NOTES for Gal 3:6-7

Paul speaks of righteousness and faith as what constitutes the foundation of Christianity. Indeed, they are what bind the faithful person to Christ, and righteousness as a spiritual state allows a person to share in the life of the Kingdom. Righteousness is not a consequence of the Torah, not the result of its effect on a person, and not even the result of fulfilling it. Of course, a person who follows the Torah will attain righteousness, but only in one case: if he follows it in all its fullness and to the end, becoming a living Torah. Then a person acquires the quality necessary for righteousness, for life in the Kingdom.

But the point is that it is impossible for a person to become a living Torah. Righteousness for fallen humanity is not a property or quality; it is a state in which one can abide. But following the Torah in itself does not allow a person to gain such a state, because to gain righteousness one must keep the Torah precisely in all its fullness, and if there is no fullness, everything is useless. The 'works of the Torah,' or 'works of the law,' add and subtract nothing here in themselves: when the issue is righteousness in general and Christian life in particular, fullness is what matters, and everything else does not count. It does not matter how far a person remains from the goal, from becoming a living Torah; what matters only is whether he has become it or not.

The foundation of righteousness since the time of Abraham is not the Torah itself, which in Abraham's time had not yet even been revealed, but a person's faithfulness to God. Faithfulness in the most literal sense: the alignment of the human will with God's will, the handing over of oneself to God. The Torah is only an instrument for reaching this goal. Entrusting himself to God, a person ceases to belong to himself, and then righteousness, impossible by nature, becomes possible for him as a state into which God Himself brings him.

And if this was true already in Abraham's time, it remains all the more true now that Christ has come: the fullness of righteousness required of a Christian is the same, and its necessity has now become even more evident, since otherwise one cannot enter the Kingdom. That is why the apostle asks the Galatian Christians the main question: did you feel the breath of God and share in the life of the Kingdom through the Torah and circumcision? Was it not through the good news about Christ and through faithfulness to Him? Why then have you left what opened new life to you and gone to look for something else? What did you lack?