Original Meaning
THE FIFTH AND final1 section of Peter’s “Guidelines to Social Groups” (i.e., household codes) expresses his concern with everyone in the churches, and his regulations exhort Christians on how they are to behave in general. Accordingly, this section records the general ethical principles required of believers who want to live circumspectly in a world that opposes both their lifestyle and existence.
Peter begins with a brief listing of virtues concerning harmonious social relations (3:8); these are immediately followed by two clauses that deal with an appropriate Christian response to opposition (3:9). These exhortations are then buttressed in 3:10–11 by a quotation from Psalm 34:13–17, reexpressing the virtues of 3:8–9 and grounding the motivation of living this way by an appeal to the omnipresence and omniscience of God (3:12). Peter calls his readers’ attention to this passage from Psalms especially because of its last verse.
The interpreter must decide whether 3:8 is concerned with “insider” ethics (how individual members are to interact with one another) and 3:9 with “outsider” ethics, or whether both verses are concerned with how Christians are to relate to the world. To begin with, Peter’s exhortations here are applicable to every encounter Christians have with others. To be sure, (1) his concern from the beginning has been with how various Christians relate to the outside world (Christians to government, slaves to unbelieving masters, wives to unbelieving husbands, and husbands to wives in general); (2) there is nothing in 3:8 that makes us think exclusively in terms of insiders; and (3) 3:9 is clearly concerned with outsiders. The flow of the text, then, makes us think almost exclusively in terms of how Christians are to relate to the outside world. In other words, we would be on sure footing if we read 3:8 as providing ethics for general relations in society rather than for relations within the Christian community, and particularly for how the church ought to relate to a hostile society (3:9). In this interpretation, Peter then grounds this ethics in the important observation that “God is watching us” (3:10–12).
However, to balance the evidence properly, we must note that the specific words Peter uses in verse 8 are used elsewhere in the New Testament (documented below) for the ideal relations of Christians to one another. I contend, then, that Peter begins by exhorting all Christians to relate to one another in a certain way, both because it is right for them to relate this way and because it provides them with a family of acceptance in the face of a hostile world.2
Ethics for General Relations in the Church (3:8). While the previous three sections were addressed to specific kinds of people (slaves, wives, husbands), this exhortation is for “all of you.” All his addressees are to “live in harmony with one another;3 be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble.” If our conclusion above is accurate, the focus in these virtues is on how Christians demonstrate these virtues as they live with one another in a hostile world. They must begin with “harmony” (cf. Acts 4:32; Rom. 12:16; 15:5; 1 Cor. 1:10; Phil. 2:2; 4:2) in both mind and spirit. When this virtue is present, “what results from this is not uniformity but unanimity.”4 Harmony is, in part, a development of being “sympathetic” (cf. Rom. 12:15; 1 Cor. 12:26; Heb. 4:15; 10:34). It is both compassion and understanding.
In addition, believers are to “love as brothers” (1 Peter 1:22; 2:17; 1 Thess. 4:9). Such a virtue characterized much of early Christianity, though because of human nature, it was always under threat. Christians are to love one another and any whom they encounter as good neighbors. Those who love others are also “compassionate” (Eph. 4:32) and “humble” (Phil. 2:3).
Ethics for Relations to a Hostile Society (3:9). Since it is difficult to imagine Peter thinking of Christians throwing hostile barbs at one another, we are probably justified in thinking he has here moved from “inter-Christian” ethics to “outsider” ethics—to how believers should relate to the hostile world in which they live. “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing,” just as Jesus lived (cf. 2:21, 23). Once again, Peter sees the Christian response to pressures from the outside world as one of passivity and grace, not aggressive retaliation. Why? “Because to this you were called so that5 you may inherit a blessing.” Peter anchors their relationships to outsiders in their calling and promises them a “blessing.”
While some have seen this blessing as the final state of salvation,6 others find here a promise for some kind of blessing in this life, perhaps a longer life or greater toleration for Christian faith.7 In light of Peter’s citation of Psalm 34, where the beginning emphasis is on “see[ing] good days” (3:10), he likely has in mind a prolonged life on this earth because of Christian goodness, in spite of persecution. In line with his emphasis at 2:11–12, he imagines it will be a much better life for the churches if they are quiet, humble, and gentle, and if they refrain from retaliation and vindication. One might dub this orientation as “optimistic,” but it is a conclusion drawn by a victim of persecution who knows, from tough times, how life works.
