Lecture 26: The Pastoral Letters: False Teachers, Godly Leaders, and the Questions of First Timothy 2

The lecture, section by section

1. One unit, three occasions

   Since the eighteenth century, First and Second Timothy and Titus have been studied together, three distinct letters with three occasions but common language and themes. Behind each stands deviation from the faith: from the end of the first missionary journey to the end of his life, Paul battled false teachers rising against the churches. In Ephesus the teachers want to be teachers of the Law, confidently asserting what they do not understand, probably men influenced by the Judaizers rather than the Judaizers themselves; and Paul's antidote, throughout all three letters, is the installation and protection of the right kind of leaders.

2. Shipwrecked leaders at Ephesus

   Strikingly, the named false teachers of the Timothy letters are former insiders. Hymenaeus and Alexander professed and taught the faith, then rejected faith and a good conscience and suffered shipwreck, becoming blasphemers whom Paul delivered over to Satan, discipline aimed at their coming to their senses. In Second Timothy, Hymenaeus reappears with Philetus, whose word spreads like gangrene, teaching that the resurrection has already taken place, a realized eschatology that upends the faith of some. Fee's inference, which Essex shares as probable though not explicit, is that these were former elders: Paul had warned the Ephesian elders at Miletus that from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things; and the caution of 1 Timothy 3 against installing a new convert suggests the church had promoted men before they were ready, and Satan made instruments of them.

3. Crete's different front

   Titus faces a rawer situation: elders have not yet been appointed in every city, and the troublers are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, Judaizers upsetting whole families for sordid gain, finding ready recruits in a population their own poet described as liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons, a description Paul cites as simply accurate of unregenerate Cretan character. Titus must silence the deceivers and, before all else, set what remains in order by appointing elders in every city.

4. The faith, sound teaching, and godliness

   The letters' vocabulary carries the burden. The faith, with the article, is the deposited body of truth from which some have turned away; faith without the article is the faithfulness and good conscience the shipwrecked rejected. Sound teaching means healthy teaching, opposed to diseased teaching that breeds spiritual disease, for in the pastorals doctrine and life are organically joined: sound teaching produces godly living, ungodly living traces to diseased teaching, or in S. Lewis Johnson's maxim Essex loves to quote, teaching is the root, godliness is the fruit, and you cannot have the fruit without the root. Six times comes the marker, this is a trustworthy statement, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners chief among them; and godliness, a term for taking one's belief seriously in visible life, names the goal. Essex's application is blunt: where churches see ungodliness, the remedy is not a dose of law but a diet of truth, and the modern de-emphasis of doctrine is the enemy, not the servant, of holy living.

5. Elders and deacons

   Paul's standing defense of the churches is godly leadership. Titus 1:9 defines the eldership's core: holding fast the faithful word, able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict, teachers, exhorters, and, in Essex's phrase, heresy sniffers, since most heresy sounds plausible, as the liberal reduction of Christianity to love God, love people illustrates: a slight, logical-sounding deviation that wreaked havoc where elders failed to refute it. Between elders and deacons the qualification lists differ at exactly one point: the elder must be able to teach; nothing about teaching is required of deacons, who hold the faith with a good conscience and serve under the elders' direction, the pattern of the Seven of Acts 6, which Essex takes as the deaconate's model rather than its formal beginning. Deacons are no second class, and the deaconate is a natural seedbed of future elders; but where eldership answers a permanent need, teaching and refuting, the deaconate exists wherever elders need such God-given helpers, always under their authority.

6. Church order, and God our Savior

   First Timothy 2 and 3 give conduct for the household of God, the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth: the men praying, the women adorned with good works and receiving instruction, the qualifications of overseers and deacons. Chapter 5 orders the church's care: honor for widows who are widows indeed, family responsibility before church support, and Timothy's relationships with older and younger, men and women. Woven through the letters is the title Savior, applied about half the time to the Father and half to Christ: the God who desires all men to be saved and, through the finished work of Christ, accomplishes salvation.

7. First Timothy: occasion, purpose, and shape

   After release from the first imprisonment, Paul's plans had changed: Spain could wait, for the eastern churches, Colossae's error, the dogs circling Philippi, needed shoring up, so he went east first, dealt with Ephesus, and moved on to Macedonia, leaving Timothy behind. First Timothy, written about AD 63, exhorts and instructs Timothy, and through the public reading the Ephesian church, to stop the influence of the false teachers and restore order. Like Galatians, and only Galatians, the letter has no opening thanksgiving: the elongated prologue moves straight to the charge, I urged you to remain at Ephesus to instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, grounded in Paul's own conversion and commission, and renewed against Hymenaeus and Alexander. The body then orders conduct in the church, chapters 2 and 3, and directs Timothy's own ministry, chapters 4 through 6: pay attention to yourself and your teaching, and let no relationship in the church, older men, older women, younger men, younger women, widows, elders, negate the ministry of the word.

