“Brother, I have a problem, I need help before this afternoon,” the message read. A pastor from India whom I had worked with for some time outlined his problem and asked for an urgent reply. It had something to do with baptism, scheduled to take place within two or three hours. I dashed off a brief answer and hit send. It took all of five minutes.
Twenty years earlier, I had been assigned an article on baptism for an outreach magazine with a circulation of 250,000. The editor gave me a deadline of several weeks, and I used all that time. I cared no less about my brother in India than about those 250,000 readers. He just needed his answer faster. The apostles knew both kinds of deadline.
We read the New Testament epistles the way we read a textbook. Chapter and verse, doctrine by doctrine, as if Paul sat down one quiet morning and decided to write some theology.
He didn’t.
Most of the epistles are first-century email. Something went wrong in a church somewhere. Someone carried the news, sometimes hundreds of miles. And Paul — or Peter, or James, or John — answered. Not with a thesis. With a response to a fire.
Realizing that changes our understanding of how they were written. Listen to Paul in 1 Corinthians: “I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius.” Then he remembers. “I did baptize also the household of Stephanas.” Then he isn’t sure. “Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.” That isn’t a man polishing a manuscript. That’s a man talking while a scribe writes it down. Writing is idealized speech. Dictation is not.
So when someone argues that a letter “isn’t in Paul’s style,” I want to ask: which Paul? Lay my five-minute reply beside that magazine article and you might conclude two different men wrote them.
Each letter shows you what kind it is. A letter answers a question we don’t always hear. We have Paul’s half of the conversation. The other half — the report, the crisis, the people involved — we have to reconstruct from clues in the letter itself. Paul’s counsel addresses a particular situation. Until we know the situation, we can’t be sure which part is the principle and which part is the application.
That sounds like an obstacle—but it’s a doorway.
Once you ask what happened that made him write this? the letters stop being lists of rules. They become stories. People in trouble. A friend who cares enough to answer. They contain counsel concerning specific circumstances, not necessarily universal truths. Names you skimmed past turn out to be people standing in the room, or fighting the fire in another city.
Take two letters. Philemon, Paul’s shortest, fits on a single page, and almost nobody reads it. Colossians runs four chapters, and almost everybody quotes it. The canon puts five other letters between them, and we file the two in different places in our heads. One is a personal note about a slave. The other is high theology about the cosmic Christ.
But they went out together, because Paul had two problems from the same place. The two letters traveled the same road, and they would be read in the same house.
Two questions. One answer.