Foundation for Ethics: God Is Watching Us (3:10–12). In Peter’s principle that believers are to absorb some injustices for the sake of the gospel by not returning evil with evil, the apostle expresses a theological anchor that goes deep into the network of New Testament theology. The Christian is supposed to be motivated by a desire to receive a “blessing from God” (3:9), a desire grounded in the fact that God is the final Judge. Christians have been called to inherit a blessing, which is God’s reward for an obedient life. Peter supports his exhortation by quoting an Old Testament text that describes the close relationship between one’s life and God’s assessment of that person. Knowing that God knows everything and is control of everything gives Christians a serenity and acceptance of injustices while they await the truthfulness of God’s final assessment.
Psalm 34 is particularly suitable for a situation of being harassed and persecuted. Its theme is that the one who wants to “get along in this world” must be peace-seeking, gentle-spoken, and good. Yet the fundamental point Peter makes is that God is omniscient and omnipresent—he sees all, knows all, and is always present. People must not think that they can get by with evil behavior, for God is watching and evaluating; his eyes are on the righteous. Moreover, he hears their prayers—that is, God is on their side, protecting and shielding them. At the same time, the Lord’s face is turned against those who are wicked. Once again we are drawn back to 1 Peter 2:12: Those who live righteously before God will, in the end, be vindicated by God on the great day of glory, but those who live sinfully and oppressively will receive condemnation from God Almighty on that same day of his glory.
Bridging Contexts
IT REQUIRES NO special knack to understand abstract moral principles and see their general relevance to one’s everyday Christian life. Texts that exhort Christians to “live in harmony with one another” are not hard to apply, since “living in harmony” is so flexible a principle and so clear an order that a special context is not required to discern its relevance. Texts that are specific and intricately linked with a cultural context (e.g., shaking the dust from your feet at Matt. 10:14) require the interpreter to generalize a specific practice into a transcultural principle that can then be applied to his or her target audience.8 But if the principle is general, specific applications need to be discerned for that principle to be practiced in various cultures.9 Our passage here provides an abstract principle (“live in harmony”) for us apply to our cultures in various ways.
To be sure, to say “live in harmony” in Ireland may be different from saying it in the Netherlands, but the point remains the same: Abstract moral principles are not hard to understand. Their specific application in particular contexts, however, may be especially difficult to put into actual practice. This passage, then, is filled with abstract moral principles (be sympathetic; live in light of the judgment) that are not hard to understand (Christians of all ages need to live in light of the judgment), but specific applications can be difficult.
What does it mean, for instance, to “live in harmony” when one Christian group disagrees theologically with another Christian group? As an example, for a post-World War II Confessing Christian survivor of a German concentration camp to be understanding of a German Lutheran State Church pastor who supported (indirectly or even directly) the Third Reich was more than difficult for many of them.10 In the broader context of biblical theology, a statement like “live in harmony” cannot be given more than its due because it is not intended to be the only factor in determining relationships. Truth is not sacrificed on the altar of harmony, but personal feelings belong on that altar. I can live in harmony with the person who has offended me by worshiping with him and by serving him; I cannot live in harmony with the person who blasphemes the name of Jesus Christ. I can pray for him and I can evangelize him, but those activities are not what Peter has in mind when he speaks of harmony.
Thus, in moving this text into our world, we must take into consideration Peter’s setting as well as consider the meaning of his words and the function they were to have in his setting. He is exhorting communities under stress to live in harmony so that the gospel can have its desired effects. He is not speaking of the attempts of some Roman Catholics and Anglicans to unite their respective congregations into one large, catholic communion (though his point about harmony might apply in some senses). For true application to take place, the context of Peter must be considered carefully.
If Peter’s words here are driven by the contextual situation of Christians under stress, then they need to be applied especially to any situation where Christians are experiencing persecution. Whenever Christians are under threat,11 they need to be harmonious and love one another if they are going to be able to make an impact on the outside world; in fact, they may need to unify simply in order to survive. In the introduction to this commentary, I called attention to the work of J. H. Elliott.12 One major element of his understanding of 1 Peter is his accurate emphasis on the church as the household of God. Elliott develops this emphasis in the direction of self-identity; that is, the church developed its own identity through its reliance on other members who could become an extended family and allow that very identity to nurture itself and grow. Two Christian fundamental ethical principles were brotherly love and not retaliating when injustices occurred. I believe Peter’s exhortations here are not only Christian theology and ethics, but also important common sense at the social and pragmatic level: If his audience wants to survive and live God’s will in this world, then they must be loving and kind people.
To bring this passage into our modern world, then, and to apply it the way Peter did, we should find analogous circumstances of Christian communities under threat. In fact, this context is more important for application than is sometimes recognized, for this text is only indirectly about social influence. It is about how to live together under stress in such a way that the community can survive. The impact this community may have on its surrounding environment is indirect; that is, if believers live together harmoniously, they will be able to survive; if they meet injustices with non-retaliatory attitudes, they may have an influence on their world. But this text is not a strategy for evangelizing the world. Life among the outsiders is here described as a life known for being nonvindictive (3:9, 10–11). One has to think that the peace that is enjoined in 3:11 is along the line of being harmonious, gentle, and “submissive” (2:13, 18; 3:1, 7).
