Main news for 30 September 2022

Speaking of circumcision as a path backward into slavery, Paul evidently has in mind the spiritual dynamic connected with the action of the Torah in a person. He says directly to supporters of obligatory circumcision: if you are circumcised, you must fulfill the Torah in all its fullness. The issue here is not only fulfilling all the religious prescriptions of Judaism, but walking the whole spiritual path marked out in the Torah, from a purely external, moral, and religious understanding of it to the spiritual work implied by the concept of the inner Torah.

Otherwise, understood only religiously, the Torah loses all spiritual meaning, and circumcision becomes a kind of religious game that by itself leads a person nowhere, only distracting him from the genuine spiritual path. The apostle is not speaking against the Torah; he simply does not want following the Torah to turn into a kind of religious entertainment, by which many also reassured themselves that now they were doing everything necessary for God and for Christ. Evidently many, being circumcised, felt themselves to be 'proper' Christians, and in Christianity they began to see not a spiritual path and not the life of the Kingdom, but a 'proper' religion.

In such a case religious life in general imperceptibly replaced spiritual life, and it is precisely against this substitution that Paul warns the Galatian Christians. He says to them: do you seriously want to become Jews, to walk the whole spiritual path that the best representatives of the Synagogue walked? In that case follow the Torah in all its fullness. Move from the external Torah to the inner Torah, try yourselves to become a living Torah, and learn by your own experience what this is like and what comes from such attempts. The apostle knew what he was talking about: in another letter, the Letter to the Romans, he himself described his attempts to realize in life the ideal of the living Torah.

Complete failure, spiritual crisis, finally the meeting with the Risen One on the Damascus road: all this is Paul's own path, but none of the circumcising Galatian Christians intended to walk it. The path of the Torah was not interesting to them; they simply wanted a little religion for variety in life and for peace of soul. It is no wonder that such a position could evoke nothing in the apostle except indignation: he took the Torah, Christ, the Kingdom, and his own spiritual path with complete seriousness. Seeing certain 'teachers' profane everything that was absolutely important to him, he could not remain calm.