What does 1 Peter teach us today?

When I first learnt New Testament Greek, the set text for our class was (slightly oddly!) 1 Peter. This has left me with an affection for the letter—so I was very interested to see the new commentary on the letter by Sean du Toit in the New Covenant Commentary Series. I had the chance to ask him about his commentary and the letter itself.

IP: What first drew you to 1 Peter within the New Testament? Why has this been an important text for you? 

SdT: As a pastor I was acutely aware of my own context and trying to help Christians, and particularly students, navigate how they interacted with their own culture and other cultures—in both South Africa and New Zealand. The issues faced by the early church were of course different, but they were also at times similar. Christians could either assimilate and lose their identity and distinctiveness as Christians, or they could attempt to cloister themselves away from secular culture by forming disconnected communities who rarely ventured into the supposedly scary pagan world (by pagan, I just mean not Christian or Jewish).

My reading of 1 Peter challenged both those strategies. It seems to me that 1 Peter advocated a distinctive engagement with culture so as to retain the fidelity of his audiences and further the gospel, recruiting pagans into the purposes of God. In 1 Peter I discovered a frame for carefully considering which aspects of culture could be affirmed and celebrated, which had to be avoided or rejected or which aspects could be reframed or restored so that they could be adopted or accepted. It was a more challenging and beneficial model than either retreat or assimilate. In hindsight it felt like my ministry offered me a set of questions and challenges that 1 Peter addressed but in an entirely different socio-historical context.

But by travelling back in time and wrestling with 1 Peter, I was able to see my own culture and issues more clearly. According to the congregations, ministers and students that I’ve interacted with over the years, this has proved beneficial to their work. 

IP: One of the regular questions about the letter is whether it could have been written by a fisherman like Peter. How does the mention of Silvanus in 1 Peter 5.12 make a difference—and how does our recent understanding of writing and authorship in the ancient world reshape the debate here?

SdT: As I tried to show in the commentary, the issues of authorship are more complex than most people realise. There are a wide range of ways someone could be considered an author, from actually having put pen to paper to authorising someone else to write on your behalf. I’m sceptical of our ability to say a fisherman could not have written a letter like this because we simply don’t know much about Peter’s education after Jesus. He could have had help from an amanuensis or someone else in the Christian community (cf. Rom 16:22). There are a number of scenarios we can imagine.

I didn’t finish high school but I now have a PhD and write academic works. So it’s not impossible that a fisherman gathered some skills along the way, and had some help to write an epistle such as 1 Peter. But it’s also possible he commissioned the work in his name. With other scholars I’ve concluded that Silvanus was unlikely to be a collaborator in writing the letter but was probably the letter carrier (the suggestion is that the list of places in 1:1 is perhaps the route the letter carrier took) and perhaps Acts 15:22-35 provides some clues to this.   

IP: You go with the majority in considering that the audience for this letter is primarily pagan converts to following Jesus. What is the evidence in the text for that, and how does this shape the way we read it? 

SdT: In 1 Peter 1:18, the author writes: “you were liberated from meaningless ways of life inherited from your ancestors…” I think it is entirely implausible that a Jewish-Christian would categorise their Jewish heritage as “meaningless ways of life.” 1 Peter shows a deep indebtedness to the Jewish scriptures and traditions, and I can’t see any repudiation of that in the letter. Secondly, the vices in 4:3 seem more apt to describe pagan practice than that of Jews, especially the climactic vice of “lawless idolatry”. I find it unlikely that pagans would be “surprised” that Jews no long joined them in their flood of unrestrained immorality (cf. 4:4). Finally, 1 Peter describes the audience as those “called out of darkness,” those who were “once not a people” which seems more appropriate to describe pagan conversion.

The difference this makes to my reading is that I am attuned to the ways that Peter seeks to enculturate or disciple former pagans. I am attentive to the ways that Peter might be addressing issues specifically related to pagans, and thus that is why he reframes the household code because he’s taking something they’re possibly familiar with and using it to communicate beneficially to them. Peter often appeals to elements of the Graeco-Roman world to aid his communication and I think that’s because he’s an attentive communicator, aware of his audience(s). So he appeals to ethical lists (2:1; 4:3, 15), or concepts familiar to the average Graeco-Roman (honour, beneficial deeds, civic loyalty, dress codes for women, etc.). 

IP: Peter appears to use language of Jews and of Israel from the Old Testament without remainder to these people. What does that tell us theologically about how Peter sees the people of God in Jesus compared with the people of God in the Old Testament?

SdT: I struggled with this throughout because 1 Peter is frustrating in that the author doesn’t seem to nail down the issue in a way that for me is decisive. I suspect he sees a continuation of one people from Israel to the church. The descriptions in 2:9-10 seem to indicate that pagans have been adopted into the people of God. So I’m inclined to view 1 Peter as extending the privileges and prerogatives of Israel to the Gentiles who have been included by virtue of their conversion to Christ (see Liebengood’s Reading 1 Peter After Supersessionism).

I don’t see any indicators that the Christian community replaces Israel in 1 Peter. However, 1 Peter is clear that Jesus is the Messiah, and that salvation is found in Jesus, and some may see a kind of salvific supersession in that. 

