Notes

1. . Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus (in part), Clement of Alexandria (in part); before them Flavius Josephus, Wisd. of Sol. 7:17, 13:1, 19:18, 4 Macc. 12:13, and Plato regarded them in physical terms. Aristotle considered earth, air, fire, and water to be derivative of four more fundamental elements‐heat, cold, dryness, and moisture. (Citations for these and other ancient sources are given in full by A. W. Cramer, Stoicheia tou kosmou: Interpretatie van een nieuwtestamentische term [Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf, 1961]; Andrew John Bandstra, The Law and the Elements of the World [Kampen, Netherlands: J. H. Kok, 1964]; and Gerhard Delling, “Stoicheion,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, 10 vols. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1971], 7:666–87.) Justin (Dialogues 23:3), John Chrysostom, Theodoret, Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome, Victorinus (in part), Theodore of Mopsuestia, Epiphanius, and Augustine identified the stoicheia as heavenly bodies. No pre‐Christian evidence exists, however, for this identification; indeed the earliest references are all from the end of the second century C.E. (including Diogenes Laërtius 6:102).
2. . Clement of Alexandria in part (in Patrologia Cursus Completus, series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, 161 vols. [Paris, 1857–], 9:284) and also apparently Origen (see Bandstra, pp. 5–6).
3. . Tertullian, Jerome, Theophylact of Bulgaria, and Gennadius believed them to be worldly learning. Eusebius believed them to be religious ritual and customs; this position now is represented ably by W. Kern (“Die Antizipierte Entideologisierung oder die ‘Wellelemente’ des Galater‐und Kolosserbriefes Heute,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 96 [1974]: 185–216), who regards the stoicheia in modern terms as the ideological use of sports, tourism, fashions, mass media, political theory, astrology, witchcraft, the Playboy philosophy, etc., as pseudoreligious rites and beliefs.
4. . The one exception may be Augustine, but see the discussion in Bandstra, pp. 10–12. Testament of Solomon, (8:1–4 and 18:1) alone of all ancient sources associates the elements with stars conceived as demons or gods; its date (3 C.E. or later) and mentality are far removed from New Testament times.
5. . Hugo Grotius, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, 8 vols., 2d ed. (Gröningen, Netherlands: W. Zuidema, 1828), 6:576–78; 7:124, 131. So also E. De Witt Burton in this century.
6. . W. M. L. DeWette, C. J. Ellicott, B. Weiss, H. A. W. Meyer, and J. B. Lightfoot. They were followed in the twentieth century in various ways by P. Ewald, H. L. Strack, P. Billerbeck, W. Barclay, A. Cole, M. J. Lagrange, S. Greijdanus, H. Ridderbos, T. F. Torrance, R. Schippers, R. M. Grant, A. L. Williams, O. Langercrantz, and Wilfred Lawrence Knox (in part).
7. . A. Neander, followed by A. H. Blom, T. Zahn, and J. C. K. Hofmann and in the twentieth century by J. Kögel, G. Kurze, and N. W. De Witt. J. Van Wageningen and F. H. Colson referred to the stoicheia as heavenly bodies.
8. . F. Spitta, H. Diels, O. Everling, E. Y. Hincks, and A. Dieterich; in the twentieth century B. Reiche, G. A. Deissmann, M. Dibelius, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, F. Pfister, T. K. Abbott, W. H. P. Hatch, L. B. Radford, W. Bauer, R. T. Stamm, A. M. Hunter, G. H. C. Macgregor, E. Langston, H. Lietzmann, H. Schlier, S. G. F. Brandon, E. Lohmeyer, G. S. Duncan, R. Leivestad, F. F. Bruce, A. Lumpe, G. B. Caird, J. H. Thayer, M. Jones, W. Bousset, and J. Knabenbauer. Most citations for these and other modern writers listed previously can be found in the excellent bibliographies of Bandstra, Delling, and Cramer.
9. . The Revised Standard Version, otherwise our best guide to a literal rendering of the Greek, is on this point the worst of the versions. In Gal. 4:3, 9 and Col. 2:8, 20 it consistently translates stoicheia as “elemental spirits,” even though only the word “elements” stands in the Greek. Yet when it comes to Heb. 5:12 or 2 Pet. 3:10, 12 the rendering is “first principles” and the physical “elements.” Ironically the worst paraphrase of Scripture, The Living Bible, is consistently the best in its versatile treatment of stoicheia as context dependent for its meaning, thanks to the Fact that the author, not knowing Greek, had to take all of his clues from the context and therefore stumbled on the right solution! The Jerusalem Bible and J. B. Phillips are also excellent. The New English Bible follows the RSV's elemental spirits” but acknowledges in footnotes that other translations are possible such as “the elements of the natural world” or “elementary ideas belonging to this world.”
