An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Welcome to another Author Interview from Books At a Glance! I’m Fred Zaspel, and we have Dr. Robert Yarbrough with us today … I think for the very first time. Dr. Yarbrough is the well- known professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, and he is with us to talk about his excellent new commentary on Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus – the “Pastoral Epistles.”
Bob, welcome, and congratulations on this major new accomplishment!
Yarbrough:
Thank you very much, Fred.
Zaspel:
Let’s begin on what appears to be a very important personal note: Don Carson says in the Editor’s Preface that you are quite gifted with the chain saw. What is that all about?
Yarbrough:
Yeah, that sounds a little bit scary. My father and my grandfather were both employees of Davey Tree Expert Company out of Kent, Ohio and so I grew up around tree trimming tools and that included chainsaws. Then in my young adulthood I spent five years logging in northern Idaho and western Montana. And I climbed trees for a couple of years for Davey Tree; and actually, I still do some tree work when I need to do it, and I heat with wood. So, I still have, I think, five chainsaws.
Zaspel
How about that! Good to know.
I assume this was not your first time working through these epistles – have you taught through them in the classroom or in local church settings?
Yarbrough:
Yes. I’ve taught New Testament survey since back in the 1980s so I had a passing familiarity with the letters. And probably more intensely before I got into academia, I was in local church work starting out at Trinity Baptist Church in Missoula, Montana. I remember studying the Pastorals avidly because we seemed always to be looking for pastors. Eventually I felt a call into ministry and so the Pastorals are primary sources for gauging your own sense of call and what it means to be a minister of the Gospel.
Zaspel:
Who were Timothy and Titus? What was their relationship to the apostle Paul? And what were their respective ministries?
Yarbrough:
Timothy was a young man that was, it seems, evangelized during the first missionary journey. So that would be in Acts 13 and 14. And then when you get into Acts 16, you see that as Paul begins his second missionary journey, he wants to take Timothy with him and he has to have him circumcised because his father was not a Jew. His mother evidently was, and his grandmother was; we don’t know if the father wouldn’t allow it or if the mother and grandmother were just lax enough that they didn’t get Timothy circumcised. In Jewish reckoning what your mother is is what you are; so, if your mother is a Jew, so are you. Timothy is Jewish; he was somewhat noncompliant; so, he is circumcised and then he becomes a coworker of Paul. If you read Paul’s letters, there are a number of letters where Paul gives his name and Timothy. Timothy is right there as Paul writes. I don’t think that means that Timothy helped him write it, but I think it does mean that maybe Timothy is known to those people. Maybe he’s going to be the courier of the letter or going to have some other ties with that congregation, whether it’s Corinth or Thessalonica or whatever it is. There’s no other person we know from Paul’s letters or from Acts that was a close associate and a more trusted lieutenant, you could say, in Paul’s missionary and church planting work.
Titus is somebody who is a little bit like Timothy except he’s not Jewish. So, Paul will not allow Titus to be circumcised, even though some of the Christians who are Jewish think that he should be. This comes out in Galatians, chapter 2, that Paul says of Titus, we did not allow him to be circumcised even though people were spying out our liberty and they demanded that this happen. We did not allow it to happen because it would have compromised the Gospel for a non-Jew to get circumcised, to look like a Jew, to satisfy people who thought you have to be Jewish to be right with God as a messianic Jew or as a Christian.
They are both coworkers, but I think, either temperamentally or for other reasons, Paul was closer to Timothy. That’s not to say that he had a bad relationship with Titus. If you look up the references to Titus in the New Testament, you’ll see there are maybe a dozen places where Paul mentions him. He clearly was a right-hand man, but as far as we know from the writings, they didn’t have the chemistry that Paul and Timothy did.
Zaspel:
Okay, these are called Pastoral Epistles – what are some of their leading themes?
Yarbrough:
In my commentary, I argue that the leading theme is God. And, of course, if you’re a believer in holy Scripture every word of God has been tested. He is a shield to all who take refuge in him. Anything that the pastoral epistles treat is highly significant because it’s the Word of God. People will say the main thing is fidelity to God, or the main theme is mission, or the main theme is salvation, or the main theme is Jesus Christ, or the main theme is the church, or the main thing is the pastoral ministry. I mean anything that’s in there is worth teasing out, but when you do a search of the three letters, and I have a chart in my commentary, overwhelmingly the words that Paul uses the most are words for deity. In other words, he is full of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And I don’t think that means he is cut off from social or ecclesial realities, but I do think it means he’s coming from a place where he, himself, has found meaning and purpose in life in the knowledge of God in Christ. And in a life that’s directed by his relationship with God, and the Scriptures that God has given his people, and the duties to which God calls the saints. So, God is the overarching reality for him. And that’s reflected in his rhetoric, both to Timothy and to Titus and in what he wants them to urge on their churches and the reasons that he wants them to do the things that he wants them to do. News Testament scholars like to find immanent purposes, things in history, things in society, things in Paul’s psychology, things in Timothy’s weakness. And very soon reading the commentary becomes a process of finding all the things that the writer is not actually talking about. You know, the social setting, or the Artemis cult, or the situation on Crete, and the background becomes the foreground.
