7. Отец Небесный

To be a Christian means to believe in God as Christ taught us to believe, and to live according to this faith. The first question of evangelical theology is the question of how Christ taught to believe in God. This first point of the Gospel teaching, like others, does not represent a pattern inscribed by the hand of Christ on an empty board - tabula rasa - of the human soul. No, the Gospel assumes certain truths to be known and certain; it begins with the highest human beliefs. The Gospel system is not a catechism, not elementary theology, but the highest religious knowledge, the extreme peak of religious thinking, the last stage of theological contemplation. The Gospel teaching about God is adjacent to those beliefs of the Jewish religion, which at the same time turn out to be the last religious word of the universal human mind, the last limit accessible to man in his quest for divine truth. These are the truths of the unity of God, His omnipotence and spirituality. They can be doubted, they can be approached gnostically through abstract evidence and logical persuasion; but they can simply be lived, possessed as experiential truths, as they were in the religious history of the Jewish people and as they can be in the personal religion of everyone. The Gospel accepts them as experiential religious truths; it addresses believers and does not at all have in mind those who theoretically doubt the existence of God. And vice versa - non-believers have nothing to do with the Gospel: for them it is a book with seven seals. The Gospel does not teach about the unity of God, His omnipotence and spirituality; it presupposes these religious truths and, if it expresses them, then indirectly, not as betraying its teachings, but indirectly, drawing conclusions from them. Thus, calling the Old Testament commandment of love for God as the highest, Christ cites it with the words: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord" 669. Proclaiming the truth of spiritual worship, He bases it on the spirituality of God: “the spirit is God, and those who worship must worship in spirit and in truth” 670. Speaking about the difficulty of salvation for the rich, He approaches the truth of divine omnipotence, since with God everything is possible, 671 thereby expressing the idea that salvation is also possible for the rich if they act in God’s way. He calls God the Lord of heaven and earth when he praises Him for what was revealed to babes from the wise men 672; He casually speaks about the beginning of the world and the end of the world 673. The personality of God is implied in His speeches about the will of God, about His conscious actions... It is not in these meager data that the Gospel teaching about the unity, omnipotence and spirituality of God is contained; it breaks through every line of his, comes through in every word. If we assume that God is not alone, that He is not omnipotent, that He is not a living person, then we will not understand a single line of the Gospel. The Gospel has a completely religious basis: everything is from God and everything to God, everything is from the power of God and for the glory of God. The Gospel is not an abstract philosophical system; it is rooted in living religious life. Relying entirely on a general religious basis, on the religious element of humanity, it does not teach about this basis for two reasons: firstly, because it takes this basis not in abstract thinking, but in living sensation, and secondly, because in this main part the religious experience is not specifically evangelical, but remains universal to mankind. Adhering to the highest human beliefs in the form of the religious experience of the Jewish people, a truly God-chosen, aristocratic-religious people, the Gospel reveals on this basis its own teaching about God the Father. And our own gospel teaching is given not in new religious concepts, but in new religious experience. The first fact of religious evangelical experience is the divine-absolute love of Christ. He was full of love. “Christ did not please Himself” 674: this is the historical characteristic of the New Testament Teacher, given by the Apostle of Languages ​​and completely consistent with the Gospel image. Throughout the entire gospel history, we do not see in the image of Christ a single trait of self-love or self-indulgence; on the contrary, His life was a continuous sacrifice. He was not afraid of the shame of communicating with sinners, he looked for the humiliated and lost, and did not hesitate before the horror of crucifixion. – Much more important than these external evidence is the self-awareness of Christ, His own testimony. He felt full of love. “I have loved you,” He said to His disciples 675. “I lay down My life for the sheep,” - this is how He defined His work 676. Throughout His entire life He saw the sacrifice of love 677. Gospel love, as it appears in these words of Christ and in all His speeches, is love that is alien to any partiality, inspired, spiritually absolute, truly divine. Such love is evident in the entire teaching of the Gospel, in its commandments and requirements; Christ Himself experienced such love. In one of the speeches of the Apostle Paul, we recall the words of the “Lord Jesus”, which “He Himself” said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” ( ) 678 . This deeply personal experience introduced a completely new current into the history of mankind, touched strings in the human soul that had never been heard, since all of humanity lived according to the empirically based rule that it is more blessed to take than to give, that it is better to accept sacrifices than to make sacrifices, that happiness is only in egoism and that self-denial is necessarily suffering and turns out to be essentially only suffering. And for the first time in the inner life of Christ, a new revelation is given - the bliss of love. It was not an abstract thought, a dream, a flight of imagination. It was a living feeling that colored my entire life, warming my entire soul. When Christ visited despised tax collectors, entered into fellowship with sinners, healed the ailments of the sick, “took upon Himself our infirmities and bore our illnesses” 679, laid down His soul for people, He lived and acted according to the blissful feeling of love. The bliss of sacrifice was foreseen even before Christ, and before Him the human heart opened before the sun of love and the soul of the elect with sweet trembling looked into the abyss of self-denial, but man never reached the end of the sacrifice, could never take his eyes off earthly blessings. No matter how high a person burdened with a burden rises to a mountain pass, unless he goes beyond the last edge of the peak, the weight will pull him back, and he will not feel the delight of complete relief, the bliss of the pass in the opposite direction: so people before Christ did not know the complete bliss of sacrifice, did not have divine love in themselves (οὐκἔχετε τὴν ἀγάπηντοῦ θεοῦ ) 680 . Only Christ, who carried within himself the natural mystery of closeness to God, was the first to reach the end of the sacrifice, the first to build his entire life on the bliss of self-denial, the first to be filled with the work of God to the fullest, to the point of forgetting about earthly food, about earthly blessings. It is easy to determine what significance this new revelation of spiritual life has in religious history. Whereas for the old man the image of a suffering righteous man was more a prophecy than a reality, because he always expected an external reward, in the face of Christ this image became a real truth: spiritual religious good became an internal reality for a person, he felt it as a self-sufficient, unconditional, limitless good. In the blissful feeling of absolute love and boundless self-denial, God moved into the human heart, incarnated in it - in other words, together with the experience of the absorbing bliss of love, man entered into the very reality of divine-absolute life, rose to the height at which for him all convention, looking back, and reckoning with heaven disappeared. Unlimited self-sacrifice is the only entrance into the divine sphere accessible to man, the only image of truly divine action possible for people. “No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, then God abides in us and His love is perfect in us... There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” 681. The religious experience of Christ was the complete opposite of what the human heart usually lives with: His love was a manifestation of non-human life. At the same time, it