NOTES for Co2 3:17

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.

We meet very often in the Bible the assertion that God is Spirit. As seen, the apostle connects to this obvious fact the liberty, asserting in a way that God, being spirit, is the God of liberty, and not of slavery, even if it is about the enslavement of some form of religion. At first sight, the link between these two assertions is not visible. But if to think well, it is easy to see that this link all the same exists, although it is not visible immediately. Indeed, any spirit (whether it is God Himself or any spiritual being created by Him) distinguishes itself from the nature (in all its possible forms, maybe, even those that are still unknown to us today) in particular by the full and absolute liberty. God has no nature; He is pure will and pure self-consciousness.

It is not accidentally, in contrast to the theologians, the Bible tells us nothing about God's nature, but here is about His will and His personal qualities - constantly. The will is the foundation of any spirit and its primary demonstration; it is not by chance that it is the basis of any spiritual life, including the human. The self-consciousness is a derivative of the will, which in a normal case is only conditioned by it and depends only on it.

Practically it means that the spirit in the original sense of the word depends only on itself, and never on nothing and on nobody else. Any relations between spiritual beings will be always free and profoundly personal, and any restriction of the demonstration of the will means the restriction of liberty, which ultimately leads to the diminution of the fullness of the spiritual life of the one, whose will is limited. Other thing is the nature: it never defines its own being, being always dependent on something, and on the final account on somebody else.

If the spirit by definition is free, such that the diminution of its freedom reduces its spiritual potential, then the nature is also by definition not free. Of course, any spirit can cooperate with the nature, without losing its liberty, quite as God created the whole world natural, not belittling Himself at all and shamelessly thus of His liberty. His self-belittlement and self-restriction turned to be connected not with the nature, but with the spiritual beings created by Him, with which connected Him to love relations.

Such a self-belittlement and such a self-restriction can also of course be considered formally as a restriction of liberty, but since it is about an absolute voluntary choice, such restriction stops to be external, becoming for God an organic form of His own existence. And in the Kingdom all the forms are defined in the same way, from the relations of mutual love, which suppose a mutual self-restrain, as consequence of the consideration of the existence of those who are close by.

There is no external border here, there is only a form of the self being voluntarily accepted by each, considering the existence of the relationship with God, with Christ, with the neighbor. And here is; in the not transformed world, on the contrary, all restrictions are connected, above all, with the natural component of man, which prevailed after the fall, subjugating the breath of life that every person receives at birth.

It is not surprising that they bind, fetter the spiritual liberty of man. And the religion here is not an exception: because except the spiritual component appropriate to it, there is in it quite a lot of nature, connected with the psyche and the behavioral models of the fallen man. And it was impossible of course to the apostle not to know it. That is why he calls his correspondents to liberty. To the liberty of the Kingdom, without which are impossible real and full relationship with God. And thus, is impossible the salvation also.

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.