The Christian Household as Act of Resistance and Beautiful Alternative: A Series of Reflections on Titus 2 (Part 2)
The Love of God and Ordered Relations
Mark A. Garcia
In Titus 2:1, Paul seizes Titus’s attention with a direct address: “You.”
“But as for you, teach [say/speak] what accords with sound [or healthy] doctrine.”
Paul and Titus have a rich, recent history. Paul’s ministry has reached Gaul (2 Tim. 4:10), and his congregations around the Aegean now include Crete, Miletus, and Nicopolis (Titus 1:5; 2 Tim. 4:20), each of which is endangered by Judaizing-Gnostic attacks. Of greatest concern is that this grave threat comes from church leaders and apparently some former co-workers (2 Tim. 1:15-18; 2:16-17; 3:6-9; 4:10; Titus 3:9-14). The effects have been devastating. Some of these young house churches were ravaged and near dissolution, and so Paul tells Titus, “Restore the things that remain, and appoint elders in each city… For many deceivers… are overthrowing whole houses” (1:5, 10-11).
For his part, Paul continues to work from a hub city, probably Corinth (2 Tim. 4:20), and makes occasional visits to the churches throughout the region. But he cannot send a letter to every congregation, along with a colleague to explain and apply it. Instead, he sends letters to specific, greatly trusted co-workers (Titus in Crete and Timothy in Ephesus). These letters, which we know as First and Second Timothy and Titus, are aptly termed “pastoral epistles.” They function in at least two ways: as personal communication and encouragement to the leaders, and as public communications to be read to the church groups themselves, thus providing a kind of vade mecum of apostolic authorization for Timothy’s and Titus’s teaching.
The Cretan congregations Titus is called to organize and serve likely met, as churches in Paul’s day ordinarily did, in the homes of affluent members. These homes could accommodate a standing congregation of 100-200 people in the main room (atrium) or in a colonnaded garden (peristylium) further back in the house (as Ellis notes). The Aegean church groups had affluent members: we note the instructions for slaves and masters and for proper attitudes toward wealth.
The letter to Titus is usually dated to around AD 65. In the mid-60s, the church at Rome had suffered the martyrdom of “a great multitude” (so Clement and Tacitus), and the Aegean churches had suffered defections. Nevertheless, many of these churches quickly recovered and enjoyed rapid growth, so that the total membership of churches throughout Greece and Asia by AD 67 may have numbered in the thousands.
The churches Titus must minister to and organize therefore preceded his organizing work: we should imagine them as already meeting together, sharing with one another what they were learning in the “sound doctrine” that had been given to them at the beginning, enjoying fellowship and their hosts’ hospitality, and so on. In other words, they knew one another. They knew the older and the younger, the men and the women, the mature in the Faith and the novices. As they talked with one another, men and women had been teaching, and–having already told Titus what kind of presbyters to appoint to govern, protect, and lead each group–Paul now wants Titus to guide how the members teach one another so as to protect them from their enemies and to preserve the integrity of the Gospel that the churches proclaim. Thus, Titus is not creating something from scratch the way a modern church planter might. He is working with a real church group that has had a story already, a life together, but which is severely threatened. Paul tells Titus what he must say to these churches to preserve them in the Faith and protect them from further destructive error.
Doctrine, and the Things That Accord With It
“What you say must be in keeping with wholesome doctrine” (v. 1). As Yarborough puts it (p. 508), “Paul means business; Titus cannot take this lightly… If Titus is going to identify, train, and appoint elders, he must be exemplary in all of his own speech. What he “says” (a broader category than formal teaching and preaching) must be “appropriate to” (prepei) “sound doctrine.” Importantly, Paul is not simply telling Titus to teach sound doctrine, though of course he is telling Titus to say at least that much. Paul knows Titus is well familiar with the sound doctrine he elsewhere summarizes in terms of the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But here, Paul does not stop to provide another summary of the content of that sound doctrine. Instead, he tells Titus that he must speak things in keeping with sound doctrine.