had the character of absoluteness, infinity: it was a phenomenon of an unearthly order. Therefore, gospel love is a revelation of divine love: love from God - ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν 682. And Christ saw in His love a manifestation of God’s love; in His entire life He contemplated the fulfillment of the will of God: “God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son” 683... Negative criticism is inclined to recognize these words, like the entire fourth Gospel, as the fruit of a theological mind. But this is not theology, this is not a logical conclusion, but a direct sensation, a direct spiritual experience. When Christ listened to His heart, to that all-encompassing wave of love that filled him, when He surrendered to the inspiration of love, which carried Him away from the earth and made Him alien to its limited interests, He could recognize the voice of His heart only as the voice of God, in His inspiration He heard the breath of God, in His love. He contemplated divine love: He felt Himself abiding in the love of God (μένωαὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ) 684. He was warmed by the warmth of love, ascended on its wings, felt its unearthly power - and He pointed to His deeds as the deeds of God, and to His life as a revelation of the Father. In other words, He attached epistemological significance to His religious experience: recognizing His love as divine love, in love He saw the reality of divine life. “God is love” (ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστ ί ν) 685, says the disciple of Christ. For the Jews, God is a being infinitely greater than the world. This is how every developed mind imagines God. Christ also spoke this religious language 686. But He introduces a new experiential feature into old religious ideas. God, who infinitely rises above the world, is not infinitely distant from it, but is close to us: He is revealed in love, He is known in love. Metaphysical-gnostic, abstract knowledge about God is not increased by this. We are not given the opportunity to know what God is in His being, detached from the world; but we are given to know what God is in the essence of His relations to the world and man, in His revelation: He is love for the world and man, He is revealed in love and is known in love. Since a person cognizes God experimentally, in the experience of divine love, this knowledge of God has the highest degree of persuasiveness and it is real knowledge. While Jews and pagans vainly sought to comprehend the being of God with their minds, and for them God remained an “unknown God,” the Gospel transfers the very divine absoluteness into the human heart and makes the experience of this absoluteness an inevitable condition for knowing God. Only one who has the love of God in himself can know him 687: one must become a son of God in order to know God 688, but a son has such real knowledge of God that he would be a liar if he said that he does not know Him 689. Epistemologically, the experience of divine love turns out to be a prior fact in divine-human relations, but genetically, evangelical love in the human heart reflects the love of God, so that the experimental knowledge of divine love is inextricably linked with faith in God’s love for the world and man. This is precisely the difference between the religious character of evangelical knowledge and abstract gnosis: in religious creativity, the epistemological outcome and genetic dependence coincide in one act of God-filial self-consciousness. Religious experience begins with filial knowledge, which contains, as immediately given, the fact of paternal authority 690. Spiritually-experiential knowledge of God establishes a new relationship between man and Him, which is called in the Gospel the filial relationship with God. In the Old Testament, sonship with God indicated the choice of a person from among others and his messiahship, anointing for a certain cause, for certain purposes. Evangelical sonship with God has a completely different meaning, internal: it is based on internal experience. The filial relationship of man to God and the fatherly relationship of God to man in the Gospel express their communication in love, their unity in love; in the Gospel, divine-sonship denotes divine-human relationships that are internally personal, completely intimate. How Christ Himself felt Himself abiding in the Father's love and God - abiding in Himself 691; so He commanded His disciples to abide in His love and to abide in Him 692. The Apostle of Christ remains completely faithful to his Teacher when he writes that everyone who loves is born of God and knows God 693. In the religious experience of Christ and according to His teaching, man’s sonship with God does not indicate the external relationship of being chosen by God and heavenly favor 694, but rather the internal communication of man with God, the commonality of their spiritual life, and intimate contact. “In Me the Father and I in the Father... I and the Father are one” 695. In this religious experience of Christ, something is given that is so intimate and original that from the outside, it is impossible to judge these divine-human relationships; they are inaccessible to external observation. It is not that God establishes a rank or dignity for the elect, and determines the type of His dealings with men; but the person himself, who has recognized himself as the son of God, gives himself entirely to God and receives all of God into himself, just as one drop reflects the entire sun. Therefore, the knowledge of God is both an exclusive property and an undoubted evidence of the divinely filial relationship. It is noteworthy that in such an understanding of intimate sonship one cannot see the features of the fourth Gospel. We find the same understanding among the weather forecasters, who convey the significant and mysterious words of Christ: “all things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the son, only the Father, and no one knows the Father, only the son and to whom the son wants to reveal” 696. The internal reality of the sonship of God and the knowledge of God is characterized by the fact that only the actual experience of divine life gives knowledge of the Father, and the complete intimacy of sonship with God and the inaccessibility of its external confirmation is evidenced by the fact that only the reverse knowledge of the son by the Father can be adequate to filial knowledge of God. Here it is jointly affirmed that internal sonship with God eludes any external, mental, theoretical comprehension, and that in the religious sense, filial experience is not a subjective dream, but it is filled by the response of the Heavenly Father, since filial knowledge of the Father is equal to knowledge of the Father. Unconditional epistemological subjectivity is balanced by the religious objectivity of sonship with God, and in it the roots of all the advantages of sonship with God are affirmed. All divine-filial privileges do not have a legal character and do not have the appearance of external dignity - they are all based on the internal reality of divine sonship and cross the boundaries of subjective illusoryness by the sole factual force of their content 697. The paternal relation of God to man, while appearing in the teaching of Christ, on the one hand, to be completely intimate, is revealed, on the other hand, to have a universal character. The intimacy of the gospel's sonship breaks the Old Testament limitations of God's chosenness and heavenly favor. In the religious evangelical experience, sonship with God infinitely deepens inside the individual and transcends those external historical boundaries in which God’s chosenness is carried out; by the reality of its good and factual absoluteness, it rises above any goals of visible anointing and is placed beyond any conceivable need for external sanction. However, this is not a natural universality, and the Gospel is erroneously commented on in terms of Stoic philosophy. According to the Gospel, God is the Father not because He is the creator of everything and the provider. “Look, the birds of the air neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, but your heavenly Father feeds them” 698. God created everything and He provides for the smallest birds, but He is not called their father, He is only the father of people: your heavenly Father feeds them. Likewise, people are not sons of God by nature: not all people are actually sons of God. “Do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or what to drink? or what to wear? - because the pagans are looking