IP: The question of pressure (persecution?) for following Jesus features often in the text of 1 Peter. You consider the different possibilities for understanding this, and conclude that most of the pressure here comes from pagans, is local in origin, and is about the pressure to conform to social and cultural norms—which has some similarities with the issues in the Book of Revelation, written to people in a similar region. What do you think its message of exhortation and encouragement has to offer for Christians in the West today?

SdT: Those who live in a secular world are constantly trained to see the world as if God does not exist. So Christians in the West today have to develop a Christ-like resilience to that ubiquitous pressure. This is something I wished I’d explored further but I am grateful for the work of Katherine Hockey in this respect (“Resilience in 1 Peter: Faithfulness and Hope in the Face of Adversity”).

Christians in the west don’t often face the violent social pressures often associated with the Graeco-Roman world, but more often they face the overwhelming plurality of perspectives and practices that are associated with secularism which subtly denigrate fidelity to Christ. The air we breathe is shaped by individualism, capitalism, and the various idols promoted and celebrated through social media. Cultivating faithfulness to Jesus is difficult because we are too often distracted by a host of other issues and events.

1 Peter exhorts us to take stock of our allegiance to Christ and to think carefully about what we will give ourselves to as those who have been liberated from futility into a hope that is alive because of the resurrection of Jesus. It challenges us to take note of those who are suffering for the faith and to emulate their ardent commitment to Christ and to participate in God’s redeeming work in this world. It promises us an eschatological hope that is steadfast and secure, because God is faithful (1 Peter 1:4-5). 

IP: You comment on your own varied contexts, of church leadership and of academic scholarship. How have these different experiences helped you engage with the letter?

SdT: Trying to be faithful to Jesus in this world with all of its distractions, demands and devastations helps me to consider what challenges and issues the early Christians faced in their daily lives. I cannot separate my fidelity to God to from my scholarship and I hope that it will be beneficial for the church. I wrote this commentary with my friends in mind, friends and colleagues who are involved with various kinds of ministry around the world from pastoring, to children’s ministry, to missionary work, to those just trying to be a faithful presence in environments that are indifferent to the gospel or deeply cynical about Jesus and his church.

While there are some issues I just had to deal with, most of my energy was spent thinking through “so what?” questions. Not that I had the opportunity to explicate that, but that helped me choose which issues I could focus on because I thought they would be beneficial to those in ministry. The question I constantly wrestle with is, “How should followers of Jesus negotiate life in exile as the holy community who belong to God and live according to the pattern of life we see in Jesus, as we reach out in hope to our world?” That question came from the dynamic interplay of wrestling with 1 Peter and serving the church. It’s a question I still wrestle with. 

IP: You talk of writing a commentary as being quite an isolating experience on the one hand, but an essentially communal one on the other. How has the experience of writing a commentary changed and challenged you—and how has it changed the way you read the New Testament?

SdT: One of the things I sought to implement in the latter part of writing was to share the material with the various churches that I work with and to listen carefully to their feedback. It’s easy to just read the academics, which I have greatly appreciated. But there’s a place for listening to various Christians as they seek to follow Jesus. So while there is an isolating in the actual writing process, the more I listened to the feedback of God’s people, people who come from vastly different cultures, socio-economic backgrounds and ecclesiastical traditions, the more I felt I could appreciate what the writer of 1 Peter was trying to do in his letter.

I’ve become more attuned to the collective wisdom of God’s people, and to people who have been trying to faithfully implement this vision for much longer than myself. I often find myself focussing in on various named and unnamed characters in the New Testament, trying to figure out what issues affected them as they sought to be faithful (my latest has been Gaius in 3 John, a wonderful example of Christian fidelity to mission and the church’s flourishing). This imaginative work is crucial for understanding the New Testament; this is something I picked up from R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History. 

IP: What is the main thing you think 1 Peter offers the church today?

SdT: 1 Peter offers the attentive reader a reminder of God’s faithfulness, Christ’s example, and the Spirit’s empowerment for sustained witness in a hostile or indifferent culture. If we press into the details I see a model for cultural engagement that emerges from the text. Christians have to carefully and communally reflect on the life of Jesus and the witness of Scripture, to be able to discern whether issues and items in culture should be rejected, received, or reframed. Only then should Christians offer an embodied response to the world.

By focussing on the ordinary lives of slaves (2:18-20) and women (3:1-6), 1 Peter offers real life examples of Christians struggling to remain faithful amidst difficult circumstances. There is no facile simplistic instruction but rather a generous call to what Milbank calls a “non-identical repetition” of the life of Christ, or what Peter refer to as “the example of Christ,” which is not a mindless or superficial replication or cloning but rather a prayerful and involved reflection on the example of Jesus which leads us to “honour everyone” (1 Pet 2:17), practice beneficial deeds (2:15), living lives of holiness (1:15-16), before a watching world (2:12) so that people may be won to Christ (2:12; 3:1) and God glorified (2:12; 4:11). That seems pretty relevant to faithfully navigating life in a secular world. 

IP: Thank you Sean for sharing your insights both into 1 Peter, and the process of writing a commentary, as well as the issues for us today!

Dr Sean du Toit, originally from South Africa, is a senior lecturer in Biblical Studies at Alphacrucis College in New Zealand, and is ordained in the New Zealand Assemblies of God churches. He’s married to Sue and they have two daughters, Ava and Mia. He’s an avid snowboarder, a wannabe drummer, and a member of Connect Church in Timaru.