Paul—A Pastor’s Heart

The Apostle Paul is one of the most fascinating and pivotal characters in Bible history. Previously a persecutor and legalist he became a great missionary and pastor to the churches he established. His writings form a crucial part of the New Testament.

However, as his second letter to the Corinthians demonstrates, there is a deeply human aspect to Paul’s writings as he grappled with enormous challenges and difficulties. Paul Barnett’s insightful and sensitive consideration of Paul’s situation and character, seen in this letter, sheds precious light on this pastor as he sought to care for this ‘difficult’ church in its early and turbulent years.

Paul Barnett, former Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, Australia, is a Visiting Fellow in Ancient History at Macquarie University and Teaching Fellow at Regent College, Vancouver and Moore College, Sydney. He is a frequent traveller to Israel, where Christianity began, and to Turkey and Greece, to which it rapidly spread.

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Paul — A Pastor’s Heart | paul barnett

Paul — A Pastor’s Heart

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Contents

Preface

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1.

Paul’s last letter to Corinth

1

2.

Paul’s pastoral objective—Restoration

7

3.

Paul’s authority

27

4.

Opposition in Corinth

34

5.

Paul’s defence

55

6.

Paul the peacemaker

73

7.

Paul’s love

83

8.

Why Paul persevered—The collection

92

9.

The third visit

102

10. Paul the apostle and the church in Corinth

107

APPENDIX A - The unity and format of Second Corinthians

117

APPENDIX B - Corinth and Romans

127

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Preface

Second Corinthians contains many wonderful passages which are much loved by preachers and ordinary Bible readers. But there is a problem. Once you leave these purple patches much of the rest of the letter is not very clear at all.

A text like ‘you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich’ (8:9) is indeed great.

So too do we cherish the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all (13:14). The problem is with the words in between these and other famous texts—we simply read them without much idea of what they mean.

I became conscious of this issue many years ago, so that it became a personal challenge to understand the whole letter. I began serious study of this major, but often little understood, letter and took every opportunity to teach it, since teaching would be a good way to learn about its overall meaning. I did this to such an extent that some of my friends joked that I didn’t know any other part of the Bible.

I even had the gall to ask John Stott if I could write a commentary on it for his Bible Speaks Today series. Graciously he agreed, though the task of writing proved much harder than I had thought. After many unsuccessful drafts that came back covered with Mr Stott’s red ink, this book was eventually published. Some time later Dr Gordon Fee the newly appointed editor of the New International Commentary series (published

by Eerdmans) approached me to write on Second Corinthians for the series. So for the next seven years all my spare moments were devoted to understanding Paul’s sometimes complex letter, which he wrote to this difficult congregation.

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Paul—A pastor’s heart In the years since, I have had opportunities to work through the letter with interested people and have benefited from their insights. I never fail to find new things.

This little book is not another commentary, in the sense that it discusses Paul’s text verse by verse. Yet from another perspective it does attempt to identify the challenges which faced Paul at the time, and from that viewpoint it will—I hope—help my readers to understand the message of the book, by which I mean the overall message of the book.

Second Corinthians is deeply personal, at times passionately emotional. Each of Paul’s letters to his churches is ‘pastoral’ in the true sense of the word, but none more so than this letter to the Corinthians. In what follows I will try to uncover and apply as many of Paul’s ‘pastoral’ insights as possible and relevant for today’s situations. Of course, there are many differences between Paul the apostle to the Corinthians and other more ordinary pastors of churches (see chapter 3: ‘Paul’s authority’). Nevertheless, there is much to learn from Paul’s concerns for this church and the steps he took to help them in their relationship with Christ.

While I have learned from many scholars who have written on Second Corinthians, I will not be making reference to their works in footnotes in this book. At many points I will give references by name to other New Testament books, but for Second Corinthians I will only mention in brackets the chapter and verse.

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One

Paul’s last letter to Corinth

For I fear that perhaps when I come I may find you not as I wish, and that you may find me not as you wish...

2 Corinthians 12:20a

Let me recapture the setting of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians.

It was the year 56, a mere quarter-century after Jesus, and Paul was in Macedonia in Northern Greece. He was soon to make his final visit to Corinth and from there to Rome via Jerusalem.

