person and history of Jesus are thrown here into much bolder relief. That is natural in the case of a personal disciple of Jesus, who, in the full sense of the word, lived through everything, while James still stood at a distance from it; especially do we feel from the Epistle, as already mentioned, the impression which the suffering and resurrection of Jesus left upon the author. That the teaching office of Jesus is not expressly mentioned, as it is in the sermon to Cornelius, can only be accidental, and is connected with the fact that he has not in view, as he had there, a missionary discourse in which he must start from the very foundation, but an exhortation and strengthening of already instructed Christians. For the author's doctrine of the regenerating power of the gospel reminds us, even more than Jas. i. 18, of Jesus' Parable of the Sower (i. 23), and the remarkable doctrine of the preaching of Jesus to the departed spirits (iii. 19, iv. 6), traces back the deliverance of these spirits in the same way to the power of His word. In this very doctrine of the going of Jesus to the dead, in order to preach to them, we have an entirely peculiar element of our Epistle, which, however, as we shall see, agrees most thoroughly with the universalistic character, which is more and more developed in the case of the Peter of the Acts of the Apostles. The most important point on which the Epistle goes beyond the early Petrine preaching of the Acts of the Apostles comes out in the consideration of the death of Christ, to which is here ascribed a saving significance, a redeeming power; yet even this advance lies on the lines of a natural and inevitable development. In this doctrinal advance we may conjecture an influence of Paul on Peter; but even without such an influence, words of Jesus, such as Matt. xx. 28, about the λútρov åvтì TOXλv, and still more the institution of the Supper, as well as the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, in which the disciples long since saw the prophetic image of their Master, must have forced the first apostles along this way of knowledge. Yet the author of our Epistle received his most decisive impression, not from the death, but from the resurrection of Jesus. It had begotten him again to that living hope (i. 3) which makes him feel and contemplate the whole Christian life on earth as a pilgrimage (i. 1, 17, ii. 11), a pilgrimage to the true and heavenly home. That living hope

penetrates and dominates his whole Christian consciousness so much, that to him it has become the very foundation of his Christian teaching. Where Paul would speak of faith, Peter speaks of hope (cf. i. 13, 21, iii. 5, 15, etc.). Thus the main feature of the first apostolic Christianity is not less clear here than in James, and in the early preaching of the Acts of the Apostles; in fact, it is clearer than in any New Testament writing, except the Apocalypse. The hopeful outlook to the salvation yet to be revealed, formally outweighs the lofty feeling, which is so powerful in Paul, of possessing the salvation already established. Nevertheless, the moral earnestness of the author avoids an actual displacement of the healthy balance between present and future. That living hope kindled at the resurrection of Jesus is to him living, just for this reason, that it thoroughly sanctifies the earthly life. It is, on its subjective side, the fruit of the experience of a second birth (i. 3), and to preserve this through all the relations and conflicts of the earthly life is the Christian task corresponding to that gift of hope. The author comprehends this task in the idea of sanctification (i. 15), which he makes the fundamental idea of all his exhortations, just as the idea of hope is the fundamental idea of all his consolation. On the other hand, we find no trace formally in his writings of the Pauline. doctrine of justification by faith. And thus we may sum up the Petrine conception of Christianity, as it meets us in this Epistle, in the simple proposition: Salvation in Christ is a gracious divine communication of a sanctifying hope. His detailed exposition of this main idea may be considered under the following heads:

I. God the Father, and the people of His inheritance. II. The person and sufferings of Christ.

III. The pilgrim condition and walk of the Christian.

IV. The preaching to the dead, and the judgment of the

world.

CHAPTER II

GOD THE FATHER AND THE PEOPLE OF HIS
INHERITANCE

§ 1. IDEA OF GOD

It is a more developed view of the world than that of his early mission preaching, which the mature Peter in his Epistle presents to the already existing Christian Churches. It starts from the eternal purpose of God's love to procure for a chosen people an imperishable inheritance. But by proclaiming, as he does, that this purpose of God's love has fulfilled itself, not in the Jewish people, but in the Christian Church, the whole novelty and greatness of the experience which transformed the apostle from a Jew into a Christian is shown. In the first place, the idea of God, from which he comprehends that purpose, is new. He applies the name Father to God much more abundantly than James, and thereby shows that he is clearly conscious of the Christian distinction which lies in calling on God as the Father (i. 17). The more detailed application is quite after the way of Jesus Himself: God is, in the first place, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (i. 3), then, our Father also (i. 17), finally, the Father simply (i. 2), so that the name becomes a designation of nature. This designation of nature means to Peter, as to Jesus also, that God is absolute goodness and holy love; and this idea of God is developed on two sides, as in the teaching of Jesus, that God is the morally perfect Being, who stands before man as an ideal to be copied (Matt. v. 45, 48), and at the same time that He is the gracious power which comes down to meet man to enable him to reach this his destiny. The first aspect of the idea of God is described by Peter as holiness, the other as mercy or grace; from both, then, flow God's several glorious attributes, which the apostle calls (ii. 9) His ȧperaí, virtues, a name very significant of the absolutely ethical character of his idea of God. The holiness of God (i. 16), related to that righteousness which judges without respect of persons (i. 17), belongs more to the Old Testament circle of ideas than the moral TeλeLÓNS on which Jesus lays stress, but the sense is certainly the same. 25

BEYSCHLAG.-I.

