Suffering And Salvation, Submission And Subversion: Grounding Nonviolence In 1 Peter

Suffering and Salvation, Submission and Subversion GROUNDING NONVIOLENCE IN 1 PETER

Brandon D. Rhodes

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May 2007

Box #679

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(All scripture citations are taken from the English Standard Version, the ESV.) Introduction & Thesis The First Letter of Peter can, at first blush, run against the subversive and countercultural current of the rest of the New Testament. Where Paul builds his gospel and theology by reworking imperial rhetoric around Jesus, by claiming that this Jesus – not Caesar – is the world’s one true lord,1 Peter tells his readers to honor the emperor not once, but twice! Peter tells slaves to stay in line, but doesn’t follow Paul in insisting that masters also love their slaves. Where is the justice in this? For all his meditation on suffering, Peter doesn’t always seem to present an explicit way to overcome it. Instead, it can feel, the Christian is to be passive and just let bad things happen; as David Bartlett has said, “1 Peter can be seen as profoundly unliberating.”2 Indeed: Jesus and Paul stand up to the powers in the name of love and justice, and all Peter asks is that we not rock the boat! The activist impulse of Christians across political, cultural, and generational lines will saddle up along 1 Peter with no small anxiety. It will be shown, though, that 1 Peter arrives at and advocates a dissident and countercultural spirituality rooted in Isaiah-draped reflections on and applications of Jesus’ suffering love and cruciform victory. By following the Messiah’s Way, suffering Christians can overcome pagan malice with enemy-love, evil with nonviolence, and injustice with redemptive submission.

Arguments 1

Wright, N.T. “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire”, in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation. Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl. Ed. Richard A. Horsley. (Harrisburg, PA: TPI, 2000), 160-183. Available online at http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/wright.htm. 2

Bartlett, David. L. “The First Letter of Peter: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections”, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume XII. (Nashville, KY: Abingdon Press, 1998), 240.

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Primer on 1 Peter Peter is writing to the dispersed elect throughout Asia Minor, people whom he designates several times as being in some sort of exile (1:1, 17; 2:11; 5:10). The language of exile likely means that they are spiritual-political exiles in the similar way that the Jews were under the four empires – “strangers in a strange land (all the more strange because it used to be home).”3 Instead of a systematically persecuted community, the church of Asia Minor is likelier to be facing slander as a peculiar people that do not join their neighbors in their evil ways.4 Therefore Peter’s imagination, intentions, and audience are more in keeping with those of Jesus than Paul. Both the Lord and Peter are addressing a people (Israel-in-exile and the church-in-exile) who are 1) theodiceally trying to resolve their present sufferings with their allegiance to the sovereign God, and 2) in need of teaching for how to be God’s eschatological people still under the boot of exile. Restated, Peter and Jesus alike address two questions: ‘What is God doing with this suffering?’ and ‘How ought we respond to this suffering?’. These are twin questions we will trace his answers to in due time. Commentators on 1 Peter frequently date it before Domitian’s reign (81-96 A.D.) because, the logic goes, Peter would never have instructed the honoring of the emperor (2:13, 17) in a time in which he is commanding blasphemous worship of himself.5 This is granted: Peter would have been far less likely to write such a thing when the worship was coerced. Yet since the time of Augustus Caesar, Roman emperors had been heralded as the ‘son of God.’6 This and its corollary cultic claims were esteemed as blasphemous by 3

Ibid, 236.

4

Ibid, 234.

5

Ibid. Wright 2000

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Jews and Christians since well before Domitian. That Peter and his readers are under a blasphemous empire will be of subsequent interest to the arguments of this paper. The outline of the letter is straightforward, and for reference later in this paper, is worth sharing here. I. II. III. IV.

