Fulness
Fulness
The word to be considered is pleroma (). Nouns of the termination properly denote the result of the action signified by the cognate verb; and therefore (from = to fill, or, metaphorically, to fulfil) primarily means that which possesses its full content, an entire set or series, a completed whole regarded in its relation to its component parts, or in contrast with a previous deficiency of any of these parts. The full crew of a ship or strength of a regiment is a pleroma; the soul becomes a pleroma of virtues by means of those three excellent things, nature, learning, and practice (Philo, de Prmiis et Pnis, 11).
This is the sense in Gal 4:4 : when the fulness of the time came, i.e. when the entire measure of the appointed period had been filled up by the lapse of successive ages. So the fulness of the Jews (Rom 11:12) and of the Gentiles (Rom 11:25) is the full complement, the entire number contemplated (however determined-by predestination or otherwise). Lightfoot in his classical discussion of the word (see Literature) denies any other than this passive sense; but his argument is far from convincing. When we think of a pitcherful of water, we may regard the water as a completed entity, which by successive additions has reached its full quantity and become a pleroma of water; but much more naturally we think of it as that which fills the pitcher, and is pleroma. This active sense must be accented in Mat 9:16, Mar 2:21, where can only mean the patch that fills the hole in the worn-out garment; in Mar 8:20, where inevitably means basketfuls; in 1Co 10:26, where the earth and the pleroma thereof cannot be made to signify anything else than the earth and all that it contains, the abundance that fills it. So also in Rom 13:10, love is the pleroma of the law, the context (he that loveth his neighbour has fulfilled the law) shows that pleroma is not to be taken passively, as the law in its completeness; but actively, as that which fills up the whole measure of the laws demands.
The use of the word as a theological term is confined in the NT to those closely related writings, Colossians, Ephesians, and the Fourth Gospel. In Col 1:19 it is predicated of Christ that it pleased the Father that in him the whole pleroma should dwell, and in Col 2:9, with greater precision of statement, in him dwelleth the whole pleroma of the Godhead in a bodily fashion (cf. Joh 1:14). Here the meaning of the word is beyond dispute. All that God is is in Christ; the organic whole of Divine attributes and powers that constitute Deity () dwells permanently in Him.
The term with such an application is a startling novelty in NT phraseology, and is an instructive example of the hospitality of early Christian thought, of the promptitude with which it appropriated from its complex intellectual and religious environment such categories as it could convert to its own use. Since the connotation of the word is assumed to be familiar to the Apostles readers, it is evident that it must have played an important part in the speculations of the Colossian heresy, as it did also in the Hermetic theology (R. Reitzenstein, Poimandres, 1904, p. 26). In the developed Gnostic systems of the 2nd cent., and especially in the scheme of Valentinus, the conception of the Pleroma became increasingly prominent, as signifying the totality of the Divine emanations. But for a full account of the Gnostic usage, the reader is referred to Lightfoots exhaustive note (see Literature) or, in briefer compass, to the articles Pleroma in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) and Fulness in Dict. of Christ and the Gospels .
The problem with which religious thought was wrestling, as for centuries it had done and was still to do, was how to relate the transcendent God to the existent universe, to effect a transition from eternal spirit to the material or phenomenal, from the absolutely good to the imperfect and evil. And in Colossae the solution was sought not in a Gnostic series of emanations, but, on the lines of Judaistic speculation, in a hierarchy of principalities, dominions, and powers, the who ruled the physical elements and the lower world, among whom the Divine Pleroma was, as it were, distributed, and to whose generally hostile rule men were continually subject. Against this doctrine, without denying the existence and activity of such beings, St. Paul lifts up his magnificent truth of the Cosmic Christ and his vision of a Christianized universe. Christ is not one of a series of mediators; in Him the whole Pleroma dwells. He is not only Head of the Church, but Head over all things, delivering His people from bondage to the hostile elements, and translating them into His own Kingdom, that new cosmic order in which God will finally reconcile all things unto Himself.
In Ephesians the emphasis is not so much upon Christs possession of the Divine Pleroma as upon His communication of it to the Church. The Church is His Body, the pleroma of him that filleth all in all (Eph 1:23; for exegetical details, see Armitage Robinson in loc.). Whether be understood in an active sense (the Church is Christs complement, that by which He is completed as the head is by the body) or in a passive sense (the Church is Christs fulness, because His fulness is imparted to it and dwells in it), the result is practically the same-the one sense implies the other. The Church is the living receptacle and instrument of all that is in Christ, all grace and truth, all purpose and power. But the ideal character thus claimed for the Church is yet to be achieved in the sphere of human aspiration and effort. Its rich diversity of gifts and ministries is bestowed for this very end, that we all may be brought to that unity and many-sided completeness of spiritual life in which we shall collectively form a perfect man, attaining thus to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ (Eph 4:13). And, as in the Apostles thought the fulness of the Godhead descends through the One Mediator to the Church, so again it ascends through Him to the first creative source. The end of all prayer and of all attainment is that we may be filled unto all the fulness of God (Eph 3:19). The Church, redeemed humanity in its vital spiritual unity, grown at last to a perfect man, to the fulness of Christ, which is the fulness of God; God thus possessing in man the fulfilment of His eternal purpose, His perfect image, the consummate organ of His Spirit-even this is possible to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think (Eph 3:20).
