Who Are You? (2)
For the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, Titus 1:7 NASB
Not pugnacious – Pugnacious. A word I am sure you use every day. Right! We don’t have much problem understanding Paul’s requirement of a calm constitution (“not quick-tempered”) and we certainly know what it means to avoid addiction to wine (or any other abusive substance), but “pugnacious,” no, that one is a bit beyond most common vocabularies. So let’s start with the Greek. Plektes, a word that means, “violent person” or “bully.” It is also translated as “quarrelsome” and “striker.” You get the idea. This is the person who uses authority or power or some other influence to get their way despite the consequences. A true bully is not simply someone who beat on you in elementary school. A bully is someone who persecutes you, who oppresses and torments, who intimidates. It really doesn’t matter how a bully accomplishes this. The fact that matters is that this person shows little or no regard for the dignity, self-esteem and self-worth of another. In this regard, a bully is a henchman of Satan. No life matters except his life.
Some time ago I read an article entitled, “Is Your Boss a Psychopath?” It made the point that many people in authority act like a plektes. We have a common saying about this sort of thing. “A person with a little authority soon becomes a tyrant.” Perhaps you’ve met someone like this in a TSA line at the airport. Paul’s list includes such people because they have very little regard for the life God granted to all His subjects. No one should be an overseer who cannot stand in the other man’s shoes. Compassion, sympathy, empathy and good-will are the essential attributes of a true overseer. And, by the way, the community knows this! They also know who the bully is. I imagine Paul’s advice is to avoid such people if possible, and if not possible, to resist their hubris.
Only one left on Paul’s negative list. Fond of sordid gain. Actually all this is found in one Greek word, aischrokerde. The word is derived from kerdos (gain). But Paul modifies it, and rightly so. It isn’t profit that is on the negative list. Everyone works for the excess after costs. Profit is a godly goal. Paul objects to those who live for profit, whose objective in life is accumulation by any means. The word contains that idea of shameful gain, what is acquired without regard to God or others. There are plenty of examples in our world, but those in the news probably don’t count as much as what happens very close to home. If your most important dreams are about winning the lottery, you might need to consider aischrokerde.
We’ve reached the end of the negatives. Fortunately Paul also has a positive list. Overseers are not just people to avoid the bad stuff. They are people who exhibit the good stuff. As we shall see.
Topical Index: pugnacious, plektes, sordid gain, aischrokerde, Titus 1:7
“A person with a little authority soon becomes a tyrant.” So how do we avoid becoming tyrants? Avoid “a little authority”? How SHOULD we view (and handle) positions of trust (authority)? I suppose that would be a question of how to be a servant at every opportunity of trust.) What should that look like?
Further, how do we “avoid such people if possible, and if not possible, to resist their hubris”? This question came up for me because I found it necessary (as a codependent) to learn “detachment with love” (Alanon). This is the art of loving the sinner but not feeding their sin. Most people of the world live under repressive governments. This is a big enough problem, but even more of them are directly being repressed or actively bullied by those who are supposed to love them; i,e, their immediate family and community. Abuse on this planet is almost guaranteed for people in minorities in these units (women and children – the “widows and orphans” in particular). If you cannot run and you cannot hide and you cannot strike back (would this count as “resist their hubris”?), what do you do? How are we going to leave this subject of abusive authority without addressing what to do WITH it?
Finally, I have noticed that the world’s systems do not give good ways to correct abuse of authority. Further, I think I am becoming aware that only in functioning community can people have a WAY to correct abuse at the top as well as within the community. Abuse is going to continue unless and until we become willing and able to build working communities that are designed as much as possible on the early design given to ancient Israel. This model has been tried with varying degrees of success – many many groups of people fled to this country in an effort to have the freedom to build community that was able to correct authoritarian abuse by implementing healthy communal and family structures. I believe we need to become willing to look seriously at what a functioning community at the physical level looks like. Not church. This advice of Paul’s was directed at an everyday community. These people formed communal structures in which they implemented their own police and legal capacities to handle everyday matters. This is NOT a ecclesiastical problem.. This is an everyday need for these people who are subjected to authoritarian abuse. A functioning community is the best way to help, as well as to resist. We have no good WAYS without good communities.
I am preaching to myself. I am setting off to pursue the answers to my own questions. Hope to report from the front as soon as I figure out how to create it. Until then, back to y’all!
Skip, as usual your insights are extremely helpful–thank you. I would like to suggest a slightly different view of profit and “sordid gain”. You state: “Everyone works for the excess after costs. Profit is a godly goal. Paul objects to those who live for profit, whose objective in life is accumulation by any means. The word contains that idea of shameful gain, what is acquired without regard to God or others.”
I do not see where Scripture declares profit “as a goal” to be “godly”. On the other hand, God clearly places relationships and loving and serving others as a Godly goal. Profit is certainly a necessary means to creating sustainable enterprise, but when profit becomes the “goal”–the purpose of a business enterprise–then people can, by definition, be no more than a means to that goal and tools/costs of production. Treating people in line with the second great commandment to “love your neighbor” occurs only to the extent it costs less than it produces and contributes to the “goal”. And we already know that we can’t serve two masters–we must choose.
Is it possible that “sordid gain” is not just “accumulation by any means” (which I agree is problematic) but gain for gains sake–profit as a “goal” which necessarily comes at the expense of loving and serving others? It is the “Why” and not just the ‘How” that matters.
Personally, I think that the key to redeeming work (God’s good creation in Genesis) and business is renewing our minds to see profit as a good and necessary means but to see the purpose of business as serving people externally by creating goods and services that help the community to flourish (or to restore brokenness) and internally by creating opportunities for people to flourish by using their God-given gifts and creativity to be productive.