Scripture

Letter from an Apostle – II: Known & Chosen

Dr Bob

An ongoing study of the epistle 1 Peter.

  1. Letter from an Apostle – Background

  • 1:1 — This letter is from Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ. I am writing to God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners in the lands of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, the province of Asia, and Bithynia.

The apostle Peter, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, appears frequently throughout the Gospels and the book of Acts. He was a fisherman, chosen by Jesus, and one of the inner circle of the disciples. He was present at the transfiguration of Jesus; in the garden of Gethsemane; at his trial, where he denied Jesus; and was appointed by Jesus to lead his Church. By declaring himself an apostle (apostolos)– a specific claim to have been appointed directly by Christ to teach and lead His Church — Peter is declaring his authority to speak on behalf of Christ Himself.

He addresses his epistle to those “chosen” of God and “foreigners”, in areas located in modern-day Turkey. The imagery here is strikingly similar to that used of the Jewish people, who also were spoken of God’s chosen people, many of whom represented a diaspora spread throughout the ancient world.

We do not know if Peter was writing to these churches which he himself had founded, or to Christians whom he had evangelized, or whether he was speaking to those he had never met, in his office as the chief of the apostles. He does not mention specific individuals — unlike many of Paul’s letters — which may suggest he himself had not founded these churches.
 

The use of the term “foreigners” (or “sojourners” or “pilgrims”) speaks to those who are not natives in the land in which they dwell. This suggests that these were either converted Jews of the Diaspora (for Peter was the apostle to the Jews), or perhaps Gentile Christians who had emigrated to Asia minor. As Peter will develop later in the epistle, however, there is also a sense of the Christian in the world as a pilgrim: a foreigner traveling to a world not his own, while a citizen of heaven.

  • 1:2a — God the Father knew you and chose you long ago…

“God the Father…”

This is shockingly and intensely personal. It is not God the Creator; God the lawgiver; God of judgment; God unapproachable, inscrutable, unknown. This is family: this God, although vastly above us and beyond our understanding, nevertheless considers us children, family, friends. This is a stunning contrast to the religions of this and every age, with gods either mythical, or vengeful, or distant and impersonal. This is a God of profound love, of tenderness, of mercy, of gentleness; a teacher, a guardian, a guide, a defender. Even among the Jews, who worshiped and served the same God, there was no sense of such intimate personality; theirs was the Yahweh of Sinai and the burning bush, a God to be feared and obeyed but surely not befriended. The God whom Peter came to know through Jesus Christ was an utterly new revelation, a profound paradigm shift in man’s understanding of God.

“God the Father knew you…”

We are known: intimately, throughout eternity, in every moment and every aspect of our lives. This is not mere familiarity, nor faint acquaintance: this is full, complete, transparent knowledge, that of the Creator fully comprehending His own creation.

We are known: in all our greed and selfishness; in our gossip and backstabbing; in our anger, and deceit, and hatred, and arrogance. The God of eternity, transcending time, knows our every moment, our every thought, our every action, our birth and death and all that lies between. “Every hair on your head is counted” — there is naught that is hidden, every corner of your soul, every cell of your body is known by God, throughout eternity.

We are known: not only in our deep rebellion and sinfulness, but in the glory which we might bring Him, and His purposes which we may serve. We are known in our fullest and highest potential; the goodness which God can bring about when we are once again restored to Him, empowered by Him, guided and gifted through Him. In this too we are known.

We are creatures of time; we have a beginning, and an end, and the sequence of minutes, hours, and days which pass between, one after another. Yet the God who knows us is above and outside time; He is eternal, unbounded by that which He has created. Every moment of our lives is now for God; He inhabits our past, our future, our eternity with Him yet to come: these are present to Him, who transcends time and redeems it.

“God the Father knew you and chose you…”

To be chosen: to be accepted in whole, unreservedly, unconditionally. This is the very deepest need of man; our rejection by God and man fosters an endless parade of human misery, suffering, pathos and pathology. Our entire lives are spent seeking the acceptance of others, and failing to find in them the acceptance which is our very life. Deep within each of us dwells a bottomless abyss, into which we pour an endless train of insufficient and destructive detritus. We seek to fill the abyss with material goods; with drugs, or alcohol, or food, or sex; we seek relationships, hoping through them to fill that void — then destroy those relationships when they fail to accomplish what they are utterly incapable of fulfilling. Neither power, nor money, nor eminence, nor the esteem of others will suffice. Only to be chosen by God; to be accepted, fully, unconditionally, eternally by Him: this alone fills the despondent destitution within — for that emptiness was made to be filled with naught but God Himself.

And we are chosen, not because we have earned this esteemed position; not because our behavior has made us worthy, nor our status gained God’s attention, nor our inflated self-worth merited his favor and mandated his choice. We are chosen: broken, failures, rebellious, arrogant, fully worthy of utter rejection — yet by grace, plucked from the mire of hopeless self-destruction and empty, purposeless lives, for the sole reason that we are loved, and that this love can transform us from something useless and empty to something purposeful and valued. We are chosen because we are loved, though unworthy, and because we may become empowered by our choosing to manifest that same love to a lost, desperate world.

