teaching/sermons/col-1-15-20/expansion/03_through_for_in_him.md

03 — Through Him, In Him, For Him (Christ as Agent + Telos of Creation)

Col 1:16 — "For in him all things were created... all things have been created through him and for him."

The hymn lands four prepositions on Christ: in him (ἐν αὐτῷ), through him (δι' αὐτοῦ), for him (εἰς αὐτόν), and (1:17) before him. Tim's gloss, citing Scot McKnight: "He's above, he's before, he's through and in all things."

This isn't decoration. The grammar is doing theological work — and Paul borrowed it from himself.

What BP says

The grammar comes from 1 Cor 8:6 — Paul's "messianic Shema"

The single most important BP move on Col 1:16-17. Paul has already written this Christological grammar, more compactly, in 1 Cor 8:6:

"Yet for us, there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by/through whom are all things and we exist through him." — 1 Cor 8:6

Tim:

"He's basically stuck Jesus in the Shema. ... He's taken the line of the Shema, 'Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,' and he's taken the words Lord and God that refers to one and he's split them into two. ... God the Father and the Lord Jesus Messiah as the one God." — [podcast:firstborn-creation]

"Now we have two infinities. One is the Father, the other is Jesus Messiah. ... So the Father is from whom are all things and we exist for him. ... And one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things and we exist through him." — [podcast:theme-god-e18-who-did-paul-think-jesus-was]

1 Cor 8:6 keeps the prepositions distinct between Father and Son. Father = from whom / for him. Son = through whom / through him.

Col 1:16 collapses both sets onto Christ. Christ becomes both through whom AND for whom AND in whom AND before. This is a deliberate intensification.

"That phrase 'all things have been created through him and to himself' in... Corinthians, he says same kind of thing. For him and through him. ... But the 'for him' is referring to the Father, and 'through him' is Jesus. And here in Colossians, the 'through him' and 'for him' are both for Jesus." — [podcast:theme-god-e18-who-did-paul-think-jesus-was]

This is the upgrade move Col 1 makes. In 1 Cor 8 the Father is the telos; in Col 1 Christ is also the telos. Paul is pushing his own Christology further.

Three Hebrew Bible "shelves" Paul is drawing from

"This is a Jewish rabbi converted to Jesus believes that he is Yahweh become human. ... Do I have shelf space in my mind for God using a second self as the medium by means of which He brings creation into existence? ... We have a lot of shelf space for that idea. The word and the ruakh, wisdom also. ... Paul's drawing upon that shelf space here of the Father as the one from whom. Like he's the equivalent of 'in the beginning, God created.' How does God create in Genesis 1? By means of his word and the Spirit." — [podcast:theme-god-e18-who-did-paul-think-jesus-was]

Three Jewish "shelves" Paul is pulling from to put Jesus in the agent-of-creation slot:

  1. Word of Yahweh — Ps 33:6 "By the word of Yahweh the heavens were made."
  2. Wisdom of Yahweh — Prov 3:19 "Yahweh founded the earth by wisdom"; Prov 8:22-31 — Lady Wisdom as architect.
  3. Spirit/Ruakh — Gen 1:2 "The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

Paul collapses all three Jewish "shelves" into Christ. Through him (= Word, Wisdom, Spirit, all at once).

"He is the source and the goal"

Tim's compact summary, on multiple records:

"He is the source and the goal of all creation. He's the very radiance of God's glory. He is the exact character, the representation of the divine nature, all creation..." — [podcast:power-jesus-over-death]

"All things came into being through him; apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being." — [podcast:beginning-lady-wisdom] (paraphrasing John 1:3)

Source-and-goal language is Greek philosophical category (archē kai telos) — and BP names that Paul is taking it head-on.

The "in him" is the most spatially radical

Among the prepositions, en autōi (in him) is the strangest:

"And then he's got this line of all things hold together in him. That's a, wow, what a status." — [podcast:firstborn-creation]

In him = the cosmos exists inside Christ's personhood. Not Christ in the cosmos (panentheism). The cosmos in Christ. This is what Acts 17:28's quote of Epimenides ("In him we live and move and have our being") intuits, and what Paul makes explicit. Tim doesn't dwell on it explicitly, but the framing is implicit in the Athenagoras passage in [podcast:firstborn-creation].

Greek territory

The four-fold preposition pile-up is a deliberate rhetorical move. Each preposition makes a different claim, and together they exhaust the relations a creator can stand in to creation.

Hyperlinks BP names

Dictionary entries directly relevant

ANE / Colossian frame

The agent-of-creation move was not unique to Christianity. Paul's hearers would have known multiple variants:

Paul's move in 1 Cor 8:6 → Col 1:16 is to take this widely-recognized "second God / divine agent of creation" slot in Jewish thought and fill it with the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. Not "Jesus is like Wisdom." Jesus is the one Wisdom always was.