for all this and because your heavenly Father knows that you need all this” 699. God is the God of the Gentiles, but He is the father of only a select few. His providence for people is so universal that He warms the evil and the good with the rays of the sun and rains on the righteous and the unrighteous? those who have His all-encompassing love 700 become His sons. The category of persons for whom God is not a father is even directly named 701. All men are not in fact sons of God, but this is not because God's paternal attitude is limited to one chosen people, as the Jews thought, but because it has no natural basis. Evangelical sonship with God is equally alien to both folk-historical exclusivity and natural universality. It is not limited to legal features, but it is not reduced to natural necessity: it consists in the internal communication of a person with God, in the essential power (ἐξουσία) of intimate relationships with Him 702. From folk-historical limitations, the Gospel elevates man through the natural equality of all to the religious creativity of the individual. According to the teachings of Christ, God is the father of the one who has God in the depths of his own heart: sonship with God is neither in right nor in nature, it is a fact of internal experience in the entire depth of the creative personality. Christ did not come from nature and history to man; on the contrary, He proceeded from his own experience, from religious freedom. According to the Gospel, it is not God who creates the son, but the son has the Father in himself and shows Him to the world. God creates man, but man becomes a child of God (τέκνα θεοῦ γενέσθαι). Evangelical sonship with God is intimate and self-born. But these are both the foundations and features of evangelical universalism. As a completely intimate and personal, evangelical sonship with God is not bound by any historical or natural boundaries. In the kingdom of the gospel good there are no national-historical or externally natural advantages; there is no historical or physical predestination here - this is the bright kingdom of inner freedom and divine-human rationality. It cannot be said in an absolute sense that anyone could be a son of the Heavenly Father, since the deepest roots of sonship with God are hidden in the mystery of “attraction” by the Father and since the actual presence of sons exhausts the problematic possibility; but the important thing is that nature and history cannot place any boundaries on the sonship of God. In the direction of national characteristics and natural talents, sonship with God is limitless. And what is even more important is that the evangelical sonship of God is spreading in all the peculiarities of its inner originality. Here the subsequent relates to the preceding not as a copy to the original, imitation to originality, memory to a fact, but the one who gives birth is reproduced by the begetter, the teacher by the student, from the side of his inner originality, in the strength of his originality. The student, having improved, becomes like the teacher. There are no degrees or conventional gradation, no intermediary barriers, but each new member of the kingdom of God is placed in direct relationship with the Father and each is decisively equalized with others. In terms of historical significance, differences are possible, since subsequent ones replace the previous ones, and only one can be the first. But no matter how far this difference extends and no matter how deep the mystical foundations of the birth of the firstborn (ἀπαρχὴ), in any case, in this spiritual realm, the one who gives birth gives birth to subsequent ones in “his own image and likeness,” which is why it is appropriate for them to be called friends. Although Christ is one, like the Heavenly Father is one, nevertheless His sonship of God is transmitted to others not as a commandment, not in weakening the medium, but in such a way that the dead, having heard the call of the Son of God, themselves become living sons, they themselves enter into communion of love with the Father 703. And this goes so far that even no one can enter the kingdom of the gospel blessings unless he is attracted by the Father 704. He who is freed by the Son becomes not a slave of the Son, but a truly free son 705. Evangelical sonship with God is intimate and personal and at the same time limitless from the natural and folk-historical side. This explains the fact that Christ did not teach about the Father of all people: He always spoke about the Heavenly Father of this or that son, certain sons. “My Heavenly Father” is the first fact of Christ’s religious consciousness and the first point in His teaching about God. The principle of the divinely filial intimacy of relations with the Heavenly Father, by virtue of which everyone born for the kingdom of God is born in the image and likeness of the one who gave birth, i.e. every born son of God is in an internal relationship with the Heavenly Father and has religious freedom and inherent value; this principle in no way absorbs the objective historical feature by which the “firstfruits” of the sons of God is the one Christ 706. On the contrary, all sons are equalized in terms of personal intimacy and freedom of internal relations to the Father, and not external rights and natural gifts - and it is precisely this equal self-bornness for all that makes it possible for everyone to have their own objective historical appearance and their place in the system of the kingdom of God. On this path, not only each son of God differs from every other, but also the first one differs from all subsequent ones. This difference in the “firstfruits,” without at all affecting the internal, divinely-born self-birth, which is equal for all, falls on the external relations of the birth of all from the previous one, except for the first, who not only has the Father in himself, but is also born from Him, so that he is the Son of God by nature. We will not delve into this mystery of Christ in this place, but it is necessary to keep it in mind in order to appreciate the fact that He distinguished His attitude towards God the Father from the attitude towards Him of other sons, His brothers, saying to them: “My Father and your Father, My God and your God” 707. – However, what is important is that even in this case, Christ calls other sons His brothers, thereby expressing that His own sonship with God, without repeating itself in the same relationships, is reborn in them in the intimate essence of sonship with God, so that each of them has his own Heavenly Father. Christ says to each of them: “your Heavenly Father” - this is the second point in His teaching about God. “When you do alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you... And when you pray, go into your room and, having shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” 708, etc. The relationship of each son of God to the Heavenly Father is its own relationship, constitutes an internal secret, has an internal bottomless depth and cannot be exhausted by any external views and images. – Unity here is possible through the unity of the Heavenly Father and the unity of Christ the teacher. And Christ said to the “little flock” of His disciples: “your Father.” “Fear not, little flock, for it has been your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” 709. He taught them to prayerfully call on God: “Our Father.” Nevertheless, this association has a secondary, derivative meaning, and not a primary and basic one. It not only has its reason in the love that fills the heart of each of Christ’s disciples and is socialized in their society by reciprocity, uniting them with church bonds, but also preserves for each personal freedom and absolute significance, since it is based on the equal self-bornness of all. This is a circular union of points, each of which is connected to the center by its own radius. The idea of ​​God-fatherhood and human sonship with God, flowing from the religious and creative experience of divine love, is the essential content of the evangelical religion. And the difference between this religion and the Old Testament is not only that there the name of the father was lost among the other names of God, but also that the Old Testament name of Jehovah the Father was itself an external representation of His love for man, for the Jewish people, so that Jehovah remains the Father, even if neither the eldest nor the youngest sons of the nomistic theocracy were worthy to be called His sons. The less this name of God gave in the sense of real experience, the more stable it was preserved