Main news for 28 December 2025

In his letters Paul often compares Christian life to a race, and Christians to runners in a stadium competing with one another. Here too the apostle compares the recipients of his letter to runners who began their race well, but then something stopped them so that they no longer hear the voice of truth. From the immediate context it becomes clear that he is speaking of an infatuation with that very religiosity which has never been enough for a genuinely righteous life.

Circumcision becomes the symbol of this religiosity, and with it, apparently, some members of the Galatian church connected their spiritual life even more than with Christ. And here their spiritual path ends. It ends precisely as a path on which they were supposed to walk or run, and which was supposed to pass in direct communion and union with Christ. The Christian's path is the path of the Kingdom, not the path of religion. But that is not the only point.

Paul does not accidentally tell the recipients of his letter that they have stopped. They did not turn onto another path, did not turn back, but precisely stopped. And no wonder: religiosity can both help a person on the spiritual path and hinder him. Religious life as such has no direct relation to spiritual life, although it is connected with it. It is connected above all as form is connected with content. Or, more precisely, as a source of forms for the content with which spiritual life is filled in that part of it which is connected with communion with God.

Here religion can indeed prove useful. But not when it turns into an end in itself. Not when religious life replaces spiritual life, that dynamic of relationships binding a person to God and to other people, which no religion can replace. Here one can truly speak only of a stop on the spiritual path. And if the stop lasts long enough, perhaps even of a rejection of that path: after all, a person can be satisfied with religion alone if he makes the corresponding choice. But then one will have to speak only and precisely of religion, and not of Christianity.