Main news for 7 March 2019

King James Version (en)

Jude, Chapter 1, verse 3

¹ He exhorteth them to be constant in the profession of the faith

³Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

NOTES

In his letter, Jude speaks of certain people who ‘reject authority’ and ‘revile glory’. Judging by the meaning of these words and their particular usage, he is referring not to earthly authorities but to God's authority and to His glory, which in the language of the Yahwist and Jewish traditions denotes God's presence. They do all this while ‘defiling their bodies on the basis of dreams’.

It is not very clear what is meant here. One thing is clear: the people mentioned by the apostle claimed to follow some tradition or certain ‘teachers’ who based their teaching on certain ‘dreams’ (or perhaps simply ‘visions’—the corresponding Greek word has more than one meaning). What exactly does Jude mean when he says that they ‘defiled’ their bodies? Some commentators thought he was referring to self-castration, and that the movement mentioned in the letter must have resembled the later sects of the Skoptsy.

Yet, judging by the indulgence of their own lusts and the excesses at the meals accompanying the breaking of bread that the apostle mentions, he is hardly speaking of ‘defiling the body’ in the sense in which one might apply that expression to the Skoptsy. He is more likely referring to a movement of a peculiar kind of ‘Christian spiritualists’, convinced that the body means nothing for spiritual life. What matters, they said, is the soul; the body is merely a shell and plays no part in spiritual life. Its condition is of no importance whatsoever: it has no effect on a person's spiritual life, and if it does, that means the person is not yet sufficiently ‘spiritual’.

On the basis of such ideas, the people mentioned by the apostle considered any ascetic practice connected in one way or another with the body unnecessary. Apparently they rejected even the most elementary restraint, regarding excess in eating as a trivial matter from the standpoint of spiritual life as they understood it. In practice, this peculiar speculative spiritualism led to a situation in which the commandments could be broken and spiritual life thrown completely out of balance, on the false premise that the body plays no part in a person's spiritual life.

It is hardly surprising that Jude strongly objects to such ‘spirituality’. The issue is not only the possibility of breaking a commandment. Above all, it is that God created human beings as creatures not only of spirit but also of nature, and they are to enter the Kingdom not only with their souls but also with their bodies. Any attempt to ‘correct’ ourselves by excluding our own nature from our lives merely leads to an imagined life taking the place of genuine life. A life that cannot lead to the Kingdom.

What wants to say the apostle, by exhorting the addressees of his message "to contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints"? It would have been possible of course to think that it is about a certain doctrine that the believers are called to protect, if necessary, at the cost of their personal...

Probably, if Christianity was simply a new religion, it would then have been necessary to understand the words of the apostle particularly so. But indeed, Christianity is not a new religion, not a new morality and either a new theological doctrine. Christianity is the life in this Kingdom, which the Savior brought to the world.

Well then arises question: how and from what the Kingdom should be protected, if it, according to the very words of Jesus “is not of this world”. What can the forces of our non transformed world do, what damage can they cause to what not only is not a part of it, but also is directly of the another nature? The question would have had no sense, if it was not one "but": the Kingdom, being of a different nature from the non transformed world, must all the same be present in it to have the possibility to transform it, and this presence is possible only in the form of Church, communities of people living in the Kingdom, and in this sense “saints", that is sanctified by the breath of the Kingdom.

And in order that such community not only break, but also lives a full life, is important the loyalty of its members to each other, and to the One, Who brought the Kingdom in the world. Of course this loyalty should be kept and protected. And the problem here is not only in the persecutions and the pursuits for the faith and for the membership in the Church, even if the persecutions in the life of the early Christian churches were numerous. The problem is again in what could divert the believers from what composed the main sense of their life, to divert by new or not too new ideas, theories, religiosity, - in short, all that, having taken completely man, can completely redefine his system of values and life priorities.

But for the life in the Kingdom, is particularly important in particular the system of values and life priorities, it is in particular it which defines the possibility of joining the Kingdom. First - "the Kingdom and its righteousness", and the rest will follow.

And "rest" however could be not only the material assets of this world, but also its cultural values, and its religion: because even in religion, to the basis of which is the experience of the revelation, there will be always a considerable layer of purely human religiosity, which longs to go out to the foreground, pushing revelation behind. But, no matter what proposes to the faithful this world as alternative to the values of the Kingdom, this alternative will not be in any case adequate. And the apostle reminds it to the authors of his message: because it is not simply about a doctrine, but about life and about salvation.

Dangers to the Church can come not only from outright persecutors, but also from among those who would seem to be our own brothers...

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