10. . See Bandstra, p. 32. Delling (p. 673) cites Plato's view (“an original constituent” which is not perceptible) and Hesychius’ (5 C.E.), still reflecting the doctrines of Empedocles‐“all that which is indivisible and without parts.”
11. . Thus Isocrates spoke about the “elements of a good commonwealth” (Ad Nicodem 55), Plutarch of the “prime elements of virtue” (De Liberis Educandis, sec. 16). Galen wrote a medical book “concerning the Hippocratic principles”; Euclid did the same on the elements (theorems) of geometry.
12. . For reasons quite puzzling to me Bandstra (n. 1 above) abandons this fundamental insight as his book proceeds and ends by virtually equating the stoicheia with the Law. Note the title of his book and his first proposition: “The phrase ‘elements of the world… in Gal. 4:3 (9), and Col. 2:8, 20, refers specifically to the law and the flesh as the two interactive, fundamental forces operative in human existence before and outside Christ” (p. i).
13. . This includes rejecting all those tortured attempts to reduce the stoicheia to a common denominator, from Theodoret to Wilfred Lawrence Knox (St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939], pp. 108, 165, 168–69) and T. F. Torrance (“The Atonement,” Scottish Journal of Theology 7 [1954]: 263–64).
14. . John Pairman Brown has directed my attention to the hellenistic practice of inventing hypogrammoi, or verses composed of the twenty‐four letters of the alphabet, each used only once, as writing examples for children in school (cf. 1 Pet. 2:21). Clement of Alexandria has preserved three such verses in Stromata 5. 48–49, which he ingeniously interprets as lists of the four elements: “The way in which the stoicheia [of the alphabet] are taught to children contains as its interpretation the four stoicheia [of the universe]” (5. 46. 3).
15. . This use of elements as the physical stuff of the universe was already routine in the Septuagint (Wisd. of Sol. 7:11, 19:18; 4 Macc. 12:13).
16. . Clement of Alexandria, The Exhortation to the Greeks, trans. G. W. Butterworth, Loeb Classical Library, no. 92 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), chap. 5.
17. . Edward Schweizer has attempted to specify the philosophical milieu of Colossians even more precisely as a kind of neo‐Pythagoreanism in which the physical elements were revered and accorded a certain transcendent power (“Die ‘Elemente der Welt’ Gal. 4, 3.9; Kol. 2, 8.20,” in Verborum Veritas: Festschrft für Gllstau Stälin zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Otto Böcher and Klaus Haacher (Wuppertal, West Germany: Theologischer Verlag Rolf Brockhaus, 1970), pp. 245–59.
18. . See the essays in Confict at Colossae, ed. F. O. Francis and Wayne A. Meeks (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1975).
19. . The RSV's “elementary spirits of the universe” again derails comprehension. Living Bible's translation (“the worlds ideas of how to be saved”) fits perfectly with the meaning as I understand it.
20. . In RSV's “elemental spirits” the word “spirits” of course does not appear in the Greek. Living Bile is graphic if awkward: “How can it be that you want to go back again and become slaves once more to another poor, weak, useless religion of trying to get to heaven by obeying God's laws?”
21. . “Zeus,” says Cicero, “attributed a divine power (vis divina) to the stars, but also to the years, the months, and the seasons.”“General opinion,” says Proclus, “makes the Hours goddesses and the Month a god, and their worship has been handed on to us: we say also that the Day and the Night are deities, and the gods themselves have taught us how to call upon them. Does it not follow that Time also should be a god, seeing that it includes at once months and hours, days and nights?” (as quoted by Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks und Romans [New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912], p. 109).
22. . M. Brändle, cited by Delling (n, 1 above), p. 672. The Gospel of Mani (4 C.E.) went so far as to tegard the stoicheia as part of the divine quaternity: “Praise and glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the elect Breath, the Holy Spirit, and to the creative (or: holy) Elements!” (New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, 2 vols. [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965], 1:359).
23. . Franz Cumont. The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1911, p. 33.
24. . Tertullian Against Marcion 5. 4 (in The Ante‐Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 8 vols. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951], 3:43.537).
25. . Tertullian Against Marcion 5. 19.