I wanted to read the Pastorals along the lines of what they talk the most about. They talk about all kinds of things but it’s very much a theocentric the Christocentric starting point and nexus in which everything Paul says is couched in terms of God and Christ and their will and their work.
Zaspel:
Situate these letters for us within the biblical canon – what is their contribution and role?
Yarbrough:
That’s a good question and I probably haven’t thought about it as much as I should, but apparently, they help those of us who are Christian leaders or trying to live in sync with Christian leaders. You could say they give us great examples of ecclesially applied theology or Christology. In other words, given the grandeur of God and the centrality of God, what difference does that make? Or how should that be reflected in the household of God, the church of the living God, the pillar and the bulwark of truth, as Paul calls the church in 1 Timothy 2.
That’s one way I think of understanding the place in the canon. They really helped bring together a lot of the narrative material, a lot of the didactic material. How do you actually administer that on the ground in a congregation? These are not church manuals per se but they certainly give us examples of the kinds of ways that doctrine and practice should be expressed in the body of Christ.
Zaspel:
Judging from these letters, how should we best sum up or characterize the role and function of the pastor/elder?
Yarbrough:
Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:12, he talks about teaching and it is usually translated “exercising authority.” There’s a lot of controversy on that word, and I think Al Walters has done some great lexical work. But basically, as I studied that word and looked at other references to church leaders in Paul and looked at the role of Jesus and how he did what he did as a pastoral or shepherding leader, I think a great deal of the task boils down to two things. That’s instruction and spiritual oversight, or care of souls. Of course, teaching also is care of souls, but a shepherd has to protect and a shepherd has to guide and a shepherd has to think things out and assume responsibility for the welfare of the flock. In other words, the pastor, even a great teaching pastor, if all he is doing is instructing, well, that’s just kind of academics, potentially. And if all you’re doing is carrying and nurturing, well, where’s the discipling, where’s the teaching, where’s the proclamation, where’s the ministry of the Word of God? You don’t need the Word of God just to care for people. You can go to the hospital or you could be a social worker. But the unique situation of the pastor, and we see this in the pastoral epistles, is this is a person that is called by God as an apostle is, and is committed to the Word of God and the ministry of Christ that was bequeathed to the apostles as the apostles were, but now this person is not an apostle but they are conveying the apostolic message and they are living out the apostolic care that Jesus marked the apostles with and that people like Paul, who were direct followers of Jesus, modeled. Of course, we know more about Paul than any of the early Christian leaders but he, himself, talks about how he was like a mother with a child, or how he was like a father, or this person was like a son.
So, to summarize: teach and exercise spiritual oversight. Or, if I could turn it just a little different direction, if, in our society we can still talk about and model father, a dad who, along with his wife, teaches their children, they know their children need to be instructed daily in all kinds of things. So there is a strong didactic stress in the household, but there’s also a strong oversight and care and training so that the kids develop as they need to develop in the household function, in the chores, and in their future life. And that takes direction. It takes somebody that says no sometimes. And it takes organization in the family so that the family looks to the father figure. And I think in Paul’s pedagogy a pastoral leader is a father figure. Not at all denigrating that you need a mother, too; and you need the whole community of the family; you need the whole community of the body of Christ; but it’s clear in the New Testament that there were point persons to the house churches that were like fathers in families. Which is why, when you read the qualifications for a pastor in 1 Timothy 3, and in Titus 1 and 2, there are things that keep coming up that sound like a father, or that sound like a mother, because the early churches were house churches and the pastoral functions were extensions of what good fathers and mothers should be doing in the household of God.
Zaspel:
I think that’s an excellent analogy.
Yarbrough:
And I think that’s too often lost in churches because our churches often are cut off from real organic connections to the home. And that’s something that we really have to work to maintain the integrity of both. We need more real church in the home; and we need more real home in the church.
Zaspel:
Excellent!
In the introductory section of your book you make an interesting contribution entitled, “Paul as a Working Pastor.” Can you highlight that for us?
