Main news for 10 July 2021

In his letters Paul often compares Christian life with a race, and Christians with runners in a stadium competing with one another. So here too the apostle compares the addressees of his letter with runners who began their race well, but then something stopped them so that they no longer hear the voice of truth. From the immediate context it becomes clear that he is speaking about fascination with that very religiosity which was never enough for truly righteous life.

The symbol of this religiosity becomes circumcision, with which some members of the Galatian church were apparently linking their spiritual life even more than with Christ. And here their spiritual path ends. It ends precisely as a path on which they were to walk or run and which was to pass in direct communion and union with Christ. The Christian's path is the path of the Kingdom, not the path of religion. But this is not the only point.

Paul does not accidentally tell the addressees of his letter that they have stopped. They did not turn onto another path or go back; they stopped. This is not surprising: religiosity can both help a person on the spiritual path and hinder him. Religious life as such has no direct relation to spiritual life, though it is connected with it. It is connected above all as form with content, or more exactly as a source of forms for the content that fills spiritual life in that part of it connected with communion with God.

Here religion really can prove useful. But not when it becomes an end in itself. Not when religious life replaces spiritual life, that dynamic of relationships binding a person with God and with other people, which no religion can replace. Here one can truly speak only of a stop on the spiritual path. And if the stop lasts long enough, perhaps even of a refusal of that path: a person can be satisfied with religion alone if he makes the corresponding choice. But then one will have to speak only and precisely of religion, not of Christianity.