Main news for 5 December 2022

King James Version (en)

1 Timothy, Chapter 4, verse 1

¹ He foretelleth that in the latter times there shall be departure from the faith

¹Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;

NOTES

Speaking about the last times, Paul mentions certain false teachers with a "seared conscience" who, according to him...

Speaking about the last times, Paul mentions certain false teachers with a "seared conscience" who, according to him, will try to forbid the faithful things that God by no means forbids them (vv. 1-5). Apparently, some of these false teachers had already tried to preach something similar in the Church, if we suppose that the "old wives' tales" mentioned by the apostle (vv. 7-9) are connected with the false teachings he is discussing. Paul, as we can see, does not mention bodily exercise here by accident: the corresponding Greek word could mean not only gymnastics in the sense in which we use the word today, but in general some system for keeping the body in a certain state, including perhaps one that today we would call not gymnastics but ascetic practice.

Of course, what is clearly present here is Judaism's restrained and skeptical attitude toward asceticism in the form in which it existed in some pagan, including Greek, religious and philosophical systems. Later, practices of this kind partly entered church life, but this happened noticeably later, already in the Middle Ages. The early Christian church, judging by everything we know of it today, avoided them, orienting itself more toward traditional Jewish piety, where the key role was played not by external, bodily asceticism, but by the practice of unceasing prayer and by efforts connected with acquiring the inner Torah.

But the matter, apparently, was not only this. Paul, judging from all his letters, generally did not attach special significance to religiosity and piety, considering them not especially important for spiritual life. But he always spoke out decisively against religion or traditional piety standing in the way of someone who wants to live the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness. And now the apostle, as we can see, is not speaking against one variety of piety in favor of another, but against restrictions that are completely unnecessary for a person on the way into the Kingdom. He understands perfectly well that ascetic practice is often connected not so much with the desire to fulfill God's will as with the desire for self-assertion, for which ascetic achievements are excellent nourishment. Therefore the apostle speaks sharply against those who make ascetic practice the center and meaning of spiritual life, rightly pointing out that such a shift in emphasis has nothing in common with Christian revelation.

And this is not surprising: ascetic practice understood in this way presupposes not the "life in abundance" which, according to the Savior, He brought into the world when He opened the Kingdom to the world, but eternal lack and self-limitation. This kind of religiosity involuntarily suggested that God was not a loving Father who lacks nothing, but a strict and not very merciful steward, sparingly measuring out His gifts to those ready to suffer for Him, to suffer not because the world lies in evil, but because these sufferings are needed by the steward himself. Such religiosity was not witness, but counter-witness. A counter-witness with which the apostle could not and would not put up, allowing its bearers to darken the face of God and lead those seeking the Kingdom off the right path.

It is difficult to determine how the same words of Holy Scripture sound in different centuries. Perhaps today's reading has often...

What does Paul call "teachings of demons," and why? Above all, evidently, those religious prescriptions of Judaism that are connected with kashrut, with the division of food into clean and...

What does Paul call "teachings of demons," and why? Above all, evidently, those religious prescriptions of Judaism that are connected with kashrut, with the division of food into clean and unclean. It would seem hard to expect this from a man who never renounced his Jewishness. But after becoming a Christian, Paul no longer ever absolutized his religion or considered its norms obligatory for every Christian.

Meanwhile, in different church communities there often appeared "teachers" who considered it their duty to demand from their brothers, as obligatory, what only recently had been completely non-obligatory for them as pagans and what Jews themselves had never demanded of them. Another problem was preachers of sometimes excessive asceticism, what the apostle calls "bodily exercise."

The issue here is, of course, not physical exercises and not sports, but ascetic exercises; the word "ascesis" in Greek itself means "exercise." And Paul speaks sharply against bodily asceticism for its own sake. As can be seen, in the Church at that time there were also such "teachers" who demanded extremely strict bodily asceticism from their disciples without really understanding why it was needed. It should be noted that the Synagogue knows its own tradition of very severe asceticism, rooted in antiquity, though of course asceticism in the Synagogue never reached the scale it reached in the Church.

It was to this tradition that the "teachers," the zealots of strict ascesis, appealed. Meanwhile, both the absolutizing of religiosity as such and asceticism, especially bodily asceticism that has become an end in itself, represent the two main dangers on any spiritual path, and especially on the Christian path. Both distract a person from the main thing: from spiritual work as such and from that dynamic of spiritual formation which is its content.

Instead of spiritual dynamic, spiritual life, a person begins to concentrate on what at best forms its remote periphery, and at worst has no relation to it at all. Indeed, both religiosity and asceticism can easily exist outside the context connected with the relationship between God and the human person, and outside the space of the relationship of the Father and the Son in which the life of a Christian should normally unfold. And then instead of spiritual life there is a serious danger of receiving its substitute, leading into a spiritual dead end, which is what Paul reminds Timothy about.

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