Main news for 29 October 2019

King James Version (en)

Philippians, Chapter 3, verse 7

⁷ which notwithstanding he counteth as dung and loss, to gain Christ and his righteousness

⁷But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.

NOTES

There is a well-known truth: everything is known by comparison. It is not surprising that it also applies to the Christian life. But in what sense? Of course, every time...

There is a well-known truth: everything is known by comparison. It is not surprising that it also applies to the Christian life. But in what sense?

Of course, whenever a person experiences conversion, not necessarily to God or to Christ, but to any new faith for him, even a philosophical one, his first reaction as a new convert is a revaluation of all values, often a very radical one. But with the passing of time, as a rule, such a neophyte becomes less radical, and the less so the more he ceases to be a neophyte. It does happen otherwise, but that should probably already be regarded as an anomaly of spiritual development.

With Paul, however, as we can see, everything is different: his revaluation proved not only radical, but also very stable. The attitude he expresses here toward all his former knowledge is one he confirms throughout his entire Christian life. What is the matter here? Paul cannot be suspected of spiritual immaturity! As we can see, the issue lies elsewhere.

One could, of course, also say that a person who has experienced conversion to God and has set out on the path of righteousness often revalues his entire former life once and for all, especially if his life was sinful and incompatible with righteousness. But this cannot be said of Paul either: he chose God and the path of righteousness long before the meeting on the Damascus road. What, then, does he mean?

To understand Paul, one must perhaps live through what he lived through: the staggering experience of the reality of the risen Christ and of the Kingdom that entered the world with Him. Against such a background, everything former truly becomes something of little importance, or of no importance at all. The point is not that the Kingdom has no need of any human knowledge or human experience. The point, rather, is the quality of this knowledge and experience. After all, all our experience is by definition the experience of an untransformed world. Such experience inevitably proves limited. And, like everything belonging to the untransformed order of things, in the Kingdom it must change, be remelted, be transfigured. But this will become possible only if we do not cling to our knowledge and experience in their former, old quality. The most important thing here is to understand that in such a quality it is no more fit for the Kingdom than garbage is fit for the household. Paul understood this, giving up what had formerly formed the basis of his life, both religious and intellectual. In return he received far more: the living experience of the Kingdom, which transforms a person together with all his knowledge.

Paul touches on the theme of righteousness and the theme of circumcision, which at that time was acute in some churches of Greece and Asia Minor. The apostle connects circumcision...

Paul touches on the theme of righteousness and the theme of circumcision, which at that time was acute in some churches of Greece and Asia Minor. The apostle connects circumcision "with the righteousness that comes from the Torah," while noting that if anyone had grounds to boast in such righteousness, he had more than those who were defending it before the Philippian brothers. But in comparison with what he received in his encounter with the Risen One, Paul considers it no more than trash.

And the point here is not that the apostle rejects the Torah as such. He simply understands too well, from his own experience, that the Torah as such does not make a person righteous. It only points out the path of righteousness, from outside or from within, if we are speaking of the inner Torah. But it is not the Torah that makes a person righteous, but God, who gave the Torah to a person as an instrument on the path of righteousness. The Torah is a spiritual compass that points a person to this path.

But to reach the Kingdom, it is not enough merely to look at the compass; one must also walk the path it indicates, and here God's help and the participation of the Savior Himself are important, all the more because He Himself became the living Torah. The alternative to such a path is religion, religious activity, religious life in general, which often substitutes itself for spiritual life. And then, instead of the path, people begin to be carried away by various religious customs, rituals, and ceremonies, supposing that this is the very thing to which God is calling them.

In reality, however, all these things are merely human games that people invent for their own peace of mind and play for their own pleasure, while the players themselves consider them a means of attaining a certain "righteousness" (which the apostle calls, perhaps not without irony, "the righteousness that comes from the Torah"). Circumcision was just such a game for many Philippian Christians, and not only for them.

For them it was merely a religious rite: after all, they were not seriously intending to walk the spiritual path of Judaism, the path of the inner Torah, humility, unceasing inner prayer, the acquisition of the Shekhinah - in short, everything that mattered to the finest representatives of the Jewish spiritual tradition. For them circumcision was merely a kind of religious game that they played, thinking they were doing something important and necessary. Paul regarded such games as a profanation of the genuine spiritual path, and he was completely right to do so.

Today the apostle Paul lists his "merits" before the law. He does this for one single purpose: to explain that he renounces reliance on righteousness...

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