Thursday 28 July 2011

Pastoral Epistles 1: Faith and Doubt

1 and 2 Timothy, plus Titus, are known as ‘the Pastoral Epistles’; pastoral in the sense of duties of care and church governance (by ‘pastors’) rather than having any rural focus. To start with a striking bit of a passage from 2 Timothy 2: 11-13:
The saying is sure:
If we have died with him, we shall also live with him;
If we endure, we shall also reign with him;
If we deny him, he will also deny us;
If we are faithless, he remains faithful—
for he cannot deny himself.
This seems to me a very interesting little passage. It starts out affirming what is now common currency of Christian belief: that through death Christ won eternal life, and that for his followers to die in his name is to guarantee their eternal life and reign. The main point here, clearly, is to stress ‘faithfulness’, or more specifically our need to remain faithful to God and Christ: to endure in our faith even if it leads to our death. This embodies what we might call the familiar form of Christian paradox—that only in death can we have life. This is to say, it is one of the textual functions of the New Testament to force us to reappraise what we think we mean when we say ‘life’ and ‘death’ – for instance, that life without Christ doesn’t really amount to life at all (from values ranging for ‘empty and banal’ right up to Coleridge’s horribly vivid phrase ‘nightmare life in death’); where conversely dying in the Christian faith is actually fully to come alive. We might put it this way: life and death only seem to be opposite terms; in fact the setting of the two in spiritual dialectic reveals profound truths about what it means to be ‘alive’. But faith is a different matter: the writer of the pastoral epistles takes faith as a straightforward value, to be upheld; there is no equivalent spiritual dialectic for faith and doubt here, in the way that there is for life and death. On the contrary, these epistles are shot through with a sens of faith as an absolute, and unfaith as an uncomplicated wickedness. 1 Timothy starts with the withering report of ‘certain persons who have made a shipwreck of their faith, among them Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have delivered to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme’ [1 Tim 1:19-20]; and repeatedly the author stresses the wickedness of ‘missing the mark in faith.’ The stress is on heretical misbelieving, rather than (as it might be) unbelief; but that only makes these three lines more puzzling:
If we deny him, he will also deny us;
If we are faithless, he remains faithful—
for he cannot deny himself.
My first thought is that the second element here strikes a note consonant with much of contemporary Christianity (a common-enough Christian rebuke to atheists is: ‘you may not believe in God, but He believes in you!’), although it is phrased in a rather striking way ... as if to say that God’s faith in mankind is actually nothing more than a faith in himself. But what leaps out is the way this sentiment, taken as a whole, seems to contradict what immediately precedes it. One way of glossing the passage would be: ‘if you have no faith in God then He will have no faith in you; but if you have no faith in God he will have faith in you.’ And that comes over as merely contradictory. Is this the faith-doubt dialectical I earlier suggested had no part in the pastoral epistles, in (as it were) meta form? Perhaps this encourages us to quibble on the distinction between ‘denying’ God and ‘lacking faith in’ God; or perhaps—to quote from J L Houlden’s commentary on this passage—we need to import a temporal element to our reading:
On the face of it, v. 12b and v.13a contradict each another, and v.13b seeks to elucidate the matter by providing a paradox. But it is partly a matter of “when”: if we deny him, he will deny us—at the Last Day; on the other hand, our faithlessness does not deter God from faithfulness to his covenant and his purpose, chiefly now. It is also a matter of “who”: v.12b has in mind the individual believer and his fate; v.13a the purpose of God for his people in general. [Houlden, The Pastoral Epistles (Penguin 1976), 119]
But by seeking to rationalise the conceptual gnarliness of this passage, Holden defangs it. Inserting ‘time’ into the sentiment seems to me an arbitrary move (temporally speaking, the structure of the sentiment is surely that of a straightforward ‘if you do x now, then y will be your future reward’). And the notion that the passage draws an implicit distinction between individuals and ‘people in general’ leads to some very queer thinking: ‘if you as an individual have no faith in God then He will have no faith in you as an individual; but on the other hand, if humanity as a whole has no faith in God he will have faith in humanity as a whole.’ How would that work, exactly?

Looking at this passage again: ‘if we have died with him, we shall also live with him’ looks like a paradox, although what we might call a ‘simple’ one (one, indeed, central to the Christ story). ‘If we endure, we shall also reign with him’ has nothing paradoxical about it; it describes a cosmos where action A (keeping faith) leads directly to action B (reward). The sentiment then shifts about; for ‘if we deny him, he will also deny us’ has the same straightforward causal look about it; elevating Auden’s icy phrase, ‘those to whom evil are done/Do evil in return’ to a spiritual and cosmic plane. Since the faith we are being exhorted to uphold is precisely that Christ has paradoxically superposed death and life, this at the least follows on. It is, then, the final that looks anomalous: ‘if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.’

What strikes me is that the final element (v.13b) brings in an element not of ‘Last Days’, or of distinctions between the individual and the group, but of choice. God keeps faith with us because he cannot do otherwise; it is, to drop (inappropriately of course) Kantian terms, a synthetic truth. Perhaps there’s even a sense that, once death has been undone and turned into another kind of life, then what follows (good service leads to reward; faithlessness will be repaid by faithlessness; God cannot deny God) is merely the iteration of an A=A logical flatness.

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