Gotcha with that title, maybe?
I have seen a person argue that the checklist in 1 Timothy is paramount. The points are non-negotiable. So elders must be married. All right, what about having children? That's in there, too. If a pastor must be a married man he must also have children who are well spoken for and properly disciplined. He must also manage his household well. This could suggest that the man is finacially competent to run his own family and business and not just that he's married. He must not be too new a believer.
He also must be well regarded even by unbelievers in the community. It's interesting how few conservative Protestants care about that particular point. The main thing is that the guy ought to be married. Paul's list can't be a case of having fourteen points as firm but the fifteenth point as optional. The truth is that in many cases most Christians don't give a crap if their pastor is well-regarded by unbelievers so long as they like him, he's married, and his kids and wife are well-behaved and pitch into the church effort. Even those who claim the checklist is inviolate don't wait for many pastoral candidates to have kids. Just the wife will do, thank you.
In fact a case could be made that those people who want a rigid checklist get a scriptural beat-down showing that their approach to the criteria isn't practical. Le us consider something, namely that there's this epistle called 2 Timothy. Paul took care to make a list, that's right, and he also urged Timothy to not appoint anyone too quickly. Don't lay hands on anyone too quickly and so participate in their sins, Paul warned near the end of 1 Timothy. So in 2 Timothy Paul is still urging Tim to get `er done and appoint those men suitable to teach.
What was going on? Why couldn't Tim just get the job done? Paul also talked about how no soldier got entangled in civilian affairs and that Timothy would understand what this meant. Paul had urged Tim in the last letter to consider younger women as sisters, in all purity. Paul ALSO said in 2 Timothy, "Come to me soon and get my coat and books." So what was the "civilian" stuff Timothy was admonished to avoid? Was it youthful lusts? Well, that's often referred to as some kind of sexual temptation in most sermons and yet this youthful lust is immediately followed by a warning against arguing about stupid controversies. Now of all the lusts young men have in the Christian blogosphere a lust for debating stupid theological points is probably near the top of the list.
Between letters 1 and 2 to Timothy may not have been long but the question arises as to why Timothy was being told in the second letter to hurry up and finish what he was appointed to do in the first letter? The ancient world was not so fast-paced as our so for there to have been a second letter at all suggests that Timothy was not having the easiest time finding and appointing men he considered qualified to teach sound doctrine in Ephesus. It can't have been because so few men in Ephesus were married, can it? Despite the fact that polygamy was not exactly forbidden in Greco-Roman culture the number of people who would have had multiple wives can't have been that high among the early church as found in Ephesus, could it?
Church tradition has held that Timothy himself was recognized as the first bishop at Ephesus and we are not told whether or not Timothy himself was married. Paul hoped Timothy would hurry up and head over to him and bring his stuff but we don't know that this happened. We know that a missionary trip to Romans never materialized for Paul, though he told the church in Rome he hoped to visit them. We are never told how the collection for Jerusalem worked out. To suggest that it doesn't matter if Timothy was married or not if he was first bishop of Rome is to claim that anything the scriptures do not directly speak to doesn't matter and might as well not exist, even though our debates about how to apply the scriptures depend a great deal on
understanding the history of the early church. For instance, we have to consider 1 & 2 Timothy as unified correspondence if we hold to Pauline authorship. Only someone who believes Paul wrote one or neither of these epistles can dodge the huge question of why Timothy hadn't appointed men to teach and gotten back in touch with Paul between epistles 1 & 2.
And what was the "civilian affair" that could have kept Timothy from returning to Paul? At the risk of indulging in some levity, what reason usually comes up for a single guy to stop hanging out with his friends and coworkers and getting work done? If Driscoll can propose that Abishag was SOlomon's first love and first wife I have some freedom to propose that Paul was urging Timothy to not settle down with an Ephesian wife so that he could return to missions work and get his cloak and parchments back to him.
My speculation has the advantage of being drawn from just the Timothy correspondence rather than patching together passages from Kings and Song of Songs. Perhaps Timothy had trouble finding any married men qualified to teach and Paul was concerned that Timothy might settle down in Ephesus. Paul was willing to declare of fellow Christians who did not continue with him in ministry projects as people who have "loved this world." Paul could be strikingly harsh and dismissive of people who wanted to stay in certain cities rather than rejoin him.
Now a person could propose that scripture does not speak to this issue and therefore it doesn't matter. Actually, it matters a great deal because if you insist on saying that the checklist is non-negotiable than if Timothy was first bishop of Ephesus he doesn't seem to have fit all the traits in the checklist. We never hear from early church tradition that he had a spouse. If the checklist criteria that says a man MUST be married to be a bishop and this was so non-negotiable and so indisputable why weren't spouses mentioned? Well, maybe because women weren't important in that society in terms of public roles. But this doesn't seem likely since women played vital and important roles in the church. Even the less than entirely persuasive claim that Lydia was Paul's wife grants her substantial role in the early church. So if women played such important roles AND marriage was a prerequisite for pastoral appointment why have the scriptures been so uninformative?
It Timothy was married and marriage was such a vital and non-negotiable part of the checklist in 1 Timothy we should not have ever heard of unmarried bishops in the life of the early church in the post-apostolic era. For that matter if it was necessary for bishops to be married why not apostles? Yet most Christians have held that Paul himself was unmarried per 1 Cor 6-7. Notice I said "most". There are reasons for that.
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