St. Peter. First Epistle

Any person who considers the passages in the Acts of the Apostles which refer to St. Peter, will, I think, be of opinion that he was only for a short time settled in Jerusalem, though he may have returned to it often, especially on great occasions, like that of the debate respecting circumcision. We hear of him as tarrying in Joppa, going to Cæsarea, being found at Antioch. In his Epistle he addresses the strangers scattered abroad in Pontus, Cappadocia, Galatia, Asia and Bithynia, apparently as a person who has visited them and dwelt among them. If we connect these intimations with the popular tradition that he was at one time Bishop of Antioch, and at another of Rome, and with the great ecclesiastical theory which represents him as the universal Bishop, we may arrive at some more intelligible conception respecting him, than these contradictory reports, taken by themselves, will give us. Is it necessary to suppose that St. Peter ever occupied anywhere a position analogous to that of St. James at Jerusalem? May it not have been intended by the Divine Ruler of the Church, may not His intentions have been accomplished by a series of what would be called very natural accidents, that one of the Apostles of the circumcision should be the overseer of the first Christian society, should live in the city, should exhibit a pattern of righteousness in it, should write from it to the twelve tribes, should be sacrificed there; and that another Apostle, also primarily of the circumcision, though the opener of the Kingdom of Heaven to the Gentiles, should exercise a general oversight, never tying himself to any one locality, and if resident anywhere for a time, not assuming any specific jurisdiction? Those who are acquainted with the records of the first century, will recollect several difficulties respecting Antioch and Rome, which would be reconciled by this hypothesis, and they will understand how easily the opposite one might gain ground from the determination to apply to an earlier time a fixed type which strictly belongs to a later one. But the main necessity for this or some similar view of St. Peter’s office, arises, I conceive, from the consideration of his epistle.

At the conclusion of that epistle, our translators have introduced the words “The Church which is in Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you.” Nearly all modern commentators have protested against this version as a quite monstrous paraphrase upon the original. But it is open, I believe, to an objection quite as grave as the etymological one. How could the Church at Babylon be elected together with those to whom St. Peter wrote? Who were they? The strangers dispersed through a number of countries in Asia. The Church in Philippi might by rather a bold and unusual form of speech be said to be elected together with the Church of Ephesus or Rome. Here the expression is without any force at all. The fact, I believe, is that the word ecclesia in St. Paul’s sense of it, is not and could not be found in St. Peter’s epistle. The Jewish nation was still to him the body called out of all lands. Gentiles might be joined to it, but it was the nucleus or heart of any divine society which would be formed in the world. And hence it has come to pass that St. Peter’s Epistle has in all times been called a Catholic Epistle. That is to say, it is not limited to any particular city or neighborhood. It belongs to a body which, though far enough from universal, yet had in it the seed of universality, and in its dispersion throughout different lands was testifying of a society which should belong equally to all.

In these observations upon what may seem only the outward form of the Epistle, I believe I have indicated its most essential characteristics. Every one has perceived that it is in some respects most unlike the Epistle of St. James. De Wette and other German commentators exclaim with astonishment that its tone is almost Pauline. There I cannot agree with them. I believe that in its method and immediate design it is quite as distinct from the letters of one of these Apostles as of the other. In its spirit and its ultimate object I believe it is equally in harmony with both.

The continual introduction of the name of Christ is the obvious difference between it and the epistle we last considered. It is by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ had begotten them. Their faith was to be tried with fire that it might be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. The spirit of Christ in the prophets testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. They were to hope for the grace that should be brought unto them at the revelation of Jesus Christ. They were redeemed from their vain conversation with the precious blood of Christ.

It is obvious, I think, that Christ is here set before them expressly as an object of faith, as a centre to which they were to turn, and to which God was continually attracting them. Such an object was precisely what men scattered abroad and enduring a great fight of afflictions wanted. Jerusalem still existed. But could they feel about it as they once did? could they feel that it was indeed their capital, their home? The temple was still standing. But was it a real practical bond of cohesion and sympathy to wanderers and outcasts? St. Peter leads them away from the city and temple to Him who had given the city its real worth in the eyes of all who came up to it, to Him who had dwelt in the temple, and had met the true worshippers there. “To whom coming as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God and precious, they as lively stones were built up a spiritual house to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.” This thought of a divine temple consisting of living men, and of a corner-stone by whom and in whom they could alone cohere, may be traced throughout the whole epistle. From first to last he seems to be telling them of a unity which existed for them, and which they might enjoy in spite of their dispersion, if only they would recognize the living ground of it, if only they would move round the true centre, and not try to exist as separate atoms apart from it.

