St. Peter. First Epistle

Anyone who studies the passages in Acts about St. Peter will conclude, I think, that he stayed in Jerusalem only for a short while, though he may have returned often, especially on great occasions like the debate over circumcision. We hear of him staying at Joppa, going to Cæsarea, being found at Antioch. In his Epistle he addresses the strangers scattered through Pontus, Cappadocia, Galatia, Asia, and Bithynia as someone who has visited and lived among them. If we connect these hints with the tradition that he was at one time Bishop of Antioch and at another of Rome, and with the great church theory that makes him the universal Bishop, we may reach a clearer idea of him than these contradictory reports give on their own. Need we suppose that Peter ever held anywhere a position like that of St. James at Jerusalem? May it not have been God’s intention — carried out by what would be called natural accidents — that one apostle of the circumcision should oversee the first Christian community, live in the city, model righteousness there, write from it to the twelve tribes, and be martyred there; while another apostle, also chiefly of the circumcision though the one who opened the Kingdom to the Gentiles, should exercise a general oversight, never bound to one place, and claiming no fixed jurisdiction even where he lived a while? Those who know the records of the first century will recall several difficulties about Antioch and Rome that this idea would reconcile, and will see how the opposite idea gained ground by forcing a fixed later pattern onto an earlier time. But the main reason for some such view of Peter’s office, I think, comes from the Epistle itself.

At the end of the Epistle our translators put the words “The Church which is in Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you.” Nearly all modern commentators protest that this is a monstrous paraphrase of the original. But it is open, I think, to an objection as grave as the linguistic one. How could a Church at Babylon be “elected together with” those to whom Peter wrote — the strangers dispersed through several countries in Asia? One might, by a bold and unusual figure, say the Church at Philippi was elected together with the Church of Ephesus or Rome. Here the phrase has no force at all. The fact is that the word ecclesia, in St. Paul’s sense, is not and could not be found in Peter’s Epistle. For him the Jewish nation was still the body called out of all lands. Gentiles might be joined to it, but it remained the heart of any divine society that would form in the world. That is why Peter’s Epistle has always been called a Catholic Epistle: not limited to any one city, it belongs to a body which, though far from universal, carried the seed of universality, and by its dispersion through many lands bore witness to a society that would belong equally to all.

In these remarks on what may seem merely the Epistle’s outward form, I believe I have pointed to its most essential characteristics. Everyone sees it is in some ways very unlike the Epistle of St. James. De Wette and other German commentators exclaim that its tone is almost Pauline. There I cannot agree. In its method and immediate aim I think it is as distinct from Paul’s letters as from James’s. But in its spirit and ultimate object it is in harmony with both.

The obvious difference from James’s Epistle is the constant naming of Christ. It was by the resurrection of Jesus Christ that the God and Father of our Lord had begotten them. Their faith was to be tried by fire so it might be found unto praise and glory at the appearing of Christ. The spirit of Christ in the prophets had testified beforehand of Christ’s sufferings and the glory to follow. They were to hope for the grace to be brought them at the revelation of Jesus Christ. They were redeemed from their empty way of life by the precious blood of Christ.

Clearly Christ is here set before them as an object of faith, a centre they were to turn to and to which God was continually drawing them. Such a centre was exactly what scattered men enduring great affliction needed. Jerusalem still existed — but could they feel about it as they once had, as their capital and home? The temple still stood — but was it a real bond of sympathy to wanderers and outcasts? Peter leads them away from city and temple to Him who had given the city its worth in the eyes of all who came to it, who had dwelt in the temple and met true worshippers there. Coming to Him as a living stone, rejected by men but chosen and precious to God, they too as living stones were built into a spiritual house to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. This idea — a divine temple made of living men, held together only by a corner-stone who is Christ — runs through the whole Epistle. From first to last he tells them of a unity that existed for them and could be enjoyed despite their dispersion, if only they recognized its living ground and moved round the true centre instead of trying to exist as separate atoms apart from it.

With this aim always before him, Peter could not write to Jews simply as Jews, the way James was right and bound to write. What Peter chiefly wanted to press was not their election — though he wanted them to remember and understand it — but the bond of their fellowship with one another. And that fellowship they could realize only when they confessed a living Christ implied in law, priesthood, and temple. However the dispersed Jews might wish for brotherhood and use the name of brother, they would stay divided in heart and mind, not only in place, until they confessed as their common brother One above all place, who had ascended on high, and loved and rejoiced in Him with joy unspeakable. But they could not do this unless they believed He had actually suffered for them and with them — unless they acknowledged Jesus the sufferer to be the Christ.