If it is Christian high school students experiencing opposition at the public schools for meeting with one another “at the pole”13 to pray for the school, or if it is the Christian businessman or businesswoman finding it tough going in an unsanctified environment, or if it is some local church in a difficult area of China, the words of Peter are especially important: Stay together, live peacefully, do not retaliate. Christians ought to be good citizens and be obedient to their superiors; wives ought to win their husbands by good behavior, and husbands ought to live with their wives sensitively. These short exhortations, then, are timeless words, but I doubt that they are a timeless or a “situationless” strategy for every Christian facing persecution.
My daughter and her friends, for instance, can write to the school newspaper and appeal to their civil rights for free speech; a Christian businesswoman can appeal to the same or to “fair trade” laws; a local church in Saudi Arabia, however, may have no other option. That last situation is analogous to Peter’s situation. But what should Christians do when they face persecution and can do something about it? This is exactly the kind of question we need to ask and probe in order to find out how to apply this text to our world.
I contend, above all, that regardless of whether we can do something about our situation, the gentleness and “general pacifistic” nature of Peter’s exhortations are fundamental to how Christians are to relate to the outside world. We ought not to be known for fighting and quarreling, nor ought we to become an unruly mob that is always agitating for one thing or another. Instead, we ought to be seen as peace-loving people who are good citizens. This is what I mean by “pacifistic” (the word comes from pax, the Latin word for “peace”). Christians are to be known not only for their love (John 13:34), but also for their peacefulness.
Arguing that Christians ought to be peaceful does not mean they ought to opt out of culture and the public forum. There is a time when they ought to act, just as there is a time when they ought to wait. But, Peter urges us, when they do act, it should be in a gentle, law-abiding manner and in consort with one another; they live before the holy God who will judge them for their behavior.
Another point worthy of consideration is whether words like these apply when severe differences over the nature of the gospel are at stake. In other words, does the exhortation to live in harmony apply when the minister has gone off the deep end theologically or when someone in the church has ransacked his own family through hideous sins? I doubt it. Peter’s words are not “situationless.” They no more apply to the sinning husband in such a way that the wife must stay with him than they do when a leader argues that Christ is but one way of salvation. Harmony and unity are important, but that unity is not to be preserved by sacrificing what unites Christians: Christ and the gospel.
Contemporary Significance
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH should be seen as a community, a family. A local church ought to be the model par excellence in its own community of what it means to live harmoniously, lovingly, righteously, and peacefully. When disruptions are necessary, even these ought to be done in as peaceful a manner as possible.
John R. W. Stott has insightful words in regard to this issue:
The problem we experience, whenever we think about the church, concerns the tension between the ideal and the reality. The ideal is beautiful. The church is the chosen and beloved people of God, his own special treasure, the covenant community to whom he has committed himself for ever, engaged in continuous worship of God and in compassionate outreach to the world, a haven of love and peace, and pilgrim people headed for the eternal city. But in reality we who claim to be the church are often a motley rabble of rather scruffy individuals, half-educated and half-saved, uninspired in our worship, constantly bickering with each other, concerned more for our maintenance than our mission, struggling and stumbling along the road, needing constant rebuke and exhortation, which are readily available from both Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles.14
Stott contends that there are at least three challenges from the secular world to the church today: the challenge for transcendence, the challenge for significance, and the challenge for community. The church, in other words, ought to be a living embodiment of what God wants for people in social relations. Simon and Garfunkel sang the song that reflected individualism at its highest when they sang, “I am a rock … I am an island … a rock never cries … and an island feels no pain.” But what people continually return to is the need for community that is driven by the divinely created need for love. The church of Jesus Christ, in its deepest sense, is to be precisely that: the living incarnation of the love of Christ that is expressed for one another and the world.
The great Russian novelist Dostoevsky once said that “hell is the punishment of being unable to love.”15 This places love where it ought to be: the most important virtue of the virtues, the leading note of all our relationships. This is the love Peter calls his churches to have as they live in harmony and in community. “Love cures. It cures those who give it and it cures those who receive it.”16 But love must be worked at because those with whom we live in our communities are not, unfortunately, innately lovable. All we can offer to others is who we are: “The primary gift of love is the offering of one’s most honest self through one’s most honest self-disclosure.”17 When we truly open ourselves to one another, we pave the way for love, and love creates community. But until we open up, we will retain worldly values and blockade the creation of community. This, too, prevents growth, both personal and communitarian, for, as Harry Stack Sullivan said, “All personal growth, all personal damage … as well as all personal healing and growth, come through our relationship with others.”18
Churches throughout the world need to examine their constitutions and confessions, and then thoroughly analyze their practices to see if the idea of the “church as community” defines their existence. I am not speaking here just of programs, like “coffee hour” or “prayer meetings”—both good ideas that may well encourage community. Nor am I speaking here only of “church growth” and its apparent development of a larger community.19 Rather, what I have in mind is a perceptive discernment of our local churches to see if they truly function as a community where people are led to the holy love of God (the Father of the family), where that same love dominates the relationships and programs within that church (the nerve of the family), and where that love is known in the larger society as the characteristic of that church (the mark of the family).
