Main news for 5 December 2025

As is evident, already in the early Christian era there were people in the Church who were sure that Christians "may do anything." And the apostle, arguing with this widespread view of spiritual life, responds: "anything is permitted," yes, but not everything is beneficial. "Anything is permitted," of course, but not everything serves upbuilding. The corresponding Greek word literally means building or constructing a house, and it is assumed that the matter is not walls alone. "Anything is permitted" sounds like a slogan of complete liberation from everything that binds and limits a person in the untransformed world. It appears that the people who advanced it understood and remembered only one thing: the Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of freedom. They had not reflected much, apparently, on what this freedom is filled with.

Perhaps the situation was aggravated by the peculiar "charismatic" views of some new converts who, having experienced the reality of the Kingdom for the first time and having felt what grace is, decided that they were now free from sin and could do anything whatever without any spiritual harm to themselves: after all, as they were probably convinced, the untransformed world with all its evil no longer had power over them. Paul reminds them, however, that everything is not as rosy as it may appear in the first days after conversion or in moments of spiritual uplift. Ahead lies a long path, the path of inner, spiritual upbuilding, that ordering of inner and outer life which the concept of the inner Torah presupposed.

And on this path the struggle with sin is inevitable, for the path into the Kingdom is not yet finished; it is only beginning. And the very upbuilding of the Kingdom, that same upbuilding of which the apostle says that not everything is beneficial for it, was also only just beginning then, for the matter concerns, in essence, the first two generations of Christians. And the path of each individual Christian is finally completed only on the day of the complete transformation of the world, the day of the Savior's return and the triumph of the Kingdom. And the apostle does not tire of reminding people that Christianity is not "grace-filled" relaxation, but intense spiritual work and the upbuilding of the Kingdom, without which Christian life loses all meaning.