical perspective.

I think that would be useful to get a little bit of picture of that as well. So if you would turn again to Colossians Chapter 2, I'd like to pick up on this theme that I think Paul is developing at this point in the letter, again the point he makes here about Christ being the one in whom all the fullness of the deity dwells and the fullness we enjoy in him.

Fullness in Christ and Deliverance from Sin’s Power

Paul as I suggest now in these subsequent verses after that statement is helping us to understand how it is that we have come to this fullness. What is this fullness and in broad outlines it seems to me then as we've begun to talk about the circumcision imagery in verses 11 to 12, the focus is on a fullness in terms of what we sometimes call the new experience of deliverance from the power of sin.

He's talking here I think, it's not explicit but I'm going to try to argue the case this morning, essentially about the power to live a new life. The ability that we are given by Christ in our identification with him to be a new people.

And then in verses 13 to 15 where I think a little break comes between 12 and 13, he takes us back to the fundamental work of Christ in delivering us from what we call the penalty of sin. A new life in terms of forgiveness especially is the theme as we will see in verses 13 to 15.

I would like to explore with you a bit further this idea of our being circumcised with Christ. I would like to again make clear that in my mind it is a very hard call to know whether in the imagery of circumcision in this verse, Paul wants us to think of our identification with Christ in his circumcision, a metaphor for the death of Christ in which we participate, or whether he is drawing our attention in a sense to our conversion when we come to Christ and experience our own circumcision performed by Christ.

That latter is a direction the TNAV translation takes that you have before you. Most English versions reflect something like that. But the alternative again that sees some reference to Christ's own metaphorical circumcision is a very valid option.

One of the better commentaries for instance on Colossians written by Peter O 'Brien, I think a soul mate to many of us in terms of his general theological perspective, Moore College in Sydney, Australia, argues well for the identification of this as Christ's experience.

Again, without going into that debate any further, I am taking it as a way of talking about that in coming to Christ we have what Paul calls this body of flesh, this enveloping power of flesh stripped off from us.

Now, one or two of the brothers came up to me after the session last evening, I think it was, and engaged in the ministry of very, very cordial remonstrance, which I appreciate because they were absolutely right in the point they make.

I spoke incompletely or perhaps unconsciously. Of course, I did not mean that Paul is suggesting that when we come to Christ the flesh is stripped off in the sense that we no longer have anything to do with it or never are bothered by it or never are tempted by it.

Of course not. But rather, I think the imagery that we have here in verse 11 is similar to the imagery Paul uses in Romans. All of my students accuse me of always going to Romans to talk about everything.

I confess, I do tend to do that. But there are worse places to go, I must say. That the imagery, remember there, Paul develops when he talks about the flesh, particularly in Romans 8, that we are no longer in the flesh.

That sort of defines who a Christian is. We are no longer in the flesh. But he warns us, remember, don't have the mind of the flesh. Don't walk according to the flesh. So in some sense, as a Christian, this power of the flesh, the worldly impulse, the anti-godly tendency, no longer dominates us.

We don't live there. That's not where we belong anymore. It doesn't dictate terms to us as it used to. And remember, Paul also uses the language of slavery to get at that idea in Romans 6. But of course, we are still able to be influenced by that flesh.

And so clearly, when Paul uses the imagery here in verse 11, he doesn't intend to say a body of flesh is stripped off in a way that means we no longer have to worry about it. But he does want to, again, encourage us by reminding us that in Christ, because of his work, no longer does flesh dominate us.

That is not the one, again, who is Lord and Master any longer. That's the imagery I see him using. Now, verse 12, baptism. What do we do with this? Well, you see the connection that Paul draws. He talks about this circumcision of Christ.

Again, in my view, the circumcision performed by Christ is the way I think that the TNAV translates appropriately so, if this is the correct interpretation. It's connected with our being buried with Christ in baptism.

In which baptism, I think, there is an ambiguity in the Greek text here. The second clause in verse 12 could also be translated in a sense, in Christ you were also raised with him. But it's more likely that Paul continues the reference to baptism.

You were buried with him in baptism, and you were raised with him in baptism. Partly because, as we'll see, this matches the pattern of Romans 6 that I think Paul is drawing from here. Romans again, you see, everything gets back to Romans eventually, one way or another.

