Main news for 29 June 2025

Addressing the church in Rome, Paul calls Christians by the word that is key to understanding Christianity. He calls them saints. And the point is not that they were all righteous people. The idea of holiness as righteousness became characteristic of medieval Christianity, but in early Christian times holiness meant something else. It meant roughly the same thing it had meant in earlier, pre-Christian times. Then holiness meant, first of all, sanctification. It was a special state of nature or of a person that had come into contact with God's presence, that presence of God which was revealed in places chosen by God. For example, at Yahwist altars, which never appeared by accident, but always there and then, where and when God manifested Himself and in one way or another made His presence known.

This presence, invisible to the eye yet completely real, could change the nature of whatever it touched. This naturally included the human being. But the human being had one special feature: he necessarily had to take conscious part in the process of his own sanctification. A person can change when he encounters God, but only if he himself wants this, turns to God with the corresponding request, and then gives himself fully into God's power so that God may fulfill that request. Then a person can become different. His life can become different. In biblical language, his soul. And his heart as well.

The heart comes first, because it is there, in the heart, that the question is decided: will a person give himself to God or not? In the language of the Bible, the heart is the source of a person's will, his spiritual self, the very place where choice is made and decisions are taken. And the state of the heart then determines a person's life, its course, what the Bible calls the soul: the stream of life in which a person abides and which flows through the person. It is what a modern philosopher would call existence.

The fullness of this stream with God's presence is what the New Testament books call the holiness of a person and of his life. Of course, the call to holiness had sounded earlier as well. But before Christ's coming, if it was attainable at all, it was attainable only in part. Now it is different, when, according to the Savior's word, the Kingdom has drawn near. Now it is open to everyone who seeks, and everyone who seeks can share in its life. Christianity, in essence, is nothing other than the life of the Kingdom and life in the Kingdom. Everything else is secondary.

That is why Paul and the other apostles call Christians saints: they are sanctified by the life they live and carry within themselves. Of course, this does not yet guarantee not only Christ's sinlessness, but even traditional Yahwist righteousness, which presupposed a person's ability to follow God despite his own sinfulness. Such sanctification is not a human achievement at all: it does not depend on the person; it is given to him as a gift. But what he does with this gift depends only on the person. For Christianity is a path that must be walked. And Paul knows this path far from hearsay.

Rom 1:7

NOTES

Today we read the beginning of the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans, that is, to all of us, because the Roman community consisted of Gentiles who had accepted Christianity, converted Jews, new converts, and those who had already followed Christ for many years. And the beginning of the letter immediately gives us a brief summary ...

The apostle Paul greets the Christians of first-century Rome in this way, but these words can be addressed to us as well. Then we...

Commentators often call the Letter to the Romans theological, having in mind its...

Commentators often call the Letter to the Romans theological, having in mind its complexity and the ambiguity of its interpretation. But the apostle himself, addressing the Roman Christians, as is clear, has theology by no means in view. He, as always, remains a preacher, a witness of the Kingdom that was opened to him when he met the Risen One on the road to Damascus (vv. 1-7). And all Paul's theological reasoning turns out to be for him only a means of such witness. In this he remains precisely an apostle in the full sense of the word, a messenger who cannot and must not say anything on his own, but must only convey what he was entrusted to convey by the One who sent him. And he must convey it in such a way that he is heard precisely as a witness, as one for whom the Kingdom is an unquestionable reality, and not simply as a herald, to whom it is often a matter of complete indifference what exactly he proclaims in the city streets and squares. That is why Paul rejoices that those to whom he addresses his letter themselves bear witness to the world about Christ and about the Kingdom (v. 8).

The apostle knows that he is not going to those to whom something must be explained and proved, but to his brothers, with whom he is united in the main thing: in the experience of the life of the Kingdom, which is in fact what is called Christianity. It would appear that those who have such experience no longer need any instruction. But Paul nevertheless wants to see the Roman Christians in order to give them a certain spiritual gift that will help them "be strengthened" (vv. 9-11). And for the apostle himself this, as is clear, serves as consolation, which he shares with his Roman brothers, rejoicing in their faithfulness to Christ and the Kingdom (v. 12).

As is clear, Paul looked at his ministry not as teaching, so characteristic of the rabbinic environment to which he himself had belonged before his conversion, but as the experience of jointly living through the reality of the Kingdom, which was known to every Christian. Paul's witness became, to use philosophical language, an actualization of this Kingdom, allowing the brothers who listened to the apostle to be strengthened in what was, of course, already known to them from their own spiritual experience. Thus preaching became witness, and witness became communion and unity in the Kingdom.

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