Main news for 12 February 2025

King James Version (en)

2 Timothy, Chapter 2, verse 19

¹⁹Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.

NOTES

Paul urges Timothy to avoid unnecessary and useless arguments, which give no one anything and only destroy the inner peace of those taking part in them...

Paul urges Timothy to avoid unnecessary and useless arguments, which give no one anything and only destroy the inner peace of those taking part in them. It should be noted that both the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds were worlds of many words, many arguments, and many opinions. This is not simply about what today is called pluralism; it is about a cult of argument, debate, and discussion. Conversation, often on fairly abstract subjects, argument, and philosophical debate were considered the most respectable occupation for a free person who had leisure for such pursuits; that was how it had been in the Greco-Roman world since antiquity.

In the Jewish world, discussions and debates, but on religious subjects, on matters connected with the Torah, were common; and often not only learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah took part in them, but ordinary people as well. After all, every believing Jew read and studied the Torah, and there were no others then, so there were people to talk and argue, and things to talk and argue about. Of course, in a certain respect such an atmosphere was very productive: new ideas, views, concepts, and theories appeared in it almost daily.

Intellectual life flourished, but spiritual life did not always. This is understandable: such a setting encourages argument, debate, and discussion to become ends in themselves, so that taking part in them is already considered important work and a serious pursuit, while often no time remains for spiritual work, and it is not considered especially important anyway. After all, correct views and opinions appeared to be the main thing, not correct life.

Such an atmosphere also made its way into church communities, and there it had to be resisted. Even if Christianity were simply a new religion, sooner or later it would have been necessary to stop and think not about words but about life. But since Christianity never was a religion and always was precisely a new life, life in that Kingdom which the Savior brought into the world, the excess of words, arguments, and discussions threatened Christians with serious spiritual losses.

Of course, serious questions that arose in the Christian environment had to be answered, because they really could affect a person's spiritual life. If, for example, someone, like the "teachers" mentioned by the apostle, seriously thought that "the resurrection had already happened," that everything was already over and Christianity had essentially remained in the past, he would hardly be able, with such views, to live a full Christian life.

But to devote one's life to arguments and discussions in order to win them and become the most famous and unbeatable debater, and still more to see such victory as the meaning of one's church ministry, is a spiritual dead end. Arguments will never end, and in the end they will simply swallow a person, leaving him no time for life, even ordinary life, to say nothing of Christian life. This is the danger Paul warns his disciple against.

Speaking of the spiritual foundation laid by God, Paul gives two quotations from the Book of Psalms and from the literature we today call instructional, or the writings of the sages: "Yahweh knows His own" and "let everyone who confesses the name of Yahweh depart from iniquity." These two sayings briefly set out the Yahwistic and Jewish teaching on righteousness as we find it in the Bible. Righteousness is not a human matter, but God's. Only God is righteous, and only to Him does righteousness belong as something inseparable. To a human being, by contrast, it is not natural. For a human being, righteousness is not a property or a quality, but only a state in which a person may abide, and such abiding contradicts fallen human nature.

In a certain sense one could say that a person can be righteous only in spite of himself, not his true self, of course, but the self he became after the fall. But it is possible for a person to abide in a state of righteousness only when God "knows" him, in God's presence. Of course, God in one way or another sees and knows everyone; no one can hide from Him anywhere. But His immediate presence beside a person is not merely knowledge that such and such a person lives in the world, nor even the omniscience by which no human heart is hidden from God.

Here there is always the will of God directly addressed to a specific person, and this is impossible if the person himself does not seek God and does not strive for communion with Him. Through such striving a person becomes "His own" for God, not in the sense that such a person becomes God's favorite, but in the sense that the person's relationship with God becomes conscious. But consciousness also implies something else: the one who is conscious of his relationship with God and puts it first must shape his life accordingly, keeping the Torah in view, and above all the inner Torah.

Only if the commandment becomes an inward imperative for a person, spiritual and moral, will he be able not only to become conscious of his relationship with God, but also to make it stable. And where relations with God are stable, conscious and voluntary sin can no longer have a place in a person's life. Of course, anyone can stumble and fall, but such things usually happen apart from a person's will. This building of conscious and stable relations with God is the spiritual foundation of which the apostle speaks.

"Remind them of this, charging them before the Lord not to quarrel about words, which does no good but only ruins the hearers." This is, perhaps, the most important rule of church health, the health of people inclined toward active life within the church, or simply people active in relation to their spirituality. Let us turn to the spiritual diaries of one of the major theologians of the twentieth century, Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann. "...what confusion, even darkness, there is in these young heads; how deadened the immediate moral reaction is; what chaos has been created in the world, in the soul, in culture by every kind of 'intelligentsia.' The endless pride of all this. Pride and vulgarity. Artificial agitation over pseudo-problems, pride in pseudo-consciousness, the importance of emptiness. And now this unfortunate 'academicism,' 'problematics,' the possibility for everyone to imagine himself to be something. And faith in 'discussions,' 'clarifications,' 'communications.' Not one person in the world has been enriched by discussions. Only by encounter with reality, with truth, goodness, beauty. <...> Therefore, as one approaches 'reality,' fewer and fewer words are needed. In eternity there is only: 'Holy, holy, holy...' Only words of praise and thanksgiving, prayer, the whiteness of fullness and joy. Therefore only those words are genuine and needed that are not about reality ('discussion'), but are themselves reality: its symbol, presence, manifestation, mystery. The Word of God. Prayer. Art" ("Journals," Moscow, 2005, pp. 21, 22). In the same book, much later, he recalls a conversation between two women that he overheard in passing. They were arguing about how long the dead remain with us: forty days or not forty. "After all, the Church teaches..." "Why is this necessary?" Father Alexander simply asks. And this is the most terrible thing, when we spend time on "disputes about faith." All this is only a pitiful parody of warfare about the Spirit. So why give ourselves over to it? Let us seek among people those who are close to us not by convictions, but in the way shown to us by the Lord in the parable of the merciful Samaritan.

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