Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Colossians 2:8

"Take heed lest there shall be any one that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ:" — Colossians 2:8 (ASV)

Paul first warns against the danger of being taken captive through a false philosophy. The singular “no one” suggests that Paul may have had a particular person in mind, perhaps the leader of the heretical teachers. The words translated “that no one takes you captive” point to a real, not a supposed, danger. “Takes captive” (GK 5194), a word regularly used of taking captives in war and leading them away as booty, depicts the false teachers as “people-stealers,” wishing to entrap the Colossians and drag them away into spiritual enslavement.

“Through hollow and deceptive philosophy” expresses the means whereby the errorists were attempting to do this. This is the only occurrence of the word “philosophy” in the NT. It would be a mistake to conclude that Paul intended his statement to be a condemnation of all philosophy. Here, because of the reference to the Colossian error, it has a derogatory connotation.

Paul uses three descriptive phrases to characterize this “hollow and deceptive” system; each constitutes a reason for its rejection.

(1) It was according to “human tradition.” By “tradition” (GK 4142) Paul likely means the various pagan theories current in that day. He asserts that these, not divine revelation, were the bases of the “philosophy” of the Colossian errorists.

(2) It was a philosophy that depends on “the basic principles of this world.” “Basic principles” (GK 5122) has a variety of meanings. Originally it denoted the letters of the alphabet, its root meaning being “things in a row.” The term then came to be used of the elements (“ABC’s”) of learning (cf. Galatians 4:3; Hebrews 5:12), of the physical elements of the world (cf. 2 Peter 3:10), and of the elemental spirits or supernatural powers believed by many ancients to preside over and direct the heavenly bodies (cf. Galatians 4:3). The sense in the present passage may be either the elements of learning or the elemental spirits. If the former sense is intended, the statement means that the Colossian system was really only rudimentary instruction, the ABC’s of the world—i.e., it was elementary rather than advanced. The rendering “elemental spirits” is, however, to be preferred. This philosophy probably had the elemental spirits of the universe as its subject matter. We know from 2:18, for example, that the Colossian heresy made much of the “worship of angels.”

(3) It was a system not according to Christ. This is Paul’s most telling criticism of the teaching at Colosse. The philosophy of the heretics did not accord with the truth as revealed in Christ. He is the standard by which all doctrine is to be measured, and any system, whatever its claims, must be rejected if it fails to conform to the revelation God has given us in him.