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As usual, when looking at a new book, I like to check out the wikipedia page and see what it says about date and authorship. We are in the normal situation, both of these items are hotly contested. One thing that caught my eye and made me chuckle, is that one of the arguments that it is not written by Peter is the linguistic difference between 1 Peter and 2 Peter, but 1 Peter was also argued to be not written by Peter. Although I guess that argument would lead to the conclusion that at least 1 was not really written by Peter, even if it can't pin down which is which.
Greeting (v. 1-2)
Peter identifies himself, and then wishes grace and peace to those of the faith.
Basically just a hello.
Make Your Calling and Election Sure (v. 3-15)
God granted us everything that is good, the world is the source of all things sinful and bad.
Same old thing, they give credit to God for anything good and he is free from responsibility from anything bad. If he is an omnipotent creator, shouldn't he take responsibility for the good and bad?
Supplement faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with steadfastness, steadfastness with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection, brotherly affection with love.
Seems odd to have been structured this way, where each item is intended to supplement the last. It doesn't seem to make a ton of sense to me, I think it would have been better to simply have a list of things that a good qualities, which is essentially what this becomes. What does it mean to supplement godliness with brotherly affection?
As for the list itself, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, brotherly affection and love are good. Virtue and godliness are relatively vacuous terms as far as I'm concerned. What does it mean to be virtuous? "Well, it means to do good things." What good things? "Well such as..." Yeah, whatever goes in that list, that's what I want to hear. And of course there is faith, which is a bad thing. I'm just going to leave this off of my overview post. I hate these lists, and it is a mixed bag anyway. Kinda hard to pick out the good bits and argue those parts make a good lesson.
Christ's Glory and the Prophetic Word (v. 16-21)
Peter says he knows Jesus is really the son of God because he personally heard the voice of God make this claim. He also says that he has prophetic word, which we should all listen to. Prophecy doesn't come from people, but rather it comes from God through the holy spirit.
Interesting that he talks about how awesome prophecy is, and yet he doesn't give any specific prophecies, maybe next book.
For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation)
Bad:
1:3-4 God is the source of good stuff, bad stuff is from earth
"His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness...escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire"
What is telling is that knowledge is in third place after faith and virtue.
ReplyDeletethat's a good point
DeleteThat "godliness" stuck me as odd, too, Hausdorff. I checked the lexicon, and it seems that the base word means piety or godliness. Personally, I would think that godliness is a much greater quality than piety, as it literally confers being like God. So I would think that if Peter (or whoever) meant godliness instead of piety, that it would have been the last, and therefore most important, quality listed. So I would wager "piety" as a better interpretation here.
ReplyDeleteOf course, if we leave it as godliness and consider the whole "God is love" thing, "love" could be swapped out with "godliness," and we'd end up with an infinite do loop. ;-)
Yeah, I never really know what to think of a word like godliness. It basically read to me like it is saying "be good" but just with a lot of emphasis. In one sense this is a good thing, telling people to be good (for whatever good means to them) has some small amount of value. But in another sense, people can justify doing pretty much anything they want to do. They can twist logic and convince themselves that any action is ultimately good. So I see this command as somewhat worthless.
Delete