Timothy’s Education
Can you imagine having a conversation with the apostle Paul? We all know impetuous Peters, and tender-hearted Johns, but no one presumes to compare himself to Paul! Paul can’t be put in a personality box–he’s zealous, stormy, tender, confident, humble…unpredictable. It’s almost as if Paul is an ideal instead of a real, living person; I just can’t imagine him sitting in front of the fireplace in my slipper putty chair.
Today as we began a study of a pastoral epistle, we saw Paul’s fatherly love for one special young man, Timothy. Paul had a lot of friends and co-laborers, but he spoke of no one besides Timothy as his own son in the faith. So just how did Paul and Timothy get hooked up in the first place? Since Paul specifically mentions Timothy’s grandmother and mother, Lois and Eunis, it’s possible that Paul had spent time in Timothy’s home. We can imagine the young boy, Timothy, wide-eyed, listening to Paul’s stories of Roman soldiers, prisons, and shipwrecks.
One of the things Paul commends in Timothy is his knowledge of the Scriptures. Considering the apostle’s own grasp of the Old Testament, it’s safe to assume that Timothy knew more than a few flannelgraph stories. And it seems that Timothy got the bulk of his education at home, or least the most important part of it. Besides his knowledge, Timothy must have been disciplined and earnest, a boy with a bright spark in his eye, a spark that caught the attention of a man larger than life itself.
What’s the Point?
When the women in Timothy’s life set out to educate him, what exactly did they have in mind? How did they choose the curriculum–what was the point of it all? In Neil Postman’s book The End of Education, Postman asserts that our present educational system will fail because it has lost its purpose. While his case is quite convincing, his own suggestions for a point to education are pretty pathetic. R.C. Sproul writes about his experience with an outstanding Boston school. When asked to explain the ultimate purpose of the school (“What sort of person are you trying to make?”), the principal was at a loss for words. Sproul described the encounter as “frightening.” It is frightening when we put thought, time, and energy into a process, a process for which we do not even know the desired outcome.
This week’s theme is the end of education, or the purpose of education. When Jim Berg, the author of Changed Into His Image, dropped his daughter off to work at a camp to serve for the summer, she was having second thoughts about being away from home. The Bergs had the end game in mind when they reminded her: “This is what we raised you to do.” How do you think Lois and Eunice felt when the wild missionary asked them if he could take Timothy on his dangerous travels? Didn’t Timothy have a great future ahead of him? He had the best education. He was a prodigy. He could do anything he wanted to do. Were they willing to give him up to a man who would get him nowhere, who had nothing to offer but persecution and maybe prison?
“Mother, grandmother–I want to go with Paul.” They looked at each other and smiled. “Of course. That’s what we raised you to do.”