We were chosen long ago — as we measure time.

Yet the time of our choosing is now, if we will but accept it.

Letter from an Apostle – Background

Dr Bob

I have been asked to lead our small group Bible study, and have chosen to study 1 Peter. This short letter is often overlooked, as much time in the New Testament is spent on the Gospels or Paul’s epistles. But 1 Peter is a very rich resource, and I’m looking forward to studying it in some depth.

I thought I would share some insights from studying this book on the blog. I am not sure how well this medium will serve such a study, and I may experiment with some different formats and see how it plays out. I often find by writing my understanding of a topic deepens substantially, and it is my hope that any notes I post here will be helpful both to you as well as myself.

I am currently using the New Living Translation (which, unlike the Living Bible is not a paraphrase, but rather a thought for thought translation — see this for different philosophies and approaches to translating the original Scriptures). I will be referencing other translations from time to time as the need arises.

So let’s get started, and see where this goes.

  • 1:1a This letter is from Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.

What seems at first a straightforward attribution proves not nearly as simple as it first appears. We are drawn to think of Peter, one of the 12 apostles chosen by Jesus to be his immediate followers, and spoken of often throughout the Gospels and the book of Acts.

When examining a piece of ancient literature, there are a host of tests and methods to assess its veracity. In general terms, these are categorized as internal and external sources. External sources refer to such things as archaeological evidence, references to a given work in other ancient works, and consistency of the message with its historical and cultural context. Internal evidence would refer to the specific writing style, internal consistency, stylistic similarity to other works by the same author, and in the case of Scripture, its harmony with the established teachings and traditions of the Christian faith.

It turns out that letters or Gospels claiming to be written by an apostle were a dime a dozen in the first few centuries after the death of Christ. The early Christian church, believing that the true gospel and true faith had been given to the apostles by Jesus, who then transmitted the same faith and truth to their immediate followers and disciples, placed great emphasis on ascertaining that any given letter or literary work was in fact the work of the apostles or their immediate delegates. The body of Scripture, which we refer to as the canon, represents the culmination of this verification and culling process. Although modern skeptics seek to portray this as the product of a dogmatic declaration by church leaders and bishops, designed to entrench them in power and exclude equally legitimate interpretations of Christianity by those out of power.

While this narrative has popular appeal in our modern culture, it quite simply does not mesh with historical fact. We have a great deal of literary evidence regarding the life and belief system of the early Christian church, embodied in the works of water known as the Apostolic or Church Fathers. We know from this large and diverse body of literature a great deal about what the early church taught and believed, from sources of extraordinary variety, both geographically and culturally.

It is clear from such sources that the core teachings of Christianity were not simply invented in the fourth century or later, but in fact were present from the very outset, taught by those who themselves were often disciples of the apostles, or disciples of those disciples. Furthermore, we have frequent early citations of Scripture which attest to manuscripts dating back virtually to their primary sources, themselves no longer in existence and thus undiscoverable archaeologically.

We know from these sources, as well as ancient manuscripts of Scripture itself, that most of the New Testament canon was universally accepted as apostolic, and had its origins from the very earliest days of the Christian faith. This body includes the four Gospels, the book of Acts, Paul’s letters, and 1 Peter. There was some dispute about a minority of the books in the New Testament, especially 2 Peter, Jude, James, Revelation, and 2nd and 3rd John, and some time passed before they were verified and accepted as well as part of the body of inspired Scripture.

The testimony of such sources is compelling that 1 Peter was in fact a letter by the apostle Peter, likely within 2 years of his martyrdom in Rome under Nero in 64 AD. Some scholars have disputed his authorship, asserting that the classical Greek style could not have been written by an unschooled Aramaic fisherman, and that the theology was too sophisticated and rather Pauline in nature. But Peter himself acknowledges the assistance of Silas, a Greek who was a companion of Paul and Timothy on their missionary journeys, and thus this objection seems easily overcome.

Pause and consider for a moment: what we have in this short letter are the thoughts, beliefs, and teachings of a man who accompanied Jesus throughout his earthly ministry, and if he is to be believed, witnessed the risen Christ after His resurrection. Whatever your opinion or convictions about the Christian faith, this surely must be acknowledged as a remarkable historical document, and an invaluable asset to understand the teachings of Jesus and the convictions of his followers.

So that’s some background on this epistle — we’ll start diving into the content, anon.

