NOTES for Co2 3:1-18

Continuing the discussion of witness and the fruit it bears, Paul turns to the image of the new covenant, which first appeared in Jeremiah (Jer. 31:31-34). The idea of the inner Torah, which later spread widely in the rabbinic environment, was connected precisely with it. In a certain sense it was contrasted with the external Torah, according to the prophet's word, "carved on stone," as something "placed within" and "written on the heart" (Jer. 31:33). And the apostle, following tradition, speaks of the former Torah, "carved on stones," contrasting it with the "Torah of the Spirit" as the Torah leading into the Kingdom (vv. 7-8).

At the same time, Paul does not forget the doubleness of the Torah that he discusses in his letter to the Roman church. The letter of the Torah kills; its breath ("spirit") gives life (v. 6). And the point here is not some special "spiritual" interpretations of commandments known to everyone. The point is which side the Torah turns toward a person. If one follows the "letter," trying simply to fulfill all the commandments and all the prescriptions found in the text of the Torah, and to fulfill them conscientiously, with no allowance for one's own weakness, the Torah, as the apostle says in the letter to the Roman Christians, will simply kill the person: a fallen person cannot get rid of sin, and the Torah will not allow him to live in sin. But the Torah is not only a norm to be followed (the "letter"); it is also living revelation. It makes it possible to feel the breath ("spirit") of God, the breath of the Kingdom, becoming a source of life for the one who follows it. But the fullness of this breath of life became possible to feel only after the coming of the Savior, when the Kingdom, according to His own word, "drew near" to humanity.

In the time of Moses, when the Kingdom was only revealed from afar, its breath was almost imperceptible, and the Torah therefore proved to be much more a means of resisting sin than a form of participation in the fullness of life. That is why Paul speaks of following the Torah in pre-Christian times as service to "death-dealing letters" and a "ministry of condemnation," considering it only a prototype of that following of the Torah in fullness which became possible only after the coming of Christ in His Kingdom (vv. 7-11). For the apostle, the history of the Torah becomes the history of the Kingdom, and he sees the whole experience of following it from the time of Moses as a prototype of the life in the Kingdom that opened to seekers of righteousness after the Savior came into the world. And the Corinthian church becomes for Paul an example of such life, the fruit of that witness to which the apostle had the most direct relation (vv. 1-3).

In saying this, Paul was undoubtedly recalling the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who maintained that the new, messianic covenant would become possible only when the Torah was not merely engraved on stone but written in every person's heart. By the “letter of Christ,” the apostle means first and foremost precisely this inner Torah. In Gospel times, people spoke often and at length about the inner Torah; in the mind of a believing Jew of that age, the path of the inner Torah was inseparable from ideas about righteousness. The ideal of righteousness—an unattainable ideal—was a person who had become a living Torah: someone whose life was determined by the inner Torah alone, and by nothing else.

This ideal was unattainable because a fallen human being, whose nature had been corrupted in the Fall, could not become a living Torah. To do so, one would have had to become sinless and completely overcome the consequences of the Fall within oneself. The letter of the Torah showed a person a path that fallen humanity could not walk. A person could only die on that path, escaping the power of sin at the moment of death; to remain alive and become a living Torah was impossible for fallen humanity. The Torah engraved on stone bore witness against the human person, and service to it was a ministry of condemnation. The more someone strove toward the ideal—to have the inner Torah govern their whole life, to become a living Torah—the more convinced they became that the goal was unattainable. The closer the goal appeared, the more insurmountable became the barrier of sin separating the traveller from it. In the end, the goal stood very near—and yet remained absolutely beyond reach.

Only the breath of God, the breath of the Kingdom that entered the world through Christ, could radically change this situation. Christ's coming made possible what had previously been impossible: the living Torah ceased to be the righteous person's unattainable ideal and became a very real goal of their journey. More than that, there was no other way to enter the Kingdom. In the Kingdom, by definition, there could be no place for any sin. Therefore, not only the One who brought the Kingdom into the world had to be free from sin, but everyone who wished to become its inhabitant as well. This is why the first Christians looked upon Christ as the living Torah while striving, with His help, toward the same goal themselves. In this sense, every Christian truly was a “letter of Christ”: only the One who is Himself the living Torah can make a living Torah of someone who trusts Him and follows Him. Thus the “letter of Christ,” written in the hearts of the faithful, becomes for them a pass into the Kingdom and a path to salvation.