Having this end steadily before him, St. Peter could not write to Jews simply as such, in the way that St. James was justified in writing and obliged to write. It was not their election that St. Peter chiefly desired to insist upon, though he was most anxious that they should remember it and understand it. It was the bond of their fellowship to one another. But that fellowship they could only realize when they confessed a living Christ to be implied in law, priesthood, and temple. The dispersed Jews, however they might desire to claim brotherhood with each other, however they might use the name of brother, would be severed in heart and mind as well as in place, until they confessed One who was above all place, who had ascended on high, as their common brother; until they loved Him and rejoiced in Him with joy unspeakable. But they could not do this unless they believed that He had actually suffered for them and with them; unless they acknowledged Jesus the sufferer to be the Christ.

St. Peter’s Epistle then is in one sense more exclusive than that of St. James. It seems more distinctly to cut off the unbelieving Jew from the blessings of the new covenant. But it does so in no formal manner, by no harsh edict of excommunication. The Jew had a right to look upon himself as belonging to a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. Only he was to understand on what foundation his royalty, his priesthood, his election, stood. He was not to build it upon any thing fleshly or external, but on Him by whom they had been redeemed, by whose blood they had been sprinkled. Thus their union was represented as holy, spiritual, internal, grounded upon their relation to One whom they could only know by faith, who had come expressly to deliver them from outward sensual vanities, and to bring them to an inheritance eternal, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away.

And thus in another sense, this Epistle is more comprehensive than that of St. James. Though the Jew is always present to the mind of St. Peter, though all his language, all his thoughts, are derived from the Old Testament, though it is the Shepherd, the Corner-stone, the Priest of Israel, he is setting before them, still there is nothing in his language which any baptized Gentile might not feel to be his own, and joyfully appropriate. If this living stone be the bond of a spiritual temple, it must be because all men are spiritual beings, and have a relation to Him; because apart from Him they do not know or realize their own spiritual condition. While therefore St. Peter uses the diffusion of the circumcised body over different heathen nations as the witness of a real divine federation, which circumstances cannot break up or persecutions annihilate, he at the same time shows how a body might continue to exist in all lands which had no mark of circumcision at all, which merely stood upon the Name of Him who had called them out of darkness into His marvellous light. At times we are almost tempted to feel that the Gentiles were specially present to the Apostle’s mind, as where he says, “which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God; which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.” Yet such language would not be felt as strange by Jews who had for years been cut off from all spiritual privileges, who had been regarded as strangers among Gentiles, without really having any sense of communion with each other. And if we hold, as I think we have every right to hold, that St. Peter had fallen in with many descendants of those Israelites who had never returned to Jerusalem in virtue of the decree of Cyrus, who, whether they had shared the first or the second captivity, had never known any thing of the restored city or the second temple, we may feel that their recognition as members of the commonwealth of Israel, as joint-heirs of a divine inheritance, as called by the divine Shepherd into his fold, must have been a Gospel indeed.

I need not point out to any one how carefully St. Peter constitutes all relationships of husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, upon the basis of the common relation to Christ; how all the obligations of elders to their flocks, the duty of not being lords over God’s heritage; how the duty to civil governors, all mutual services, obligations, courtesies, are placed on the same ground; how the whole framework of human society is shown to rest on Him who gave up Himself; to rest upon self-sacrifice, and therefore on that complete and accepted sacrifice of which all others are to be the images, in the power of which all others are to be offered. But I would ask, whether the idea of filial obedience and filial sacrifice, of a Son who is come to make men sons of God, is not as much the subject of this epistle as of the last; whether their great and striking differences do not make this cardinal resemblance more conspicuous? And I would just suggest a question, which I may have to press upon some future occasion, whether of all Epistles in the Bible, St. Peter’s is not the one which, as much by its direct statements as by its omissions, proves that Jesus Christ the Son of God, and not any man whatsoever, certainly not St. Peter himself, is the rock upon which the Catholic body must stand, and against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail?

