I grow more and more convinced that Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus have been wrongly written off as flat and unimaginative. In fact, they offer some of the apostle’s most creative theologizing.

One of Paul’s finest moments is his finding in an unnamed pagan prophet from Crete’s past a diagnosis for which his own gospel is the antidote (compare Titus 1:12 with 2:12).

“We Cretans are (religious) liars,” confesses the prophet. “God’s grace became incarnate to teach us godliness,” counters Paul.

“We Cretans are vicious beasts” admits the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us justice,” urges Paul.

“We Cretans are lazy gluttons,” bemoans the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us self-control,” offers Paul.

I wrote all that up in more scholarly form some time ago in “Titus as Apologia: Grace for Liars, Beasts, and Gluttons” (for a copy, click the link), insights from which my friend Phil Towner adroitly worked into his truly outstanding NICNT commentary, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Eerdmans, 2006).

My main summer project has been completing a short writing project for Baker Book House: essentially fifty-plus words per verse of commentary on these three letters to Paul’s two most trusted lieutenants.

The writing comes on the heels of three lectures and some valuable interchange with University of Florida students at the Christian Study Center (headed up by Richard Horner, himself an exceedingly astute scholar of Western intellectual history) in Gainesville during this past spring semester. My lectures, How Pauline are the Pastorals … and why does it matter?, are available in mp3 format from the CSC website).
That lecture series and this summer’s writing have provided the first chance I’ve had in a while to work carefully through these last of Paul’s letters. It’s been both bracing and convicting.

This summer happens to find us in the midst of a political season. For that reason, when the writing brought me at long last to the beginning of Titus 3 and to Paul’s instructions on civic virtue there, I found myself having to linger a while.

In a word, Paul says that Christians should not only be passively obedient, say, in praying for government (1Tm 2) and in paying taxes (Rom 13), but beyond those duties we should be ready “for every good work” (Titus 3:1). He’s talking about works done in the public square, not in the Christian ghetto.

Moreover, as if to anticipate those who assume he means we should lead with indignant anger and strident denunciations of all that is wrong with the world, Paul urges us: “to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone” (Titus 3:2 TNIV).

I thought those words were worth calling attention to during the summer of a presidential race, so a few days ago I posted some reflections at Glenn Lucke’s Common Grounds Online community, “Paul to Titus: On Christians in the Public Square.” I’d be pleased to have friends drop in there to continue the conversation about what Paul would have us do.

But before I stop keyboarding, I also have to recommend a sobering article by David Brooks of the New York Times, “The Great Seduction: America’s Next Moral Threat Isn’t Sexual — It’s Financial” (NYT, June 10, 2008). Brooks, in turn, refers to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “A Nation in Debt: How We Killed Thrift, Enthroned Loan Sharks and Undermined American Prosperity”).

Its Puritan theology and Franklinesque ethic of prudence, opines Brooks, originally enabled the U.S. to be wealthy without being corrupted by wealth. But that legacy has given way to a culture of financial decadence, an explosion of debt, and the division of our citizenry into an “investor class” and a “lottery class.” At our peril, may I suggest, we neglect the prospect of resentment-fueled class war.

Between them, Brooks and Whitehead offer various suggestions for turning things around, e.g., tightened usury laws, raised awareness about debt, access for the poor and middle class to financial planning, re-purposed lotteries, foundation- and church-based short-term loans.

What they leave for somebody else to say is this: What’s going on around us in the collapse of the housing market and in the skyrocketing of personal debt has everything to do with what happens when we do not pay attention in the marketplace and in the public square to the basic values the gospel teaches: truth will eventually out us, and we can only deny the claims of justice and self-control so long (Titus 1:12). If we’re a city on a hill, as it was put by the One who came to teach us to deny ungodliness and worldly passions and to live soberly, justly, and piously, now is a time for shining (see Titus 2:11-12; Mt 5:14-16).

In sum of this post and of my explorations in the Pastorals over the last few months: we dare not keep our faith in the prayer-closet — and we could do worse than to heed the apostle’s considered judgment as to how he wanted his theology to be applied in the next generation.