Paul’s warning in II Timothy 4:3–4 is not subtle. It’s one of those passages where the apostle stops speaking like a gentle counselor and starts speaking like a fire bell in the night. And what makes it so disturbing is that he doesn’t predict the church will merely be attacked from the outside. He predicts the church will be hollowed out from within by a kind of spiritual consumerism—people treating “teaching” the way Rome treated entertainment: as something purchased to satisfy taste.