We ought to note, then, that these “things” are distinguishable from the doctrine itself. They are “things” that are consistent with, coherent with, or that “go” with the doctrine, as other translations make clear. There is the doctrine itself, in other words, and then there are many things that must be said that are not the doctrine per se but are properly related to it. These things include, to be sure, what Paul then goes on to tell Titus to say to older men, older women, younger men, and bondservants–each of which represents an ordered relation suffused with ethical significance and important for the Church’s witness to the Cretan world, “that the Word of God may not be reviled” (v. 5). But this combination of, on the one hand, speaking (ethical) things in accordance with the Gospel and, on the other hand, the ordered relations that immediately come into view in this chapter merits careful reflection. Before we march right on into v. 2 and start unpacking what Paul tells Titus to say to older men, we would do well to ask: what exactly is the bearing that the Gospel (the “sound/healthy doctrine”) has (or ought to have) on ordered relations among God’s people (the “things that belong to/accord with” sound doctrine)? There is a distinctly American form of this question to consider as we work to hear Titus 2 well.
Checking Assumptions
We come to Titus 2 with assumptions about what Paul is referring to when he speaks of older and younger men and women, of household relations, and the like. We are oriented to these ideas and roles in terms that reflect, predictably, our contemporary American setting (where applicable). Whether we affirm or reject contemporary ways of thinking of the meaning of man, woman, youth, age, households, and other ordered relations, those ways of thinking largely set the terms and determine the options before us. These assumptions inform our selective affirmation or rejection of what historic figures say on these matters, how we evaluate the world around us or the churches we belong to, and so on. What has been said about Augustine and medieval theology can be said about modernity and ordered relations, namely, the latter is largely a discourse of footnoting the former, whether to agree or disagree with it. Put differently, both proponents and opponents of contemporary American notions of how people related to one another ethically negotiate versions–even if apparently opposite versions–of the same reality.
As we approach Titus 2, then, we must ask how these two related facets of ministry determined by the Gospel—the sound doctrine and the things that are well-fitted to that doctrine—may upset, subvert, and remake those assumptions. This is precisely what Paul insists must be the case, not only here but in his other treatments of household relations, especially in Eph. 5-6. How, then, do we imagine those relations in the contemporary West? What makes them what they are? What are their nature, dynamics, and social function? These questions are not irrelevant to what it would mean to hear Titus 2 well. First-century Cretans had a reasonably settled framework for thinking about those questions, a framework ordinarily characterized by scholars as patriarchal with a focused and comprehensive role for the paterfamilias (husband, father, master) who rules the others and maintains the household as an economic and social mechanism. We have assumptions too. Is our assumption correct? Does it have anything to do with the Gospel—the “sound doctrine”—that Paul refers to in v. 1 and which he says controls the “accordant things” that must be taught?
Love, Reality, and Ordered Relations
For guidance on this point, we may note how this question, among others, framed the decade-long debate in the 1980s and 1990s between David L. Schindler and the "neoconservatives" (George Weigel, Michael Novak, and Richard John Neuhaus). It was a disagreement not merely about policy or culture but about the metaphysical foundations of America itself, and ultimately about the nature of love.
The neoconservative position holds that the American experiment represents the fruition of a "natural" social order as that order was recovered and developed in early modernity. Anglo-American liberalism, which is distinct from the “continental liberalism” of the French Revolution, is built squarely and deliberately on the premise of personal autonomy: freedom means the capacity to choose what one judges to be right and good. On the neoconservative view, Christianity does not conflict with this arrangement but affirms and perfects it, adding deeper reasons for the good, greater clarity about it, and firmer motivation to pursue it. Importantly, even where Christianity points to various ways the contemporary expression of this concept of freedom must be sanctified, reordered, perfected, and the like, Christianity coheres with it at bottom, and presents a better way for it to be fulfilled. When American origins are characterized as the triumph of ‘liberty” over tyranny, and then that liberty is cast in Christian terms, this is often (but not always) what is meant. This reading of America has deep roots in American Catholic thought, especially through John Courtney Murray, and stretches back to figures like Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson. In effect, it treats America's self-understanding, which is driven by freedom as autonomous choice among goods, as itself compatible with, even an outworking of, a Christian theology of nature and grace.
