NOTES for Rom 2:28-29; Rom 3:1-18

The apostle speaks to us about the difference between the Law as a properly spiritual reality and the religion it gives rise to. Judaism as a religion is indeed unthinkable without the Torah. But the Torah itself is greater than Judaism.

Moreover, observing the religious prescriptions of Judaism does not yet guarantee what that same Jewish tradition calls "keeping the Torah": one can be a religious person and at the same time a violator of the Torah, and then religiosity in itself loses every meaning. And one can be not religious at all, like the pagans, but follow the "natural" Torah, and those who follow such a "natural" Torah may prove closer to God than Jews confident in their religious piety.

Of course, when Paul speaks of pagans, he does not mean worshipers of some pagan cults, but rather those whom today we would call secular people: for most of those called pagans in Paul's time were religiously indifferent. There were, of course, real religious pagans as well, but they would hardly have been among the apostle's listeners and certainly would not have become Christians.

What matters to Paul above all is following the inner Torah, not the external forms of the Jewish religion. He understands perfectly well, of course, that precisely the attempt to follow the inner Torah will reveal human sinfulness sooner than anything else, and this very process becomes judgment for a person. But it does not follow from this either that the Torah itself is bad or that one must sin deliberately in order to reveal one's sinfulness to the end.

The inner Torah reveals it sufficiently as it is, while to sin consciously means only to increase the measure of sinfulness in one's life. One must only not renounce the path that presupposes following the inner Torah, even if such a path becomes judgment for a person. And in this sense the Jews, as the people of God, have an advantage over every other people: precisely to the Jews as the people of God the Torah was given for understanding, awareness, and conscious following.

If there were no Jewish people, there would be not only no Judaism as a religion, but also no path of the Torah without which full knowledge of God is impossible. And if not all Jews follow this path, the path of the Torah is a matter of a person's personal, voluntary choice. One can force a person to fulfill religious norms and prescriptions, but one cannot compel him to a spiritual path, to the spiritual work without which this path does not exist. And even if many of Paul's fellow believers turn out to be merely religious formalists, their formalism in no way devalues either the Torah or the spiritual path it presupposes.

Today the Apostle speaks to us about very important things. God gives people His Word so that we may live according to His plan. Which of us has perfectly fulfilled His will? Yet even when a person proves unfaithful to his calling, God remains faithful to His love. Does this mean that His faithfulness gives us the right to forget His call and do evil in the hope that God can turn it into good? The Apostle warns us against this. For us, this is the only way to respond to God’s faithfulness.

Paul quotes a text from the Book of Psalms that speaks of universal sinfulness, of the fact that no righteous people remain on earth. These are rather allusions to certain passages from different psalms, so that it is impossible to find the passage cited by the apostle in the form in which it appears in the letter. Such allusions to well-known passages from the Book of Psalms, from the prophetic books, or even from the Pentateuch were not rare in rabbinic discussions.

Paul's main thought is clear: there are no sinless people in the world, and therefore there are no innocent people before God and the Torah. It is precisely the Torah that reveals a person's sinfulness; by it, according to the apostle, sin is known. Here Paul raises a very serious problem, relevant to those who walked the way of righteousness presupposed by the Torah, and above all the inner Torah. It was precisely the inner Torah, perceived and experienced by a person as a spiritual and moral imperative, that revealed to the seeker of the way his own insufficiency.

The Torah, perceived mainly or exclusively in an outward way, could create the illusion of something on which one could establish oneself by contrasting oneself with those who do not know or observe the Torah. But then the Torah is reduced to what the apostle calls "works of the Torah" or "works of the Law," to what we would today call religious duties. And then, of course, the Torah becomes for those who follow it an exclusively religious phenomenon.

Paul, however, speaks of something else. He speaks of the inner Torah and of the spiritual path that following it presupposes. Here the issue is no longer religion. What matters here is to relate each step, each intention, to the inner Torah as to a system of God's intentions opened to a person. This is spiritual work, reducible to no religious practice. But precisely the attempts to relate one's will in its concrete manifestations to equally concrete manifestations of God's will reveal to a person his imperfection.

It turns out that doing this is not at all simple, even with every desire: the will of fallen humanity does not obey a person nearly so easily, and a fallen person cannot even simply track all his intentions, not to mention becoming aware of them. And no "works of the Torah," no religious practice, and no outward religious activity can help a person here. If only because all such practice and any such activity touch only the surface of the human person, the periphery of his existence. But the way of righteousness corresponding to the Torah requires deep changes.