It's not true if you can't find it in Romans, is my theory. We were buried with Christ, we were raised with Christ, and it's awkward for Paul to say, in Christ, you were raised with Christ. You see, I just think that would be an odd thing for him to say.

So I do think it is more likely here that the reference is to baptism in both members of verse 12. Buried with him, raised with him. Now just a couple of observations on this. First, why does baptism get involved here?

It is clearly, first of all, in my view, water baptism. This is not spirit baptism or something of that sort that some like to resort to. I don't think that works. I think this is water baptism. And I think, again, that we find parallel here, importantly, in Romans 6 and 1 Corinthians 15, which I quoted last night.

Fundamental, Paul says, to the tradition he inherited, the essence of the gospel. Christ died, he was buried, he was raised. These fundamental events that stand as the inaugurating events of the new covenant era.

And so it is not at all unnatural, then, in a passage like Romans 6, when Paul is talking about our death to sin, our removal from sin's power and influence, that he will allude to our participation in Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection.

And connects that with baptism in Romans 6. Now it is at this point that many people, in my view, and I must say, especially in the Baptist tradition in general, have, in my view, misinterpreted this language.

The language in Romans 6 and in Colossians 2 is not an attempt to symbolize the physical actions of baptism. There is no hint of that in either of these texts, nor can I find any evidence of that tradition until sometime in the second century of the Christian church.

In other words, it is not the case, in my view, that we have any New Testament foundation to say that this language is intending to correspond to the physical actions of baptism, as we sometimes hear it presented.

We go down into the water, symbolizing our burial with Christ. We rise up from the water, symbolizing our resurrection with Christ. This is not what Paul is getting at by talking about Christ's death, burial, and resurrection.

He is not setting up an analogy in which he says, just as Christ died and was buried and raised, so also you are sort of metaphorically dead, buried, and raised when you undergo baptism. Now if you look carefully at both passages, baptism is the place where these things happen.

We were buried with him in baptism, raised with him in baptism. We are identified with Christ in and through water baptism, which immediately sets some of us who are not all that sacramental squirming.

How can Paul say this kind of thing about water baptism? We all know he was a good low church Baptist. How could he say things like this about it? And so people again resort to, well, it's got to be spirit baptism, it's got to be a metaphor, something of the sort.

I think there's a better answer when we look at the New Testament as a whole. First of all, as Dr. Moore reminded us the other night, this is not the only place in the New Testament where baptism is set forth for us as a pretty significant event.

He was, remember, looking at the 1 Peter 3 passage, which is another one of those that make us squirm. Baptism now saves you, and of course Dr. Moore appropriately noted how that's qualified in its context, but nevertheless, Paul, see everything's Paul in Romans.

Peter, Dr. Moore was making the same mistake, wasn't he? You see, it's a natural thing. Peter says something there that I'll bet most of us would not be very comfortable in saying, no matter how much we qualified it.

How many of you would be happy to stand up in front of your congregations and say, baptism saves you, no matter how much you then qualified it and explained it and so forth. And what I think, again, this does is present us with a striking possibility that at this point, the New Testament perspective on baptism and our usual way of thinking about baptism are not aligned as accurately as they might be.

I think that's what these kinds of statements in scripture should force us to do. Yes, we need to interpret them in their context, we need to explain them in the larger biblical theological framework, but sometimes we are too quick to domesticate these difficult passages in scripture and make them fit the scenario we've already adopted.

We're just like the Pharisees in John 9. Great story. In a sense, they keep saying to this poor fellow who has just had his sight restored, no, no, you can't see. Our theology makes it clear that no one like this Jesus guy could have healed your eyesight.

You really can't see. And all this poor fellow says, well, you might be right, but it sure seems like I can see. And so, again, we have to be careful of that tendency. As much as we need to have a theological system, as much as we need to interpret every passage of scripture in the context of a system we're building, to always let scripture come back and reshape and reconfigure that system.

If we don't do that, our professed claim to stand under the authority of the Bible doesn't mean very much. So we've got to keep doing that. So, again, at this point it does seem to be, in many passages of the New Testament, we are confronted with evidence of a prominence for baptism, not as a step of discipleship, but as a step in the conversion experience.