Many kinds of suggestions have been made on how the church can “live as a community.” One might think of the individual home model, where Christian families begin to become “open” to having others live with them;20 or one might think of the community church model, where churches strive to be an alternative society.21 Neither of these models is the superior, though the latter is our concern in this section. Unfortunately, many churches are not defined in light of the biblical category of “community.” Instead, they are defined by how many people attend, on how tight their doctrinal statement is, or by some other measure. While we have to be balanced, arguing that community, evangelism, and doctrine each have their place in the definition and organization of the local church, we must also admit that far too few churches are defined by how they foster community—and, tragically, in a time when community is fundamentally needed.
A sure indicator of how “community oriented” a church is, in my experience, is how one is greeted and incorporated into a church as a first-time attendee. Both words are important: “greeted” and “incorporated.” Some churches are gregarious at greeting new people but seem unable to incorporate; other churches may be a little bashful at “greeting” but work strenuously and sensitively at incorporating new people. A church that sees itself as a community welcomes new people and finds a place for them within its fellowship. While it may be normal for a three-year-old to resent the new infant mommy brings home from the hospital, such an attitude among Christians when new (and sometimes gifted!) people enter their community is repugnant. Churches ought to be welcoming, expanding, and developing as they grow with the gifts of new members.
In fact, it is precisely here that we see the fundamental nature of Christian community. When nothing changes and the church stays the same, no one gets upset. But when new people invade the community, as when a transfer student invades a student group or a neighborhood clique, we find out whether or not the church is a true community. When it can reach out and include because the other person is a Christian, then the church is operating as a community. But when it finds the poor person unacceptable, the African-American suspicious, or the Irishman intolerable, we are seeing the opposite of what Peter wants in the church. Differences create the need for sympathy and brotherly love. The churches of God are supposed to be communities, and that means expanding, welcoming, and incorporating all kinds of believers.
For Peter’s day, as for ours, the church as community was vital for survival, for sustaining one’s faith in the midst of threats and violence. We cannot compare our “Western trials with society” as identical to the Diaspora churches’ experience of persecution, but such an analogy can be made as long as we recognize its distance. If the early church was a community in which Christians found strength to carry on in the midst of troubled times, then the church today ought to play the same role in our world, whatever the “trouble” might be. If our society is noted by an absence of moral values, then Christians need the family of believers to reinforce and strengthen their resolve to inculcate morals in their children and live a life of righteousness. If our society is noted by pluralism and skepticism about knowing “truth,” then Christians need the family of believers to confirm their grasp of the truth as taught in the Bible and to hold that truth high. If our society is noted by psychological battery with its increase in technology and its absence of treating workers as genuine individuals in need of love, then Christians need the family of believers to be a society in which they are treated as those worthy of love and affection.
In a brilliant examination of the problem of self-identity in modern society,22 Anthony Giddens, a noted British sociologist, contends for elements in a “pure relationship” that characterize meaningful relationships and are the desire of people in modern society. He finds seven characteristics of pure relationships: They (1) are not anchored in social or economic life but in the relationship itself; (2) are sought only for what the relationship itself can do for the parties involved; (3) continue to be based on self-examination of its value for the persons involved; (4) root themselves in commitment to one another rather than in some kinship relationship or economical relationship; (5) focus their attention on intimacy in a world that is characterized by a lack of privacy, thus leading to the idea that a pure relationship is in part a haven in an invasive world; (6) base themselves on mutual trust by the persons involved; and (7) create and sustain self-identity in our world.
Giddens has made some penetrating insights into our modern culture. While marriage and family are two areas where the “pure relationship” ought to be found today, the pure relationship of which he speaks ought also to be a fundamental trait of the church. In the church people ought to find trust, commitment, the development of self-identity, and growth in one’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian in relationship with others. It can be easily said that what the world needs from the church is an alternative society, a society in which people are treated as genuine individuals worthy of love and instruction. Instead, the church has too often repeated those characteristics of society that are sources of despair and pain, instead of offering an alternative to a hurting people. Put differently, if Peter’s churches were havens in which people could endure persecution, ours today ought to be havens in which people can endure the onslaught against personal morals and identity. The church is the house of God, and God is holy and loving. He calls people to be holy and loving in community.