The outline I’ve adopted mirrors Dante’s journey through heaven in his third volume of the Divine Comedy: the Paradiso. As he moves up through the planetary spheres, Dante sees bad faith (the Moon), misplaced hope (Mercury), and disordered love (Venus) being repaired by Christ. Next he goes through planets where Christ teaches his followers how to live up to the classical world’s four “cardinal virtues”: making us teachers of true Truth (the Sun), courageous warriors (Mars), just rulers (Jupiter), and masters of our appetites (Saturn).
Finally, Dante shows both the integration of the theological and the cardinal virtues, as well as the primacy of the theological virtues. He does so by climaxing the pilgrim’s journey through the heavenly spheres with examinations on faith (by Peter, bearer of the keys of the Kingdom), on hope (by James, counselor to patience in suffering), and on love (by John the beloved disciple). Dante’s point, I think, is that Christ has come to ennoble human aspirations to the good life (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance), but only through a redemption that begins and ends with faith, hope, and love.
What makes the Pastoral Epistles so very special in the canon of Christian Scripture is the unique way Paul, the author of the three “theological virtues,” takes account of the four “cardinal virtues” of the classical and Hellenistic world. He claims them for Christ, and incorporates them into a Christian vision of a good and noble life.
Faith grounds us and gives us wings. Early in this final section of the Paradiso Dante muses over the irony of faith grounding us in reality by inviting us to believe in unseen things. Following the Latin translation of Hebrews 11:6, “Faith,” observes Dante, “is the substantia (that which “stands under” [sub + stare]) of things hoped for” (Paradiso 24.64). For our lives to mean anything, all of us believe in more than what we see — from the force of gravity, to the sun’s rising and setting; from the validity of principles of right and wrong, to the veracity of stories about our ancestors. The key to life is basing our lives on the right unseen realities.
And faith in those unseen verities gives our lives wings. Interestingly, all three of the main books of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, end with the word “stars.” Faith lets you stand upon those things that are beneath the surface of things. And when you take your stand on them, then you can hope for things above — faith enables you to reach for the stars.
In the Pastorals, faith enables us to reach for the stars. People on the island of Crete had an ancient belief that Zeus had originally been a human who ascended to deity by his righteous deeds. They were raised to believe that they too could live such virtuous lives that they could become gods themselves. If they reached for the stars in their mastery of themselves, in their practice of justice with other human beings, and if they did right by the gods — if they did so, they could become like Zeus. Their basic religious spirit amounted to something like an anticipation of Mormonism, the byline of which is: “What we are now the Father once was, and what the Father now is we shall become.”
Cretans’ upside-down faith won them the mockery of non-Cretan Greeks, and the self-critical remark of “one of their own prophets”: “Cretans are always liars, vicious beasts, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12). The temptation for Cretans was to view Christ the way the 20th century novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, himself from Crete, was to envision him: as a man who rose to divinity by self-mastery, righteous living, and pleasing of the divine.
Such “faith” would be entirely misplaced. Such reaching for the stars would fall far short. To counter such ideas and to encourage a faith that would ennoble us rather than finally degrade us, Paul pointed to Christ as not a man who had ascended to deity. Paul portrayed Christ for the Cretans rather as God’s very own attributes descended to us: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us … to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly” … and … “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy…” (Titus 2:11,12b; 3:4–5a).
If, by God’s grace and by the Holy Spirit’s work within us, we humbly set aside our pride and humbly accept this Christ — the Christ who has come down to us — we can indeed reach for and attain the stars.
In the Pastorals, faith grounds us. People from Ephesus had been shaped by a religious spirit opposite that of the people of Crete. They had been taught, not that people rise to deity, but that deity had come down to them … in the form of a lifeless rock.
As a result, they prostrated themselves before things that degraded and belittled them. One of the smaller deities in Ephesus was Priapus, the god of the phallus. Ephesians were susceptible to sorcery and witchcraft (Acts 19:18–19). Paul feared they would worship their wealth: “As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to … set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches” (1 Timothy 6:17a,c). And Paul was shocked that they were attracted to demonically-inspired, anti-humanistic, and slothful “disciplines”: dietary restrictions and renunciation of marriage and of domestic responsibility (1 Timothy 4:1–5).
Paul counters the life-denying religious spirit of Ephesus by pointing to the vibrant humanity of Christ: “[T]here is only one mediator between God and humanity, himself a human being, Christ Jesus…” (1 Timothy 2:5b NJB). God grounds our lives in the one true human being, who mediates his life to us and makes us over into new people.
That’s why Paul encourages Timothy to punch above his weight: not letting others intimidate him because of his age, not letting his own physical afflictions get the better of him (“take a little wine for your stomach” — 1 Timothy 5:23), rekindling the gift he had received at the laying on of hands by Paul and others, being courageous. In this posture of strength, Timothy will be able to model the “new self” which Paul had already taught in Ephesians 4 and 5, and into which God is forming his whole church.
The faith that Paul encourages in all his letters, culminating in his counsel to Timothy and Titus, is extraordinary.
We are called to have faith in the Christ who has brought heaven’s life down to us. He does so, as he taught the Cretans, by embodying God’s communicable attributes. He breaks us of a pride that we can build some sort of stairway to heaven, but then he lifts us up by imparting the very attributes of God — his own grace, kindness, and loving kindness — so that we can live heaven’s life in the here and now, and reach for and ultimately attain the stars.
At one and the same time, we are called to have faith in the Christ who has down to us not as a dumb, lifeless, and life-denying rock. He has come not to make us subject to desires we cannot control — like lust and greed and occultism. He has come to ground us in our full humanity, molding us into new people, fully embracing our calling as men and women, full of life and of love.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
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