Main news for 11 September 2025

In his letter to Titus, Paul reminds him of the essence of Christianity, that a person is saved not by "works of righteousness," but by the grace he receives in communion with Christ and in the context of relations with Him. Today for many Christians these words of the apostle have become a commonplace. Meanwhile behind them stands the fullness of awareness of that tradition of the path of righteousness which was characteristic of Yahwism already in the pre-exilic period. Even before the coming of Christ, everyone who took spiritual life seriously understood that righteousness cannot be attained by any human efforts, that at its foundation it is God's work, not man's.

But on the other hand, it could still be called a divine-human work, because without the participation of the person himself righteousness is impossible. And not only in the sense that a person must agree to God's presence in his life, but also in the sense that a person must make constant efforts to maintain himself in a state of readiness to receive what God gives him, to participate in the life that God opens to him and into which He includes him.

This activity of the person was usually called "works of righteousness." Of course, in every age there has also existed a purely religious understanding of righteousness, which did not presuppose a path in the proper sense, but only the scrupulous fulfillment of a prescribed set of religious norms and rules. But such an understanding of righteousness does not even reach the best examples of Yahwism and Judaism.

Yet if in the Synagogue religious righteousness could still find a place on the periphery of communal life, though that periphery, as usual, was usually much larger numerically than the center, then in the Church there could be no place for it by definition, at least as long as Christianity had not partially degenerated into religion, or more precisely, into many religions that in time blossomed on its spiritual soil. This is what Paul reminds Titus of, probably also because the tendency toward a religious understanding of righteousness already existed in the Church in those days, and the apostle perceived it as an essential spiritual distortion of Christianity.