Somewhat akin to eating cheese?

Don't read a review of NTWright before you go to bed. Not if your main task the next day is to study a Pauline epistle anyway.

I had set myself to Colossians. Sometime after I'd noted/marked themes and repeated ideas, Tchaikovsky's 1812 thundered to a conclusion from my (borrowed, ancient) laptop, leaving the sound of silence to fill the room. Dangerous. First of all I got distracted pondering why Paul calls Jesus 'Christ' almost every time throughout Colossians whereas in other letters he uses 'Jesus Christ/Christ Jesus' and in others a fairly good mixture of combinations of the words of Lord, Jesus and Christ. Having concluded from flicking through that there was no logical division I could see immediately to be made between those contexts in which one and another were used, I turned back to Colossians. I managed to further note some of the main arguments (the enthralling Spot the Conjunctions game) and applications being made (Spot the therefore/so + imperative) before, having noticed the argument to do with dying, being raised and living in Christ, my mind went off on one, and these scribblings appeared at the bottom of the page where I was making notes on Colossians:

Living in a metanarrative: covenantal (relational - God-centred; consequential)
Escatological, social, moral, cosmic (implications, hopes)
All realised focally in the Christ event: revealed as the interpretative lens: in Christ
We live this metanarrative in Christ
That is the interpretative framework because it is the realised framework: Christ's death and resurrection, according to the Scriptures, for our sins. That is the gospel. Not just his death but his death and resurrection, not just a philosophy of life but bound up in historical events; according to the Scriptures: not an invented interpretation of the death and resurrection, they come in context as the focal point / realisational point of the metanarrative; for our sins: without the substitution the death and resurrection do no good 'for us': we must be in Christ to live in his story, in him, in his death and resurrection, as he took our death...

I blame NT.

And back to Colossians.