8. Titus and the Cretan mission

   Acts records no Cretan evangelism, so the island's churches belong to the release years: having revisited the established churches, Paul returned to pioneer work where Christ was not named, perhaps first to Spain, if Clement of Rome's limit of the west is so read, then Crete on the way back, then Nicopolis. Leaving Crete's young churches, he assigned Titus the work he and Barnabas once did in Galatia: appoint elders in every city. The letter, some two or three years after First Timothy, exhorts and instructs Titus, and through him the churches of Crete, to stop the false teachers: a salutation naming Titus his true child in a common faith, the charge to appoint elders who exhort in sound doctrine and refute contradiction, a body of conduct in the church and the world, with Titus himself the model for younger men, and the epilogue with its travel plans.

9. Second Timothy: the last letter

   Arrested again about AD 67, Paul writes from Rome facing death: the first defense is past, and as a citizen he awaits the sword. The letter summons Timothy, come before winter, bring the cloak, only Luke is with me, Demas has deserted; and because Timothy may not arrive in time, it doubles as succession: Timothy, Paul's kindred spirit, is to carry on the ministry of the gospel entrusted to Paul even after Paul's death, continuing as his representative and entrusting what he has heard to faithful men who will teach others also, the relay by which, Essex reminds his students, the apostolic doctrine reached the present room. Here the thanksgiving returns, for Timothy's sincere faith, before the exhortations to steadfastness, to unashamed workmanship, to preach the word in season and out, and the long, newsy epilogue that tells Timothy where every co-worker has gone, in case he arrives to an empty house. Whether Timothy reached Rome in time, Scripture does not say; the possibility that he would not is why we have the letter.

10. The pastoral shelf

    Two outstanding Greek commentaries now serve the letters: George Knight's NIGTC and William Mounce's WBC, one of the two finest in its series, written while its author, at an institution Essex leaves unnamed, took real grief for his conclusions, which explains its occasional polemic. Knight and Mounce argue the issues fully and do not always agree, making them a working exegetical digest. In English, Fee and Towner, the latter thorough but often unwilling to land; and for exposition, MacArthur's three volumes, which always tell you the conclusion, alongside Stott's two, where an Anglican amillennialist's phrasing repays the reading.

11. Women and teaching: Ephesus only, or every place?

    First Timothy 2:9 to 15 draws the modern fire. Paul wants the men in every place to pray, and likewise the women to adorn themselves with good works; a woman is to receive instruction quietly with entire submissiveness, and, I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. Two limiting moves are made. One reads the instruction as Ephesus-only, occasioned and expired; Mounce answers that all Paul's letters are occasional, and no one cancels Romans on that ground. Fee ties the restriction to women ensnared by the false teaching; but the three false teachers named in these letters, Hymenaeus, Alexander, Philetus, are all men, which unravels that reading. Essex, with Knight, Mounce, and MacArthur, takes the instruction as universal: in every place says so, and the ground Paul gives is not culture but creation, Adam formed first, then Eve, an argument that reaches every church because every church descends from Adam and Eve. He adds the perspective the debate forgets: that women received the same instruction, together with the men, was itself revolutionary against synagogue practice; the one distinction is that the teaching-authority role in the assembly belongs to the elders, who must be men apt to teach. Kevin Giles's franker route, granting the traditional exegesis while voiding its application by cultural change on the analogy of slavery, Essex counts more dangerous still, as Köstenberger's rebuttals showed: a hermeneutic that lets the culture cancel apostolic imperatives can cancel any of them, and the new battlefield in evangelicalism is exactly there, not interpretation but application.

12. Saved through childbearing

    Verse 15 is the enigma: she shall be saved through the childbearing, if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint. The options: physical preservation in childbirth, the New American Standard's, preserved, which founders on the fact that believing women have died in childbirth and on the pastorals' consistent spiritual use of the saving word-group; deliverance from the error just addressed, or from idleness, too thin for the language; Knight's venerable reading, saved through the Childbirth, the birth of Christ through the woman's seed, doctrinally attractive but nowhere else does Scripture attach saving significance to Christ's birth rather than his death and resurrection; and the reading Essex holds with the majority of his commentators: the verse names the woman's sphere in which salvation shows itself, not teaching and exercising authority in the assembly, but the bearing, and by extension the nurturing and raising, of a godly generation, accompanied, as the condition insists, by continuing faith, love, sanctity, and self-restraint. Essex is candid that no reading works exegetically on all fours, childbearing must stretch to child-rearing, but in context this is the best understanding of a hard text.

1. Teaching is the root, godliness is the fruit. When a church sees ungodly behavior, why is the instinct to prescribe rules rather than doctrine so common, and what would a truth-first remedy look like in practice?

2. The named false teachers of Ephesus were once trusted leaders. What safeguards, in character testing, patience with novices, and plurality, help a church avoid promoting men before they are ready?

3. Essex argues the new battlefield is application rather than interpretation: granting what a text means while denying that it binds. How can a believer test whether an appeal to culture is legitimate contextualization or a cancellation of apostolic teaching?