Reflections On Church Order In The Pastoral Epistles, With Further Reflection On The Hermeneutics Of "Ad Hoc" Documents -- By: Gordon D. Fee

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 28:2 (Jun 1985)
Article: Reflections On Church Order In The Pastoral Epistles, With Further Reflection On The Hermeneutics Of "Ad Hoc" Documents
Author: Gordon D. Fee


Reflections On Church Order In The Pastoral
Epistles, With Further Reflection On The
Hermeneutics Of Ad Hoc Documents

Gordon D. Fee*

An old saw says, “Give a dog an ill name and hang him.” The same can also be true of a complimentary name. When Paul Anton of Halle (1726) first called Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus the Pastoral Epistles (PE), and it stuck, they have been forever thereafter read and understood as consisting “mostly of advice to younger ministers.”1 However one may feel about the question of authorship,2 the view as to their occasion and purpose has been basically singular. Whether in Paul’s lifetime or later, the letters are seen as responses to the encroachment of alien ideas in some Pauline churches with a view to setting the churches in order as the proper antidote to heresy. Hence they are read and consulted as “church manuals,” whose basic intent was to give the ongoing Church instructions on church order in light of Paul’s advanced age and impending death (or the decline of his influence at the end of the first century, for those who consider the letters pseudepigraphic). Indeed, so fixed is this view in the Church that I recently taught a course on the exegesis of these letters in a seminary where the students by taking my course could receive credit for their pastoral ministry requirement.

The concerns of this paper are double-edged. First, I want to offer an alternative to the traditional way of viewing the occasion and purpose of the PE (limited to 1 Timothy) and to reexamine the questions of church order in light of that purpose. Second, I hope to reopen the hermeneutical questions about church order in light of this exegesis and offer some suggestions about contemporary relevance. These are suggestions at best; no specific applications to any local church or denomination are being contended for.

*Gorden Fee is professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

The “church manual” approach to the PE has almost always paid lip-service to the threat of the false teachers (FT) as the occasion of 1 Timothy but has usually all but lost sight of that occasion when exegeting the letter, except for the places where the FT are specifically mentioned. Thus after setting the stage in chap. 1 by ordering Timothy to stop the FT, Paul’s real concern, the “ordering” of the church, begins in chap. 2 with instructions on prayer (2:1–8). This ...

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