St. Peter. Second Epistle

Allusions to St. Paul have been imagined in the Epistle of St. James; his name is formally introduced into the Second Epistle of St. Peter. It is obvious that there was an antecedent improbability of such a reference in the one case which does not exist in the other. St. James was writing to the twelve tribes, to people who, whether believers or unbelievers in Jesus, regarded the Apostle of the Gentiles with suspicion and dread, and were not in the least danger of misusing his authority or his statements to their own destruction. St. James, who at all events was thoroughly and profoundly practical, cannot be suspected by any one who reads his letter, of combating tendencies to which his disciples were not exposed; he aimed directly at the diseases which he had seen in them. St. Peter, who writes to those “that have obtained like precious faith with us,”—who, as is evident from the superscription of his first letter, had travelled over the very ground in which some of St. Paul’s most flourishing Churches were established, who, though he regarded Christians not as connected with particular cities, but as members of the commonwealth of Israel, yet had been the first to recognize Gentiles as entitled to enter that commonwealth, would inevitably come into contact with St. Paul’s converts, or with those who had received impressions from him directly or at second hand, and might feel it necessary, as we shall find St. Paul himself did, to point out grave and perilous errors into which they had fallen.

It has never been doubted that Antinomianism is the tendency which is denounced throughout this Epistle. Now Antinomianism may be used vaguely to mean any doctrine which leads to the neglect of good works. In that sense St. James is of course fighting with it. But Antinomianism in its strict etymological meaning as the opposition to outward law, St. James is not combating; he is much rather warning his readers against the forgetfulness of that inner government which God is exercising over the heart and tongue, of the faith which is not in a living God, and therefore produces no living fruits. St. Peter is engaged with a different phase of feeling and thought; with the disposition to make the liberty of the Gospel an excuse for disobedience and rebellion. That this was a possible result of St. Paul’s doctrine misunderstood and perverted, has never been denied. It might however result from influences of a very different kind; and many circumstances in the condition of the Jews in the provinces might give it with them especially a political direction. St. Peter does not use the name of his beloved brother for the purpose of insinuating that he had stirred up this feeling; he claims him as an assertor of the truth which he was asserting, that the long-suffering of God was not an excuse for recklessness, but a power leading to salvation and holiness; though he intimates that an opposite inference had been deduced from his writings by the unstable and ignorant.

The use in this Epistle of words almost the same with those which occur in the Epistle of St. Jude, as well as certain peculiarities in its composition,¹ and perhaps the reference to St. Paul, have created a suspicion of its genuineness, which is very widely diffused among German critics, especially in our day. I do not the least pretend to account for the similarity to St. Jude. And there are many passages in this Epistle which I feel that I do not understand. But I cannot think that if any book, not in the Bible, had been attributed for many generations to a certain author, these would be esteemed sufficient reasons by sober critics for denying it to him. I do not feel that any important issues are involved in the decision. If the evidence were strong I should of course acquiesce in it. I quite admit that the difficulties which have led students to resort to it, deserve careful examination. But, on the other hand, there are strong internal signs that it belongs to the first age, if not that it belongs to St. Peter, which I think certain prejudices in the minds of modern critics tempt them to overlook.

It is not, as I said when speaking of St. Jude, at all in accordance with our notions, that members of the primitive Church should be accused of crimes as great as those which brought destruction upon the world before the flood or upon the cities of the plain. We attach to the words “apostolic age,” “first age,” certain impressions of purity which no testimonies or arguments will induce us to lay aside, until we learn to adopt the uniform language of the Apostles, and believe that they are writing, not about the beginning of an age, but about the end of one. I cannot express how much importance I feel is connected with the use of this scriptural nomenclature, or what mischiefs have arisen from the substitution of another of a directly opposite kind. It has been absolutely necessary, for instance, to take this Epistle of St. Peter as if it applied to a time immeasurably distant from his own, though every exhortation which he uses must seem to plain men utterly unsuitable, utterly deceptive, if it does not refer to the circumstances of the people for whom he was writing, to fears which their teacher entertained for them.