Literature.-articles Pleroma in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) , Fulness in Dict. of Christ and the Gospels ; C. F. A. Fritzsche, Pauli ad Romanos Epistola, 1836-43, ii. 469ff.; J. B. Lightfoot, Colossians3, 1879, p. 257f.; J. Armitage Robinson, Ephesians, 1903, p. 255ff.; H. A. W. Meyer, Commentary on the NT, Philippians and Colossians, 1875, Ephesians and Philemon, 1880; Erich Haupt.; Die Gefangenschaftsbriefe7 in Meyers Kommentar zum NT, 1902; D. Somerville, St. Pauls Conception of Christ, 1897, p. 156ff.; J. Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 1908, p. 29ff.; M. Dibelins, Die Geisterwelt im Glauben des Paulus, 1909; W. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, p. 267.
Robert Law.
Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church
Fulness
a term variously used in Scripture.
1. “The fullness of time” is the time when the Messiah appeared, which was appointed by God, promised to the fathers, foretold by the prophets, expected by the Jews themselves, and earnestly longed for by all the faithful: “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent his Son,” Gal 4:4.
2. The fullness of Christ is the superabundance of grace with which he was filled: “Of his fullness have all we received,” Joh 1:16. And whereas men are said to be filled with the Holy Ghost, as John the Baptist, Luk 1:15; and Stephen, Act 6:5; this differs from the fullness of Christ in these three respects:
(a.) Grace in others is by participation, as the moon hath her light from the sun, rivers their waters from the fountain; but in Christ all that perfection and influence which we include in that term is originally, naturally, and of himself.
(b.) The Spirit is in Christ infinitely and above measure, Joh 3:34; but in the saints by measure according to the gift of, God, Eph 4:16.
(c.) The saints cannot communicate their graces to others, whereas the gifts of the Spirit are in Christ as a head and fountain, to impart them to his members. “We have received of his fullness,” Joh 1:16.
3. It is said that “the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily,” Col 2:9; that is, the whole nature and attributes of God are in Christ, and that really, essentially, or substantially; and also personally, by nearest union; as the soul dwells in the body, so that the same person who is man is God also.
4. The Church is called the fullness of Christ, Eph 1:23. It is the Church which makes him a complete and perfect head; for, though he has a natural and personal fullness as God, yet as Mediator he is not full and complete without his mystical body (as a king is not complete without- his subjects), but receives an outward, relative, and mystical fullness from his members (Watson, Dictiomary, s.v.).
5. It is probable that the expression fulness of the Godhead, as applied to Christ (Col 1:19; Col 2:9), contains aen allusion to the theories of some speculators, who taught that there were “certain distinct beings” (sons as they called them), “who were successive emanations from the Supreme Being himself,” to whom they gave the title of “the Fulness.” They pretended that one of these had assumed human nature in Jesus Christ. It was probably in designed contradiction to this that the apostle asserts the indwelling in Jesus “of all the fullness of the Godhead” (Eden).
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Fulness
(1.) Of time (Gal. 4:4), the time appointed by God, and foretold by the prophets, when Messiah should appear. (2.) Of Christ (John 1:16), the superabundance of grace with which he was filled. (3.) Of the Godhead bodily dwelling in Christ (Col. 2:9), i.e., the whole nature and attributes of God are in Christ. (4.) Eph. 1:23, the church as the fulness of Christ, i.e., the church makes Christ a complete and perfect head.
Fuente: Easton’s Bible Dictionary
Fulness
FULNESS ().The Gr. word is used in the Gospels in its natural, physical sense in Mat 9:16, Mar 2:21; Mar 6:43; Mar 8:20. It has a definite theological meaning in Joh 1:16 [the only place in the Gospels where it is translation fulness]. In the Epistles it is used: of time, to denote the period that fills up a certain epoch (Eph 1:10, Gal 4:4; see Fulness of Time); of persons, the full number required to make up a definite figure (Rom 11:12; Rom 11:25); of measure, to indicate the full capacity, the entire content (1Co 10:26; 1Co 10:28, Rom 15:29), also this may be said to be its meaning in Rom 13:10 where love is spoken of as the . The word has also a definite theological meaning in Col 1:19; Col 2:9, Eph 1:23; Eph 3:19; Eph 4:13. The central conception of the word, wherever used, seems to be completeness, the totality of the things spoken of, that which binds them into a symmetrical whole. Even when it is the latest addition that is indicated as the , the word refers back to the beginning, and signifies the completeness effected by the addition. Thus in the passages in St. Matthew and St. Mark which refer to the sewing of the new patch on the old garment, it is not the patch that is the , it is the completeness that results from the patch; and, as Lightfoot correctly points out, the idea meant to be conveyed is the paradox that it is this very completeness which makes the garment incomplete. A false show of wholeness is worse than an open rent,an idea entirely in accordance with the method of the teaching of Jesus.