Baptism in the New Testament is not the first act of discipleship. It is the last act of conversion. And to me, that's just being faithful to what the New Testament is teaching, whether I like it or not.

Now, having said that, at the same time, we, of course, recognize, as we try to look at the balance of the New Testament as a whole, that there are maybe at most a dozen references to water baptism, and there are hundreds of references to faith.

And so we have to be careful about maintaining a balance at this point. This is where some traditions have gone wrong. They single out these, albeit very significant, references to water baptism or the Lord's Supper, and they elevate these in a way that seems to me to be fundamental out of kilter with the New Testament as well.

I've been helped immensely here by the earliest book of James Dunn, of New Perspective fame, in his book on the Holy Spirit, in which he develops the concept of what he calls conversion initiation. And he makes the case, and I'll just be very brief about this, that in the New Testament, faith, repentance, the gift of the Spirit, and water baptism are portrayed as kind of a series of events that are unified and are all in relationship to one another.

That this was a package, as the New Testament authors tended to present it. A person came to faith in Jesus Christ involving repentance, the gift of the Spirit was given to them, and they were baptized in water as a natural expression of that situation.

And again, they were baptized pretty quickly. Acts chapter 8, Peter did not tell the Ethiopian court official to come to Jerusalem and enroll in baptism classes once he came to faith in Christ. Hey, here's some water.

Why can't I be baptized, you see? And I think, again, that reminds us of a way in which the New Testament views baptism that is not always in keeping with ours. So what am I trying to say in all of this?

Who knows? I confess it's easier to make some of these general points than to get down to the specifics. This much I feel comfortable affirming. Number one, in these passages, water baptism is being used as the place where we meet Christ.

We were buried with him in his grave. We were raised with him, identified with him, and water baptism was the place where that happens. Water baptism, again, is not functioning as a symbol of those things.

There's no way you can get that out of these texts. Water baptism is the means by which, the place at which our identification takes place. And so the power for us to lead a new life, you see, comes in our union with Christ, a theme that was dear to Calvin and is throughout the Institutes and that we have sometimes lost a little bit too much in some contemporary versions of theology, in my view, because I think it solves a number of theological problems for us, union with Christ.

Baptism, then, is functioning as a way of alluding to the entire process. When Paul talks about baptism, as he does in these passages, as Peter talks about baptism in chapter 3 of his first epistle, it is not baptism in and of itself.

It is baptism as the culminating experience of these other events, of faith and repentance and the gift of the Spirit. And so we must not divorce water baptism from these other things in any way, or baptism, of course, loses its significance.

Paul never dealt with the question that we so often have to deal with. No one ever asked him. The Corinthians never had a problem or said, Paul, what do we do with an unbaptized believer? It is a good question.

Why didn't someone ask Paul, we ask. How would he have responded to that? I think, just looking at the bulk of his theology and putting words in Paul's mouth, he would have said, well, if a person has genuinely come to faith in Christ, they're a Christian, they belong to the people of God, they're in the faith, but they're missing something, and they should be baptized in water as the sort of climax and the seal that comes upon that whole conversion experience.

I believe God does work in baptism. Some would then say, well, all right, baptism is a sacrament. Depends on what you mean by sacrament or sacramental. If by that we mean an event through which God promises when, again, carried out for people who love and believe in him, a ritual or an act by which God confers grace on us, yes, I'm happy to call baptism and the Lord's Supper a sacrament in that sense.

It's not just bare symbol. I'm not as wingling at this point. I'm more on Calvin's side on this point, because I think he develops in his theology the concept of these events as not simply symbolic or even mainly symbolic, but events in which God and Christ does meet with us and confer something on us.

And so the next excellent question that someone asks is, well, what is it that the unbaptized believer is missing that the baptized believer has? I don't know. Ask somebody else. I've taken us this far.

Let someone else do the rest of the work. But the fact is, in my view, it's awfully difficult to tease that out of the New Testament per se. Very difficult. I want to be very careful on this point. I don't want to say, oh, if you've got a believer who's not been baptized, they are really missing something substantial in their Christian life.

No, I don't think that's the case at all. Do I think that they are missing something that God does in his grace through baptism? Yes, I think I have to say that. What that is, I'm not sure again. But the closest I can come is to the sense of sealing, putting a seal upon this conversion experience as a point at which, in a sense, God stamps us with his approval, as it were, as an outward ritual that is something that can be great to point back to as well.

