NOTES for Tit 3:5
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 received in communion with Christ and in the context of relationship with Him. For many Christians today these words of the apostle have become commonplace. Meanwhile behind them stands the full awareness of the tradition of the path of righteousness that was characteristic of Yahwism even in the pre-exilic period. For even before the coming of Christ, everyone who took spiritual life seriously understood that righteousness is unattainable by any human effort, that in 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 righteousness is impossible without the person's own participation. 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 keep himself ready to receive what God gives him, to participate in the life that God opens to him and into which He includes him.
This kind of human activity was usually called "works of righteousness." Of course, in every age there has also existed a purely religious understanding of righteousness, one that did not imply 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 religious righteousness could still find a place in the Synagogue on the periphery of community life, though that periphery, as usual, was usually far more numerous than the center, then in the Church there could be no place for it by definition, at least so 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 about, perhaps also because the tendency toward a religious understanding of righteousness already existed in the Church even then and was perceived by the apostle as an essential spiritual distortion of Christianity.