The theological meaning of in St. Johns Gospel must be taken in connexion with its use in St. Pauls Epistles. Granted the authenticity of the Epistles and the Gospel, St. John must have written more than a quarter of a century later, and must have addressed practically the same circle as that which St. Paul had in view in writing to the Colossians and the Ephesians. It is clear that St. Paul is dealing with the word in a technical sense as a word which is familiar to his opponents, but is used by him in a sense different from theirs; and St. Johns use of the term is exactly similar. The represented a leading thought in the Gnostic heresy, of which we find the first germs referred to in the vigorons polemic of St. Paul. Gnosticism was further developed by Cerinthus, a contemporary of St. John, and reached its culmination in the fully elaborated system of Valentinus. The problem with which these Gnostic heresiarchs were continually wrestling was one that is as old as human thoughthow to pass from the infinite to the finite, and reconcile absolute good with the existence of evil. The details of the earlier systems with which the Apostles had to deal are unknown to us, but in the speculations of Valentinus, as preserved in the writings of the early Fathers, especially the Philosophoumena of Hippolytus, we have a system in which philosophical conceptions are clothed in Oriental imagery, and an attempt is made to give a consistent explanation of the mysteries of Creation, Sin, and Redemption.
From the Absolute Being or the Abysmal Depth, there issued twin emanations, having each a relative being in itself, but each pair, as they receded from the primal source of existence, had fainter traces of the pure Divine spirit. These emanations are personifications of the Divine attributes, and in their totality constitute the realm of pure spiritthe of the Godhead. Opposed to the is the , the emptiness, the realm of matter and material things, the shadow-world as against the world of reality. It is the philosophical distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the realm of archetypal ideas and the objects of sense perception, with a moral significance imparted into it. In the , the thirty aeons of the have their material counterpart, presided over by the Demiurge or Creator, who has no organic relation to the spiritual realm. This world of chaos and ancient night receives from the a spiritual principle, reducing it to a semblance of order, in the person of Sophia Achamoth, an emanation from the Sophia of the spiritual realm. The higher Sophia, the latest of the aeons, and the furthest removed from the Absolute, had been consumed with a desire to reach upwards to the Primal Glory, and to emulate the Uncreated by giving birth to another aeon. The result was an abortion,a being spiritual in essence but out of harmony with the ,which was cast forth from the spiritual realm and found a place of exile in the . Here Sophia Achamoth imparted of her essence to the aeons of the void, and thus introduced a spiritual principle which was capable of redemption. To those who had in them this spiritual essence Christ was sent, each of the aeons contributing something of its own perfection to fit Him for His errand. The aeon Christ entered into the man Jesus, and through Him effected the redemption of those spiritual beings who were involved in the lower realm of matter, but who had received quickening through the infusion of the spiritual principle into the .
What degree of elaboration this fantastic theory had reached in the age of St. Paul, and still later in that of St. John, there is not now material to decide; but there are distinct traces of it in the Epistle to the Colossians in the reference to principalities, dominions, and powers (Col 1:16); and we know that Cerinthus, a contemporary of St. John, thought out the religious problem on very similar lines, and used the word pleroma in a similar sense. We are to regard the use of the term, then, by the two Apostles as an assertion of the true doctrine of the pleroma as against a false doctrine which had wide currency. In the Logos, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, the whole pleroma of the Godhead is contained. Jesus was not the last of the aeons, created as an afterthought. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all created beings (Col 1:15). The long chain of mediators between God and man is relegated to the realm of myth, and the one Mediator, , full of grace and truth (Joh 1:14), through whom alone God effects His purposes in Creation and Redemption, is held up for the adoration of all men. And this fulness of the Divine, which is in Him through the closeness of His contact with God, is imparted to His disciples (Joh 1:16) and to the Church which is His Body, and which in its ideality is the fulness of Him who filleth all in all (Eph 1:23). The Church is here regarded as the complement of Jesus. The Head and the Body make one wholethe pleroma of the Godhead, the full realization of the Divine purpose which centres in the redemption of man. For through this Church, which on earth possesses the potentiality of the pleroma, by means of its varied ministries, the fulness which is in Christ the Head passes to the individual, whose destiny it is to attain to the perfect man, to the possession, in his degree, of the entire pleroma of the Godhead.