Peter draws from it the same deduction as Jesus from the perfection of God: "Be ye holy; for I am holy" (i. 16). Mercy (Tò TOλÙ AVTOû ËλEOs, i. 3) is related to grace as the disposition of heart to its exhibition, at least xápis throughout is used in the latter sense (cf. i. 2, 10, 13, ii. 19, iii. 7, iv. 10, v. 5, 10, 12).

§ 2. THE INHERITANCE AND ITS TRANSFERENCE TO THE CHRISTIANS

In this holy love of His which is His very nature, God has prepared an imperishable, undefiled and unfading inheritance, which is preserved in heaven in order to be revealed in the last time (i. 4, 5). Angels desire to look into its glory (i. 12), but it is intended for the children of men (ver. 4). Peter might have applied to it the name kingdom of heaven, but only in the onesided future sense, which would not have corresponded to the teaching of Jesus; or he might have used the kindred term eternal life, which, iii. 7 (σvyKANρονόμους χάριτος ζωής), he actually brings into connection with it. He has preferred the common Old Testament notion of the promise κλŋpovoμía, and has thus (as Jesus also does, Matt. v. 4) spiritualised the idea of the land of promise, just as he afterwards spiritualises the idea of the chosen people. Hope is connected by him with this notion of the final incorruptible inheritance from the first, and the hope of this inheritance is indeed the fundamental idea of Christianity. It is the deepest meaning and the highest consecration of the earthly life, and was awakened by God in the children of men long before Christ. For already Sarah and other holy women hoped in God (iii. 5), that is, even the patriarchs had a promise of that eternal inheritance. Afterwards God made it known to the prophets, and though He let them see that they should not themselves behold the works of the Messiah, by which the inheritance was to be secured, they could announce them for a later generation (i. 12). For though the nation in which they lived was chosen and called by God to be His priestly kingdom and His holy and peculiar people, it was not such in reality as yet (cf. ii. 9). On the contrary, when God laid in its midst the foundation-stone of salvation in Jesus the Messiah, it rejected Him (ii. 14), and so it threw

away its title to that eternal inheritance (Acts iv. 11). God has indeed made this Jesus whom He had chosen, and who was dear to Him, the foundation-stone of the spiritual house that is to be built on earth, but for Israel He has made Him the corner-stone on which it is to strike and stumble (ii. 7). And He has laid it that it may be a stone of stumbling and rock of offence (ii. 8); that is to say, the holy and righteous order of the world is perfectly exhibited in the fact that the Jewish nation is now ruined and completes its judgment in this very Jesus Christ, in whom as its deliverer it might have been established. But the prophetic promise, " He that believeth on Him shall not be put to shame" (ii. 6), has not on that account remained unfulfilled. The spiritual house, the temple which God desired to build on this foundationstone, has arisen, though built of other stones; those who were once not a people and had not obtained mercy, have now been pardoned and made a people of God's inheritance (ii. 10). And so Peter can exclaim to his readers in the heathen lands of Asia Minor: "Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, that ye should show forth the virtues of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvellous light" (ii. 9); that is, all that Israel should have been and was not, all that of which it has become the very opposite by the wickedness of its rejection of Messiah, that you now are in reality the chosen people of God. As already noted above, there can be no doubt that the apostle addresses these words to communities essentially Gentile; not only are Christian Churches made up wholly of Jews reaching from Pontus to Galatia and Bithynia historically inconceivable, but Peter describes his readers as not Jews: οἳ ποτε οὐ λαός, νῦν δὲ λαός θεοῦ (ii. 10 ; cf. iv. 3). That certainly means a great change in the views of the apostle between the days of his first preaching and the days when he wrote this Epistle. But not only had Peter since learned that "with God there is no respect of persons, but in all nations he that feareth God and doeth righteousness is accepted of Him" (Acts x. 34, 35); he must also have learned, with Paul, that only a remnant of Israel would be converted, while the Gentiles in great numbers were entering into the kingdom of Christ. He writes his Epistle, unless we are mis