A good servant: nourished and trained

If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. 1 Tim 4:6-10

Paul begins by commending Timothy to do what he has been charged with, to act as a vicar for the apostle. If Timothy “puts these things before” or “makes these things known” or “teaches these things” he will be a faithful or good servant. This gives us a callback to the last trustworthy statement that came right before the qualifications for church office: “If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.”

Recall that the “noble task” could be more literally (which is not to say better) translated as “good work”. The effect is that Paul is telling Timothy that teaching “these things” is the current manifestation of conforming to the qualifications for church leadership.

What are “these things”?

A natural next question is what is Paul telling Timothy to convey? Textually speaking, how far back does “these things” extend? It could be just the prior passage, Paul’s condemnation of the false teachers and their ascetic practices. It could extend as far back as the last trustworthy statment preceding the qualifications for overseers and deacons or even as far back as the beginning of chapter 2 (“First of all, then, I urge that…”). What are the differences between the options?

If “these things” is the local context only then Timothy is being exhorted to oppose the false teachers specifically on their pragmatic practices. Timothy then should therefore hold marriage in high regard as Paul himself does elsewhere (cf. Eph 5) and free believers from burdensome dietary restrictions (NB: this recalls the actual revelation to Peter in Acts 10, “what God has made clean, do not call common”).

On the other hand, if “these thing” extends back even to Paul’s inital urging then Timothy is not only obliged to opposed the practical regulations of the false teachers but to positively encourage the Ephesians in orderly worship and the election of qualified, godly church officers. The difference to me seems to be the level of emphasis placed on the threat the false teacher poses and the solution to them. Certainly Paul intends Timothy to provide public and authoritative correction to these teachers but part of that correction must also include exhortation of the rest of the body to godliness both in congregational worship and in congregational leadership.

faith and doctrine

Paul follows this command with a description of Timothy in accomplishing it: “being trained in the words of the faith and the good doctrine that you have followed.” Paul sets up a two-part system in this commendation. The “words of faith” should be understood to refer to the gospel itself often referred to simply as “the faith”. There are several examples in this epistle alone:

• 1 Tim 1:2, “To Timothy my true child in the faith”
• 1 Tim 3:9, deacons “must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience”
• 1 Tim 4:1, “in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons”
• 1 Tim 5:8, anyone who does not provide for his house “has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever”
• 1 Tim 6:21, by professing false knowledge some have “swerved from the faith”

The second part of this characterization is following the “good doctrine”. This certainly includes what we would traditionally think of as ‘doctrine’ but the connotation is slanted towards the doctrines which flow from the gospel over against false teachings. In 1 Tim 1:9-10 we have the declaration from Paul, “the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient” and he follows this with a list of those marked by vice whom the law is aimed at. He ends this vice list with the blanket statement “and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God.” There is a firm connection for Paul between the gospel, the inevitably practical beliefs that follow from it, and their superiority over all other systems.

Remember the immediate context is Paul’s invective against the false teachers. Notice that there is a similar process happening among them as well. How does the false teaching arise? Some devote “themselves to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons”. And how is it mediated? “through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared”. The teaching is from “deceitful spirits” and it comes through deceitful people. Paul is encouraging Timothy to remain steadfast in the opposite direction, contending for the truth of the gospel and the received teachings of Christ and the apostles.

This bears on us a little differently as believers coming literal millennia later. At our church we have a fairly strong focus on the creeds because they provide an important role for the believer. They are not just compact statements of the orthodox faith but are also weapons of the early church to strike down heretical teachings. Most of the creeds came in response to false teaching which makes sense. The church as a whole didn’t need to articulate precisely the nature of Christ’s person until we had someone who was going around saying “you know what, Jesus actually isn’t God.”

In this way the creeds play an instructive role in that they tell us what the church at large believes but they also play an interpretive role. A creed is like a hermeneutical guard rail for us and when we approach scripture we can do so with the certainty that whatever I need to understand it in light of the creed. It could be easy to take this too far and import an undue reverence to the past statements of the church and certainly this has happened before. We should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater though. The historical creeds of the church are the servants of orthodoxy not its master. Put another way, the creeds recognize orthodoxy but do not prescribe it.

training and nourishment

Paul tells Timothy not to have anything to do with the old wives tales concocted by the false teachers. I love this description. Paul points out the danger of teaching-it’s “irreverent” or “profane”-but also denigrates its content-”silly” or “characteristic of old women”.