In Paul's words on the epistle or the message (the Greek corresponding word admits both translations) of the Christ, written in the heart, it is not difficult to notice the allusion to the prophetic books and, in particular, on the book of Jeremy, who speaking about the new messianic union-covenant, mentions that the conditions of this new union will not be any more on tables of stone, as it was the case with the text of the Decalogue (and the Decalogue was in fact the text containing the conditions of this union that the people concluded with God on Sinai), but written in the heart of each, becoming an integral part and the basis of the life of man in the messianic Kingdom. It is in particular these words of Jeremy that served as the basis for the representation appeared at the period before captivity in the Judaism of the internal Torah, which was seen not as a certain new text, but as the spiritual core, which is formed gradually in the heart of the man, who longs to follow the Torah and to observe the commandments, becoming the spiritual foundation of all his life.

As seen, in the image of the epistle of Christ, written in the heart, it is not difficult to find the link with the words of Jeremy about the Torah written on "tables of the heart", quite as with the image of the internal Torah, which should have been familiar to Paul who received a traditional rabbinic education. But as seen, the apostle reinterpreted these traditional representations in the context of what says Jesus about the Torah, which He came, according to His own words, not to destroy, but to lead to fullness.

Obviously, the Savior does not speak in this case about the text of the Torah, of which He had not at all in plan either to modify, or to complete (although He gave His comments to some of the commandments), but about the internal Torah which He alone could manifest in all fullness. Indeed, in order to observe the Torah totally, become a perfect righteous, or as said in that period a "living Torah", it was necessary to be completely free from the power of sin. It goes without saying that, except the Christ Himself, nobody could manifest anything similar to the world. It is not surprising that the first generation of Christians look at their Master, as at the only example in the world of the "living Torah".

It is not also surprising that the possibility of the internal Torah, as the foundations of the spiritual life, is conceivable for the Christian only as the life in the Kingdom, connected for them to the personality of the resuscitated Savior. To obtain the internal Torah in unity with Christ, the entrance into the Kingdom, where each becomes a "living Torah" - such sees the apostle the purpose of the life of the Christian.

These words of the apostle are very widely known. The apostle juxtaposes the Old and the New Testament, and the letter countered in this case as symbol of the law written in the Old Testament. Why the apostle asserts that the written law is a murderous thing? And what if the law was right and just? Literally, the legislation of the Old Testament contains good, necessary and right laws.

But, being already written, the law becomes in a way an objective reality separated from the executor, and quite as from the most important, the legislator. It is not because no written law can exhaust all the varieties of the real life, although it is evident.

But it’s a faceless thing, controlling the life of those that God endowed the image and the resemblance of His personality, and that is why there is a humiliation of this image. It is not accidentally that on the eve of the time of the New Testament, arise in Israel a representation on the Divine Wisdom - it is the personification of the law, composing its living sense, its spirit.

Words on Wisdom in the Bible turn out to be prophecies about Christ, because they reflect God’s will to become directly the Master of His Kingdom On the contrary, the everlasting Spirit of the New Testament gives the possibility to its participants not to be under the influence of tables of stones, but under the influence of the very Legislator.

It doesn’t mean at all, let’s say, that the moral requirements demanded to them were different from those of the participants of the Sinai covenant. "I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill" says the Lord Himself. But it is not these requirements which make the main part of the human life. Their execution becomes a function, a demonstration of a personal relationship with the Legislator.

After the words about the murderous letter and the vivifying Spirit, the apostle speaks in detail about the glory of the Old and the New Testament. Regrettably, our sad history considerably distorted the understanding of this word that is why this word needs explanation. It is not about what imply slogans. We remember glory of the kings and masters of the earth.

Our brothers-Christians in Ancient Rome called it very exactly "pompa diaboli". The biblical sense of the word "glory" (from Greek. δόξα, from Latin gloria) is most deeply shown in the vision of Esaïe: "the glory of the Lord has filled the temple".

It is the form of such presence of God, when the man knows and blesses this presence. And it is in particular why the plenitude of such a glory in the New Testament turns out qualitatively superior to the letters of the law of the Old Testament.

