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Regarding purpose, what do the Pastoral Epistles have in common? What does this tell you about the difficulties facing the early church?
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2 Replies
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The pastoral epistles share in their purpose to encourage the young minister to “guard the deposit” of faith being passed down to them. This means keeping sound doctrine in the churches and rebuking the heresies and erroneous ways that might creep into the church. There likely were heresies among the people of Ephesus and Crete that were having an effect on the congregations Timothy and Titus were shepherding, and Paul writes these letters to encourage Timothy and Titus to continually work against those heresies. The commonality between these letters of appointing elders shows Paul’s belief that having structured church leadership is important for guarding the people of God against heresies.
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The Pastoral epistles which comprises of the first and second Timothy and Titus are somewhat united in purpose. The common denominator is in the area of combatting heresy and appointment of officers. They are also united with the fact that the standard of sound doctrine must be promoted as the only solution to the nagging problem of heretical teachings. The solution to both ethical and doctrinal problems lies in sound teaching.
The picture we have of the early Church shows a fledgling organization in turbulence of both ethical and doctrinal problem which was in dire need of urgent rescue measure. These ethical and doctrinal problem constitute threat to both the gospel and the testimony of the community of believers which needs to be nipped in the bud. These ultimately can be sentence of death on Christian faith. These account for why trusted allies of Paul were deployed to these two strategic centers.