If the reader once adopts the conviction that St. Peter is writing about a distant future, I cannot be surprised that he finds the whole Epistle fragmentary and disjointed. He may then easily accept the hypothesis, that the first few paragraphs concerning Christian virtues and graces are St. Peter’s, and that the rest of the document, proceeding from some other source, has been accidentally, and by mistake, attached to them. But if he can overcome his disinclination to believe that there was a fear among the Apostles that their converts should sink into the very worst moral state, that they should lose all hold upon truth and righteousness—and that there was a judgment coming upon the world of that day which would be more tremendous in its principles and its issues than the one which Noah had witnessed—I think he will discover a peculiar fitness in the opening of the Epistle to such a state of things. I do not hold that it is necessary, with our excellent Hammond, to trace Gnosticism at every turn in the apostolical writings, or to suppose that there were in the apostolical period the elaborated forms of Gnosticism which the next age brought forth. But that the Antinomian tendency of that time, as of all times, arose from the attempt to separate knowledge from obedience, to set up the apprehension of truths against the submission to commands, I am bound to suppose. And I cannot conceive any more apostolical method of treating such a tendency than that which St. Peter has resorted to. “You boast of your illumination, your knowledge of the divine and the invisible. But that knowledge is first of all the acknowledgment, the ἐπίγνωσις, and inward discernment of a righteous person, of one who is the deliverer from sin.” The γνῶσις was taken to be something in itself; it stood in no direct relation to faith; in still less direct relation to moral energy or virtue and to self-restraint. But faith St. Peter says will not subsist if virtue do not sustain it; virtue demands knowledge; knowledge requires self-government, self-government patience, patience brotherly affection, brotherly affection love in its highest sense. Each grace he speaks of is not to be “added on” to the last, as our translators perversely teach, but to be brought as a fresh supply of fuel to prevent the fire, already kindled, from going out. The etymology of ἐπιχορηγήσατε, no less than the use of it elsewhere, even if it were not joined to σπουδὴν πᾶσαν παρεισενέγκαντες, will surely decide this to be the sense of the Apostle.

And this sense goes through the Epistle. They were called to glory and virtue. Let them see that they made their calling and election sure; that they actually inherited and possessed that which was made theirs. So that supply of grace which was always ready for them would be effectual for its purpose, so that entrance into the eternal kingdom of the Lord and Saviour, which He promised them, would be a real, not a nominal one, an entrance into a kingdom of Righteousness, Peace, Joy.

To this effort the Apostle would stir them as long as he dwelt in this tent or tabernacle. It was not to be a fixed tabernacle, like that which he had proposed to build on the Mount for Moses, Elias, and Jesus, not knowing what he said. The voice which had dispersed that dream, “This is my beloved Son,” was still in his ears; still assuring him of a more fixed and eternal habitation, warning him that the stakes of the visible tent would soon be taken down. That voice was as real now as it had been then; the glory which shone about them at that moment was a permanent one. They had not been indulging, as many thought, in elaborate myths, well concocted legends, when they had spoken of His power and presence. They had been permitted to witness a momentary manifestation of it, that they might call upon their disciples to believe in it and to enter into it. That vision enabled them to grasp more firmly the prophetic word, which spoke of this power and presence. To that word those whom St. Peter was addressing were applying themselves, perhaps with some fear and restlessness, each of them seeking some partial and private solution of its riddles. Their study was not overzealous; they did well to work in that mine. But let them remember that the day of the Lord which the prophets spoke of was to arise and shine fully in their hearts. Let them remember that holy men spoke under the power of the Holy Spirit, and therefore did not speak out their own narrow thoughts and speculations, but truths concerning the nature of God and the well being of the Universe.

And if they were busy with true prophets, let them not forget what they so continually spoke of, the existence of false prophets side by side with them. Such had been in all times, such would be among themselves.