The prophet Jeremiah spoke for the first time in the history of the people of God of a new union-testament, the renovation of the relations with God, and the expression "new union" (or "new testament") belongs to him in particular. Jeremiah spoke about the new testament as about a messianic testament, being sure that the coming of the Messiah will change qualitatively the relationships between God and His people, in the same way as the relationships between God and individual. And for Paul the new testament becomes not only the messianic covenant, but the covenant of the Kingdom. Indeed, the union with Christ is possible only in case the man becomes an inhabitant of the Kingdom. Is exact also the opposite: you will not become an inhabitant of the Kingdom, not having concluded first union with Christ. But what then mean in this context the words of the apostle that the ministers of this new union-testament - ministers not of the letter that kills, but ministers of the spirit that gives life? Of course, the whole Kingdom is filled with the breath of God. This breath penetrated the world the day of the Pentecost, when the Kingdom entered into it and when in it was born the Church. But, speaking about the union-testament, all prophets and all teachers also always mentioned the Torah, without which there is no testament. And Paul, speaking about the new testament, do not refuse the Torah, which he, such as Jeremiah, considers not as a text, but as the spiritual internal state of man. According to the words of the prophet, the Torah will not already be stamped on the stone, but written on the human heart. But this is possible only if the Torah will stop being just a text, which, as any text, can be studied and commented, and will become what in the time of Paul in the rabbinical middle, where the apostle came from, was called the internal Torah. It was about this spiritual internal rod, which defined the spiritual quality of life of man, his relationships with God, with Christ, with the neighbor. Such an approach of the Torah contrasted tremendously with the very wide-spread in that time in certain rabbinical schools literalism, even if it was about a purely Jewish approach. For Paul, who no matter what it is about, always spoke about the Christ and about the Kingdom, the contrast was even more striking: because if man could take with him in the Kingdom the internal Torah, literalism had no place there. It only took away from the Kingdom the one who is fond of it. The letter, which has become the object of worship, spiritually killed those who worshiped it, by closing the worshiper the way to the Kingdom. And the breath of the Kingdom transformed man into "the letter of Christ", making him what in the rabbinical middle in this period was called "the living Torah" - the living realization of this fullness of righteousness, which is possible only in the Kingdom.

Speaking of believing Jews who read Holy Scripture, Paul mentions a veil that prevents them from seeing the true meaning of the text, just as the veil once placed over Moses' face prevented those around him from seeing it. What does he mean?

Of course, reading this passage through today's eyes, we first of all pay attention to the difference between the traditions connected with Jewish and Christian interpretation of the same Old Testament texts. But in the apostle's time it was still too early to speak of some special Christian tradition. There were already, perhaps, some stories about the Savior's death and resurrection, quite possibly even written down, but a Christian corpus of sacred texts did not yet exist. Nor was there a special, developed Christian tradition of interpreting the Torah or the prophetic books; too little time had passed for such interpretations to appear. The point, plainly, is something else.

And here one recalls the evangelist's words that Jesus Himself, after the resurrection, during one of His meetings with the disciples, opened their minds to the perception of Scripture. In this case, the point was hardly some mysterious exegesis available only to the "initiated."

Rather, the matter lay elsewhere, in the very essence of what one may call the understanding of any text, especially a sacred and God-inspired text. In fact, to understand any text, one must first reconstruct the system of meanings that the author created when writing his text. A text, at least a literary text, is a system of meanings clothed in words. Meanings cannot simply be copied the way we copy letters; they can only be recreated by walking with the author the path he walked as he created his text.

But what if there was more than one author? What if God inspired him, if He revealed the meanings and the author only embodied them in words? Then it follows that the path must be walked not only with the human author, but also with God, who inspired him. To understand the Bible, one must understand God. And no one can teach this understanding better than the Savior. More than that: some foundational things only the Savior Himself can teach. Otherwise there is a veil. Otherwise something remains hidden forever.

This is what the apostle means when he says that only God's breath, the breath of the Kingdom, frees a person and gives him the fullness of understanding of Holy Scripture as the word of God. God is free from all human limitations, and only in His freedom can one understand His word.