So Peter’s Epistle is in one sense more exclusive than James’s. It seems more sharply to cut off the unbelieving Jew from the blessings of the new covenant. But it does so by no formal edict of excommunication. The Jew had a right to see himself as belonging to a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. He was only to understand what his royalty and priesthood and election rested on — not on anything external, but on Him by whom they were redeemed, by whose blood they were sprinkled. Their union was thus shown to be holy, spiritual, and inward, grounded on their relation to One known only by faith, who had come to deliver them from outward vanities and bring them to an inheritance eternal, incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading.

And in another sense this Epistle is more comprehensive than James’s. Though the Jew is always in Peter’s mind, though all his language and thought come from the Old Testament, though it is the Shepherd, the Corner-stone, the Priest of Israel he sets before them, there is nothing here that any baptized Gentile could not feel as his own and gladly claim. If this living stone is the bond of a spiritual temple, it must be because all men are spiritual beings related to Him, and apart from Him do not know their own spiritual condition. So while Peter uses the scattering of the circumcised across heathen nations as witness of a real divine federation that circumstances and persecutions cannot destroy, he also shows how a body could exist in all lands with no mark of circumcision at all, resting only on the Name of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvellous light. At times we are almost tempted to think the Gentiles were specially in his mind, as when he says they “were not a people, but are now the people of God; which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.” Yet such words would not seem strange to Jews long cut off from spiritual privileges, treated as strangers among Gentiles, with no real sense of communion with each other. And if, as I think we may rightly hold, Peter had met many descendants of Israelites who never returned to Jerusalem under the decree of Cyrus — who had known nothing of the restored city or second temple — then their recognition as members of Israel, joint-heirs of a divine inheritance, called by the divine Shepherd into His fold, must have been good news indeed.

I need not point out how carefully Peter builds every relationship — husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants — on the common relation to Christ; how the duties of elders to their flocks, their not lording it over God’s heritage, the duty to civil governors, and all mutual services and courtesies rest on the same ground; how the whole framework of human society is shown to rest on Him who gave up Himself — on self-sacrifice, and so on that one accepted sacrifice of which all others are images and in whose power all others are offered. But I would ask whether the idea of filial obedience and sacrifice, of a Son come to make men sons of God, is not as much the subject of this Epistle as of the last — whether their great differences do not make this central resemblance stand out the more. And I would raise a question I may press another time: whether, of all the Epistles in the Bible, Peter’s is not the one which — by its statements and its omissions alike — proves that Jesus Christ the Son of God, and no man whatever, certainly not Peter himself, is the rock on which the Catholic body must stand, and against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail.

St. Peter. Second Epistle

People have imagined allusions to St. Paul in the Epistle of St. James; in the Second Epistle of St. Peter his name is openly named. Clearly such a reference is unlikely in the one case but not in the other. St. James wrote to the twelve tribes—people who, believers or not, regarded the Apostle of the Gentiles with suspicion and dread and were in no danger of misusing his authority to their own ruin. St. James was thoroughly practical; no reader of his letter can suspect him of fighting tendencies his disciples were not prone to, for he aimed straight at the diseases he had seen in them. St. Peter, on the other hand, wrote to those who “have obtained like precious faith with us.” As his first letter’s address shows, he had travelled over the very ground where St. Paul’s flourishing Churches stood; and though he saw Christians not as belonging to particular cities but as members of the commonwealth of Israel, he had been first to admit Gentiles into that commonwealth. So he would inevitably meet St. Paul’s converts, or people influenced by him directly or at second hand, and might—as St. Paul himself did—need to point out grave and dangerous errors they had fallen into.

No one has doubted that this Epistle throughout denounces Antinomianism. The word can be used loosely for any doctrine leading to neglect of good works; in that sense St. James certainly fights it. But Antinomianism in its strict sense—opposition to outward law—is not what St. James combats; he rather warns against forgetting the inner government God exercises over heart and tongue, and against a faith that is not in a living God and so bears no living fruit. St. Peter deals with a different mood: the tendency to make the liberty of the Gospel an excuse for disobedience and rebellion. That this could result from St. Paul’s doctrine misunderstood has never been denied, though it could arise from very different causes too; and among the provincial Jews their circumstances might give it a political turn. St. Peter does not name his beloved brother to hint that Paul stirred this up, but to claim him as a fellow-witness to the truth Peter himself asserts—that God’s long-suffering is not an excuse for recklessness but a power leading to salvation and holiness—while noting that the unstable and ignorant had drawn the opposite inference from Paul’s writings.