26. . Enough can he known to make this more than just a good guess. Thus those who identified the stoicheia as earth, air, fire, and water (Clement [in part], Victorinus [in part], and Hilary) were correct regarding 2 Pet. 3:10, 12, though the context of 2 Pet. justifies as a variant translation “the heavenly bodies will disappear in fire” (Living Bible) since not only the earth but the entire solar system would be dissolved (Chrysostom, Theodoret, Victorinus [in part], Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Augustine). However, this astral interpretation probably was late, prompted by the tremendous rise of astrological fatalism. Col. 2:8 does refer to philosophy as Clement and Origen saw it, just as Gal. 2:20 refers to religious practices (Eusebius). Gal. 4:3 clearly points to the Jewish Law (Jerome), and 4:9 implies worship of stoicheia as gods (Theodore of Mopsuestia).
27. . Even if further sources which identified the stoicheia with stars or angels or demons or personal beings should be discovered‐an identification for which we have as yet no evidence prior to the close of the second century C.E.‐there would be no problem to this solution. Stoicheia still would be a formal term used in specific reference to these entities. The stars functioned as stoicheia in Greek thought, even if they may not have been thus named, as did the angels in Jewish apocalyptic. The prologue of 2 En. (2–7 C.E.) in speaking of the orders of angelic powers in heaven includes “the ineffable ministrations of the multitude of the elements.” The text is in Slavonic, but stoicheia no doubt lies behind it. One could connect this back easily with the angels set over the physical elements described in 1 En. 82:10–14, Jub. 2:2, Asc. Is. 4:18, 4 Ezra 8:20–22, Rev. 9:15, 16:5. However, the early Christian theologians continued to speak, as did Jewish apocalyptic, of angelic powers in charge of the elements (Athenagoras, Hilary) and not of the elements themselves as angelic.
28. . A nineteenth‐century physicist, Lord Kelvin, typified this stance: “When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind” (as quoted by Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972], p. 108). It is easier for us today to see that such a pitiable generalization has only limited validity even in the realm of physics, but such an attitude still straitjackets many people.
29. . Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918).
30. . Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); John A. Miles, Jr., “Jacques Monod and the Cure of Souls,” Zygon 9 (1974): 33–34.
31. . Sirach 16:27–28: “He [God] arranged his works in an eternal order,/and their dominion for all generations;/they neither hunger nor grow weary,/ and they do not cease from their labors./They do not crowd one another aside,/and they will never disobey his word.” The powers of creation are declared thus to antedate life and to operate invariantly (‘they will never disobey his word’) and harmoniously (“they do riot crowd one another aside”) in their ceaseless maintenance of the universe. The angels having oversight over invariant phenomena, unlike other angels, cannot observe the Sabbath therefore (Bk. Jub. 2).
32. . Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan Co., 1968), p. 17.
33. . On the issue of reductionism see Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies, Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969), esp. the chaps by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Viktor Frankl; Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1968); David Bakan, On Method: Toward a Reconstruction of Psychological Investigation (San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, Inc., 1967).
34. . William Hoffer, “A Magic Ratio Recurs throughout Art and Nature,” Smithsonian 6 (December 1975): 110–12. Wolf Strache's Forms and Patterns in Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973) uses the photographic essay to document the way the same designs and patterns are repeated in nature. Marie‐Louise von Franz adduces other examples and postulates that the natural integers are the archetypal patterns that regulate the unitary realm of psyche and matter (Number and Time, trans. Andrea Dykes [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974]). For further examples see Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science, 4th ed. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1962).
35. . I have adapted this image from Ralph Wendell Burhoe's “Introduction to the Symposium on Science and Human Values,” Zygon 6 (1971): 98, n. 30.
36. . Ralph Wendell Burhoe, “Natural Selection and God,” Zygon 7 (1972): 60; italics mine.
37. . Ralph Wendell Burhoe, “The Phenomenon of Religion Seen Scientifically,” in Changing Perspectives in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Allan W. Eister (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), p. 32.
38. . See Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 212.
39. . Ornstein, pp. 213–16; A. P. Krueger, “Preliminary Consideration of the Biological Significance of Air Ions,” in The Nature of Human Consciousness, ed. Robert E. Ornstein (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1973). Gravity also is suspected of having an effect on psychological states through physiological structure (David Sobel, “Gravity and Structural Integration,” in ibid., pp. 397–407).
40. . John A.Eddy, “The Case of the Missing Sunspots,” Scientific American  236 (May 1977): 80–92.
41. . Cumont (n. 21 above), p. 137. Cf. n. 23 above.
42. . Clinton V. Morrison, The Powers That Be (London: S.C.M. Press, 1960), pp. 77–80.
43. . Tatian Oratio ad Graecus 9–10; Tertullian De Idolatria 8–11.