as an objective religious thought and a support for material hopes. The pagan idea of ​​a natural God-patronymic name seems even more abstract. Meanwhile, the gospel idea of ​​God the Father is affirmed on the irreducible fact of inner experience, which in its presence forms the very essence of the new religion and which, if absent, cannot be replaced by anything. Given in the personal experience of God's sonship, the reality of divine absoluteness itself is expressed on the positive side in the fact that the idea of ​​God-fatherhood embraces not just one aspect of religion, but all its sides and all its depth, constitutes its center and completeness, and on the negative side - in the fact that with the absence of real experience, any support for an objective concept disappears. Without God-fatherhood there is absolutely no Christianity, and God-fatherhood cannot be given apart from sonship with God. That is why the disciple of Christ writes that “everyone who rejects the Son does not have the Father,” and that only he who abides in the Son abides in the Father 710. The evangelical religion is not a religion of abstract concepts and detached transcendence 711, but a religion of living experience, the mystical depth of real experiences, and personal creativity. To a superficial reader of the Gospel and an inexperienced or prejudiced thinker, it may even seem that the God of the Gospel is an impersonal principle of spiritual life. This pantheistic understanding of the Gospel does not deserve serious attention. The gospel is generally religious. In particular, evangelical love, as stated above, is epistemologically and genetically connected with divine love. Moreover, God loves his son, and faith in this love, as we will see below, is included in the content of the Christian religion. In its religious objectivity, the Gospel is not inferior to the Old Testament religion. Nevertheless, in this respect, too, the difference emerges that in the Gospel, religious objectivity to the most extreme extent does not lose touch with the reality of personal experiences. “Therefore the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life” 712. The difference from the old covenant is that it began with the love of Jehovah manifested in the election of the people, and the chosen people were required to respond to the beneficent love of God with grateful love, while in the new covenant nothing religious is accomplished apart from the actual experiences of the human heart. If here, too, genetically human love reflects divine love and is a response to it, then this happens not in the sense of a symmetrical correspondence of human affection to divine beneficence, but in the sense of a real kinship of both loves, in the sense of the actual divinity of the experiences of the human heart. Of the benefits of the evangelical religion, nothing is given by nature and by popular rights; the sons of the Heavenly Father are not born along with natural birth or popular election, they are fiant non naseuntur; but people become sons of God not from themselves, no matter how appropriate the efforts, but from God. It is better to say that the sons of the Heavenly Father are not born by nature, but are spiritually reborn. With all the clear rationality of the bright kingdom of God, evangelical love is inspired love. The less the Gospel is protected from nature and tradition, the less natural and religious-legal supports it has for the detached objectivity of religious thought and religious hopes, the less grounds it has for the calculated practice of legalistic work. In Christianity, in the end, everything depends on personal religious creativity - not on the calculated actions of a person, but on the living reality of religious inspiration. Therefore, evangelical sonship of God and evangelical love cannot be the subject of a commandment, command, or law. You can be a son of God, you can be reborn as a son of God, but you cannot strive to become one, to become one. The commandment is possible here too. But just as the initial “let there be” was a creative word; so the New Testament “be” (ἔσεσθε) 713 rests on the actual creativity of spiritual experience. Here the commandment of love is given by the one who himself has loved - the commandment of love coincides with the creative work of love, with its power of rebirth in one’s own image and likeness 714. In the sense of an external prescription, the commandment certainly has no place within the confines of the evangelical religion; sonship with God is absolutely unthinkable as an external ideal. The New Testament effort does not go beyond the limits accessible to the midwife, since in the kingdom of the Heavenly Father only Christ sows and only God grows, and man does not know how the seed grows. Emerging from the depths of the Old Testament religion, the aristocratic religion of God's chosen people, the evangelical faith is essentially aristocratic: it is the religion of the elect, 715 and not the religion of the crowd. Only this aristocracy is not a natural-national aristocracy - the evangelical personal chosenness of God is not nobility, but godhood, theogenism 716. The gospel religion is the religion of those born of God, marked by His seal. Many are called, but few are chosen 717. We will not add anything new and will only illuminate the same subject from a new perspective if we point out the absoluteness and boundlessness of gospel love. In formal terms, New Testament religion is characterized by the absence of any limitation and positive infinity. This is the meaning of the fact that the evangelical religious experience is the experience of divine life in all its reality. The formal boundlessness of religious experience must also correspond to the content of religion. This content of the evangelical religion is love. From the point of view of the basic formal character of Christianity, love, as a religious content, is therefore irreplaceable because only love, of all real experiences, can have the feature of absoluteness, only love can fill the absolute form of religion with content. Love alone can be divine and, on the contrary, the very concept of egoism contains the property of limitation. Love is essentially divine and only divine: “no one is good but God alone” 718. But it is clear that here we mean only divine goodness, only boundless love. Only this kind of love is spoken of in the Gospel, and not of the passionate affection that is characteristic of pagans. That the love by which Christ lived is divine love, boundless love, it is enough just to mention this, and we have already mentioned it. Now we mean that Christ, who loved people with boundless love and commanded His love to his disciples, taught them boundless love 719. Both in the experience of Christ and in His teaching, absolute love is understood. According to the Gospel of John, boundless love extends to death, to self-sacrifice 720; according to the Synoptic Gospels, she transcends the boundaries of blood relationship, social reciprocity and moral merit 721. One way or another, absoluteness is an integral property of evangelical love and the Christian religion in general. There is nothing more contrary to the meaning of the Gospel sermon than to consider the absolute Gospel commandments as optional advice or higher commandments, presupposing lower commandments, accessible to the majority and gradually leading to the highest degrees of perfection. No, the absolute commandments are the only commandments, the Gospels; They do not stand at the top of the Christian ladder, but Christianity ends and begins with them. The absoluteness of form and love as content - this is the only Christianity. “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” 722, i.e. “Be merciful, as your Father is merciful” 723, in other words, “be sons of your Father in Heaven” 724 - do not become, but be. Loving those who love and greeting brothers does not mean fulfilling the lowest level of the Christian commandment, but it means not acting like a Christian, acting like a pagan. All the power lies in the fact that Christianity is not in the right, not in the calculation of the mercy of heaven, but in reality, in absolute reality - it is not an expectation of the future, but an experience in the present. No mercy of God will give a person the benefits of absolute love, inspired boundlessness, if the spirit of such love does not breathe in his heart. The Gospel is not the fruit of soft sentimentality, it is a work of living creativity, a revelation of the Heavenly Father, and in it the gospel of the highest good is combined with the inexorable severity