The use here of words nearly identical with St. Jude’s, certain peculiarities in its composition,¹ and perhaps the reference to St. Paul, have made many German critics of our day suspect the Epistle is not genuine. I make no pretence of explaining the resemblance to Jude, and there are many passages I do not understand. But I cannot think that, if some book outside the Bible had been ascribed for many generations to a given author, sober critics would count these sufficient grounds for denying it to him. I do not feel much hangs on the decision. Were the evidence strong I would accept it, and I admit the difficulties deserve careful study. But there are strong internal marks that it belongs to the first age, if not to St. Peter himself—marks certain modern prejudices tempt critics to overlook.

As I said with St. Jude, it does not suit our notions that members of the primitive Church should be charged with crimes as great as those that destroyed the world before the flood or the cities of the plain. We attach to “the apostolic age” and “the first age” impressions of purity that no testimony will make us drop—until we adopt the Apostles’ own consistent language and see that they write not about the beginning of an age but about the end of one. I cannot say how important I think this scriptural usage is, or what harm has come from replacing it with the opposite. For instance, it has been thought necessary to read this Epistle as applying to a time far beyond Peter’s own, though every exhortation must strike plain men as unsuitable and deceptive unless it refers to the actual circumstances of his readers and to the fears their teacher held for them.

If the reader is once convinced Peter is writing about a distant future, no wonder he finds the Epistle fragmentary and disjointed, and readily supposes the opening paragraphs on Christian virtues are Peter’s while the rest was accidentally tacked on from elsewhere. But if he can overcome his reluctance to believe that the Apostles feared their converts might sink into the very worst moral state, losing all hold on truth and righteousness, and that a judgment was coming on their world more terrible in principle and outcome than Noah’s flood, he will find the opening peculiarly fitted to such a situation. I do not hold, with our excellent Hammond, that we must trace Gnosticism at every turn in the apostolic writings, or suppose the elaborate Gnostic systems of the next age already existed. But the Antinomian tendency of that time, as of every time, arose from separating knowledge from obedience, setting the grasp of truths against submission to commands—of that I am sure. And I can imagine no more apostolic way to meet it than Peter’s. “You boast of your illumination, your knowledge of the divine and unseen. But that knowledge is first of all the acknowledgment, the ἐπίγνωσις, the inward discernment of a righteous person, one who delivers from sin.” The γνῶσις was taken as something in itself, unrelated to faith and still less to moral energy or self-restraint. But faith, Peter says, will not stand unless virtue sustains it; virtue demands knowledge; knowledge requires self-government; self-government, patience; patience, brotherly affection; brotherly affection, love in its highest sense. Each grace is not to be “added on” to the last, as our translators wrongly teach, but brought as fresh fuel to keep a fire already kindled from going out. The etymology of ἐπιχορηγήσατε, and its use elsewhere—even apart from its being joined with σπουδὴν πᾶσαν παρεισενέγκαντες—surely settles this as his meaning.

And this sense runs through the Epistle. They were called to glory and virtue. Let them make their calling and election sure—actually inherit and possess what has been made theirs—so that the supply of grace always ready for them would achieve its purpose, and their entrance into the eternal kingdom of the Lord and Saviour would be real, not merely nominal: an entrance into a kingdom of Righteousness, Peace, and Joy.

To this effort the Apostle would rouse them as long as he lived in this tent or tabernacle. It was not to be a fixed tabernacle, like the one he had once proposed to build on the Mount for Moses, Elias, and Jesus, not knowing what he said. The voice that scattered that dream, “This is my beloved Son,” was still in his ears, assuring him of a more fixed and eternal home and warning him that his own tent’s stakes would soon be pulled up. That voice was as real now as then, and the glory that shone about them was permanent. They had not, as many supposed, been telling elaborate myths or well-made legends when they spoke of His power and presence; they had been allowed to witness a momentary showing of it, so they could call on their disciples to believe in it and enter into it. That vision let them grasp more firmly the prophetic word that spoke of this power and presence. Peter’s readers were applying themselves to that word, perhaps with some fear and restlessness, each seeking his own private solution to its riddles. Their study was not overzealous; they did well to work that mine. But let them remember that the day of the Lord the prophets spoke of was to rise and shine fully in their hearts, and that holy men spoke under the power of the Holy Spirit, so uttering not their own narrow speculations but truths about the nature of God and the good of the universe.

