NOTES for Ti1 4:4-5

It is difficult to determine how the same words of Holy Scripture sound in different centuries. Perhaps today's reading has often been relevant during the two thousand years of Christian history, but for us it can become a daily reading. Eat this, do not eat that. What was regarded as natural throughout human history is now considered harmful, and vice versa. Marriage and family are evil, and life is valued at nothing. What matters most is not godliness, but exercise, diet, and a gleaming white smile. Yet to all who reproach the Church and Christians for worshiping ritual and ceremonial, and therefore external, things, one can offer only the apostle's words, which remain to this day the rule of life for those who believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus: “...bodily exercise is of little benefit, but godliness is beneficial for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”

Speaking about the last times, Paul mentions certain false teachers with a "seared conscience" who, according to him, will try to forbid the faithful things that God by no means forbids them (vv. 1-5). Apparently, some of these false teachers had already tried to preach something similar in the Church, if we suppose that the "old wives' tales" mentioned by the apostle (vv. 7-9) are connected with the false teachings he is discussing. Paul, as we can see, does not mention bodily exercise here by accident: the corresponding Greek word could mean not only gymnastics in the sense in which we use the word today, but in general some system for keeping the body in a certain state, including perhaps one that today we would call not gymnastics but ascetic practice.

Of course, what is clearly present here is Judaism's restrained and skeptical attitude toward asceticism in the form in which it existed in some pagan, including Greek, religious and philosophical systems. Later, practices of this kind partly entered church life, but this happened noticeably later, already in the Middle Ages. The early Christian church, judging by everything we know of it today, avoided them, orienting itself more toward traditional Jewish piety, where the key role was played not by external, bodily asceticism, but by the practice of unceasing prayer and by efforts connected with acquiring the inner Torah.

But the matter, apparently, was not only this. Paul, judging from all his letters, generally did not attach special significance to religiosity and piety, considering them not especially important for spiritual life. But he always spoke out decisively against religion or traditional piety standing in the way of someone who wants to live the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness. And now the apostle, as we can see, is not speaking against one variety of piety in favor of another, but against restrictions that are completely unnecessary for a person on the way into the Kingdom. He understands perfectly well that ascetic practice is often connected not so much with the desire to fulfill God's will as with the desire for self-assertion, for which ascetic achievements are excellent nourishment. Therefore the apostle speaks sharply against those who make ascetic practice the center and meaning of spiritual life, rightly pointing out that such a shift in emphasis has nothing in common with Christian revelation.

And this is not surprising: ascetic practice understood in this way presupposes not the "life in abundance" which, according to the Savior, He brought into the world when He opened the Kingdom to the world, but eternal lack and self-limitation. This kind of religiosity involuntarily suggested that God was not a loving Father who lacks nothing, but a strict and not very merciful steward, sparingly measuring out His gifts to those ready to suffer for Him, to suffer not because the world lies in evil, but because these sufferings are needed by the steward himself. Such religiosity was not witness, but counter-witness. A counter-witness with which the apostle could not and would not put up, allowing its bearers to darken the face of God and lead those seeking the Kingdom off the right path.