Refused binaries BP would name

What this opens for the message

The four prepositions are an unusual rhetorical structure. Worth treating as such — Paul is building the claim by accumulation:

A meditation can land on any one of these without trying to land on all five at once. The hymn itself doesn't try to explain the prepositions — it stacks them. The accumulation IS the meaning.

(Echo of your CLAUDE.md: Tim and Jon literally say to not try to explain the poem — "There's no way to truly explain this poem. You just sit with it." [podcast:theme-god-e18-who-did-paul-think-jesus-was])

Pointers for digging

Classroom additions (2026-05-06 expansion pass)

1 Corinthians (Lucy Peppiatt) Session 8 — direct treatment of 1 Cor 8:6

The newly-fetched Lucy Peppiatt 1 Corinthians classroom now contains direct exposition of 1 Cor 8:6 — the verse Tim names as the source-grammar Paul rewrites in Col 1:16.

"Now concerning the food sacrificed to idols. ... 'For us there is but one God, the Father from whom all things came and from and for whom we live and there is but one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.' He's setting the scene, drawing them back, I think, to the God that we worship. ... So if there is only one, that means there aren't other gods. You know, there aren't other lords, you can't kind of invest anyone with that power or that status." — [class:1-corinthians-lucy-peppiatt:8]

Note: Peppiatt focuses on the polemical-monotheism dimension (don't go to pagan feasts; there is only one Lord) more than on the BP-classic prepositional/Shema-split move. She does NOT explicitly walk through "from whom" / "through whom" as Paul's split of Shema-vocabulary into Father and Son. That observation remains Tim's distinctive contribution ([podcast:firstborn-creation], [podcast:theme-god-e18-who-did-paul-think-jesus-was]). But Peppiatt's session strengthens the basic point: 1 Cor 8:6 is Paul setting up the foundation of his Christology — the prepositional grammar of "one God / one Lord, all things from / all things through" — and then in Col 1:16 he intensifies it.

Useful complementary teaching tone. Tim approaches 1 Cor 8:6 from the Christology side; Peppiatt approaches it from the polemic-against-idolatry side. Both lenses are in Paul's verse simultaneously. If you preach Col 1:16 as polemic-against-cosmic-rivals (the Caesar-and-the-powers reading in 06_thrones_powers.md), Peppiatt's treatment is helpful tonally — the messianic Shema is already an act of public refusal of the idols on every street corner.

1 Corinthians (Lucy Peppiatt) Session 21 — eis auton ("for him") read pastorally

Peppiatt's gloss on Col 1:16's for him (citing theologian Ian McFarland) is the most useful pastoral framing of eis auton in any classroom session:

"And then [Paul] uses this extraordinary idea that everything was created through him and then for him. And I think here what he means by that is that everything was created for his glory. So the renewal of creation and the redemption of humanity is going to be the glory, that will be the glory of the Son. ... One of my favorite quotations is from a theologian called Ian McFarland who says, 'We are the means of Christ's glory as he is the source of ours.' ... So as he comes to save us and claim us as his own, the coming back to him is a manifestation of how God's glory is made known in the world." — [class:1-corinthians-lucy-peppiatt:21]

The for him / eis auton preposition is hard to land in English. McFarland's line through Peppiatt makes it vivid: for him doesn't mean creation is a passive offering. Creation is for him in the sense that the cosmos becomes the canvas where his glory is displayed AND the humans-in-Christ become participants in that displaying. Christ is both the goal and the source — the for-whom and the through-whom — and reconciled humanity is caught up between them.

Heaven-and-Earth Session 3 — Eph 1:10 as cosmic-Christology twin

[class:heaven-and-earth:3] (Heaven and Earth Come Together in Jesus) directly reads Eph 1:10's anakephalaioō ("to bring everything together under one head") as the Eph-equivalent of the Col 1:16-20 cosmic claim. Tim says Eph 1:10 is "the introduction of a melody in the letter that he's just going to recycle in about a dozen different ways in every chapter." For Col 1:16's grammar:

"This is purpose of history — that heaven and earth come together in a royal human." — Tim on Eph 1:10, [class:heaven-and-earth:3]

Tim explains anakephalaioō: "It's actually — in like really ancient Greek, it's a math term for reconciling a sum of numbers. So you have a whole bunch of numbers and you add them all together, and you ... unite the numbers into one sum." Math vocabulary repurposed for cosmic reunion.

Why this matters for the prepositions of Col 1:16-17. The four prepositions of Col 1 (in/through/for/before) are doing the same work Eph 1:10's anakephalaioō does: gathering "all things in heaven and on earth" into one summed unity, located in Christ. Paul has two vocabularies for the same claim — the prepositions of Col 1, the math-of-summation in Eph 1. If you preach the prepositions, you're preaching the same Christology Frank may land on later from the Eph 1 side. The series-internal harmony is real.