of spontaneous truth: good to those whom the Father draws, and judgment to those who cannot come. And further - in the same property of the irreplaceable reality of gospel love, lies the fact that absolute divine love in a person inevitably becomes his real love for people. The fullness of man’s divine love is that it is both love for God and love for man. If it were not love for God, it would lack objective religiosity and formal absoluteness; if it were not love for people, it would lack reality. To be complete divine love, it must be not only objective-religious and formal-absolute love for God, but also real love for people. The reality of love completes the fullness of its bliss: in order for the joy of the disciples to be complete, they are given the commandment to love each other with the greatest love, extending to self-sacrifice for friends 725. The commandment about love for people in the Gospel is not another commandment along with the commandment about God’s love, an addition to it, but it is included in that commandment, it contains it, it complements it. – God’s love in man, rising to religious love for God, is in essence a reflection of God’s love for the world and people. To have the love of God within you means not only to love God, but also to love people and the world with God’s love, divine-absolute love. God-filial self-consciousness includes, as an irremovable element, an anthropocentric element, i.e. a person's awareness of his central position in the world. This is not in the sense in which the first man was tempted to take the place of God, and not in the sense of natural predestination or folk-historical pre-election, as this idea is possible in naturalistic or folk religions, but in the active sense of the religious and ethical creativity of man. The Son of God carries all of God within Himself and shows Him to the world, represents Him in nature and history. He is not anointed for any particular work, but He represents the whole of God to the whole world and represents the whole world to God - He displays all the love of God to the world. And such is not only the firstborn (πρωτότοκος) son, Christ and Savior, but every son of God, since this anthropocentricity relates to the essence of sonship with God. In God's filial self-awareness, there is an essential feeling of intimate communication between God and man, there is the idea of ​​God's dwelling in man, His incarnation. Just as everyone feels physical life only in himself, and therefore for everyone his own life is in the natural realm the highest reality and the highest value, even if he imagines other living beings, imagines not only his descendants, but also his parents; and in the spiritual realm the highest reality belongs to personal sonship with God. In living experience, everyone is only an instrument of God’s relationship to the world - and every son of God accomplishes all of God’s work, expresses God’s entire relationship to the world, and shows absolute divine love for people. The division of divine love into two separate types - love for God and love for neighbor - is completely impossible, since love for God without corresponding absolute love for man would be an abstract and empty absoluteness. This thought is expressed with complete clarity by the apostle, who calls love for God without love for one’s neighbor a lie and points out the commandment of Christ that he who loves God should also love his brother 726. But this very thought is also contained in the famous words of Christ about worshiping the Father in spirit and truth: God is spirit and He should be worshiped in spirit and truth (ἐν πνεύματι καὶἀληθε ίᾳ) 727. In biblical language, the spirituality of God means His power, vitality, transcendence, absoluteness, and the spirituality of serving Him means inspiration. Gospel absoluteness is in unlimited love, and serving God in the spirit is nothing other than serving Him spiritually, i.e. divine-absolute love. But the Father, as God the spirit, must be worshiped not only in spirit, but also in truth, since, according to the Apostle, one must love not in word or tongue, but in deed and truth (ἐν ἔργ ῳ καὶἀληθε ίᾳ) 728, one must have not only love for God, but also for one’s neighbor: Gospel love is absolute and real love. But, it goes without saying, just as it is impossible to separate the absoluteness of gospel love from its reality, so it is impossible to separate the reality of gospel love for people from its absoluteness. The Gospel absolutely does not give us the opportunity to identify the religion of love with social benefit. When one woman, in a rapture of love, poured a pound of precious ointment on Jesus’ feet and was reproached for this by vulgar souls who remembered the poor, Christ answered them: “You always have the poor with you” 729. The Gospel, commanding alms on every line, knows deeds that are higher than utilitarian evaluation, generated by the absoluteness of love, its aspiration to heaven. It values ​​the very divinity of love, regardless of its social benefits; It also demands absoluteness from alms and charity. In these properties—absoluteness and reality—evangelical love is so different from the Old Testament that Christ called His commandment about love new. The Old Testament demanded from man boundless love for God, but this was an external requirement, which expressed the objective supra-mundaneity of God, His infinite superiority over man, and which could be realized in the conditions of the social system. It is equally characteristic of the Old Testament that complete devotion to the one God was clothed in the form of an external commandment, and that the boundlessness of devotion to the one God could not correspondingly manifest itself in social good, but had next to it another commandment about nationally limited love for one’s neighbor. Old Testament love was human devotion to God and human affection for one's neighbor, but it was not the divine love of man for man and the world. Evangelical love appears in the illumination of God-filial self-awareness as a phenomenon of an order that is not natural-historical, not human-earthly, but divine-spiritual. Essential to the Gospel is the concept of new revelation, new life, new creation 730. The divine revelation, regardless of the number of its bearers, the sons of God, forms a new trend in world history, which decisively does not coincide with natural and social development. With the first glimpse of God-filial self-awareness, with the first sensation of boundless love, along with the natural-historical order, a new force in the world system was revealed. The bliss of divine love is experienced by a person who recognizes himself as a son of God as a self-evident reality. And since this is absolute love, bliss in its own power turns out to be inexhaustible and limitless. However, this power of internal bliss does not cover natural-historical life, and the latter confronts the divine-son self-consciousness in the meaning of external material that has yet to be overcome. In relation to this external reality, sonship with God is determined by faith, and the son of God not only experiences divine love, but also believes in God’s love for man: Christian love is believing love. Using the Gospel, you can study the philology and psychology of faith - different combinations of the word believe, different meanings of faith (somehow trust, believe), stages of faith, the relationship of faith to knowledge. But these aspects of faith are not characteristic of the Gospel and pass by its content, its own teaching, which is associated not with the outer shell, but with the inner grain of faith. We must dwell on that fundamental side of faith, which constitutes an integral part of true religion (πίστις θεοῦ) 731 and is implied both in the words of the apostles, who prayed to Christ to increase their faith 732, and in the words of Christ, who prayed that their faith would not become impoverished 733: in this essence, faith cannot be evangelical without a certain content. The Gospel Heavenly Father is the God of love. The first religious-evangelical question from a natural-historical point of view is the question about the power of the Heavenly Father, about the natural-historical power of love. In answering this question, the Gospel begins with ancient religious beliefs, adjoins ancient religious experience. Using the language of Old Testament religion and even strengthening it, it says: “with God all things are possible” 734. The Gospel applies this idea of ​​​​divine omnipotence to the New Testament kingdom of divine love in both initial moments - the