Catacomb Resident Blog

Titus versus Cretan Culture

30 May 2023

Jumping now to Titus, we will save 2 Timothy for later, as it was Paul's swan song.

With little introduction, Paul relates to Titus the qualifications for elders, referring to them also as episkope, as we noted previously. Paul's emphasis is on the context of Crete, where the culture led to the admiration of cantankerous scoundrels. It's not a war on the Cretan culture, but a dismissal of it. He offers a strong statement that church folks must reject their fleshly ethnic identity insofar as it conflicts with Christian standards. Paul paints the picture of an elder who is not very Cretan at all.

By contrast, Paul notes that many Jews felt right at home on Crete. The big problem is that Cretans in general, and Cretan Jews in particular, were notorious for faking conversion simply because they viewed the church folks as easy prey. Thus, Paul tells Titus to rebuke them sharply as if they were older children who knew better. The point here is that their feelings are not an issue. If the rebuke drives them away, they don't belong. Real Christians will respond as David exemplified in Psalms 139, eager to have the Lord crush and remake him.

In the process, Paul refers to the Talmud dismissively as Jewish mythology. One of the critical claims of Talmudists was that their elaborate rules were a safety margin for faith. Paul enunciates a very deep principle of mysticism: Those who walk in faith don't need rules because they understand the spiritual priorities. They will curtail their own liberties out of respect for what is necessary in the situation. Those who need the rules aren't walking in faith in the first place, so nothing they do can be called "good".

In Chapter 2, Paul lays out general boundaries for the various demographic categories. The culture on Crete at that time encouraged childish self-indulgence. It could be masked all kinds of ways, with only a pretense of adulthood, but still quite immature. The list of items Paul mentions for Christian aspirations sound like a high moral opposite of normal Cretan behavior. It's the picture of ancient eastern folks who are rather serene, reserved, socially skillful, and patient with the immature. This is what Christians look like, and Paul encourages Titus to be forceful in upholding that standard.

In the third chapter, Paul once again harps on avoiding anything that smacks of political or social activism. We aren't trying to change the world; it's damned and cannot be saved. Rather, we are saving ourselves in the sense of pulling away from the world. The worldliness we left behind was demanding and constantly seeking material advantage. When the Holy Spirit breathes His life into us, all of that withers away and dies. He saves us, not because we earned it, but because there is no way we could have changed for the better without His power.

So, our lives must reflect this radical change, and Titus was urged to teach just that. He must shut down all the distractions that chase the rabbits of fleshly ambitions. If people don't listen the first time, ostracize them as threats to the Lord's peace.

In the midst of a few personal notes, Paul emphasizes once again the otherworldly focus that makes it easy to be generous with what God provides.

Contemporary note: Here in the US, we have a historical vestige of Germanic social habits. They reached their peak in what we now think of as scolding Victorian pretense (and it's a satire that is not historically accurate). It's typically associated with materialistic social middle-class values, very immoral. That's the ghost of our past that haunts our thinking, and it enables a false dichotomy that pits this against a more relaxed approach to things that is quite immoral in a different sense. Both are evil.

Paul faced his own false dichotomies. He was a hardcore Christian Mystic, advocating the ancient Hebrew culture as a counter to both Pharisees and Sadducees. The false Pharisaical legalism on the one hand abandoned the ancient Hebrew intellectual traditions, and worldly secularism of the Sadducees was against genuine faith. It was not about the particulars of the Law of Moses, but the background culture that God Himself created as the proper atmosphere for revealing Himself. Paul teaches his Hebrew mystical outlook as quintessentially Christian.


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