Classroom additions — Pass 2 (Voyage-enabled, 2026-05-06)

Ephesians Session 25 — "Paul's Messianic Shema" named explicitly (Eph 4:4-6)

Voyage surfaced a major find: [class:ephesians:25] (Unity Not Uniformity) is the most direct classroom statement Tim makes that "scholars call this Paul's Messianic Shema." Pass 1 worked the 1 Cor 8:6 split-Shema in [podcast:firstborn-creation] but didn't surface this Eph 4 parallel — which is even more compressed.

Tim's verbatim — naming the Eph 4:4-6 sevenfold "one" as Messianic Shema:

"'One body, one spirit, just as y'all were called by one hope of y'all's calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, and Father of everyone who is over all and through all, and in all.' Count 'em up? I mean, come on. ... He's a rabbi. You know, you can't get seven — you can't get seven outta your blood if you've been raised on the Hebrew Bible. ... So it's truly the perfect unity for anybody Jewish, messianic or not to talk about. We have one God, what key passage in the Hebrew scriptures are we echoing here? So Deuteronomy 6 'Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord our God — The Lord is our God. The Lord is one.' So what Paul's doing, and he does this in a number of places, scholars call this Paul's Messianic Shema — and surely he wasn't the only one who said things like this. So this is a messianic shema that becomes multiplied by seven." — [class:ephesians:25]

The class lands the prepositional structure directly:

"And then of course, he saves for the seventh one, one God and Father of all. Ah, and if he's through all and in all, what's that language? God in? When God takes up residence in? Yeah, we're back to temple." — [class:ephesians:25]

Why this matters for Col 1:16's prepositions. Tim is naming Eph 4:4-6 as a Messianic Shema with the same prepositional saturation Col 1:16-17 displays:

Eph 4:6 Col 1:16-17
over all (epi pantōn) before all things (pro pantōn)
through all (dia pantōn) through him (di' autou)
in all (en pasin) in him (en autō)

The same three prepositions — over/through/in — saturate both passages. Eph 4:6 makes them all about the Father ("one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all"), echoing the 1 Cor 8:6 split. Col 1:16-17 collapses all three onto Christ. The prepositional structure isn't decorative; it's the grammar of Pauline messianic-Shema reflection.

This now gives you THREE Pauline passages where the prepositional saturation is doing Christological work — 1 Cor 8:6 (Father / Son split), Eph 4:6 (Father over/through/in), Col 1:16-17 (Christ in/through/for/before). The series-internal coherence with anything Frank lands on Eph 4:6 (Week 5+ "rooted and built up") is real.

Pulpit move this enables. If you preach the four prepositions of Col 1:16-17, you're standing in a Pauline grammatical practice that runs from 1 Cor 8 → Eph 4 → Col 1. Paul trains his churches to think with prepositions. The prepositions are how a rabbi-converted-to-Jesus does Trinitarian compression.

Ephesians Session 7 — Trinitarian agency in Eph 1:3-14 hymn

[class:ephesians:7] adds a less-cited but theologically rich move: Tim reads Eph 1:3-14 as a three-movement poem with distinct divine-agency at each movement:

"It's the Father acting in the first one, it's the beloved Son, is the main agent of the second one, and it's the Spirit who's the main agent in the third one." — [class:ephesians:7]

For Col 1:16's prepositions. The Eph 1 hymn has the same Trinitarian-agent distribution Tim names for 1 Cor 8:6's split Shema. Father chose us → Son redeemed us → Spirit sealed us. The prepositional grammar of Col 1:16 collapses all three agencies onto Christ — the Father's eis hou, the Son's di' hou, the Spirit's en hō — and gives them all back to the Son. Paul has intensified his own Trinitarian-prepositional theology between 1 Cor 8 / Eph 1 → Col 1. The hymn's prepositions are doing the most concentrated Christological work in the corpus.

Heaven-and-Earth Session 12 — Trinity at Genesis 1

[class:heaven-and-earth:12] reads Genesis 1 itself as already operating in the Father/Son/Spirit register Paul deploys in his prepositions:

"It's a very, very powerful image of all of these together. You have you have God, Elohim in verse one, creating. He's the orderer. You have Ruakh Elohim — who's the the personal presence of Elohim..." — [class:heaven-and-earth:12]

Why this matters for Col 1:16. Paul's Christological re-reading of Genesis 1 (the move Tim names in [podcast:firstborn-creation]) is already supported by Genesis 1's own grammatical pluralism — Elohim creating, Ruakh Elohim hovering, divine speech (Word) ordering. Paul reads the Trinity out of Genesis 1 because Genesis 1's grammar already gives it. The four prepositions of Col 1:16-17 are Paul's recognition that what creates as Trinity in Genesis 1 acts as Trinity in incarnation, with the Son named as the locus of all three relations.