V. VI.

Greetings (1:1-2) Praise to God (1:3-12) God’s Holy People (1:13-2:10) A. Being Holy (1:13-25) B. Being God’s People (2:1-10) Life in Exile (2:11-4:11) A. Living Honorably Among the Gentiles (2:11-17) B. Living Honorably in the Household (2:18-3:7) C. Faithful Suffering (3:8-22) D. Living Out Salvation (4:1-11) Steadfast in Faith (4:12-5:11) A. The Impending Crisis (4:12-19) B. Caring for the Household of God (5:1-11) Final Greetings (5:12-14)7

Suffering and Enemy-Love That 1 Peter was “written to a suffering church”8 begs that whenever he gives counsel, the reality of that exilic suffering be kept at the front of the reader’s mind. Whether putting away malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander (2:1), or abstaining from fleshy impulses (2:11), or submission to authorities (2:13-25), or facing physical attacks (3:8-17), that his advice is given amid suffering and exile cannot be ignored. He’s not just concerned about in-house quarrels, but about how God’s pilgrim people when reviled by the outside world, respond. When Peter talks about how to deal with suffering, he is talking about how to deal with exile. . 7

Bartlett, 243.

8

Winn, Albert Curry. Ain’t Gonna Study War No More: Biblical Ambiguity and the Abolition of War. (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 167.

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The Jews, of course, had no shortage of wisdom and literature concerning how to deal with suffering and exile. Throughout their exile, both physically in Babylon for 70 years, and spiritually in their own land for over 400 years, the Israelites thought and wrote much about what this suffering of the righteous means amid God’s bigger purposes.9 Their most sustained and moving musings are Isaiah 40-55, where God’s kingdom program is brought to birth by God’s Servant10 (who is interchangeably Israel or an individual). The climax is reached in 52:13—53:12, the fourth Servant Song, where the sins which kept Israel in exile are atoned for by the suffering and death of the Servant, and so brings them redemption, victory, and shalom.11 “The kingdom would come through the suffering of the righteous,” says Bishop N.T. Wright.12 This connection between the suffering of God’s people and God’s kingdom would have been at the fore of Peter’s mind, if we are to imagine him credibly as a first-century Christian Jew. And indeed, that fourth Servant Song, so full of suffering and hope, is interwoven throughout his exhortations to Christian slaves in 1 Peter 2:18-25 (esp. 2:2124). Bartlett says that “the passage presents themes from Isaiah’s passage to illuminate ways in which Christ served as an example for suffering household servants and for all suffering Christians in the communities to which 1 Peter was written.” 13 Therefore just as Isaiah’s Suffering Servant embeds meaning to Jewish suffering, so also Jesus as that Suffering Servant embeds meaning to Christian suffering. Thus: 9

Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 589.

10

Ibid, 602.

11

Wright, N.T. The New Testament and the People of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 276279. 12

Wright 1996, 601.

13

Bartlett, 282.

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Israel’s suffering anticipates  Jesus’ redemptive suffering  Church’s suffering commemorates

As Winn says, there is a “mystical link between the suffering of Christians and the suffering of Christ.”14 Indeed, the latter is both tied to final hope and present formation, as in 4:13f. – “But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.” Both sufferings are interwoven. The answer to how to deal with suffering, with unjust authority, with exile, is found in following Christ’s example. The twin questions above of ‘What is God doing with this suffering?’ and ‘How ought we respond to this suffering?’ turn out to be bound up together. How God dealt with suffering in Jesus is how the Christian is to continue to deal with it. The victory of God on the cross is to be implemented and commemorated in the lives of Christians on the same terms as it was accomplished – nonviolently and with love. “Christ’s passion is the path Christians take”, says Bartlett of 1 Peter. 15 His passion has “direct social consequences”16 for all who suffer, in Peter’s mind, and takes the shape of that cross (cf. 4:1: “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking…”). Richard Hays says, “1 Peter holds up the suffering of Christ as a paradigm for Christian faithfulness”.17 Jesus taught a heart orientation by which to live this way: enemy-love, which 1 Peter picks up explicitly. In 3:8-17, the author echoes Paul18 in writing: Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing. For 14

Winn, 168.

15

Bartlett, 282.

16

Yoder, John H. The Politics of Jesus. 2nd edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 236.

17

Hays, Richard. The Moral Vision of the New Testament. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1996), 332. Romans 12:14-21, 1 Thessalonians 5:15.