The positive encouragement that contrasts with the negative statement is to “train yourself for godliness”. Here again godliness makes an appearance and it does so with an interesting word.

training ≠ training

The word trained/nourished is the hapax legomena ἐντρέφω. It’s related to the root, τρέφω meaning to feed, nourish, or bring up. We see the related ἐκτρέφω used Ephesians 5:29 and 6:4 in both senses: nourishing and training or disciple. In this case, the participle could be middle (“nourishing yourself”) or passive (“being trained in”), what are the differences that come out of this? Furthermore, Paul is using the present tense so it’s not focused on Timothy’s prior upbringing but current state.

Notice the interesting conceptual connection between training and nourishment. Consider the semantic and conceptual overlap between mad/insane. Typically we might think of feeding as merely keeping someone alive. “Nourish” would connote more than simply subsistence. It carries a stronger sense of caring for and even implies flourishing. Now connect that to training. We don’t typically think of training of any sort in terms of something quite so essential. In school, training for a test is tedious and only worthwhile for exactly as long as the test is required. Job training is usually a chore. Athletic training is strenuous and can produce good results but can also be injurious and a motivation killer. Why this conceptual connection?

There are often underlying metaphors to our language which subtly shape the way we think of things. For instance, if I ask “how’s it going?” and you respond “oh, it’s looking up” what you mean is that things are getting better. If you respond “I’m feeling kind of down” what you mean is that things are not going well for you. So in our language we have an embedded idea that up is good and down is bad. This meaning even informs new uses of words as in the last century when “high” came to be used as a descriptor for the euphoric states induced by drugs.

godliness must be embodied

Paul is threading the needle of this argument really interestingly. He begins this section with a condemnation of the ascetic practices of the false teachers in Ephesus. And he’s finishing up this statement with a recognition of the passing value of physical exercise. Yet he still casts the pursuit of godliness in terms of physical exercise. Why?

The future of the false teaching Paul is addressing is the Gnosticism of the second century which makes a hard distinction between the physical and the spiritual. Interestingly, the heresy manifests in two widely diverging practices. The first which we see here is the ascetic prohibition of marriage and dietary regulation, the idea being that the physical self must be strictly controlled so the spiritual self may flourish. On the other hand, Gnosticism often led to an extreme licentiousness built out of the root idea that if the physical is of no value then it must have no meaning and therefore anything done in the body does not affect the spirit at all. So everything is permitted.

Both of these run counter to Christian teaching. Consider Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount.

• You shall not murder/if you are angry with your brother
• You shall not commit adultery/everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent
• You shall not swear falsely/do not swear at all
• An eye for an eye/do not resist the evil one
• Love your neighbor and hate your enemy/love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you

Jesus proclaims it’s not just the commission of sin which is reprehensible to a holy God, but the inclination towards it as well. We saw this in Romans 14:23, “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” This doesn’t work in reverse though. If you think, “hey, I shouldn’t be rude to my spouse, I think I’ll be loving instead” but neglect them anyway. There’s no virtue in that. You’re inclination to virtuous action only serves to accuse you for vicious behavior.

Why is this? Godliness is embodied. Godliness must be embodied. And I mean this in every sense. On the practical level if our godliness never makes it beyond our heads, we are not in fact godly. The spiritual disciplines themselves teach us this.

spiritual disciplines as embodied godliness

Does anyone else find it difficult to maintain focus during prayer? This is why we see prayer and solitude so often linked in Scripture. This is particularly in the life of Christ. Think of the two main bracketing moments of solitude in the life of Christ. He retreats to the desert after his baptism to be tested, and before his passion he retreated to Gethsemane to seek strength and unity with his Father in prayer. In between we see Jesus regularly withdrawing to pray. This is embodied godliness, an expression of holiness, of being set apart, that dietary regulations are supposed to manifest.

To continue in the vein of eating, fasting is necessarily an embodied discipline. It is perhaps the discipline that we primarily struggle with. Eating is the most fundamental thing we forgo to train in godliness. We never cease breathing for the sake of holiness, we never stop drinking water, but we are consistently commended to fast to seek God and union with him.

Even in worship we see We can see then how carefully Paul walks this line by speaking of the spiritual striving in physical terms while recognizing the limits of purely physical struggle.

The final trustworthy statement

Notes:

• The statement could look forward or backward
• “toil and strive” as connected to the idea of training/nourishment, αγων-physical competition
• “our hope is set on the living God”, ‘living God’ mentioned elsewhere?
• “Savior of all people” in what sense?

There are 24 total uses of the noun Savior in the New Testament. They universally refer either to God the Father or to Jesus, usually to Jesus. Two-thirds of the references explicitly reference Christ, the other eight concern the Father. Of those 8 verses, 6 are in the pastoral epistles (3 each in 1 Timothy and Titus, there are an additional 4 uses of the noun referring to Christ in the pastorals). Open question: considering the nature of the pastoral epistles as instruction generally to the churches and specifically to their leaders, why the emphasis on God as Savior?