I think that's why Paul might use it sometimes also the way he does. A lot of us don't know quite when we came to faith. We know that we've crossed a line, but we don't know where to put that line in our timeline as humans in our history.

But if we've been baptized, we can point to that, can't we? I can say, yeah, in April 1972, I was baptized in Greencastle, Indiana, by so-and-so. And I can go back to that, not that that event has power in and of itself, but it reminds me of the capstone to my own conversion process.

And it is an event that kind of stands in that way as an event that we can come back to. One more issue, of course, with baptism is the way in which Paul here moves from circumcision to baptism. What is he saying about the rite of baptism in doing this?

We have been circumcised, he says, in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism. Doesn't this suggest that in Paul's view, baptism is the new covenant rite corresponding to the old covenant circumcision?

Baptism and the New Covenant

Perhaps, I'll come back to that. But let's first of all note that Paul does not draw any kind of direct connection between the two. In verse 11, he talks about our being circumcised. And again, it's obviously a metaphor at this point.

It is not literal circumcision, it is a metaphorical circumcision. More than that, the connection of verse 11 and verse 12 is not, you were circumcised, which now corresponds to baptism. Rather, you were circumcised and that experience of being a shed of this overwhelming power of the flesh happens when you were buried with Christ and raised with him through baptism.

You see, there is no direct connection of circumcision and baptism in our passage, even in a metaphorical sense. Nevertheless, maybe one could say, yes, still, all that being said, is there not something of a parallel between these two?

I'm not sure I want to deny that parallel entirely. But we need to draw the appropriate conclusions from it. If we mount the argument that would go something like this, as those who belong to God's old covenant were circumcised, so those who belong to God's new covenant should be baptized, I'm not entirely unhappy with that line of reasoning.

But I would want to take it to the next step and then ask the question, how do you join the new covenant? By an act of personal faith. Not by the faith of somebody else. Not because you were born into a certain family.

Not because you were raised in a certain church. So if one wants to push the analogy at this point of circumcision and baptism, in a sense, I'm happy to do that and say, yes, let's pound the pulpit, but everyone who belongs to the new covenant should be baptized as a sign of their admission to the covenant.

But how do you join the covenant? By an act of personal faith, which is at that point somewhat distinct from the broader national ethnic connotations of the old covenant. There's a difference in the covenants at this point that we need to recognize that has a lot to say about what we might call admission standards.

Some of you may want to pick this up further in our question and answer time. Some of you might not. The idea, again, of the with language that I've highlighted here in the print that you can't see is significant in this passage and again reminds us of the Roman VI language.

It's a very interesting example. We talk about the in Christ language that dominates the first part of this paragraph and in some sense continues and then Paul shifts to the with Christ language. And both, again, certainly talk in broad terms about the significance of our union with Christ and again the realization that our new life is based on what happened to Christ and our participation in it.

When he died, we died. When he was buried, we were buried. When he was raised, we were raised. And it's important to keep in our minds that the freedom I have as a believer not to sin arises from my connection with those events in the life of Christ.

It doesn't depend on whether I've read scripture that morning. It doesn't depend on whether I've gone through all the right motions. It doesn't depend on how I'm feeling. It doesn't depend on whether I've been to church that week.

All these things are, of course, important ways of reminding us of the significance of Christ in our lives. But we have to remember the foundation, the basis for the hope I have to please God, to lead a life worthy of him, to continue to live in him.

All this language Paul is using in Colossians rests in my objective identification with Christ in God's sight. That's the foundation. Now, having talked about this freedom from sin's power, verses 13 to 15 talk about the freedom from sin's penalty, if we can use that old way of putting the matter.

And, again, I think there is a bit of a break between 12. I keep trying to make sure I watch this and have my mouth up to the microphone here at the same time, so doing some gymnastics here to accomplish that.

But you can see that I think there is a bit of a break here between 11 to 12 and then here beginning in 13 when you were dead in your sins and so forth. Language, again, is very familiar from Ephesians chapter 2, of course.

And, again, the parallels between Ephesians and Colossians are obvious, as one of the brothers was pointing out yesterday in our question and answer session. And it's talking about forgiveness of sins again.