Back in AD 50 Paul came for the first time to Corinth where he founded the church over the next 18 months. Then he journeyed to Jerusalem by a sequence of little ships that hugged the coastline around to Caesarea, and from there ‘up’ to Jerusalem. From the holy city he travelled north to the original sending church in Antioch in Syria and then over many weeks made his way overland westward to Ephesus, the great metropolis of Roman Asia. For the next three years Paul made Ephesus the hub of his teaching, which ultimately spread out into the interior of that province.

The year 55, however, was for Paul an annus horribilis.

Very disturbing news came to him about serious problems in the church in Corinth, which made it necessary for Paul to write them a major letter: First Corinthians. Meanwhile in Ephesus Paul faced mounting criticism and danger. He told the Corinthians that he was in danger every hour, had fought with beasts in Ephesus and that there were many adversaries 1

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Paul—A pastor’s heart (1 Corinthians 15:30, 32; 16:9). Paul doesn’t go into the details but we have the strong impression that he is in great danger.

The following year things grew even worse. Timothy returned from Corinth with the very bad news that the church had not heeded Paul’s First Corinthians letter so that he must go there immediately to head off a looming disaster.

Did the arrival of the great apostle solve the problem? On the contrary, a powerful Corinthian and his supporters engaged Paul in a power struggle that left him with no alternative but to return to Ephesus defeated, leaving the Corinthian church deeply divided. Paul reasoned that there was no point in staying, since this would have made a bad situation even worse.

Back in Ephesus he had to make hard choices. Would he abandon the Corinthian church or would he make one last attempt to save it? Knowing Paul’s determination as we do it’s no surprise that he chose the latter course. To that end, he wrote them a letter, which he said, he wrote with tears and in great anguish (2:4). In effect, this letter would give the Corinthians one last chance to set their house in order, that is, by disciplining the leader of the anti-Paul faction, who had grievously insulted Paul on his recent visit. (Unfortunately the letter has not survived; we only know of its existence and general character from bits of information in Second Corinthians—2:4; 7:8; compare 2:13; 10:9–11).

Paul chose Titus to be the bearer of a letter that I think was, in effect, Paul’s ultimatum. The Corinthians must deal with the offender or Paul would not be returning. Paul did not send the letter with Timothy, probably because Timothy had reported the Corinthians’ refusal to comply with First Corinthians and would be not be welcome back in Corinth.

Once Paul sent Titus with the letter however he was immediately anxious. We have the impression that Paul was worried to the point of sleeplessness about the impact this ‘tearful’ letter would have on the Corinthians (2:12–13).

Would this be the end of the road for Paul and the Corinthians, or would they submit to his authority?

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Paul’s last letter to Corinth As it happened, Paul was soon overtaken by another crisis. The situation in the city of Ephesus had now become terrifyingly dangerous. Such was the effect of Paul’s preaching of Christ in the Asian metropolis that growing numbers were abandoning their belief in the gods, especially Artemis, the patron goddess of Ephesus. The great temple of the city, the second biggest in the whole world, was dedicated to this deity, who was the much loved goddess of fertility.

Religion, sex and money went together in the temples at that time. In this case, so far as we know, it was only religion and money. The craftsmen who made and sold the little silver containers for the statue of the goddess were losing money because Paul was preaching that ‘gods made with hands are not gods’ and sales were declining (Acts 19:23–27). Demetrius the master silversmith and his fellow guild members stirred up a citywide riot, in which the people of Ephesus rushed into the great open-air theatre screaming their loyalty to Artemis and baying for Paul’s blood. Paul told the Corinthians that he had expected to be killed at that time (1:8–10).

Paul must now quit Ephesus, never to return. Doubtless greatly shaken and with heavy heart he travelled north to Troas where he had planned to reunite with Titus and hear how the Corinthians had received his letter, written in tears.

But Titus had been delayed somewhere (2:12–13). So he crossed the Aegean by ship to Neapolis in northern Macedonia hoping to find his friend, but he was not there either. In deep anxiety, Paul waited and waited. Eventually Titus arrived, with news of the Corinthians’ reaction to his visit as the bearer of Paul’s letter (7:5–6). The news was mixed. Some news was good, but other news was bad, very bad.

