He Disarmed the Rulers and Authorities

Watch out that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by the removal of the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.
(Colossians 2:8-15, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition

Looking at different translations of Scripture can help us understand its messages more clearly. 

What does it mean, for example, when Paul tells the Colossians that Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them,” as the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version reports?

The translators of the King James Version decided that “having spoiled principalities and powers, [Christ] made a shew of them openly.” Spoil seems to describe a much different action than disarm. If we read it in the sense of despoil, however, as other translations address the Greek ἀπεκδυσάμενος, it means to strip someone of their possessions or power, which fits that sense of disarmament.

What about the “public example,” though? The NIV lays things on a bit more thickly, calling it a “public spectacle.” The Common English Bible gets more specific: “He exposed them to public disgrace by leading them in a triumphal parade.” David Bentley Hart, who translated the New Testament on his own a few years ago, also draws on this imagery. “He exposed them in the open,” Hart puts it, “leading them prisoner in a triumphal procession.”

Eugene Peterson’s The Message takes a more freeform approach: “[Christ] stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.” Though Peterson wanders from the literal translation, he’s effectively drawn out much of its implicit imagery. Paul was, indeed, reminding the Colossians of Jesus’s spiritual conquest over the world’s secular powers. And Paul’s Greek vocabulary would, for its contemporary audience, evoke images of Roman military leaders dragging conquered foes and their possessions through the streets to be humiliated before the emperor and the assembled crowd. As Paul saw it, Jesus didn’t just offer some new ideas, he rendered all other philosophies of life powerless.

That brings us to the “philosophy” of Colossians 2:8.

George Fox’s spiritual awakening did not come about from any persuasive rhetoric by ministers or theologians. Quite the opposite. Fox’s encounters with the religious experts and authorities of his day convinced him, as he wrote in his journal, “to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not sufficient to fit a man to be a minister of Christ.” Fox needed a direct encounter with the Divine, he recalled, “that I might give [God] all the glory [and] Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence who enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power.”

“And this I knew experimentally,” he concludes—by personal experience, not secondhand arguments. In this, Fox resembles Paul, to whom Christ appeared on the road to Damascus. And just as Paul emphasized the “spiritual circumsision” that liberated the believer in Christ from certain modes of ritualistic behavior, Fox insisted upon a back-to-basics approach.

He elaborated on his beliefs in Some Principles of the Elect People of God Who in Scorn Are Called Quakers, published in 1661. He acknowledged, for example, that “teachers, prophets, shepherds, elders and bishops” would exist in any Christian community. But he made it clear that “they must not teach for filthy lucre, nor be covetous, nor strive about words, nor use Fables, nor Philosophy, nor the world’s Rudiments, nor Traditions, nor Doctrines of men, nor their Ordinances.”

As Paul says, we must beware the “empty deceit” of form without substance.

Fox, like other early Quakers, held a particular concern for people who “have the Scriptures of Christ, the Apostles, and Prophets,” but “are not in the Power and Spirit which gave them forth.” Such people, he warned, may seem faithful, but “cannot Worship God in Spirit[,] cannot Pray in Spirit, nor Sing in the Spirit, but quench it, and grieve it, and vex it.”

Some Friends today do not share the intense connection that generations of Quakers before them felt with Christ specifically. They no longer see the blessed community, as the 20th-century Friend Thomas Kelly called it, as an essentially Christian one. Should we find that troubling? I confess it falls low on my list of concerns.

I do think, though, that Friends do well to preserve some emphasis on the spiritual drive that brought the Religious Society forward. We don’t abstain from violence, or give comfort to the poor and oppressed, because such activities make good sense in the realm of human relations. They do, but we believe in something in this world that matters more than the efficiency of secular interpersonal transactions. Something powerful enough to “erase the record that stood against us” when we embrace it with our full hearts, redeeming our failures to love one another as we commit ourselves to making the blessed community manifest.