Remember that idea that was present also in Colossians 1 .14, where you have the kind of unusual identification of redemption in terms of the forgiveness of sins. I say unusual because Paul never anywhere else talks about the forgiveness of sins.

Interesting, isn't it? Kind of one of those Bible trivia things, you know. We make such a big deal about forgiveness of sins, and surely it's a great theme in Paul. But outside of these few passages, no references.

In fact, this is one of the reasons that critical scholars think Paul could never have written a book like Colossians. It's just got too much stuff in it that's not authentically Pauline, you see. Different from the real Paul of Romans and 1 Corinthians and Galatians and so forth.

I suspect, rather, that Paul here knows that the false teachers are making a promise of forgiveness through their particular religious orientation. I suspect, and again this is often the case when you have a biblical author, of course, using language or concepts in one book that don't appear somewhere else.

Why do they appear there? Well, not because you've got a different author necessarily, but much more often because you've got an occasional situation that's being addressed. That's usually the reason why you have distinctive vocabulary and distinctive ideas.

If you track my teaching, boy, it's going to change a lot depending on who I'm talking to and what their problems are and what their issues are and what their background is. Of course it is. Some of these biblical scholars, I think, pretend like all these New Testament writers were all people isolated on their separate islands out in the middle of an ocean somewhere and weren't part of real life at all.

A little common sense goes a long way here, but common sense is not in great store among some of us in the academy. At any rate, forgiveness of sins is something I suspect the false teachers were promising.

They were saying, you really want to get your sins taken care of? You want to be forgiven? Come down here to the temple of Mithras. Come down here and experience this mystery religion initiation, which might be alluded to, in fact, later here in Chapter 2.

We'll give you forgiveness. We'll make sure your sins are taken care of. I think that's probably why Paul brings it in here. No, again, Christological, Christocentric. Sins are taken care of definitively in Christ.

We who are dead in our trespasses and in the uncircumcision of our flesh. TNAV, sinful nature here again. I think probably on generally the right track, although I'm still not altogether comfortable with the language of sinful nature for flesh, but I'm not sure there's a good alternative.

I know some of you say flesh, but let's not go there. I heard that amen and I'm ignoring it. The idea here, again, is probably, I think, the fact that, okay, before we come to Christ, you know, our flesh dominates us.

It's in that sense not been stripped off yet, and so it's talking about our incapacity as human beings. But, of course, particularly when you think of the parallel in Ephesians here, Chapter 2, it's also entirely possible to think here that Paul is saying, you know, you Gentiles, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, not part of the people of God, were in a sense uncircumcised.

Because you were Gentiles, you were outside, but now Christ has come to bring Gentiles as well as Jews into the kingdom, and you have experienced a circumcision. Remember how Paul can use circumcision in that way in Philippians 3, kind of a polemical way.

We are the circumcision now, you see. We are the place where God is truly setting apart a people for his glory. At any rate, the main burden of the verse is clear enough. Out of that deadness, out of that state of spiritual condemnation and insensitivity, God has made us alive again with Christ, you see.

With him, when Christ was brought triumphantly to life, we in a sense were brought to life with him. And through our conversion, initiation, marked by baptism, we have been joined to those events in Christ's life, and we benefit from all the redemptive consequences.

So our sins have been forgiven. And then there's some beautiful metaphors here in 14 and 15. How did God forgive us? Well, background. He wiped out this IOU that stood against us. The charge of our legal indebtedness, which is a fancier phrase and then accurate enough here in the TNIV.

The kairographon is the Greek here. It's, again, a word that roughly, not exactly, we always have to be careful of these analogies, but roughly, and I think for our purposes, sufficiently, is like what we call an IOU.

It's as if we had all signed a document. Dear God, I owe you perfect obedience, signed Doug Moo. And there it is. Here's what I owe God. And that certificate of indebtedness, that IOU, stands against me because Satan can take it and say, uh-uh, got this one.

He has not fulfilled his obligation. That IOU is what our text says has been wiped away, nailed to the cross in the metaphor that Paul uses here. And all of this is tied up with the law also probably.

It's not absolutely clear. But when Paul talks here about the language of, and cancel the charge where he stood against us and condemned us, take away, nail us to the cross. Yeah, the charge or legal indebtedness, that phrase involves not only the IOU but also the idea of decrees present in the Greek text here, a word that Paul uses again in the parallel Ephesians 2 passage very explicitly with reference to the law of Moses.

