‘The author of the Pastorals had no theology of his own. He is a purveyor of other men's theology.’ This comment is by no means untypical of scholarly estimate of the theology of the Pastorals. Not only is the theology generally seen to be a collection of traditions, but it is also usually treated as a fairly arbitrary, inconsistent, unthought-out amalgam with little coherence.

Some justification for this estimate may be found in the fact that many of the explicitly theological statements occur in what appear to be liturgical passages or hymns. Thus it is assumed that they express the affirmations of the community rather than a creatively formed theological position, and that they were simply lifted into the text in order to punctuate it with faith-statements. Coupled with the view that the ethics is ‘autonomous’, such an estimate of these passages leaves these letters a patch-work with no meaningful structure. Until recently there has been little attempt to explore the theology of the Pastorals except by comparison and contrast with the theology of Paul, but there has been a recent trend towards assessing them in their own right. In the last chapter, it was argued that the ethics has a theological base, and that therefore there is a more consistent theology than has generally been suggested. It is time to reassess the theological material and to reconsider its function in the argument as a whole.

The project of writing a ‘theology of’ any particular writing is hampered by an inherent problem, namely the difficulty of avoiding an amalgam of salient features abstracted from their immediate context and organised according to categories in which the reader has an interest.