According to the Apostle Paul, the voice of conscience resounds in every person—it is the natural moral law written in his heart, proceeding from God who created humankind. Of course, the Law given to Israel through Moses speaks more loudly, but what matters is that no one is far from the word of God. The problem is not that we do not know what is right, but that we do not follow the right path! Why? Because we are always seeking our own will rather than God’s; hence the deceitfulness and hardness of heart of which the Savior speaks.

From following the Torah Paul moves to another theme connected with the Torah: religion and religiosity. The apostle, as we can see, understands the difference between the Torah as a properly spiritual reality and the religion it gives rise to. Judaism as a religion is indeed unthinkable without the Torah. But the Torah itself is greater than Judaism.

Moreover, observance of the religious prescriptions of Judaism does not yet guarantee what the same Jewish tradition calls "keeping the Torah": one can be a religious person and at the same time a violator of the Torah, and then religiosity in itself loses all meaning. Or one can be not religious at all, like the Gentiles, but follow the "natural" Torah, and those who follow such a "natural" Torah may turn out to be closer to God than Jews who are confident in their religious piety.

Of course, when speaking of Gentiles, Paul has in mind not worshipers of some pagan cults, but rather those whom we today would call secular people, since most of those who were called pagans in Paul's time were religiously indifferent. There were, of course, real religious pagans too, but they would hardly have been among the apostle's listeners, and certainly would not have become Christians.

What matters to Paul above all is following the inner Torah, not the external forms of the Jewish religion. He understands perfectly well, of course, that precisely the attempt to follow the inner Torah will reveal human sinfulness faster than anything else, and this process itself becomes judgment for the person. But it does not follow from this either that the Torah itself is bad, or that one needs to sin deliberately in order to reveal one's own sinfulness to the end.

The inner Torah reveals it sufficiently as it is, and to sin consciously only means increasing the measure of sinfulness in one's life. One must simply not refuse the path that presupposes following the inner Torah, even if such a path becomes judgment for the person. And in this sense Jews as the people of God have an advantage over every other people: it was precisely to the Jews as God's people that the Torah was given for reflection, understanding, and conscious following.

Without the Jewish people, there would have been not only no Judaism as a religion, but also no way of the Torah, without which full knowledge of God is impossible. And if not all Jews walk this way, the way of the Torah is a matter of a person's personal, voluntary choice. A person can be forced to fulfill religious norms and prescriptions, but he cannot be compelled to take a spiritual path, to do the spiritual work without which that path does not exist. And even if many of Paul's fellow believers turn out to be merely religious formalists, their formalism in no way devalues either the Torah or the spiritual path that it presupposes.

As long ago as two thousand years ago, both the Lord and the apostle Paul warned us: always and in every age, ever since the Fall, human beings have been at odds with themselves. Now the mind is at odds with the heart, now the soul with the body, now convictions with actions, now conscience with the way one lives… Most people are desperately lacking in wholeness of life — a wholeness in which everything within a person is in its proper place; in which, as does sometimes happen, you look at someone and realize that there is something within them for which it would be worth giving a very great deal (see Rom. 2:29). There is an inner core, not fleeting or transient, but a true foundation that nothing can shake (see Matt. 7:24–27). Not something that merely seems unshakeable, but something that will remain so even at the Last Judgment. It is precisely for a whole person that ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means ‘no’ (see Matt. 5:37). If such a person teaches at all, they teach what they themselves practise. Their actions do not dishonour their faith and convictions (see Rom. 2:21, 24). Of course, one might say that, realistically, this picture is ideal and practically unattainable. But the difficulty is precisely that this is not so. Its being an ideal cannot serve as our excuse before God, because God knows that this is not so. He was human, and He knows from within that wholeness is possible. And it is precisely because Christ has opened the way to such a life for us that He ‘will judge people's secret deeds through Jesus Christ’ — the measure of our holiness.

All people have become sinners, and therefore no one has the right to claim righteousness, much less exalt himself over anyone because of the “small” number of his sins. Even the relative gravity of sins must not become a pretext for self-exaltation, for sin is abhorrent regardless of its degree; moreover, that degree can change, and a small neglected sin inevitably tends to grow.