18

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“Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit; let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” (3:9-12) From this passage it is resoundingly clear: Christians must practice non-retaliation as enemy-love. Yet here it is not grounded in obedience to Jesus, or to participation in his suffering, but in hope for a future blessing. That is, Peter “orients his discussion of enemy-love around hope.”19 Just as Jesus’ obedience to nonviolent enemy-love on the cross were vindicated in his resurrection, so also the suffering Christian’s nonviolent enemy-love will likewise be vindicated on the day of their own resurrection. Additionally, “1 Peter joins loving the enemy with “seeking peace” in a degree of explicitness not found in any other biblical writer.”20 To Peter, Christian nonviolence and enemy-love are not only grounded in obedience to Christ’s past victorious example and hope for Christ’s future return, but in seeking that future shalom in the present. Suddenly, the arms of Peter’s imagination stretch in both directions to bring both past victory and future hope together as the suffering Christian nevertheless seeks peace. Motivated by Jesus’ nonviolent victory, assured of future blessing, the Christian’s task is to transform the present with God-empowered enemy-love. Past, present, and future inspirations for nonviolence in the face of suffering all burst forth from Peter’s heart.

19

Klassen, William. Love of Enemies: The Way to Peace. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 122.

20

Ibid.

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This way of responding to suffering is deeply subversive. Instead of following the wisdom of this age and responding to violence with violence, Peter’s solution follows the wisdom of God as demonstrated in Jesus Christ. The demonic logic of hate, which lies behind impulses of retaliation, violence, and injustice, is neutered by Peter’s flat insistence on the power of love. To the tyrant’s chagrin, the suffering they mean for evil is to be joy to the suffering Christian (4:13).

If Christ’s suffering is victory, is

redemption, then Christian participation in that suffering by modeling his enemy-love in the present points to God’s redefinitions of power and victory. Allegiance to power and victory over suffering through suffering marks all human institutions of government and power as parodies at best and blasphemies at worst. Yet the way of salvation, as we shall see, to Peter does not permit flippant disregard for them.

Salvation Up-ending Evil The shape of salvation in 1 Peter is one of community holiness (1:13-25), cruciform obedience (2:18-25; 3:13-18; 4:1), and enemy-love (2:13-18; 3:8ff.). Though these three are tightly woven, it is worth briefly summarizing each within the contexts of salvation and this paper’s broader meditation on 1 Peter’s subversive spirituality of nonviolence. Community holiness as part of the way of salvation means living under a new lord and new sense of holiness – no more living in “former ignorance” (1:14), futile ancestral ways (1:18), flippancy to authority (2:13-17), violent retaliation (3:9), or recreational debauchery (4:3-4). Instead they are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (2:9a); Peter’s readers, in continuity with national-ethnic

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Israel, are to live as an obscure people reflecting the holiness of God among the world for the world. “They are to forge for themselves an identity that sets them apart without necessarily setting them in conflict with the pagans around them.”21 Their love for one another and their holiness, ironically, only add to their sense of exile.22 This is the kind of salvation they have entered: into the community of “eschatological reality,” marked out below the emperor and among the pagans by their countercultural holiness, their primacy of love, and self-induced obscurity.23 Salvation to 1 Peter also entails cruciform obedience and enemy-love, which we have covered earlier as being the threads which hold together suffering to God’s sovereign solution. Salvation cannot but mean engaging in this subversive work of nonviolent enemy-love. Indeed, as William Klassen says, salvation as eschatological reality “takes the form of seeking peace by loving the enemy.”24 It is the spiritual milk of the good Lord (2:1-3) that grows the Christian up to salvation. Without enemy-love, the shape of salvation is skewered;25 it loses its subversive power to call the present age to account, it is severed from the sufferings of Christ, and it retains the former ignorance. First Peter’s idea of holistic salvation, then, is necessarily subversive.

Its

challenge of relationally-bonded holiness draws out the consternation of surrounding pagans; its cruciform obedience under suffering neuters the power of the unjust, the mocker, and the tyrant; and its enemy-love looses the cords of final salvation for even the

21

Bartlett, 241.

22

Ibid, 238.

23

Klassen, 122.

24

Ibid.

