NOTES for Gal 4:22-23

Paul allegorically interprets the story of the birth of Abraham's two sons, one by the concubine and the other by Abraham's wife Sarah. The allegory is that one of the two, born of the concubine, symbolizes a union-covenant with God "according to the flesh," promising nothing but slavery, while the second symbolizes a union of freedom, a covenant of the spirit. The Torah, in describing the birth of both sons, contains both covenants within itself, but the fullness of relationship with God is possible only in the spirit, in freedom, and therefore in the Kingdom, which the heavenly Jerusalem symbolizes as, in the apostle's interpretation, the antithesis of the earthly Jerusalem, and in Christ, who brought this Kingdom into the world. Here the Torah ceases to be only history or only a set of prescriptions, whether legal, moral, or religious.

It becomes a description of a spiritual path, a path leading to liberation from the power of nature and therefore from the world that lies in evil. Indeed, evil first of all, at least when speaking about the human person and human history, consists in this: in that stream of human life which the language of the Bible calls the soul, the natural component has prevailed over the spiritual one, completely or predominantly determining the life of fallen humanity. And no human efforts by themselves can radically change anything here. The Torah as a set of legal or moral prescriptions is powerless here: the moral person remains under the power of sin; he is only sometimes able partially to hide his sinfulness so that it does not draw attention, just as law can sometimes hinder the most odious manifestations of the same sinfulness in public life.

And the religious component of the Torah also cannot help in any way: religion by itself does not change a person; by nature the religious person remains the same as he was born, only trying to arrange his life so as to live in harmony with God or, more broadly, with higher powers. Meanwhile, harmony with God is possible only in His Kingdom, and here a change in the person himself is already required, his liberation from the power of sin and from the predominance of the natural component in the stream of his life.

What is needed here is the inner Torah as that spiritual imperative which can give a person a certain inner dynamism directed toward changing the quality of his life, the very process of his existence. But these changes make sense only when they go all the way, to the complete transformation of the person, to a change in his very nature; and such a change is possible only with the direct participation of the Savior Himself, who brought the fullness of the Kingdom into the world and showed the world the only example of the living Torah. From the fullness of Christ, from the fullness of the Kingdom, it hardly made sense to return to religion or morality. That would not simply be a step backward, but a genuine rollback, a return from the Kingdom under the power of this world.