And let me suggest, and I've just been influenced by a dissertation finished under my supervision just last month, fine dissertation I hope is going to be published, reminding us that in Paul there is also this idea that the law of Moses in some way represents and is similar to the original law of God back in the Garden of Eden.

And this gets into some very interesting theological territory. Some of you people who know Reformed theology will know some of the issues of the covenant of works with Adam in the garden and whether that's good biblical teaching or not and what that does to the structure of our theology and so on.

I don't want to get into all of that. I'm not even capable of doing so. But just to say that it does seem to me Scripture ultimately, while focusing so often on the law of Moses as the issue in the New Testament, sees the law of Moses as part of a bigger phenomenon, the law of God under which all human beings stand and that God's law stands then in that condemning function for all of us, all human beings.

And it's that law in a sense that gives the IOU its power. And so that is why it's so important for Christians no longer to be under the law, to have been set free from it, to have died to it, all this language that Paul uses in other situations.

Again, some interesting biblical and systematic theological implications that could arise out of this would be fun to talk about. But you see what Paul is at least doing in our passage. Full, complete, final forgiveness.

Because that IOU, containing perhaps the law itself, has been nailed to the cross. It no longer has the power to condemn those who belong to Christ. That which we could never have discharged in our own power has been taken and nailed to the cross by God himself.

Christ’s Victory over the Powers

And then verse 15. I mentioned Satan a moment ago, you might remember, and you might wonder why. Well, it's because of verse 15. You see, we come back to the powers again. Back up here, remember in verse 10?

Wasn't it verse 10? Here I go with my verses again. I'm never going to do this again. Yes, the great central part of the passage here, in Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form. In Christ you've been brought to fullness.

In him you were also circumcised. That's how we would expect the sequence to go. This statement about Christ being the head over every power and authority doesn't seem to fit all that well in the sequence of Paul's thought here.

But again, I think what we see is the reflection of the problem in Colossae. As Paul keeps adding these statements about the reality of Christ's victory over these spiritual beings. And he uses the picture, of course, as many of you will know, in verse 15 of the Roman triumphal entry, a very significant matter in Roman imperial history.

A successful general who had waged a campaign in some foreign province against some group of heathen Celts or Goths or something would have the privilege of celebrating a triumph when he returned to Rome.

He would enter the city in a chariot and people would applaud and he would be given honor. And behind him would march some of his soldiers who participated in the campaign. But especially significant, behind him would also march prisoners of war he had taken in the campaign.

He would lead them in triumph. This is where Paul takes the language here and in the 2 Corinthians 2 text, which uses the same language as well. It pictures Christ as the victorious one leading behind him the ones who have been imprisoned and defeated.

And that's the picture here of Christ and the powers in Christ and his victory on the cross. Note, not the resurrection but the cross, interestingly. God won his victory over these spiritual powers. They are defeated enemies, dejectedly walking behind Christ in his triumphal procession.

What an image this would have conveyed to first century people in the Roman Empire who, of course, living as far away as Colossae, would very unlikely have ever seen a triumph, but certainly have heard about them.

The relationship then of what God has done for us in forgiving us our sins and the spiritual powers is obviously hinted at in a passage like this. Most of us, I think, will be aware of the various theories of the atonement that have arisen over the years in the history of Christianity and there has been lively discussion about which of those images is the most important one, which is the central one, and so forth.

I don't intend to get into that debate here. Some of you also know the well-known book by Gustave Alain, Christus Victor, who argued that this imagery of God triumphing over the powers in Christ is the main imagery for atonement throughout Christian history.

He goes so far as to argue that was the main theory of atonement you find in Luther, which I frankly think is nonsense. I'm no Lutheran scholar, but that's a stretch. I do think he is also wrong about seeing this as the most fundamental image of the atonement in Scripture, but he's certainly right in drawing our attention to this as a theme, which as many of you know is very prominent in the early fathers, who make a lot of this theme, this idea of our being redeemed from the power of Satan and God winning a victory over the powers, Satan holding us in a sense in his power and something that goes on in the cross is God winning the victory over Satan so he releases us from Satan's power, all those themes.