2 Timothy 1:5 – Five Flavors of a Faith That Emphasizes the Also
In The Screwtape Letters, the master demon coaches a junior tempter actually sees advantages in some kinds of Christian fellowship. He suggests that the "patient" in the book be guided toward a pastor in his particular town who flip-flops in his preaching between contradictory extremes.
Fr. Spike in his vacillations, Screwtape reveals, is serving Hell's, common aim, "Hatred." "He cannot," rejoices the demon, "bring himself to preach anything which is not calculated to shock, grieve, puzzle, or humiliate his parents and their friends".
That reality beyond the pages of speculative fiction is why I want to dwell for a day on a little four letter word at the end of 2 Timothy 1:5. Paul uses the word also to connect Timothy's faith to that of his mother and grandmother. There is beauty there because faith in the young or the or the reorienting adult convert can so quickly acquire a distinctness that borders on defensiveness.
As a new Christian we are rightly suspicious of drifting toward conformity with the world. We have a healthy wariness of mistakes churches and ancestors have made in the past, we insist on a faith that Gene Edward Vieth, Jr. in Loving God with All Your Mind calls artificially primitive. We are, Vieth says, finding our righteousness in novel circumstances, appearances, and dates rather than in Christ's ability to make all things truly new at the level of the essential nature.
Let's look at five aspects of true newness in Christ that allow us to simultaneously celebrate what is the same about the faith we practice in keeping with the generations before us.
1. Paul sees his own storyline as interrupted rather than in broken parts.
Timothy could hardly unroll Paul's scroll containing this letter before he is struck with the seasoned apostle's sense of purpose founded in events that took God's good time to come to fruition. He is God's, Paul says. His work is God's. Anything he undertakes in Ephesus through Timothy by God's grace has long had its fountainhead in God's eternal nature. The little also is just the latest bubbling up of that assurance.
2. The Gospel chorus Paul has picked up has already included many different styles and accents among his ancestors.
As Paul looks back and sanctifies aloud his memory of his ancestors who served God with a clear conscience, he is vaccinating himself and the audience of 2 Timothy from walking and sorting by the eye and the ear instead of by faith. Among those ancestors, after all, whom Paul expands the tent of faith to include a form idolater from modern-day Iraq named Abram. Abram's faith looked different from Paul's as God gradually reveals Himself and His ways. Paul doesn't require the cultural ID badge approved in one time and place in order to perceive and proclaim faith.
3. Timothy's differences are advantages in the all things to all men Gospel.
With a Greek heritage on his father's side and a Jewish heritage on his mother's side, Paul with a sense of sanctified strategy sees what we need to see. A hopscotching, hybrid heritage, the bane of the legalists, is an advantage in the hands of God. He can go where others familiar with and defensive about only one aspect of identity cannot. We, as one writer friend coached me, can be more aware of the lives through which God has brought us and the opportunities for authentic engagement that can birth. Seeing the also in ourselves, we are more receptive to it in others.
4. Paul has the privileged vantage point of intergenerational friendships.
Paul has the common mortal disadvantage of only having been able to live in one place and one time. But not only does he reflect on a heritage of God's polyglot faithfulness in print as passed on to him by scribes, he sees it in flesh and blood. No doubt faith looks a little different Timothy's grandmother and in his mother. That they might speak with different idioms, use different examples, rejoice in different aspects of the glory of God, and be wary of different idols is all to the good. Paul, in knowing them both and taking in their common faith can shed some of the distractions of his own assumptions.
5. Paul is undercutting the jealousy the enemy might sow.
Just as we employed Screwtape with his delight in denigrating previous generations, we will make the most of his accidental affirmation of one aspect of a purposefully intergenerational Gospel. When the "patient" he and his nephew are working on is saved as an adult, Screwtape urges that the novelty of the man's faith might be an offense to the man's mother. She might be bitter, he posits, because the cultural faith she passed on to him was not good enough. She can make the renewing of his mind about the worth of her parenting
The also at the end of 2 Timothy 1:5 is a preemptive antibiotic to such an infection. We need not invalidate or obscure what our grandparents and parents struggle with as challenges to true faith to look back and testify to the aspects of faith in Christ they may have indeed reflected. Where God's Gospel work in our lives is revealing to us the pricelessness of His mercy, we can in the hearing of our parents and grandparents celebrate the times when we knew them to show mercy at a cost.
To be sure, these instances may not have been undertaken with full Gospel awareness. They may have shown aspects of God's Nature unaware, or even with false motives. Those who come before us may still be unaware of the necessity of utter dependence upon Christ, but what better way to lead them there than to affirm how He has been revealing Himself to and through them all along.
Fr. Spike in his vacillations, Screwtape reveals, is serving Hell's, common aim, "Hatred." "He cannot," rejoices the demon, "bring himself to preach anything which is not calculated to shock, grieve, puzzle, or humiliate his parents and their friends".
That reality beyond the pages of speculative fiction is why I want to dwell for a day on a little four letter word at the end of 2 Timothy 1:5. Paul uses the word also to connect Timothy's faith to that of his mother and grandmother. There is beauty there because faith in the young or the or the reorienting adult convert can so quickly acquire a distinctness that borders on defensiveness.
As a new Christian we are rightly suspicious of drifting toward conformity with the world. We have a healthy wariness of mistakes churches and ancestors have made in the past, we insist on a faith that Gene Edward Vieth, Jr. in Loving God with All Your Mind calls artificially primitive. We are, Vieth says, finding our righteousness in novel circumstances, appearances, and dates rather than in Christ's ability to make all things truly new at the level of the essential nature.
Let's look at five aspects of true newness in Christ that allow us to simultaneously celebrate what is the same about the faith we practice in keeping with the generations before us.
1. Paul sees his own storyline as interrupted rather than in broken parts.
Timothy could hardly unroll Paul's scroll containing this letter before he is struck with the seasoned apostle's sense of purpose founded in events that took God's good time to come to fruition. He is God's, Paul says. His work is God's. Anything he undertakes in Ephesus through Timothy by God's grace has long had its fountainhead in God's eternal nature. The little also is just the latest bubbling up of that assurance.
2. The Gospel chorus Paul has picked up has already included many different styles and accents among his ancestors.
As Paul looks back and sanctifies aloud his memory of his ancestors who served God with a clear conscience, he is vaccinating himself and the audience of 2 Timothy from walking and sorting by the eye and the ear instead of by faith. Among those ancestors, after all, whom Paul expands the tent of faith to include a form idolater from modern-day Iraq named Abram. Abram's faith looked different from Paul's as God gradually reveals Himself and His ways. Paul doesn't require the cultural ID badge approved in one time and place in order to perceive and proclaim faith.
3. Timothy's differences are advantages in the all things to all men Gospel.
With a Greek heritage on his father's side and a Jewish heritage on his mother's side, Paul with a sense of sanctified strategy sees what we need to see. A hopscotching, hybrid heritage, the bane of the legalists, is an advantage in the hands of God. He can go where others familiar with and defensive about only one aspect of identity cannot. We, as one writer friend coached me, can be more aware of the lives through which God has brought us and the opportunities for authentic engagement that can birth. Seeing the also in ourselves, we are more receptive to it in others.
4. Paul has the privileged vantage point of intergenerational friendships.
Paul has the common mortal disadvantage of only having been able to live in one place and one time. But not only does he reflect on a heritage of God's polyglot faithfulness in print as passed on to him by scribes, he sees it in flesh and blood. No doubt faith looks a little different Timothy's grandmother and in his mother. That they might speak with different idioms, use different examples, rejoice in different aspects of the glory of God, and be wary of different idols is all to the good. Paul, in knowing them both and taking in their common faith can shed some of the distractions of his own assumptions.
5. Paul is undercutting the jealousy the enemy might sow.
Just as we employed Screwtape with his delight in denigrating previous generations, we will make the most of his accidental affirmation of one aspect of a purposefully intergenerational Gospel. When the "patient" he and his nephew are working on is saved as an adult, Screwtape urges that the novelty of the man's faith might be an offense to the man's mother. She might be bitter, he posits, because the cultural faith she passed on to him was not good enough. She can make the renewing of his mind about the worth of her parenting
The also at the end of 2 Timothy 1:5 is a preemptive antibiotic to such an infection. We need not invalidate or obscure what our grandparents and parents struggle with as challenges to true faith to look back and testify to the aspects of faith in Christ they may have indeed reflected. Where God's Gospel work in our lives is revealing to us the pricelessness of His mercy, we can in the hearing of our parents and grandparents celebrate the times when we knew them to show mercy at a cost.
To be sure, these instances may not have been undertaken with full Gospel awareness. They may have shown aspects of God's Nature unaware, or even with false motives. Those who come before us may still be unaware of the necessity of utter dependence upon Christ, but what better way to lead them there than to affirm how He has been revealing Himself to and through them all along.
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