25

Piper, John. “Hope as the Motivation for Love: 1 Peter 3:9-12”. NTS 26 (1980), 212-31.

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enemy (2:12, 4:12-18). Peter’s doctrine of salvation, like the resurrection, breaks out of the hope at the horizon of the future, slams into the present and up-ends relationships and structures of hostility and suffering.

Submission to Evil as Subverting Empire Jesus’ solution to exile-under-empire was submission as an expression of nonviolent enemy-love. So also Peter does not call for flippant disregard or armed rebellion against government. Rather, the Christian response of enemy-love, honor, and submission call those institutions to account and allegiance to the one who is truly lord: the one whose death and resurrection have now redefined the significance of suffering. That new definition takes concrete shape before the powers in submission. Thus Peter’s answer to oppressive structures, be they empire or slavery, is submission (2:13ff.) held in paradox with allegiance to the person and ways of the one true lord (3:22). But Peter’s comments in 2:13-17 are not an approval of the emperor’s legitimacy, his authority, his values, or his actions. No: They are couched in a broader argument that the holy love of God extends even to the emperor, and so should the love of the holy community. In the same breath, Peter tells his readers to honor everyone, and to honor the emperor, as if to say “Honor everyone – yes, even the emperor!” This submissionallegiance paradox has more to do with the Christian’s response to the Lord Jesus’ own enemy-love than it does any merits of the emperor’s own. The emperor, it was noted earlier, was competing in Peter’s time for the title of ‘lord of the world’ with Jesus and YHWH – a flaring blasphemy to all Jews and Christians.

Yet even this blasphemer of blasphemers deserves the love of God as

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embodied in his people. Far from a bent knee to this sort of blasphemous ruler, 1 Peter’s insistence on honoring the emperor grows out of a love for and an allegiance to the true Lord, thus subverting and denying any claim by Caesar to that title. It cuts to the epistemological heart of Caesar’s claims and controls, and gives it to Christ. The life of God’s sojourning people perplex and offend Caesar and his governors as they give respect and limited obedience to them, while giving worship and total obedience to the risen King. Indeed, as Peter has argued for, their respect for the former is only in response to the latter! More threatening still: their nonviolence is not just a benign act of compliance, but a re-enactment of God’s own victory over empire, evil, death, and suffering. Thus, in a very upside-down way, 1 Peter’s nonviolent enemy-love toward Caesar is in reality an act of outright sedition and subversion.

This is a

submission which, in God’s economy, subverts the empire.

Conclusion First Peter has been a book of paradoxes – salvation entails suffering, subversion includes submission. Neither the revolutionary nor the status-quo can easily hold their ground before its wisdom and inspired meditations on the social outworking of the crucified God’s victory. Peter’s epistle is miles from the civically flaccid status that many have esteemed it with, and burrows with bleeding rigor to the heart of Christian civic duty, but re-imagined around the cross and exile. As John Howard Yoder wisely penned, “The willingness to suffer is then not merely a test of our patience or a dead space of waiting; it is itself a participation in the character of God’s victorious patience with the rebellious powers of creation. We subject

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ourselves to government because it was in so doing that Jesus revealed and achieved God’s victory.”26 Truly: let us continue in 1 Peter’s wisdom and God’s power to subvert today’s empires with deep love, and receive what suffering that may come with joy as our very salvation.

Bibliography Bartlett, David. L. “The First Letter of Peter: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections”, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume XII. (Nashville, KY: Abingdon Press, 1998) Hays, Richard. The Moral Vision of the New Testament. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1996)

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Yoder, 209.

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Klassen, William. Love of Enemies: The Way to Peace. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984) Piper, John. “Hope as the Motivation for Love: 1 Peter 3:9-12”. NTS 26 (1980) Winn, Albert Curry. Ain’t Gonna Study War No More: Biblical Ambiguity and the Abolition of War. (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996) -------------. The New Testament and the People of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992) -------------. “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire”, in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation. Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl. Ed. Richard A. Horsley. (Harrisburg, PA: TPI, 2000) Yoder, John H. The Politics of Jesus. 2nd edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994)

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