Spiritual existence is not subject to the limitations characteristic of a material object: shape, location, confinement to the present moment, movement through time in only one direction, and so on. When Jesus, speaking with the Samaritan woman (John 4:24), says, “God is Spirit,” He shatters human ideas that “bind” God to a particular place—a country, a city, a temple. The apostle Paul has something slightly different in mind: he says that the Spirit can act not from outside but from within, destroying our inner bondage through His grace of forgiveness and peace.

In the Bible one often finds the statement that God is spirit. The apostle connects freedom with this undoubted fact, as if affirming that God, being spirit, is the God of freedom and not of enslavement, even when the matter is enslavement to one or another form of religiosity.

At first glance, the connection between these two statements is not visible. But if one thinks about it, it is not hard to see that this connection does exist, though it is not noticed at once. Indeed, every spirit, whether God Himself or any spiritual being created by Him, differs from nature, in all its possible forms, perhaps even forms still unknown to us today, precisely by complete and absolute freedom. God has no nature. He is pure will and pure self-consciousness.

It is no accident that, unlike theologians, the Bible tells us nothing about the nature of God, while it speaks constantly about His will and His personal qualities. Will is the foundation of every spirit and its primary manifestation, and it is no accident that will forms the basis of every spiritual life, including human spiritual life. Self-consciousness is derived from will; in the normal case it is conditioned only by will and depends only on it.

Practically, this means that spirit in the true sense of the word depends only on itself and never on anything or anyone else. Any relations between spiritual beings will always be free and deeply personal, while any limitation of the manifestation of will means a limitation of freedom, which in the end leads to a diminishment of the fullness of spiritual life in the one whose will is limited. Nature is different: it never determines its own being, since it is always dependent on something, and in the final analysis on someone, else. If spirit is by definition free, so that the diminishment of its freedom lowers its spiritual potential, then nature is just as much by definition unfree.

Of course, every spirit can interact with nature without losing its freedom, just as God created the whole natural world without in any way diminishing Himself or constraining His freedom thereby. His self-emptying and self-limitation turned out to be connected not with nature, but with the spiritual beings He created, with whom He is bound by relations of love. Such self-emptying and self-limitation can, of course, formally also be considered a limitation of freedom, but since the matter is an absolutely voluntary choice, such a limitation ceases to be external and becomes for God an organic form of His own existence.

And in the Kingdom all forms are determined in the same way, proceeding from relations of mutual love, which presuppose mutual self-limitation as a consequence of taking into account the existence of those who are nearby. There are no external boundaries here, only the form of one's own being voluntarily accepted by each person, taking into account relations with God, with Christ, and with one's neighbor. In the untransformed world, by contrast, all limitations are connected first of all with the natural component of man, which after the fall gained the upper hand, subordinating to itself the breath of life that every person receives at birth. It is no wonder that they bind and fetter a person's spiritual freedom.

And religion is no exception here: besides its spiritual component, it contains much that is natural, connected with the psyche and behavioral patterns of fallen man. The apostle, of course, could not fail to know this. That is why he calls his correspondents to freedom. To the freedom of the Kingdom, without which real, full relations with God are impossible. And that means salvation is impossible too.

In the third chapter of the epistle to Corinthians, Apostle Paul speaks about the understanding of the Old Testament as a code of bans and permissions, which God expects man to accomplish. He underlines that it is only by Christ that the Old Testament opens to us as a testimony of God, Creator of the Heaven and the earth.

The face of Moses shone with the reflection of the glory of the Almighty - says the apostle, but this glory remains hidden without Christ for those who see Moses, and for those who read his books. For those who address Christ, this "cover" is removed, this veil retaining us from the vision of the glory of God. And here after these words, the apostle writes: "the Lord is that Spirit, and where the Spirit of Lord is, there is liberty".

Relationships with God are thus similar not literally bans and permissions, but to the liberty of the spirit. But it doesn’t in any case mean that in the liberty of the New Testament we can violate the commandments, of which the Jews were forbidden to violate.

The non-liberty consists of the fact that the “cover” is in our human hearts, and not giving to us the possibility of seeing the glory of God. That is why the apostle says of those who address God: "we all, with open face beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed". Consequently, he understands by the word liberty the real possibility of meeting with God and our capacity to come to this meeting.