Yarbrough:
Well, just to say that Pharisees, which Paul was a Pharisee before he was converted, were tradesmen. There was a saying among the rabbis… I don’t think I quote it in the commentary but it’s one of my favorite quotations… He who does not teach his son a trade teaches him to steal. One of the reasons that the Pharisees were respected by the common people was that these were men who could make a living with their hands. And there’s really no easy way to make a living with your hands and to be competent at it unless you’re skilled at your work and you have a good work ethic. And, of course, by and large that was an era when people who made anything of themselves had to work hard at it with some degree of physicality. And by and large in our culture increasingly the ethos is not one of hard manual work. In fact, hard manual work is something that if you have to do it, you’re a failure. To be a success means you’re above hard manual work. But Paul was not above hard manual work and as I point out in that section, if you look at all the words for hard work that Paul uses, and all the images that he sets forth for Timothy and Titus, you’ll see, I mean you will be panting with fatigue. Because Paul was a very hard worker and he expected a lot of effort from his lieutenants in the field. Sometimes pastors have a reputation for being lazy and I think one of the challenges of the Pastoral epistles is, let’s remember that, as Jesus said, we must work the works of the one who sent us while it is day; night is coming when no man can work. And I think Paul really lived that out in both his example and in the 15,000 miles he traveled. He traveled on the average 500 miles a year for thirty years by foot or by miserable boat. So, he was a very hard worker and that’s one of the reasons that the church ever survived in the Roman Empire was how hard people like Paul worked to get the labor of the ministry accomplished.
Zaspel:
Are there some “pastoral” emphases in these letters that you see as particularly needed in the evangelical church today? Or maybe to put it better, what in these letters does today’s church most need to hear?
Yarbrough:
You know, it’s going to vary where you go in the world, and that’s part of the duty of the Pastorals. I have taught them in Sudan and I have taught them in Romania and I have taught them in South Africa. And you see, no matter where you go, that there’s a crying need for the wisdom that’s there. In part, because you have to have congregational leadership, and these books speak to that issue.
In many parts of the world the issue of suffering is front and center. And especially in 1 and 2 Timothy there’s a quite a bit in there – suffer with me as a fellow soldier of Christ Jesus. There is comfort and direction for people who are taking it in the neck because of their faithfulness to the Gospel. It can help you feel less isolated and less weird because, as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:12, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. So, for the persecuted church, these are very valuable letters.
I don’t think there’s any church anywhere in the world that is living out sufficiently the doctrine of Christ in the Pastorals. The Christology of the Pastorals is so exalted and so practical that I think it’s just a growing edge that all of us should be leaning into, because no matter how far along in the faith we’ve come, as you study the Pastorals you see there are things that we could definitely draw more on Christ for, and be equipped to have larger hearts to bring him honor with. I think here especially, for example, of the widows. I just love 1 Timothy 5. It goes into such detail about the widows. It opens up a curtain on what Paul must have spent a lot of time in doing, strategizing with how do we with limited resources meet a need that… I mean, this is what religion is, the care of widows and orphans, as James put it. It’s not to say let’s just forget about theology and let’s just care for widows and orphans, but if we are good followers of Christ then our hearts have to be touched by the plight of people, especially in our congregations, who struggle. We are now in their family and there are ways for us to grow in our strategizing and executing of strategies to care for the needy in our midst. The needy often drop between the cracks in affluent countries, like ours. We don’t want to reduce the Gospel to a social Gospel, but the Pastorals challenge us with care for the people that, in the eyes of God, deserve our care.
A third area would simply be reminding ourselves of how pedagogic Christianity has to be. We are disciples. And Paul assumes a lot on the part of congregations that they are going to want to learn, they’re going to want to be challenged, and their pastors need to be students of the Word, students of their setting, and they need to be teaching their congregations. Often, preaching is not very didactic, it’s just formulaic. It rehearses well-known Christian themes, but if you’ve gone to church for a while you really didn’t learn anything from that sermon that you didn’t already know. Really, it should be a crime to preach a sermon in which most people don’t learn quite a few things. Because, when we study any text, there’s so much that’s there that people don’t know or that they’ve forgotten. The Pastorals remind us, and especially for ministers, they remind us that we should, as the King James says, study to show thyself approved unto God, rightly dividing the word of truth. We should be as much disciples who are taught and are learners as pastoral followers of Christ, as he made the first apostles to be and as he expected his followers to be.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Robert Yarbrough about his very new commentary on Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus. It’s the newest volume in the excellent Pillar New Testament Commentary series, and it is marked by the kind of thorough and close attention to the biblical text that we’ve come to expect both from the Pillar series and from Dr. Yarbrough. If you’re preaching through the pastoral epistles, this is a commentary you’ll surely want to have.
Bob, thanks so much for your good work and for talking to us today. Great to have you with us.
Yarbrough:
Thank you very much, Fred. I appreciate it.
