Dying and rising with Christ in Colossians.

Colossians was written to a congreaation threatened by a jewish
mystical teaching which offered a proleptic experience of salvation in the
form of visionary journeys to heaven. To counter this false teaching the
writer reminds the readers of the blessinas they already possess, centrina
his araument around their participation with Christ in his death and
resurrection. Christ himself is identified as God's end-time aaent of
reconciliation and new creation, who, throuah his death and resurrection,
restores the cosmos to the state of harmony God intended from the
beainnina (1:ll-20). To accompllsh this tast Christ identified himself with
humanity's fallen state and made himself responsible for their sins. By
dying their death he secured acquittal before the divine tribunal and victory
over the hostile spirits (2:13-15). In his triumphal passage from death to
new life he inaugurated the new age and became the founder of the new
redeemed human race as a second Adam (1:18). In these eventl Christ acted
in a representative capacity so that his experience of deliverance might be
both the basis and the prototype of the salvation or believers. In
conversion-baptism ChrIstians become participants in ChrIst's death and
resurrection as God includes them in his saving acts towards Christ by
pronouncing on them the same verdict of acquittal and exercising anew the
same life-giving power towards them as when he raised Christ from the
dead. Thus they are made to pass with Christ out of the old fallen existence
in which they were subject to the hostile spirits and the reliaious rules and
reaulations (stoicheia) of this world, and they enter the heavenly life of the
new creation. Although Christians have been raised with Christ (as Paul also
atrirms in Rom 6), they possess this new life only in preliminary form and in
hiddenness (3:3). They must yet strive to actualize this salvation by putting
to death what remains within of the old existence (3:5-11) and cultivating
Christlike virtues as they await the parousia, when they will enter upon this
resurrection life in its fullness (3:4).