Aliens in Your Native Land

1 Peter and the Formation of Christian Identity

Warner M. Bailey

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725268487, 9781725268494
• eBook ISBN: 9781725268500
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Living as an alien in one's native land is a familiar reality to marginalized communities. Cultural, economic, and political shifts can cause people to become alienated by a system of greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and media manipulation.How can Christians persist under a sustained threat within a social order diametrically opposed to them? This question drives Warner Bailey's investigation of 1 Peter. The mature Christology of 1Peter yields a profile of Christian identity. This picture is funded by texts from the Book of the Twelve (Hosea-Malachi) and is counter-intuitive, in that it is able to create new initiatives for behavior that offer hope for redemption in the midst of oppression. Bailey explores how 1 Peter has been used in shaping the life of modern "aliens, " such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, living in his own country under the oppression of Nazism, and feminist, black, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ readers. Placing 1 Peter within the crisis in U.S. political and economic life opens up fresh implications for faithful ecclesiastical practice and personal witness.

1

The Authorial Intent of 1 Peter

Why was 1 Peter composed and sent to the churches in Anatolia1 in the waning years of the first century of the common era? Although the question is perennial, in the last fifty years it has been pursued vigorously down diverse trajectories. The path-breaking parallel investigations of John Elliott2 and David Balch3 gave interpreters a choice between two strikingly different alternatives.4

Broadly speaking, Elliott’s answer claims that the letter is directed to Christians forcibly removed from their homelands and relocated in diaspora. The letter’s purpose is to foster internal cohesion among the community of believers in order to build as exiles a distinctive communal identity and resist external pressures to conform. The readers of the letter are to think of themselves as a sect of converts that resists, as much as possible, contact with the social world in which they live. The world is an evil and hostile place to this sect, but nonetheless, the sect considers itself to have a missionary task to save individuals from this wicked world through conversion.

In Balch’s view, the letter counsels Christians to engage positively, as much as possible, with non-Christian neighbors. “The purpose of 1 Peter, and specifically its domestic code, was to lessen the hostility and antagonism suffered by Christians by urging them to demonstrate their conformity to conventional social expectations. The church, in other words, was to accommodate to the world, in order to reduce the tensions between them.”5

Both options assume in common that the addressees largely come from populations that are not native to Anatolia. They are in Asia Minor as a result of imperial, forced migration. However, recently this assumption has been under increasing challenge. David Horrell, among others, has pointed out “converts seem to be mostly Gentiles and have previously been well accustomed to the way of life of their wider society, a way of life from which they now are urged to distance themselves. These are not, then, people for whom the wider culture is alien and strange, but people whose conversion to Christianity has created an alienation, the consequences of which need to be worked out.”6 Faced with this challenge, scholarly attention has been drawn to whether the models of assimilation/acculturation (Balch) or sectarian withdrawal (Elliott) are appropriate to describe the letter’s idea of how Christians should negotiate their place in society.

A major breakthrough of this impasse was mounted by Horrell who noticed that “what is most obviously missing from both these social-scientific approaches—and from most other attempts to move beyond the Balch-Elliott debate—is explicit attention to the structures of (imperial) domination with which the addresses of 1 Peter must negotiate their conformity and/or their resistance to the world.” Horrell grasped that at the heart of the letter is the believer’s coming to grips with the criminalization of confessing Christ.7 He pinpointed that in order to develop and sustain Christian character in the context of criminalization a re-valuing of this name into an honorable badge of new identity was required.

Horrell and others took note of how the sustained use of the Old Testament in 1 Peter contributes to the strategy of revaluation necessary to maintaining stamina and verve in the face of potential persecution. Because Jesus Christ so identified with Israel’s story, those who follow him can draw from Israel’s story of the faithfulness of God. Israel’s story, therefore, becomes a major factor supporting Christian identity under threat.8 This study focuses on how that portion of Israel’s scripture, Hosea through Malachi, which taken together in a canonical way are called The Book of the Twelve,9 is used by 1 Peter in the strategy of revaluation.

Horrell’s work has created subsequent investigations into the authorial intent, or the driving question, of 1 Peter. A discussion and evaluation of three examples of divergent answers which have been offered in the last ten years will provide the context for our constructive proposal.

1 Peter as an Explanation of Suffering

Kelly Liebengood mounts the case that “the precise issue with which Peter and his addresses are struggling [is] if Jesus is in the fact the Christ, the agent appointed to bring about restoration, then why are we suffering after his coming?”10 The characterization in 1 Peter of this suffering as a period of “fiery trials” (4:12) alerts Liebengood to the allusion being made to Zech 13:9 (“And I will put this third into the fire and refine them as on refines silver and test them as gold is tested”). The resonating of Zech 13:9 in 1 Peter suggests to Liebengood that the author of 1 Peter may have drawn more extensively from the eschatological program of Zech 9–14 to help Christians know why they are still suffering after Jesus’ resurrection. In his discussion of the Zechariahan material, Liebengood demonstrates a significant impulse to the shaping of 1 Peter.

The basic contours of the distinctive eschatological program of Zechariah 9–14 are: “YHWH’s shepherd will suffer a death that will serve to cleanse ‘the house of God’ upon which the Spirit now rests; (4:14) and bring back the scattered sheep to God, while also placing them in a period of fiery trials that they must endure until final consummation.”11 Through a sensitive and far-reaching program of exegesis, Liebengood describes how major points of Zechariah’s eschatological program form the substructure of 1 Peter, even though there is no explici...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• The Authorial Intent of 1 Peter
• The Contribution of the Twelve to the Message of Consolation in 1 Peter
• The Influence of the Twelve on Counter-Intuitive Identity in 1 Peter
• The Use of 1 Peter by Aliens in the Modern Era, Part 1—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• The Use of 1 Peter by Aliens in the Modern Era, Part 2
• Conclusions
• Bibliography