We can imagine Paul sitting with his friend, hearing his report of the visit to the southern capital. The good news was that the congregation had somehow disciplined the faction leader, though a minority still supported him (2:6). But there are hints that neither he nor his supporters were entirely happy with Paul. They and others were angry that Paul did 3

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Paul—A pastor’s heart not return as they understood he would, but sent a letter instead—and it was a tough letter (1:15–18; 7:8; 10:10). Paul the coward and promise breaker had not returned to face them like a man but had sent his friend with a piece of paper!

As is the way when things go badly, they seem to have thought of other things about Paul they didn’t like, for instance, his attitude to money (11:7–12; 12:14–15). Wealthy Corinthians were used to paying travelling lecturers, but Paul insisted on supporting himself by tent-making. Back in AD 50–52 Paul had worked to support himself by tentmaking alongside Aquila and Priscilla, until Silvanus and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, it seems, bringing money from the northern churches (Acts 18:5; 2 Corinthians 11:9).

So far as I can see, Paul did not decline financial support from the Corinthians initially. This seems only to have become a problem when Cephas came to Corinth and was paid, in line with his status as an apostle (1 Corinthians 9:3–6), prompting the Corinthians to intimate their intention of paying Paul when he next came to them. Paul declares that he did, indeed, have the ‘right’ to be paid but, for various personal reasons, declined (1 Corinthians 9:6, 12).

Paul may have felt controlled and compromised by the wealthy church members if he had accepted their gifts. But the members, especially the wealthy ones, felt slighted by Paul’s apparent ingratitude. Later, some of them went so far as to accuse him of trickery, saying that they did pay Titus who, they said, channelled his money to Paul (12:16–18).

They were saying that Paul was crafty, standing on high moral ground in declining payment, while all the time taking it by the back door from his co-worker.

This is the dreaded snowball effect. Once doubts arise, others quickly follow. When the ‘we hate Paul’ expanding snowball finally reached the bottom of the hill, the Corinthians decided they didn’t want to keep putting money aside for this relief fund Paul had established a year or so earlier (which scholars call ‘the collection’—see chapter 8: 4

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Paul’s last letter to Corinth Why Paul persevered—The collection). This was really bad news for Paul, who had the widely scattered churches of his mission geared up for this project. Emperor Claudius’ death late in AD 54 had made it possible for Jews to return to Rome and Paul had planned to go there once he had taken the collection from the churches to Jerusalem. So the collapse of the collection in Paul’s most affluent church was a major blow. Maybe Paul feared that if the news spread, his other churches would also give up on this project, one that was dear to Paul’s heart.

You might think all this is bad news and that it couldn’t get any worse. It did! The really serious, potentially fatal report was that a band of new ministers had arrived in Corinth, and in Corinthian eyes they were better preachers than Paul (11:5–6). Like Paul they were Jews, but unlike Paul they had brought letters of recommendation from members of the church in Jerusalem, probably senior members (3:1; 11:22).

These preachers came as missionaries of Christ, his ministers no less, who preached Jesus within their own clear version of the gospel (11:4, 23). They presented their message in a winning way, for they were better orators than Paul and had a kind of supernatural glow issuing from their ‘visions and revelations’ (12:1). And, what’s more these men were not at all troubled by the money question. Like Cephas, who had come there some time back and who was paid, they were quite happy to be paid. Indeed, they said, it was a mark of the true missionary to accept a stipend. The Corinthians welcomed these preachers, so who needed poor old Paul anymore?

Imagine how Paul must have felt hearing Titus peel off one problem after another, with each one worse than the one before. Paul had felt a huge temptation just to cut his losses with them then and there, gather up the collection from the other churches, head for Jerusalem and go at last to Rome.

But he didn’t.

We the modern readers need to understand Paul’s frame of mind when he eventually sat down with Timothy (and 5

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Paul—A pastor’s heart Titus) to write his last letter to Corinth, a letter that would pave the way for his last visit to the city. Are we surprised that Second Corinthians is so deeply emotional? Recall for a moment all that Paul had been through in the immediate past and the likely impact of recent events on him. He had been rejected in Corinth; he was forced to flee for his life from Ephesus to Troas; he did not find his friend in Troas or even across the water in Macedonia, despite days of waiting and waiting; most of Titus’ news was bad—in fact it was terrible news. We can understand why the letter he then wrote to Corinth was so fraught, at times even bitter.

The letter Paul wrote is a window into his heart and mind as he planned to come at last one more time to the Corinthians. For our part, we are now ready to turn to this great, but admittedly sometimes difficult letter.

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