The Evangelical churches of America today are in dire need of rediscovering the wisdom of the Pastoral Letters. No matter how well these have been exposited in the past there will inevitably be people that do not hear; and many of those people will nevertheless be thrust into the very positions of leadership of which this particular letter says so much. Day after day, year after year, in writing and sermon and popular mood, our attempt to avoid the obvious is refuted by Paul‘s counsel. One of the principle obstacles to our hearing the words of these three chapters is that we live in an era in which we are cut off—by sustained institutional deliberation and by inherited ignorance—from our Western past in which the biblical authors shared the common way of speaking about the world as if it was really there: as if it was bigger than the individual and as if it mattered for time and for eternity. Because we no longer think that way, and because we have been taught to despise that sort of thinking, we have ready-made categories to ignore or to dismiss. We will return to this concept as we introduce the book and exegete the text.