What follows is a very clear description of the tendency and character of these false teachers. The confusion of fleshly independence with spiritual freedom, of the freedom to sin with the freedom from sin, would be their main characteristic. They would deny the Lord that brought them; that is to say, they would deny that they had been redeemed; that He was their Redeemer. Redemption in their minds would bear an altogether different force from the true one; hence, indulgence was what they would be craving for. In such men the possession of spiritual powers would lead their fellows and themselves into deeper sensuality; the sin of Balaam would be repeated in them; for in him the very idea of the false prophet, as the scripture sets it forth, was realized. He was essentially the false man, trafficking with his conscience, using the divine wisdom and the divine power to serve his gain or his lust. The recollection of Simon was probably present to St. Peter’s mind. If we may at all trust the later traditions respecting him, he would exactly embody this notion of the Christian Balaam. If we may look upon him, as all antiquity encourages us to do, as the head and type of a class, the false prophets in the apostolic age may have been as numerous as they ever can have been in the times of Elijah or Jeremiah. These St. Peter regards as at once produced by, and producing the Antinomian temper which was prevailing in the Church; themselves the signs of a nearer apostasy, and hurrying forward the judgment which was at hand.

Of that judgment the Apostle proceeds to speak in the third chapter. His words, if they stood alone, and we knew nothing of what had been said by other apostles and evangelists, would certainly lead us to suppose that the last days were approaching, and that the scoffers who asked where was the promise of His coming, would be as much men of that day as the false prophets he had just been speaking of. The Apostles had told them that His coming was drawing near; the mockers would say, “Where are the signs of it? Where is the promise of it? Is not the whole course and order of things just what it has always been? Since the first fathers of the old world fell asleep, has there been the least derangement in the world’s monotony?” The answer is precisely what we should have expected from the previous passages. There is a reference to the time of Noah as a parallel to that which is approaching; there was to be as great a shock and convulsion in the order of the world then, as there had been at the time of the Deluge.

So much of the Apostle’s meaning seems to me clear; there are parts of it upon which I wait for light. I do not suppose any one is satisfied with our translation of the passage respecting the dissolution of the elements; that τεθησαυρισμένοι πυρὶ can mean “reserved unto fire;” or that τούτων οὖν πάντων λυομένων (treasured up to fire) (all these then being dissolved), can be equivalent with, “Seeing that all these things shall be dissolved;” or that δι’ ἣν has the force of, “in which;” not, “for the sake of which,” or “in consequence of which.”² The argument surely suffers from some of these deviations. What effect it would have upon men surrounded by motives to sensuality and Antinomianism to hear that at some very distant time the existing framework of things would be dissolved, I cannot understand. If they were then in process of dissolution, if the eternal day was emerging out of the mists and shadows of night, there was good reason for fixing their minds upon that in which they might abide for ever, for withdrawing them from that which was transitory by its very nature and quality. This meaning must, I think, be in the words, whatever be the correct version of them, about which I should be thankful if scholars would give a careful and deliberate judgment. This at all events I must claim, that the words, “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” shall be meditated upon in silence and awe, not turned into an excuse for making Scripture as vague and flexible as interpreters may find convenient. I can conceive no more beautiful and helpful passage than this is, if we use it to bring before our minds that day of the Lord which cannot be measured by the rules and conditions of time, which lies out of them and beyond them, and yet which is at certain crises presented in its full brightness and glory to eyes that are waiting for it, and prepared to welcome it; any which more entirely harmonizes with what is said of the day of the Lord by the old prophets, and by the other Apostles; any which can better prepare us for understanding the use of the same word by the brother to whom St. Peter alludes as having uttered some things hard to be understood. But I am sure that if we merely use the thousand years as a pretext for postponing indefinitely the judgment which the Christians of the first century 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, I think we may affirm that the two Epistles of St. Peter are emphatically Epistles concerning the Son of God, and the Son of Man; Epistles which most remarkably bring Christ personally before us in these Churches as the living bond of a society; as the object of Faith; as the deliverer from present evil; as the refuge in a rapidly approaching judgment, which would try men of every class of what sort they were. Just the characteristics which presented themselves to us in St. Mark’s Gospel are also here. Christ is not showing men a Father, but the Father is leading them to Christ. He is the actual centre which they need in their dispersion to make them a people; He is the righteous Lord whom each of them needs to keep him from falling back into the abyss of corruption out of which he has been rescued.