The Problem of Miracles

Dr Bob

ocean sunset

A commenter in a previous post on the subject of faith and reason made the following observation:

The most Christian apologetics can accomplish is to show faith in Divine revelation to be a reasonable proposition. I would say the challenges presented by various content in the Holy Scriptures are significant. As you pointed out, “we evaluate scriptures claiming to be revelation with the tools of archeology, linguistics, textual analysis for internal consistency and external verification, to validate, in some measure, the veracity of such claims.” This is all very good, but what of the more difficult propositions hidden in the texts: creation stories, Noah’s Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, a talking ass, sword wielding angelic messengers, chariots of fire swooping in to carry men to heaven, floating ax heads, the regeneration of limbs, a virgin birth, or Lazarus raised from the dead?

The subject raised here is a challenging one, and a common point put forward in any discussion about faith and reason: what about the miracles spoken about in Scripture? The events such as those mentioned above lie entirely outside the realm of our experience, and it appears utterly reasonable and rational to dismiss them as fabrications, myth, or at best allegorical tales intended for moral teaching. The belief in miracles by people of religious faith is perhaps the area most incomprehensible to the skeptic. Such events are logically and physically impossible, reside outside the laws of nature and science, and therefore no rational, intelligent person could or should believe such unadulterated nonsense. Even those of religious conviction often struggle with this aspect of their faith. Some will simply dodge the issue: “The Bible says it, I believe it.” End of discussion — and not terribly satisfying for those seeking more rational evidence for faith than mere assent to the truth of revelation alone.

For most who reject the possibility of miracles, their impossibility arises less from evidence found lacking — for they rarely objectively evaluate the evidence — than from the presuppositions fundamental to their view of the world. If the universe is purely material, randomly engendered and devoid of any possibility of divine existence, then miracles must, by necessity, be either mythical in origin or have other, naturalistic explanations. For those who believe in some sort of divine entity or power — especially one which is impersonal or abstract — the intimate intervention of a personal, supernatural Being into the natural world in any demonstrable way is inconceivable. Even for those who may believe in a personal God, the idea that the divine would intervene demonstrably in ways contravening the laws of nature and their daily experience of the world seems highly implausible and impossibly remote.

Yet the problem of miracles is central to the integrity of faith. If in fact miracles cannot occur, if in fact they are naught but myths and morality tales, then faith itself must be without substance or certainty, and becomes nothing more than a comfortable belief system without basis in reality, history, or objective truth. The problem of miracles must be met head-on if we are to have a faith grounded in reason rather than diaphanous desire.

It is not imperative that every miracle held by faith be provable — indeed, were such a thing possible, it would destroy the very essence of faith, for we do not believe in what we see, but rather in that which is unseen. Once the premise that the divine can intervene, and indeed has intervened in tangible ways superseding the dictates of logic and the constraints of the material universe, however, the largest hurdle to accepting their possibility has been bridged. Reason demands that faith be reasonable: that the injection of the divine and transcendent into the temporal and material ought not lie purely within the realm of the easily-deceptive determinations born of mere thought or mental theorems. If God has stepped into history, we should expect to see His footprints.

Christianity at its very heart is about just such an injection of the timeless into time, of the transcendent into the material. The ripples of this event radiate throughout history, with implications unspeakably vast and ever-widening. At the vortex of this widening gyre lies a miracle: the God-man come to earth, unjustly executed, and subsequently raised from the dead. That a man should claim to be God is hardly unique; that a man be unjustly tortured and killed, and esteemed thereafter as a martyr, is no rare event. That a man should make such claims, and meet such an end, and rise thenceforth from the grave, recasts preposterous claims as profound certainty and transforms his death into something transcendent and immensely powerful. If this event is but myth, Christianity becomes nothing more than platitudes and powerless moralizing; if true, no event in time is more significant, no aspect of life untouched by its enormity and seriousness.

If belief in this miracle be reasonable, if we may trace these long-traveled waves of faith back to their source, and in the inspection of their origins find evidence substantial and compelling, then the world becomes a vastly different place from that seen through a myopic focus on superficial pseudo-reality and all-too-comfortable denial of the divine.

By their very nature as supernatural phenomena, one cannot “prove” a miracle as one might prove a math theorem. Nor will mere facts or historical evidence of themselves be sufficient to document with unquestioned certainty those things upon which so much rests — for the human mind often proves stubbornly intransigent when new conclusions run counter to cherished beliefs or worldview conviction. Were such a point-by-point approach fail-safe, there would be no Holocaust deniers nor 9/11 conspirators.

If God exists, if He intrudes in human history in ways unexplainable by mere reason and material experience, then such a manifestation has profound implications for all who encounter it. For a God who intervenes thus in time stands face-to-face thereby with each of us, wherever we may stand. We may thereby hate Him or bow down to Him, but we can no longer live comfortably in delusional denial about such a reality.

It is my hope over the following posts to lay out such evidence in some detail. I break no new ground here; this evidence has been garnered and sifted many times over, by many other far more qualified to present it than I. But it seems apropos to present it again in some measure at this time, in an age increasingly skeptical and cynical, in a culture dismissive of truth and obsessed with the glorious glitter of vacuous beauty, of knowledge without wisdom, at the pinnacle of civilization yet ignorant of its stories and the substance of its soul.