initial and the final. Directing the attention of the sons of God to the final natural-historical fate of the bearers of divine love, it predicts the triumph of divine truth. Whatever the appearance of the historical process, victory will be on the side of God and those born of Him 735: the Heavenly Father was pleased to give the kingdom to the small flock of His sons, His meek worshipers will inherit the earth, the last joy is guaranteed for them 736. This final promise is answered by the initial reality of the gospel kingdom, its initial miraculous power: the preaching of the gospel was revealed in power and spirit. In accordance with such final promises and with such an initial foundation of the kingdom of God, the evangelical faith is an omnipotent force: “all things are possible to him who believes” 737. Evangelical faith forms the condition under which the sovereignty of the Heavenly Father is exercised in nature and history. This is, in its own way, ἀρχὴτῆςκινήσεως, the beginning of a divine movement emanating from man, not naturally necessary, but spiritually free. This beginning is valuable because the spiritually absolute action of the Heavenly Father, in contrast to natural creation and the historical providence of God, cannot be realized without the free effort inherent in the world itself. Such a free impulse towards divine absoluteness, opening the way to the almighty power of the Heavenly Father, is faith. Christian faith is the same absolute love that fills the human heart, but not in the peace of eternity, not in internal complacency, but in the movement towards natural-historical visibility, towards victory over nature and the world. As born from love, evangelical faith takes from it the property of absoluteness. Faith in God, in His omnipotence, and omnipotent faith are one and the same thing. Christian faith in God is divinely absolute, and the Gospel demands from us no less than an omnipotent faith. The duty of such faith is affirmed in the power of divine love. We must have faith to prepare victory for the Heavenly Father. Without our faith, His spiritual omnipotence will not manifest itself, and vice versa - nothing is impossible for a believer. Such faith determines the position of man in nature and history. Those chosen by the Heavenly Father are loved by Him and are under His primary protection. They are dearer to Him than all creatures. Even the hairs on their heads are numbered. Fear should have no place in their hearts and worries about the body should not disturb their souls. The Heavenly Father, who adorns the lilies of the field and feeds the ravens, will all the more provide for the life of His beloved sons. worrying about tomorrow and being afraid of everything that kills the body is characteristic of the people of this world; and believers have a Father in Heaven who knows their needs. They will receive whatever they ask in prayer with faith. The Heavenly Father will give good things to those who ask Him and will protect His chosen ones. In the difficult moment of persecution, they will not need to worry about how or what to respond to the persecutors: the spirit of their Father will speak in them 738. These were speeches that were understandable to the mind of the Old Testament man, who remembered the miracles created for him by God, and who was encouraged to place his hope in God and not to tempt Him with his unbelief in His miraculous power 739 . However, this coincidence of the Gospel with the Old Testament is a coincidence at one point of two straight lines going in different directions. The Old Testament, based on the idea of cosmological anthropocentrism and folk-historical chosenness of God, came to the concept of divine arbitrariness in nature and history, since God, ruling nature and nations for man and specifically for the righteous, for Israel obedient to Him, subordinated the visible phenomena of natural-historical life to ethical purposes: He, in the words of Amos, shed rain on one city, but did not shed rain on another city 740. On the contrary, the ethical anthropocentrism of the Gospel, nourished by the inner absoluteness of the spirit, can do without the arbitrariness of the natural-historical providence of God, peacefully coexists with the natural-historical necessity, which fills the visible gap between the initial miraculousness and eschatological promises. The final victory of the God of love in nature and history is not the direct result of the initial miraculousness, so that both are apparently torn apart, whereby the initial miraculousness is a symbolic garment of inner spirituality, and the last aspirations, directly connected, like fruit, with the inner matter, are covered on the natural side with an incomprehensible mystery. On this issue, the Gospel teaching is revealed in the sense of the Gospel history, to which we refer in essence. In general, the Gospel teaching about God the Father is based on facts and religious experience. But while the experience of divine love is limited to the inner world of man and almost does not enter into the external flow of nature and history, evangelical faith crosses this line, since it embraces nature and history, and therefore the gospel teaching about faith is given in the very course of evangelical history. By it we learn that religious-spontaneous inspiration and the miraculous protection of heaven, while not constituting the highest good, symbolically cover the freedom of spiritual absoluteness. The Gospel story calls believers to overcome a miracle, to overcome the pneumatic element. The Gospel gives us no less than the ancient religion, but not in order to stop at the latter stage, but in order to lead us further, to the perfect freedom of the spirit of Christ, the spirit of self-sacrificing love. Adjacent to this sense of the history of gospel miracles, to this experience of gospel pneumaticity, is the original gospel teaching about faith. The Gospel decomposes the national-historical experience of the Old Testament into natural and historical laws and exposes. God's providence in relation to the righteous in the light of these laws. His teaching is far from coinciding with the drab dreams of that weak faith, which is neither warm nor cold, and cannot resolutely stick to either earth or heaven. The Gospel is a book of great souls and high impulses. And in the matter of faith, it achieves such freedom and boldness of spirit that cannot be contained within the boundaries of lukewarmness. It brings us to naked nature, puts us face to face with its cold mechanism, with its flow, indifferent to moral values. The sun shines on the evil and on the good, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust 741: this is the truth of the gospel; in which the spirit of the Old Testament is not heard. In these phenomena one can see the face of an “indifferent” nature. We distinguish between evil and good, righteous and unrighteous, but for nature there is no such distinction, for it everyone is equal, its order is a different order, its laws are different. It is easy to see that the Gospel image of nature, which indifferently warms and irrigates everyone, has a reverse side, a rear part: if the sun shines not only for the good, but also for the evil, then hail knocks out the arable land of not only the evil, but also the good, and fire devours the home of both the unrighteous and the righteous. “And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying: Rabbi, who sinned, he himself or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered; neither he nor his parents sinned" 742. Nature does not act according to ethical laws; its phenomena follow other norms. Such is the course of history. And it follows its own laws, cold and inexorable, indifferent to ethical assessment - and it flows on the other side of good and evil. “Some told Him about the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And he answered them: Do you think that these Galileans were more sinners than all the Galileans, that they suffered so? No, I tell you... Or those eighteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were more guilty than all the people living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you" 743. Thus the Gospel places us on the same point of view as religious pessimism, and fully accepts its observation that the same fate befalls the righteous and the wicked, the good and the evil, the pure and the unclean, the sacrificer and the non-sacrificer, the virtuous and the sinner 744 . It is noteworthy that this pessimistic motive is not forgotten in the exhortation not to worry about food and clothing. Among