We are not justified by the law, but through it we come to know sin. We must remember that the law formulates rules that help us live and perceive the world. The law sets the standard toward which we should strive, but which often remains unattainable because of human sinfulness. People speak so easily and habitually of everyday sinful acts as something ordinary and even harmless, while sin is in fact an irrational, dark, and destructive force, like a bog. The law is a map of marshland, but if someone has lost his footing, a map cannot pull him from the mire. The Lord pulls him out.

Continuing the discussion of the advantages of being Jewish, Paul says directly that there are no such advantages. Of course, he is speaking not about religious advantages, but about spiritual ones in the proper sense. This is not about any tradition, any theology, or even any knowledge of the Torah as a text. An advantage in the spiritual sense could belong only to someone able to live without sinning, but in our fallen world, regrettably, there are no such people (v. 9).

To support his thought, the apostle cites the words of an ancient psalm that vividly describes human sinfulness (vv. 10-18). To this, of course, one could always object that the Torah did not require sinlessness from a person; it only required the right choice in a concrete situation, a choice that would conform to the norms of the Torah. But in this case Paul is, as can be seen, arguing with those who were sure that one could be freed from sin and enter the Kingdom by doing what the apostle in Greek calls "works of Torah" or "works of the Law" (v. 20).

The reference is apparently to what in Hebrew is called a mitzvah, literally translated as "command" or "commandment." In Paul's time, however, in the Jewish world it had begun to mean what we today usually call religious obligations. With this understanding of commandment, observance of the Torah was reduced to the performance of numerous religious obligations, some of which found a basis in the text of the Torah, while others rested solely on the rabbinic tradition that existed at that time.

Here one can see a polemic, not very noticeable at first glance, with another well-known rabbinic school: the school of Shammai, with whose representatives the followers of Hillel held constant discussions. Shammai was the one who was sure that the performance of religious obligations in itself sanctifies and purifies a person. But the apostle puts the emphasis elsewhere. He says that the Torah is not meant for competing with one another in the fulfillment of a multitude of religious obligations. It is needed in order, in Paul's words, "to know sin," that is, to learn to distinguish sin from righteousness and to see what hinders a person on the way to the Kingdom (v. 20). The Torah is not a magic wand that opens the gates of the Kingdom for the one who possesses it; it is more like a compass that helps one stay on the path of righteousness. Any other use of it makes the Torah useless, and hopes for its effectiveness illusory.

From following the Torah Paul moves to another theme connected with the Torah: religion and religiosity. The apostle, as we can see, understands the difference between the Torah as a properly spiritual reality and the religion it gives rise to. Judaism as a religion is indeed unthinkable without the Torah. But the Torah itself is greater than Judaism.

Moreover, observance of the religious prescriptions of Judaism does not yet guarantee what the same Jewish tradition calls "keeping the Torah": one can be a religious person and at the same time a violator of the Torah, and then religiosity in itself loses all meaning. Or one can be not religious at all, like the Gentiles, but follow the "natural" Torah, and those who follow such a "natural" Torah may turn out to be closer to God than Jews who are confident in their religious piety.

Of course, when speaking of Gentiles, Paul has in mind not worshipers of some pagan cults, but rather those whom we today would call secular people, since most of those who were called pagans in Paul's time were religiously indifferent. There were, of course, real religious pagans too, but they would hardly have been among the apostle's listeners, and certainly would not have become Christians.

What matters to Paul above all is following the inner Torah, not the external forms of the Jewish religion. He understands perfectly well, of course, that precisely the attempt to follow the inner Torah will reveal human sinfulness faster than anything else, and this process itself becomes judgment for the person. But it does not follow from this either that the Torah itself is bad, or that one needs to sin deliberately in order to reveal one's own sinfulness to the end.

The inner Torah reveals it sufficiently as it is, and to sin consciously only means increasing the measure of sinfulness in one's life. One must simply not refuse the path that presupposes following the inner Torah, even if such a path becomes judgment for the person. And in this sense Jews as the people of God have an advantage over every other people: it was precisely to the Jews as God's people that the Torah was given for reflection, understanding, and conscious following.

Without the Jewish people, there would have been not only no Judaism as a religion, but also no way of the Torah, without which full knowledge of God is impossible. And if not all Jews walk this way, the way of the Torah is a matter of a person's personal, voluntary choice. A person can be forced to fulfill religious norms and prescriptions, but he cannot be compelled to take a spiritual path, to do the spiritual work without which that path does not exist. And even if many of Paul's fellow believers turn out to be merely religious formalists, their formalism in no way devalues either the Torah or the spiritual path that it presupposes.