44. . To which John Pairman Brown adds in a personal communication that “the astrologers Thrasyllus and Balbillus were Sun Myung Moon to all the Julio‐Claudian emperors.”
45. . Excerpts of Theodotus 55 (in Ante‐Nicene Fathers [n. 24 above] 8:49). The pseudo‐Clementine Recognitions, in a section of the Kerygmata Petrou (1:32), describes Abraham as an “astrologer” who was able to recognize the Creator in the order of the stars. In 9:12–32 and 10:7–12, on the other hand, the later editors attack the entire astrological system. Jews also were split on the issue. Philo rejected worship of the stars and the dependence of human fate on the stars (De Migratione Abruhami 69, 181–87) yet believed that the seven planets produce growth arid ripening on earth (De Opificiis Mundi 113) and that Pleiades influences seasonal events (115). Rabbis debated the influence of the stars on Israel, but all apparently agreed that they held sway over Gentiles (see Jacob Neusner, History of the Jews in Babylonia [Leiden: E.] Brill, 1965–70], 1:139, 171–72). The magnificent zodiacs on the synagogue floors in Beth Alpha and Sardis are the weightiest evidence of the popular acceptance of astrology among Jews, however.
46. . No book of the New Testament evidences so much contact with astrology as the Book of Revelation. For a rather judicious treatment see Philip Carrington, “Astral Mythology in the Revelation,” Anglican Theological Review 13 (1931): 289–305.
47. . Advertisement in the New York Pmt (May 18, 1977), p. 69.
48. . The Metaphysical Intelligence Services have offered to read your numerological chart if you wish.
49. . The fundamental statement in this thesis is George A. Riggan's “Epilogue to the Symposium on Science and Human Purpose”, Zygon 8 (1973): 476. The subtlety of Riggan's notion of levels resolves the ancient theological position of the validity of reversing predicative statements about Cod. Most of what I have learned from Riggan emerged orally in a series of team‐taught courses at the Hartford Seminary Foundation's church‐and‐ministry program, 1975–77.
50. . Thus Kirtley Mather can be moved to suggest that such forces “pcome as near to being ultimate causes as the mind can grasp. They cannot be directly experienced by sense perception, but their reality is now beyond challenge” (as quoted by John Kuskin Clark, “The Great Living System: The World as the Body of God,” Zygon 9 [1974]: 66). Rut why should the lowest level of Gods systemic self‐manifestation be regarded as explanatory for the whole?
51. . Burhoe, “Natural Selection and God” (n. 36 above). Burhoe believes that nature and natural selection reveal a God who can be the center of the rebirth of a universal religion for a scientific and technological world. In science, nature itself finally becomes the creator, guide, judge, and sustainer of life and reveals the nature of Cod:“… it is this doctrine of elements [sic!] intrinsic to nature as the source, creator, and judge of man which has been growing in the scientific and public mind in the century since Darwin” (p. 35). Well‐meaning as this program is, it threatens to fallback into a worship of the stoicheia. Elsewhere Burhoe is more cautious (see his “The Human Prospect and the Lord of History,” Zygon 10 [1975]: 365).
52. . I am using “hierarchy” not in the sense of ranked importance, superiority, or preference but in the more neutral sense of relationships of ascending complexity, without judgment as to relative importance. Perhaps an organismic image would be bcttei‐, such as Paul's in I Cor. 12:14–31. Clearly we are speaking not of a straight stairstepping but of a clustering of subhierarchies, without reference to their relative values.
53. . George A. Riggan, “Christ and the Cosmos” (manuscript).
54. . “Call it the evolving cosmos, call it mansoul, or call it god, the superposition of states of the cosmos, in its logically primordial aspect, transcends any possible stage of its actual evolution while containing all qualities possible of manifestation‐ commensurable and incommensurable alike. Yet the cosmic system exists nowhere else than in the transient components of its evolving stages. Viewed transcendently, the cosmic superposition is immutable, omnipotent, omniscient; viewed immanently, it participates in the hopes, joys, sufferings, and failures alike of mankind and of all creation. In the polarity of transcendence and immanence it remains forever a self‐surpassing system, surpassed by none of its self‐transcending subsystemic components” (Riggan, “Epilogue,” p. 480).
55. . Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–63), 1:133. Philo sensed the appropriateness of revering the elements without worshipping them. They are, he says, matter without soul, subject to God. Yet the altar of incense is appointed for thanksgiving for the four elements, and the four elements of which the universe is created are used as a sanctuary for the father and governor of the universe! (cited by Delling [n. 1 above], p. 676).