the two didactic instructions on ravens and lilies, it is said that no one, by caring, can add one cubit to his height (cannot make a single hair white or black): if it is not given to us to do even the slightest, why worry about the rest? 745 In any case, suffering, persecution, humiliation are predicted for the sons of the Heavenly Father... Nevertheless, the Gospel, as alien to frivolous hopes for divine arbitrariness, is also far from the extremes of fatalistic pessimism. Recognizing to the fullest extent the natural-historical necessity, it does not bring the heterogeneity of the natural and spiritual spheres to the dualism of the natural and spiritual kingdoms, but establishes harmony between them. This constitutes the highest result of the evangelical faith. It seeks the reconciliation of necessity and freedom not through the ancient path of cosmological anthropocentrism and historical God's chosenness, but through the new path of ethical anthropocentrism. Two ideas are put forward - the idea of ​​the universal love of God, which knows no natural-historical boundaries and brings the natural-historical process closer to the boundlessness of divine love, and the idea of ​​complete self-denial of believers, removing the burden of natural law from the human soul. Fatalistic pessimism is overcome by the power of faith, since the evangelical faith is a completely free faith. It borrows nothing from nature and history; it grows stronger in the human heart and from here brings ethical illumination into nature and history. The phenomenon that the sun warms the evil and the good and rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous is accepted by faith in the sense that God sends sunlight and rain not only to the good, but also to the evil; for her, the love of God is visible in beneficent phenomena of nature, and the presence of these phenomena is enough to put the universal love of God beyond doubt. Therefore, from the laws of nature, illuminated and warmed by the warmth of faith, an ethical conclusion is drawn about universal love - about love not only for the good, but also for the evil, not only for friends, but also for enemies: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your heavenly Father” 746. In the heart of the believer, the indifferent phenomena of nature and history are processed into ethical order. If beneficent phenomena evoke gratitude, then destructive and calamitous phenomena generate repentance. The eighteen Galileans killed by Pilate, crushed by the tower of Siloam, were not more guilty than all those living in Jerusalem and listening to the preaching of Christ, but this does not protect the latter from ethical lessons: “no, Christ told them; but if you do not repent, you will all also perish." 747. It doesn’t matter whether you die or not perish at the hand of Pilate, what matters is whether you die in repentance or without repentance, to die the “death of the righteous” or the death of the wicked. Therefore, if there is a danger of perishing, then the survivors should look at their lives as the time left for them to repent. They are like a fig tree, which the owner had already decided to cut down for its fruitlessness, but the vinedresser left for another year to test whether it will now bear fruit 748. Likewise, about the times of His coming, the times of a terrible revolution in history and nature, like a flood, Christ predicts that then man will be a plaything in the hands of natural and historical forces: there will be two on the field, one will perish, and the other will be preserved; there will be two grinding at the millstone, one will be taken, and the other will remain; two will be on the same bed, one will be taken, and the other will be left. But what conclusion follows from this? “Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord will come” 749. It is not given to us to know the day of the Lord’s coming, because spiritual value cannot be expressed in natural-historical terms. We don't need to know this. It is important for us how this day will find us: blessed is the servant whom the master, when he comes, finds doing good, and woe to the slave whom he finds in evil deeds. We must always be ready for anything in order to preserve our moral dignity, in order to meet natural and historical disasters with unshakable moral support in our own hearts. It is precisely this derivation of ethical lessons from both beneficial and disastrous phenomena of nature and history, this attention to one’s moral tasks that puts a person above the fear of these phenomena. The friends of the Son of God are commanded not to fear those who kill the body and then are unable to do anything more; They are commanded to fear the One who can plunge into Gehenna, Who rules not only over the body, but also over the soul - this is Whom to fear 750. This own moral assessment of external events and the resulting internal value of the person himself is what makes him more valuable than many small birds or, figuratively speaking, among the sons of the kingdom, “even the hairs of the head are all numbered.” The Gospel does not reveal to us the secrets of the superstellar world, does not reveal times and periods, does not gnostically explain natural and historical processes, does not promise us magical means to influence the natural evolution of events; it limits our attention to our own moral tasks, it shows us the path of spiritual influence on the outside world. And if in this regard the beneficent phenomena of nature show us an example of the universal love of the Heavenly Father, then destructive and disastrous events outline for us a method of new activity, supernatural love, so that in ourselves these and other external events are equalized. It is not given to us to know why the Galileans died and whether they were more guilty than others, or why a man was born blind, but we probably know what we should do. Being born blind is not explained by the sin of the person himself or his parents, but gives us a reason to demonstrate the work of God, the work of divine love 751. This limitation of attention to one’s own moral world, abstinence from Gnostic reasoning about the course of world life, about causes and goals lying outside of us, this elevation of creative moral energy to the level of self-sufficient power, protects the sons of the kingdom from the despair of fatalism, gives them the strength to step over the dualistic abyss. Active human love, either reflecting divine love or bringing it into world life, is dressed in the indestructible armor of complete self-denial, with which the Christian faith is inextricably linked. And the indication of the ravens that God feeds, and the lilies of the field, beautifully dressed, this indication is found in the speech, which as a whole contains an exhortation not to physical carelessness and industrial inactivity, but to moral self-denial. To understand the gospel words about the birds of the air, which do not sow, do not reap, and do not gather into barns, and about the lilies of the field, which do not toil or spin, there is no need to imagine the fertile southern sky, where nature supplies man with everything he needs without any effort on his part. The ideal of a sparrow's carefreeness and prosperity is not the gospel ideal. On the contrary, the Gospel does not deny the legitimacy of worries about what to drink, what to eat and what to wear; it does not teach that God will free man from physical care. Of course, if you sow, you will not reap. It only says that the causal dependence of the harvest on the sowing constitutes the order of natural life, and not of religious life; in this causality and in everyday concerns there is no religion - all this is sought by the pagans, the people of this world. Sowing and reaping is natural, but not sacred. Religion forms a different order of phenomena, which is the fruit of free faith. The Gospel together eliminates frivolous hopes for the magical discovery of divine power in a person’s everyday life and does not allow his soul to freeze in the shackles of everyday worries. It teaches that man himself must rise above the natural order and create the kingdom of the Heavenly Father. In the natural order, not only the evil and the good are equalized, but here you cannot add one cubit to your height or change the color of one hair: here everything is everyday, conditional, limited. The natural providence of God is enough to equate a person with a sparrow, but not enough to place a person above a sparrow. The unconditional value of life must originate in a person’s own heart, and it can embrace the entire