And if they were busy with true prophets, let them not forget what those prophets so often spoke of—the existence of false prophets alongside them. Such had been in every age, and such would arise among themselves.

What follows is a very clear description of these false teachers. Their chief mark would be confusing fleshly independence with spiritual freedom, the freedom to sin with freedom from sin. They would deny the Lord that bought them—that is, deny they had been redeemed, deny He was their Redeemer. Redemption would mean something wholly different to them from its true sense; so they would crave indulgence. In such men spiritual powers would drag their fellows and themselves into deeper sensuality; the sin of Balaam would be repeated in them, for in him the scriptural idea of the false prophet was realized. He was essentially the false man, trafficking with his conscience, using divine wisdom and power to serve his gain or lust. The memory of Simon was probably in Peter’s mind; if the later traditions about him can be trusted, he would exactly embody this Christian Balaam. If we take him, as all antiquity encourages, as the head and type of a class, the false prophets of the apostolic age may have been as numerous as ever they were in the days of Elijah or Jeremiah. Peter sees these men as both produced by and producing the Antinomian temper prevailing in the Church—themselves signs of a nearer apostasy and hastening the judgment at hand.

Of that judgment the Apostle speaks in the third chapter. His words, taken alone and without knowing what other apostles and evangelists said, would certainly make us suppose the last days were near, and that the scoffers who asked where the promise of His coming was belonged to that very day, like the false prophets he had just described. The Apostles had told them His coming was drawing near; the mockers would say, “Where are its signs? Where is the promise? Is not the whole course of things just what it always was? Since the first fathers of the old world fell asleep, has the world’s monotony been disturbed at all?” The answer is just what the earlier passages lead us to expect: a reference to Noah’s time as a parallel to the one approaching—there was to be as great a shock and upheaval in the world’s order then as at the Deluge.

So much of his meaning seems clear; on other parts I still wait for light. I doubt anyone is satisfied with our translation of the passage on the dissolution of the elements: that τεθησαυρισμένοι πυρὶ can mean “reserved unto fire,” or that τούτων οὖν πάντων λυομένων (“all these then being dissolved”) equals “seeing that all these things shall be dissolved,” or that δι’ ἣν means “in which” rather than “for the sake of which” or “in consequence of which.”² The argument surely suffers from these deviations. What effect it would have on men surrounded by temptations to sensuality and lawlessness to hear that at some very distant time the present framework would dissolve, I cannot see. But if it were then dissolving—if the eternal day were emerging from night’s mists and shadows—there was good reason to fix their minds on what abides forever and withdraw them from what is transitory by its very nature. This meaning must, I think, be in the words, whatever the correct version, on which I wish scholars would give careful judgment. This much at least I claim: that “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” be pondered in silence and awe, not turned into an excuse for making Scripture as vague and flexible as interpreters find convenient. I can conceive no more beautiful and helpful passage, if we use it to bring before our minds that day of the Lord which cannot be measured by time’s rules, which lies beyond them and yet is at certain crises shown in full brightness to eyes waiting and ready to welcome it—none that better harmonizes with what the old prophets and the other Apostles say of the day of the Lord, or that better prepares us to understand the same word used by the brother whom Peter says wrote some things hard to understand. But I am sure that if we merely use the thousand years to postpone indefinitely the judgment the first-century Christians were taught to expect in their own time, we shall make the Apostle of the Gentiles even more unintelligible than the Apostle of the circumcision.

On the whole, then, we may say the two Epistles of St. Peter are emphatically about the Son of God and Son of Man—Epistles that remarkably set Christ personally before these Churches as the living bond of a society, the object of Faith, the deliverer from present evil, the refuge in a fast-approaching judgment that would test men of every class for what they were. The very features we found in St. Mark’s Gospel appear here too. Christ is not showing men a Father; rather the Father is leading them to Christ. He is the actual centre they need in their dispersion to make them a people; the righteous Lord each of them needs to keep him from falling back into the abyss of corruption from which he was rescued.