Christian conservatives who strongly reject disordered forms of that liberty (homosexuality and transgenderism, feminism, abortion, etc.) do so by pushing for the opposite (and earlier) expression of the same fundamental model. While both faces may look in opposite directions, they belong to the same head, Janus-like. Whereas modern American notions of liberty find expression in notions like the choice to marry a member of the same sex or a mother’s choice to end the life of her unborn child, the Christian conservative response, assuming similarly that societal and domestic relations are a matter of well-ordered choice, pushes back hard to recover the older choice to conform to putative nature, the content of which often reflects, in general terms, the Greco-Roman construct with which many early moderns were enamored. Though often updated in form to a reimagined early twentieth-century industrial configuration, this is often the “traditional” framework of ordered relations referred to by contemporary cultural critics.
Schindler's disagreement with the neoconservative assumption goes to the root of this picture. For him, this account, however sincerely Christian in intention, misses the very essence of Christianity, which is the primacy and unrelenting reality of God's love as revealed in Jesus Christ. This belongs, of course, and rather centrally so, to what Paul regards as the “sound doctrine” that Christ’s servants proclaim, which New Testament writers often summarize precisely along these lines (John 3:16; John 14:31; Rom. 8:38-39; 1 John 4:9-10; et al.). In Paul, as much as in John, God is love, and that love does not merely stand behind creation as its distant cause, as a fountain from which modern views of liberty flow. It pervades and constitutes everything that exists. This includes not only the things of creation and providence, but, perhaps even especially, the relation between things. The relations between things are not incidental; nor are they merely natural, performative, or conducive to a well-ordered and functioning society. Ordered relations are themselves an expression of love and a reflection of the inner life of God as Trinity. Each created thing, including especially the ordered relations that constitute human life before God and one another, comes from other things that give it life, sustain it, and define it, and each thing simultaneously reaches out toward others and, in doing so, toward God. Christ—by, in, and for whom this providential ordering of things has been created (Col. 1)—himself takes up this primordial, original, love-constituted order of creation just as he takes up a human nature, drawing it into the very relation of love that exists eternally within the Trinity. Love, in this vision, precedes and accounts for every created thing, gives rise to it, suffuses it, and is its goal.
This has a decisive consequence for how we understand human freedom, and it is here that Schindler’s contrast with the neoconservatives becomes sharpest. If love and relatedness precede the human person and constitute reality itself, then there is no neutral standpoint, no “Archimedean point,” from which a person first exists as a self-contained chooser and only afterward decides whether to enter into relationship or love. There is no prior pause for choice, no possibility of stepping back from a world already saturated with given relations and given love. Gift is everywhere. Gift is everything. And the gift(s) come pre-interpreted; they do not await our act or choice of attaching meaning to them. Love is not merely a goal of well-ordered relations defined on other terms such as authority, submission, power, agency, and the like. Love is from the outset the very context that makes those terms meaningful at all. Man is genuinely free, but his freedom operates from within this antecedent love, shaped by everything that has gone before him and by every prior tendency of his own being. Freedom, in other words, is properly understood not as the power to select among otherwise indifferent options, whether “liberal” (usually undifferentiated equality and unrestrained choice) or “conservative” (usually a reimagined version of Greco-Roman patriarchy), but as release into the fruitfulness of life found only in God’s loving ways. It is the Spirit-created capacity to receive, inhabit, and freely ratify (or refuse) a love and an order of relatedness that were always divine gifts and were never of one’s own making. The question before a man and a woman has always been whether we will receive, “step into,” the glorious and stupendously beautiful life God has gifted us in this vocation called “life as this man” or “life as this woman.” It has never been the question of what we will make of it, but whether we will receive the gift it is and thus flourish on its given terms. The Gospel, among other things, announces the gift of such life in Jesus Christ, who gives us the Spirit and thus reorders us exhaustively in terms of his own true and ordered liberty.