natural background of life only with the absoluteness of self-denial. Joyful submission to the natural course of events, inspired by boundless self-forgetfulness - this is what brings divine content into everyday life, which places man above the natural order. “Father! everything is possible for You, but not what I want, but what You want” 752: such is the Christian faith. In terms of wealth, a person must place himself on a par with the birds that God feeds, but through the power of self-denial, he must become infinitely superior to them. The natural order is the same for the sons of God with the birds and the heathen; but his carelessness is not the carelessness of a sparrow or the pagan hope in God, but the carelessness of boundless self-denial. Christ first addresses the instruction on carelessness not to the poor, but to the wealthy, demanding that they “sell their possessions and give alms” 753. He calls the rich man crazy who collected treasure for himself, and not for God, who became rich 754. Material security, shaded by dull complacency and short self-confidence, leads to true madness, from which a person is freed only if he prepares for himself an inexhaustible treasure in heaven, if he creates a new world with selfless love and boundless faith. The Gospel does not promise to replace human care with divine magic, but it calls on man himself to bring into the world a new stream, religious, elevating man above natural necessity. That is why, turning after the rich man to the persecuted, it does not change its word, because the religious world is one for everyone and equally elevates both the believing rich man and the persecuted above nature. It calls on the persecuted not to fear those who kill the body, but to fear only God. It does not promise him safety from those who kill the body, it only puts him above animal fear. Man himself must make himself more valuable than many birds and place himself above both the sparrow's security and animal fear. What is natural carelessness for a bird, for the son of the kingdom should become the highest feat. The laws of nature for him are the same as for sparrows and ravens, and the laws of history for him are the same as for a pagan; but he himself becomes more expensive than a sparrow and higher than a pagan. “Seek first the kingdom and its righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” 755: God’s magical intervention in the natural world seems to be promised. But this is a deceptive appearance; the correction is given by the deed itself. The same thing happens to those who seek first the kingdom of God as happened to Saul. When Saul, in search of donkeys, went to the prophet and found a kingdom here, for him the question of donkeys became too insignificant. So the one who knows the inner good of complete self-denial becomes infinitely higher than what the pagans are looking for. And he needs to sow and reap, but he will not put his soul into this work, his heart will not be here, and none of this, by seduction or fear, will keep him from heaven. Here it is necessary to distinguish between “the only thing needed”, worthy of a person and making him a man, capturing the whole soul, and everything else that is equal among the sons of the kingdom with the pagans and even with animals. Only under this condition is it easy to understand why those who pray with faith will always receive what they ask for. If it is said that the Heavenly Father will give good things to those who ask Him, then we must remember that the first gospel good is the Holy Spirit 756, the possession of which relates to other earthly blessings in the same way as receiving a kingdom to insignificant lost donkeys, since there is no benefit to a person if he gains the whole world, but damages his soul, and it is impossible to balance the values ​​of human life with any external goods 757. Such faith, based on the completeness of internal good, in boundless self-sacrifice acquires internal freedom and independence from external fate. The ancient prophet, for all the height of his contemplations, did not rise above the limitations of the Jewish religion, weakened in his trust in God, Who seemed to him a deceptive source, unfaithful water 758. Such a collapse is impossible for the evangelical faith: it overcomes all pressure and vicissitudes of fate, it is victoriously heard in the dying cry: “Father! I commit my spirit into Your hands" 759. Absolute evangelical love represents in the system of world life the power of a completely new order, not human-earthly, but spiritual-divine. Through faith, this power becomes active in the world: Christian love has universal tasks. And if Christianity has nothing in common with religious magic, if it does not connect its final expectations directly with the initial miracle of the Gospel, then this does not mean that it renounces world goals. Without getting lost in cultural-historical paths and without being embarrassed by the invisibility of its significant impact on the nature of the world, the inexpressibility of its absolute spirituality in natural-historical terms and forms, the Gospel is not confined to the narrow confines of subjectivity. The Gospel is most alien to the consciousness and subjectivity of spiritual good and, on the contrary, based on its heterogeneity with worldly appearance, it transcends space-time boundaries by the power of faith. In divine-filial intimacy, objective universality is included and in spiritual absoluteness there is an eschatological moment, although for the consciousness of the Gospel there is no other adequate expression other than the internal absoluteness of the spirit... Mf. XIX, 26; MP. X, 27; Onion. XVIII. 27. Matt. V, 45; VI, 26; XVIII, 14, etc. Is. LIII, 4; Matt. VIII, 17. Matt. X, 28; XI, 25; MP X, 27; XIV, 36. As it is in Matt. III, 17 and XVII, 5; IV, 3 6; XXVI, 63; XXVII, 40 – 43 (and par.). John III, 35; V, 20, etc. John VIII, 42 Wed. V, 42. John V, 25; XIV, 23; XVI, 27; ХVII, 26. John VIII, 36. – The personal sonship of Christ can be considered from two sides - from the side of the historical significance and natural foundations of His sonship of God - that which is embraced in the name of Christ and is not repeated in other sons of God, and from the side of the internal essence of sonship of God, repeated in other sons. In this place we are talking only about the latter, since now we are talking only about the essence of the gospel sonship of God. This peculiarity of Christ, considered in His relation to the world, turned into His decisive loneliness. But now we are talking about something else. Onion. XII, 32 Wed. Matt. V, 16. 45. 48 and many more. etc. Natural and folk-historical life also provide experience, not from the point of view of a fully developed personality, which does not entirely go into the natural and historical spheres; this experience degenerates first into symbolic images and then into abstract concepts, which is why naturalistic and folk religions, at the highest stages of development, inevitably come to artificial mysteries and philosophical Gnosticism. Both are essentially alien to Christianity. John XIII, 34; XV, 9. 12. John XV, 16.19; Onion. XVIII, 7. Someone said to Christ: “What good shall I do (what good shall I do) in order to have eternal life?" Christ answered: “Why are you asking Me about good things (τ ί με ἐρωτ ᾷ ς περὶ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ)? No one is good except God alone” (Matt. XIX, 16. 17 par.) To be good means to live according to God, according to absolute standards, i.e. not to fulfill the Old Testament law with its social limitations, but to give away all one’s property... Matt. V, 43 – 48; Luke VI, 35 – 36. Matt. IX, 17; XIII, 52; XXVI, 28 par. John XIII, 34. Matt. XIX, 26; MP. X, 27; Onion. XVIII, 27. Onion. XII, 32; Matt. V, 5; John XVI, 20. Mf. IX, 23 Wed Matt. XVII, 20; XXI, 21. Matt. VI, 25 – 34; VII, 7 – 11; X, 18 – 20; 29 – 31; XXI, 22; MP. XI, 24; XIII, 11; Onion. XII, 6 – 7; 22 – 31; XVIII. 1 – 8. Deut. VIII, 3 – 5; Psalm. LXXVII; HS, 11. John IX, 1 – 3. Of course, it is a completely different matter when a person himself, through a sinful life, brings himself to illness (Mp. II, 5 - C). The empirical connection of sin with illness is one thing, but the transference of our legal views into nature is another. The area of ​​sins leading to illness does not coincide with the entire area of ​​sin. Onion. XII, 25. 27; Mf. VI, 27 (V, 36). Mf. V. 44. 45; Onion. VI, 35. Onion. XII, 4.5; Matt. X,28 Mf. VI, 33; Luke XII, 31. M f. VII, 11= Luke. XI, 13. Matt. XVI, 26; Matt. VIII, 36. 37; Onion. IX, 25. You might be interested in: