in due season (v. 6). (2) Vigilance, circumspection, and bravery: "Be sober, be vigilant, gird up the loins of your mind with soberness" (cf. Luke xii. 35; Matt. xxvi. 41); "resist the tempter, firm in the faith" (v. 8, i. 13, v. 9). (3) Joyful trust in God and calm continuance in the doing of His will: "Cast all your care on Him, for He careth for you (v. 6); they who suffer according to the will of God are to commend. their souls to the faithful Creator (who will not faithlessly abandon His creatures) in well-doing (iv. 19). "And He, the God of all grace, who has called them to His eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will, after they have suffered awhile, make them perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle them" (v. 10). The whole power of the young Christianity to overcome the world lies in these simple exhortations and words of comfort of the apostle. CHAPTER V THE PREACHING TO THE DEAD AND THE JUDGMENT OF THE WORLD § 1. THE SPHERE OF HOPE The speedy and glorious return of Christ for the redemption and beatification of His own, is, of course, the background of these exhortations and connections. But we would err if we expected that the hope of Christendom extended only to the deliverance of its own allotted number of members among the thousand times ten thousands of humanity. Its hope goes further; there appears in our Epistle a peculiar tenet about a work of salvation which Christ performed for the departed after He had given up His life for the living; and this remarkable tenet, with which we close our consideration of the Epistle, throws an unexpected light on the whole idea of the judgment of the world. But the obscurity of the words in question demands a searching discussion. § 2. THE PREACHING TO THE DEAD After the announcement of the approaching judgment of the living and the dead by Christ in iv. 5 (ἑτοίμως ἔχοντι Kpîvai Çŵvтas Kaì vexpoús) the apostle (ver. 6) continues: "For, for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." Here, therefore, is mention of a preaching of salvation to the dead; for the evŋyyexion allows us only to think of a preaching of salvation not of a preaching of judgment, and besides, the ζῶσιν δὲ κατὰ θεὸν πνεύματι puts the redeeming object beyond all question. But this brief and great utterance points back to a more detailed and yet more obscure passage (iii. 18 f). Here, after mention of the saving death of Jesus, it is further unexpectedly said: avaτweis μèv oaρkí, ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι, ἐν ᾧ καὶ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασιν πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν, ἀπειθήσασίν ποτε, ὅτε ἀπεξεδέχετο ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ μακροθυμία ἐν ἡμέραις Νώε, κατασκευαζομένης κιβωτοῦ, εἰς ἣν ὀλίγοι, τοῦτ ̓ ἐστὶν ὀκτὼ ψυχαὶ διεσώθησαν δι' daтos; whereupon follows an interpretation of the water of the Flood as typical of the saving water of baptism, with a further reference to the resurrection and present glory of Christ. In the first place, the connection of thought in this passage is difficult; the whole saying in reference to the preaching of Christ to the spirits appears at first sight to be a departure from the path that he is following, which he regains by his comparison with baptism followed by the reference to the resurrection of Jesus. On a closer examination, however, we discover a thread of logical connection; the paragraph starts from the fact that to suffer for well-doing and not for evil-doing is not anything that man need fear (ver. 17), and in support of this is brought forward the highest example (ver. 18). Christ could indeed be killed according to the flesh, but He came forth from death in such a manner that He was able to be the author of blessing even to the departed spirits, and through resurrection, for the salvation of His own, to enter into the highest glory. If this is the right connection, then it favours the view that ζωοποιηθεὶς πνεύμar, which forms the second difficulty in the passage, is something falling between death and resurrection. The words are frequently applied to the resurrection itself by making use of the Pauline idea of the σῶμα πνευματικόν. But apart from the fact that this idea is nowhere in our Epistle, it is very improbable that an apostle, who believed in the reanimation of the crucified body of Jesus, should have described the resurrection of the Lord in such words as seem to deny the corporeity of the resurrection--woonleis πνεύματι. TVEÚμаTI. Still more improbable is it that he meant the resurrection here, and yet in the next words regarded it as not yet having taken place; for it cannot be disputed that in the following words, ἐν ᾧ (πνεύματι) καὶ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασιν ἐκήρυξεν, Christ is thought of in a condition analogous to that of the departed spirits, that is, in a disembodied state between death and resurrection.1 Manifestly the apostle in the ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι following on the θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκί, is speaking of something which immediately followed the moment of death; he had in his thoughts. either the natural reawakening of the soul from the darkness of the death conflict, or a supernatural reanimation of His spiritual nature, by which Christ was immediately in a position to act on others. That is, he places the preaching of Jesus to the spirits in a point of time when Jesus Himself is a departed spirit, in the hours between His death and His resurrection, when, according to God's decree, He went (Tоρevleis) whither the souls of the departed go, and so naturally sojourned among the dead. But if that is so, why is His preaching of salvation addressed only to those who were surprised by the Flood in their unbelief, and not to the great mass of those who had departed before Him? This is the third riddle which the passage presents, and it is usually got over by the suggestion, that the contemporaries of Noah are brought forward by way of example, in order to lead us from the Flood to baptism, of which it was made a type; but the dead in general are in iv. 6 thought of as receiving the preaching of salvation. The latter is undoubtedly correct, for immediately after the κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς it is impossible to attach any importance to the want of the article in καὶ νεκροῖς εὐηγγελίσθη, and a limitation of the idea to some of the dead is not found in it. But that in no way justifies the naming of the contemporaries of Noah alone in 1 Against Weiss, who seeks to make ζωοποιηθείς πνεύματι refer to the resurrection, but refers the following words to the intermediate state between death and the resurrection. iii. 18, the less so that the mention of baptism is so incidental that the Flood may indeed have led the writer to think of baptism, but not baptism here of the Flood. We must rather assume that the contemporaries of Noah were regarded by the apostle as the most hopelessly lost of the sinners of antiquity, so that Christ's preaching of salvation to them appears as something quite special, a surpassing act of mercy, and therefore the extension in iv. 6 of this mercy to the VEKρoί in general becomes self-evident. In the φυλακή, in which the contemporaries of Noah find themselves, we have without doubt a representation, not of Hades generally, but of a quite special place of punishment in Hades, the dark prison to which are already committed those who have received sentence, the condemned. That alone would correspond to the biblical view in general, and in particular to that of our apostle. The contemporaries of Noah represent the depth of the degeneracy and ruin of the primitive world, a corruption which made God repent that He had made man, and called forth a divine judgment of extermination, the like of which will not take place till the end of time. The apostle looks upon the Flood as the judgment of antiquity, and therefore the type of the final judgment of the world. And thus it is evident that what the death of Jesus accomplished for those already judged among the departed has not been withheld from the departed in general, as the second passage (iv. 6) presupposes. Thus from all the obscurities of this remarkable utterance the bright thought stands out, that the mercy of God revealed in Christ and Christ's death is not limited to the world of the living, but reaches beyond it into the quiet of that other world of the departed, and is made manifest in it by Christ Himself. What seems strange to us in Peter's expression of this idea is the apparently fabulous and fanciful nature of the representation, which suddenly appears here and here only in the New Testament; the question seems to be insoluble from what source Peter got his mysterious information. And yet we feel from his words that they present nothing completely new to the first readers, but allude to what is already familiar. We should not forget that our New Testament Scriptures present only a small part of the rich world of thought which early Christian prophecy brought to light. Even the legendary passage Matt. xxvii. 52, 53, according to which, at the death of Jesus, the gates of Hades were opened for the pious of the Old Testament, shows that the effect of Christ's death on the circle of the departed was peculiarly a subject of conjecture. And the question as to the fate of the great army of the departed, who on earth were never touched even by the hope of the glad message, was well worthy of the reflection of an apostle. It was no greater advance for Peter to extend the salvation in Christ from the living to the dead, than it had once been to carry it beyond the Jews to the Gentiles. He learned then "that God is no respecter of persons" (Acts x. 34, 36); and if he asked himself whether that applied also to the dead of old times, the spirit of prophecy which was in him might well have answered in such forms as were natural to him, and given him the reply which appears in his Epistle. § 3. THE JUDGMENT OF THE WORLD That Christ, who brought the message of salvation to the living and the dead, is also the appointed Judge of the living and the dead, is undoubtedly the presupposition of the passage iv. 5, 6, for it turns to speak once more of Christ's preaching of salvation to the dead, after saying that He stands ready to judge the living and the dead. The words have, indeed, been referred to God Himself, because it is said of Him in i. 17 that He judges every man without respect of person; but that Christ expected soon to return is meant by ἑτοίμως ἔχων, is suggested not only by the common teaching of the whole New Testament about Christ's office of Judge of the world, but it follows also from the inseparable connection between the judgment of the world and the reappearance (ἀποκάλυψις) of Christ for the deliverance and glorification of His own, which reappearance is so emphatically promised in our Epistle (i. 7, 13, iv. 13, v. 4; cf. iv. 7, 17). That this judgment of the world is placed at a particular, and, indeed, at no distant point of time, is due to the representation found in the Old Testament, from which Peter departed as little as any of the apostles. But his ideas of the judgment of the world are somewhat different from those which are traditionally im BEYSCHLAG.-I. 27 |