The neoconservative account of freedom, by contrast, treats truth and goodness as fundamentally objects of choice rather than realities that human beings are, by creation and providence, already given over to and surrounded by. On the neoconservative construal, society and culture become “discretionary.” They are perpetually suspended, awaiting whatever each individual will choose, rather than expressions of loves, whether creaturely loves or the love of Christ, that precede and ground the concrete, individual human person.
Virtue, religion, and real commitment to others are certainly present and sincere in American life. But American culture’s characteristic mode of openness to truth and goodness is, despite its own intentions, a kind of preemptive closure to the order of creation and providence understood as inherently relational. It is therefore also a closure to grace, since grace builds upon, reorders, and perfects the gift of ordered relations it must first be able to find—not in the Greco-Roman patriarchal world or in modern undifferentiated equality-as-sameness, but in the first love that is God’s own in his Son by his Spirit. The only life-giving “nostalgia” for a better era in the past would have to look as far back as that: the God Who is back of all things, and lovingly so. This is the nostalgia the Gospel gives us as a promised future already being realized provisionally in the present, and which orients us in remarkably unique ways to the relations (husband, wife, father, mother, child, friend, etc.) we would otherwise confuse in their essence with what the world means by the same.
The American Question at the Outset of Titus 2
America represents, in Schindler’s judgment, the most developed and purest expression of modernity as such, its underlying logic of freedom-as-autonomous-choice brings features of secular modernity “out into the open” more clearly than anywhere else, making America a privileged site for understanding, and (we pray) evangelizing, modernity itself. Without this critical vantage point on the modern conditions of contemporary Church theology and practice, the Church cannot adequately discern the deepest and increasingly dominant form of secular modernity at work in the world.
The problem with the conventional approach to Titus 2 and similar passages, simply put, is that, despite appeals to lines like “as Christ loves the Church” (Eph. 5) etc., much of contemporary discourse about household roles and the like (the “things” in Titus 2:2ff.) is underdetermined by the gospel of God and the God of the gospel (the “sound doctrine” in Titus 2:1). Ultimately, the Gospel’s core–the revelation or disclosure of God’s love, in which love is constitutive of being itself, including all providentially ordered relations, prior to and enabling rather than opposed to freedom–stands against the neoconservative and similar theologies of freedom as autonomous choice. This includes the choice to conform to a “traditional” or “natural” framework of relations rooted in any historical era and conceived of apart from the content of the Gospel itself. Love, rather than autonomy, which is ordered and not disordered, functions as the fundamental category through which ordered human relations, grace, and modernity itself must be understood.
To be sure, this love-determined approach to ordered human relations is not an ahistorical abstraction, floating above life on the ground. To the contrary, it impresses itself as reality precisely by coming to us in the very biographical circumstantiality of human life, including the era, context, or conditions of one’s life here and now. Indeed, it does so in all such circumstances, including greatly problematic or sub-optimal circumstances such as slavery (and thus we have Paul’s addresses regarding faithfulness even within the conditions of enslavement), meaning it is not possible to reduce to it one or another era or set of conditions and there are no ideal conditions in this world. If, then, the Christian approach does not merely baptize a favored model of human relations arising from historical, moral, economic, or social-political considerations, what is it? What difference does the Gospel, thickly defined, make to how God’s people relate to one another? How is the Church called to be the community on earth, even a modern earth, which—as an earthly outpost of heaven—reflects the order of God’s own love and life in countercultural ways and which commends a life-giving alternative to the world and to one another?
Having told Titus he must teach not only sound doctrine (the love of God for us in Christ) but also the things that are in keeping with that doctrine, he turns to the first of these “accordant” things: the call that belongs as divine gift to older men. In Titus 2, older men are providentially related to others in terms of their relative location in time (they are older) and space (they are envisioned not as older men in general but as older men within the Church body) and vocation (there are concrete ways in which they are called to receive and deploy God’s loving gifts of age, wisdom, and relations to others).
We turn to them next.