Do the Pastoral Epistles Still Matter?

In an article that appeared in America magazine ("On the Church," April 21, 2001), Cardinal Walter Kasper explained at length his perspective on the relationship between "the universal church and particular (local) churches." This was written in response to then-Cardinal Ratzinger's critique of Kasper's previously stated views on the subject.

Kasper's argument, in contrast to Ratzinger's subsequent response ("The Local Church and the Universal Church," November 19, 2001), was based on a critical appraisal of New Testament ecclesiology. One passage in Kasper's piece struck me as particularly interesting.

When in his principal letters Paul uses the word “church” (ecclesia) in the singular, he refers to a particular church or to a given community. When he speaks of “churches” in the plural, he refers to several local assemblies. For Paul, the one church of God comes to life in each local church. Thus there is the church of God in Corinth and so forth. The church of God is present in each of them. In the captivity letters (which in the opinion of many scholars are not by Paul), this meaning of ecclesia recedes into the background and the universal church as a whole comes into focus.

Kasper finds the ecclesiological vision he is advocating reflected in the genuine letters of Paul, and contrasts this with the ecclesiology of the inauthentic letters. Implicit in Kasper's argument is the assumption that letters genuinely written by Paul have greater authority than letters merely claiming to have been written by Paul.

For Kasper, it appears, the pseudonymous character of some of the Pauline letters diminishes their authority, at least relative to the genuine Pauline letters. That a high-ranking member of the Roman Curia has taken this position, however implicitly, seems to me quite significant.

I should point out that downgrading the authority of certain NT texts is quite different from dropping them from the canon. The question of whether that should be done is ultimately moot: they're not going to be, so there is no point of arguing about it one way or another.

Authority, however, is not necessarily the same thing as canonicity. While many people are loathe to admit that there are any contradictions within the Bible, this is not an intellectually honest position. The question arises: between two contradictory texts, which is to be preferred?

Martin Luther may have exaggerated the contradictions between the letter of James and the letters of Paul, but his way of dealing with contradictory texts is still instructive: Luther maintained the 27-book NT canon, but clearly identified Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation as less authoritative than the "main" books of the NT. They were kept within the canon, but were "officially" less authoritative. Could such a position be taken with regard to the inauthentic letters of Paul?

Officially, I don't this this would ever happen, certainly not in the Catholic Church. In practise, though, it obviously already does happen, as the example of Cardinal Kasper cited above illustrates. I think this could lead to problems, however: while many Catholics will readily accept Kasper's argument, others will reject the suggestion that the authentic letters of Paul should be preferred over the inauthentic letters, since they won't even recognise the latter as inauthentic. They will insist that the apparently conflicting ecclesiologies within the Pauline corpus are, in fact, merely apparent. In fact, they might argue, the two apparently conflicting perspectives could actually be perfectly reconciled, if we were not too sinful to see it. (Critical and pre-critical exegesis have been allowed to coexist in the Catholic Church, and I think this has contributed to a lot of conflict between Catholics -- as demonstrated by the hostility shown by some people towards Fr. Raymond Brown, for example. Critical readers often consider Brown's work to be somewhere between moderate and conservative. Precritical readers find his work somewhere between heresy and apostasy. But maybe that's a subject for another day.)

Before I conclude, I should suggest why I think the Pastoral Epistles are still important -- what was originally going to be the focus of this entry. Many people reject the Pastorals because of their overtly sexist content. The presence of such content is lamentable, to be sure, but the Pastorals do contain something positive that is sorely lacking in the rest of the Pauline corpus: a positive view of marriage and sexuality. The Catholic tradition has often taken a dim view of sex, and has always exalted celibacy over marriage. The 4th-century monk Jovinian was actually excommunicated for denying that marriage was inferior to celibacy! (His primary opponent was Jerome, whose spiteful invective Adversus Jovinianum proves, if nothing else, that even the most nasty and hateful people have a shot at becoming a "saint.")

Jovinian's arguments were drawn largely from the Pastoral Epistles. Jerome's were largely drawn from the authentic letters of Paul. Jerome may have won the fight with Jovinian, but the Pastoral Epistles forced Jerome to actually argue against scripture. Without them, it would have been no contest.

Of course, just because the Pastorals have served an important and positive role (in a limited way) in the past, are they still necessary today? Is the concept of a canon even relevant?

Works Cited