NOTES for Php 3:7
The known truth: everything is known in comparison. It is not surprising that it is also applicable to the Christian life. But then in which sense? Certainly, any time, when man experiences the call, and not necessarily of God or Christ, but in any new faith for him, even if philosophic, his first reaction, as a convert, becomes the revaluation of all values, often rather radical. But with time, generally, such a neophyte becomes less radical, and the less, the more he stops being a neophyte (it sometimes happens that it is otherwise, but it is probably already necessary to consider it as an anomaly of the spiritual development). For Paul, as seen: everything is otherwise: his reevaluation has proved not only radical, but also very stable, the relation to all his previous knowledge expressed by him here, he confirms throughout his entire Christian life. What is the matter then here? For, Paul should not at all be suspected of spiritual immaturity! As seen, the problem is somewhere else.
We could certainly say again that the man who experienced the conversion to God and who took the path of righteousness, revalues very often once for all his entire past life, particularly, if his life was sinful and not at all compatible with righteousness. But we couldn’t say this of Paul: he chose God and the way of righteousness long before the encounter on the road to Damascus. What thus did he mean by that? Probably in order to understand Paul, it is necessary to experience what he experienced: the awesome experience of the reality of the risen Christ and this Kingdom, which entered with Him into the world.
On this background, all old thing becomes something little significant or insignificant. And it is not that the Kingdom doesn’t need any human knowledge or human experience. It is rather in the quality of this knowledge and experience. Because each our experience by definition is an experience of the non-transformed world. And such an experience is inevitably limited. And, as any thing belonging to the non-transformed order of things, in the Kingdom it has to change, melt, be transformed.
But it will be possible only in case we shall not hold on our knowledge and experiences in their previous, old quality. The most important here is to understand that in such quality it is suitable in the Kingdom not more, than the garbage in the household. And Paul understood it, refusing what formerly was the basis of his life, religious and intellectual. And received in exchange much more: a living experience of the Kingdom, transforming man with all his knowledge.