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If the church is going to speak to people weary of religion, it will not be by offering better techniques or louder certainty, but by daring to say what Paul so plainly said: Christ is enough.
I recently taught a Bible study on Paul’s letter to the Colossians, and I wasn’t prepared for how much it would move me. I’ve preached on Colossians before—individual verses, favorite sections, the “Christ hymn” in chapter one—but I had never taught the letter as a whole. Somewhere along the way, I had managed to overlook one of the most thoroughly Lutheran books in the New Testament.
At one point in the class, I joked that I must be the world’s worst Lutheran pastor to have neglected Colossians for nearly 25 years of ministry. But the joke landed closer to confession than humor. Because as the weeks went on, it became clear that Colossians does not merely support Lutheran theology; it proclaims it. It does so pastorally, personally, and with surprising force.
What surprised me most was not how clearly Paul speaks about Christ, but how directly he confronts the pressure to be religious. The problem in Colossae is neither atheism nor immorality. It is a spirituality that promises fullness but never delivers it. The believers are being told that Christ is important, but insufficient; that faith is good, but incomplete; that maturity requires additional practices, deeper insight, or stricter discipline. Paul refuses the entire premise. Instead of asking what is missing, he announces that nothing is.
The problem in Colossae is neither atheism nor immorality. It is a spirituality that promises fullness but never delivers it.
Colossians insist that “in Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,” and that believers “have been filled in him” (Col. 2:9–10). That is not aspirational language. It is declarative. And it cuts against nearly every religious instinct we have. We tend to prefer progress to promise, movement to gift, technique to trust. Paul names this impulse for what it is: captivity.
As we worked through the letter, the class encountered Lutheran theological categories many had never heard named so clearly in Scripture: law and gospel, Christus Victor, the two kinds of righteousness, the theology of the cross, vocation, and the hiddenness of God. What surprised me was not only how naturally these categories arose from the text, but how deeply people were moved by them because they told the truth about their lives.
This discovery was even more compelling because of how directly they emerged from Paul’s own language in the letter itself.
The triumph of Christ over sin, death, and the powers is not implied but declared when Paul announces that God has forgiven our trespasses, canceled the record of debt, and “disarmed the rulers and authorities” at the cross (Col. 2:13–15). The passivity of faith before God is everywhere assumed, especially in the claim that believers have already been “filled in him” (2:9–10) and that their life is now “hidden with Christ in God” (3:3). Baptism provides the grammar for Christian existence itself: buried and raised with Christ (2:11–12), having died and been made alive again (3:1–3), continually stripping off the old self and being clothed with the new (3:9–10). Only after this gift is fully announced does Paul turn outward to the shape of ordinary life, locating active righteousness not in spiritual striving but in households, work, and daily responsibilities lived under Christ’s lordship (3:17–4:1). In Colossians, theology is never abstract, but instead announced, received, and then quietly lived.
Heard this way, the distinction between what Christ has already done and how life is then lived showed itself less in dramatic moments than in quiet comments along the way. One person remarked that this way of hearing Colossians gave him language he could finally use with friends who are wary of religion. Another, who has struggled for years with assurance, admitted that he felt noticeably less anxious before God than he had in a long time. Both were lifelong Lutherans, well into their seventies. A few days after one session, an email arrived simply saying how unexpectedly comforting this letter had been to her. What struck me was not that people were learning something new, but that familiar words were finally allowed to do what they had always promised to do: give rest.
Colossians also gives words to something many people sense but rarely hear named directly: the security of having your “life hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). Not visible. Not impressive. Hidden. In a culture obsessed with self-definition, success, and spiritual performance, this word landed like relief. The Christian life, Paul suggests, is not something to prove. It is something to receive, again and again.
What struck me most was how little Paul seems interested in making Christianity attractive. He offers no techniques, no programs, no guarantees of visible success. He speaks instead of death and resurrection, of baptism and forgiveness, of ordinary work done “as for the Lord,” of prayer that persists without control, of a community held together by grace. And then Colossians ends with names. The names of real people, of reconciled relationships, and finally, of grace.
The Christian life, Paul suggests, is not something to prove. It is something to receive, again and again.
Perhaps that is why this letter feels so timely for a generation that increasingly identifies as religious “nones.” Many are not rejecting God as they are stepping away from a form of religion that seems to demand more than it ever gives. Colossians shares their suspicion. It, too, is wary of spiritual systems that promise transformation but quietly place the burden back on us. The letter’s solution is not more religion, but more Christ. It refuses the spiritual hustle. It insists that if Christ is who Paul says he is, then nothing needs to be added. And if nothing needs to be added, then perhaps faith can finally be honest.
Colossians surprised me. And in doing so, it reminded me why Lutheran theology matters as a way of telling the truth about God and about us. If the church is going to speak to people weary of religion, it will not be by offering better techniques or louder certainty, but by daring to say what Paul so plainly said: Christ is enough. And that might be the most radical thing of all.
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