It is scarcely sufficiently recognized that the NT doctrine of the Church is a philosophy of the Social Organism which embraces all essential human activities (Eph 4:15-16). Our difficulty in apprehending it lies mainly in this, that the Apostles, seeing the temporal in the light of eternity, are constantly confusing the boundary lines which separate the actual from the ideal, the process from the consummation.
Literature.Lightfoot on Colossians; Pressens, Heresy and Christian Doctrine; Neander, Church History; Hippolytus, Philosophoumena; see also Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , art. Pleroma, with Literature there quoted.
A. Miller.
Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels
Fulness
FULNESS.See Pleroma.
Fuente: Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible
Fulness
FULL, FULNESS
These expressions, when spoken in Scripture with an eye to the Lord Jesus Christ, imply more than language can convey, or the imagination conceive. Jesus Christ, as the glorious Head of his body the church, is the fulness that filleth all in all. So the apostle speaks, Eph 1:23. And in the same Epistle he saith, speaking of Christ, “that he ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.” (Eph 4:10) But when we have read those expressions, and pondered them to the utmost, What adequate conception have we of their meaning? So again, when it is said, that “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the GODHEAD bodily:” (Col 2:9) who shall undertake to say what that is? Not JEHOVAH dwelling in the God-man Christ Jesus, by filling that nature with grace and glory, as the Lord Jesus by his holy Spirit dwells in the saints, and fills their hearts, and unites himself to them, and they to him, by grace here, and glory above. Not thus; but the GODHEAD dwells in Christ Jesus, and fills that nature of Christ Jesus in a personal bodily union; as fire fills the iron substantially that is in it, so that it becomes itself fire from that union. Who shall go farther, and determine what this is?
And what endears all these precious views of our Lord in his fulness is, the interest his redeemed have in it. The apostle adds to this account of the GODHEAD in his fulness dwelling in Christ bodily, “and ye are complete in him.” Here is the blessedness of the whole, as it concerns our happiness, and security, and glory in him. Hence the church is called “the glory of Christ.” (2Co 8:23) And so the church is; for it is, indeed, Christ’s glory, to give out of his fulness to his body the church, as the glorious Head of the church. And although his own personal glory is in himself, and to himself, in the GODHEAD, of his nature and essence, being”one with the Father, over all, God blessed for ever;”yet in his mediatorial glory, as the Head of his body the church, “of his fulness do all the members receive, and grace for grace.” And it is the glory of the Lord Jesus to give out, and to make that body glorious like himself, and from himself, to be his glory for ever. Oh! the blessedness of thus beholding the fulness of the Lord Jesus. Oh! what encouragement to the faith of the Lord’s poor, needy, empty people. In Jesus’s fulness we are full; in Jesus’s glory we are glorified; yea, it is Jesus’s glory to receive me, to give out to me, and to be more glorious in thus receiving and giving. Hallelujah!
Fuente: The Poor Mans Concordance and Dictionary to the Sacred Scriptures
Fulness
The fulness of time is the time when the Messiah appeared, which was appointed by God, promised to the fathers, foretold by the prophets, expected by the Jews themselves, and earnestly longed for by all the faithful: When the fulness of the time was come, God sent his Son,
Gal 4:4. The fulness of Christ is the superabundance of grace with which he was filled: Of his fulness have all we received, Joh 1:16. And whereas men are said to be filled with the Holy Ghost, as John the Baptist, Luk 1:15; and Stephen, Act 6:5; this differs from the fulness of Christ in these three respects:
(1.) Grace in others is by participation, as the moon hath her light from the sun, rivers their waters from the fountain: but in Christ all that perfection and influence which we include in that term is originally, naturally, and of himself.
(2.) The Spirit is in Christ infinitely and above measure, Joh 3:34; but in the saints by measure according to the gift of God, Eph 4:16. The saints cannot communicate their graces to others, whereas the gifts of the Spirit are in Christ as a head and fountain, to impart them to his members. We have received of his fulness, Joh 1:16. It is said, that the fulness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily, Col 2:2; that is, the whole nature and attributes of God are in Christ, and that really, essentially, or substantially; and also personally, by nearest union; as the soul dwells in the body, so that the same person who is man is God also. The church is called the fulness of Christ, Eph 1:23. It is the church which makes him a complete and perfect head; for though he has a natural and personal fulness as God, yet, as Mediator, he is not full and complete, without his mystical body, (as a king is not complete without his subjects,) but receives an outward, relative, and mystical fulness from his members.