Copyright © 2018 by the Missouri Baptist Convention
JEANIE CRAIN
Christian apologists believe they have been given a biblical mandate to defend the Christian faith against objections, and they justify the practice using 1 Peter 3:15: “… but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence” (NASV).
Emphasizing the last half of this verse, namely “an account” [frequently transliterated as reason or answer], some apologists have leaned heavily on logic, evidence, and historical facts in the face of intellectual attacks on specific Christian truths. This understanding should be challenged on two fronts. First, emphasis should be placed on “sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord,” and then on “the hope that is in you.” Second, the methodology some think the second part of the verse suggests has lost much of its power to convict. Set within its original context, the writer of 1 Peter wants Christians under persecution to be bold in confessing their gospel hope.
While science, reason, and empirical methods promised enlightenment in the 17th–19th centuries, these gradually gave way to the postmodernist critique of objectivity and truth in all forms, especially absolute, ultimate, or exclusive truths. Postmodernists chose to define truth as humanly constructed and relative. In the aftermath of this challenge to absolute truth and the subsequent suspicion of claims about God, revelation, and the authority of the Bible, apologetics defined as a religious discipline defending religious doctrines through systematic argument must be rethought.
Postmodernism has effectively called attention to the limits of scientific inquiry, revealed the complexity and ambiguity of language, and laid bare cultural biases and prejudices. It has demonstrated how epistemologies all dead-end in the extreme limits of reason. Science and proofs command respect, and they will continue to hold privilege and sway in truth-seeking; they must not, however, edge out other approaches to knowing.
A revised reading of 1 Peter 3:15 offers apologists a way out of continuing a set of debates about religion and theology; gives a renewed credence for thinking within the language of the law, the prophets, and the writings; and embraces, not the metanarrative of postmodernism, but the heilsgeschichte, the story of the Bible and God’s redemptive work in history.
SETTING THE MIND UPON DIVINE THINGS
Christians have not discounted the first part of Peter’s admonition. Indeed, faith in its earliest expression confesses Christ as Lord, but a full understanding of the writer’s call to action requires putting it within its social construct.
The author, identifying himself as “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,” delivers this sermon (kerygma) “to those who reside as aliens” (1 Pet. 1:1). Because the superscription uses “Peter” and not “Simon Peter,” it assigns him the official authority of an apostle, similar to letters ascribed to Paul. And because the writer uses syntactically fluent Greek as well as mature Christian theology throughout this work, some historicists think that a later writer assumes the name of the legendary Peter. Those “who reside as aliens” would refer to the diaspora and the experience of living in exile, a theme continued in 5:13 with Peter speaking in Babylonia, the place where the prophet Jeremiah prophesied.
If the writer is Peter, then he is the disciple who objected to having
his feet washed by Jesus, clearly, at that time, not recognizing Jesus as one who “had come forth from God and was going back to God” (John 13:3). This Peter of the Gospels hesitated in believing Jesus to be the messianic fulfillment except in the sense of a restored Davidic kingdom, and he was memorably rebuked by Jesus, “Get behind me, Satan” (Matt. 16:23; Mark 8:33). Both Gospel accounts explain the rationale for the reprimand: “for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”
The Peter of this sermon seems to need no justification other than the name itself. This Peter has come to know Christ as the “Chief Shepherd,” who will redeem suffering believers and give them “the unfading crown of glory” (1 Pet. 5:4). The writer’s choice of “sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord” suggests an allusion to Isaiah’s “Sanctify the Lord of hosts” (Isa. 8:13), implicitly evoking the revelation of the divine name (Isa. 6:3). Sitting in the court of the Temple, Isaiah sees “the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple” (Isa. 6:1). Isaiah envisions the King of Kings who clothes himself with light as a garment (Ex. 33:22). It seems reasonable to conclude that the writer of 1 Peter is a man who has become convicted of the truth of the incarnation, cross, and resurrection. These events within Peter’s lifetime have led him to his confession, one which must be made by all who can rightly call themselves Christians.
In the immediate and preceding chapter to the verse under discussion, Peter has chosen his words carefully to show that the events surrounding Jesus as the messianic fulfillment have brought a radical change to the whole Jewish religious system: Jesus has become “the very corner stone” which, rejected, has become “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense” (1 Pet. 2:7–8). Contextually, within the greater story of Jewish thinking, and particularly, within the background of Isaiah (Isa. 28:16; 29:3–4), the author of 1 Peter anchors his address in the hope arising from the messianic fulfillment.
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples the decisive question, “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29), and the answer Peter gives is the right one: “You are the Christ,” meaning the anointed one, the Messiah, God. This recognition and confession of Christ as Lord and rightful King creates a pivotal and irreversible separation between believers and unbelievers. Peter speaks to those who have joined the new Israel, and in 1 Peter 3:15, he is encouraging these new Christians, currently facing threats of suffering and persecution, to “sanctify Christ as Lord,” reminding them of the authority, power, and holiness of the Messiah.
A MATTER OF HEART AND PERSON
The basis for Christian hope is always the work of the Holy Spirit. Those who have rejected reason in its classical and reformed traditions; turned from Enlightenment faith in self, reason, and science; and who profess to have abandoned any search for truth, particularly religious truth, will not be easily persuaded by mental acrobatics, carefully constructed polemics, or credulous appeals to the Spirit, the authority of the Bible, or faith. The apologist today has the demanding responsibility of wrestling with the full critique of the limits and possibilities of knowledge, involving both head and heart.
Peter tells his addressees to sanctify Christ as Lord in their hearts. The heart of which Peter speaks represents more than a physical organ; within the framework in which Peter uses the word heart, it refers to the innermost, center part of one’s being. When Peter says, “sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord,” he talks about the heart as a sanctuary.
With language and meaning at the core of anything said or written, the word sanctify associates richly with holiness and hallowed, permitting Peter’s words to carry forward Isaiah’s awe and fear of God (Isa. 8:18; 29:23). Peter adds “in your hearts” to focus these new Christians on the heart as a place set apart and consecrated as a dwelling place for God. “Let them construct a sanctuary for Me, that I may dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8). For Peter, the difficult matters of life, death, and the possibilities for human freedom come to rest, not in some abstract, objective reality, but in the indwelling person of Christ.
The consequence of “sanctify[ing] in your hearts Christ as Lord” leads into Christian apology: “always being ready to make a defense [apologia] to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you.” Peter stresses hope over both defense and account, making clear its exact nature: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet. 1:3). The Book of Acts has Peter proclaiming: “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it” (Acts 2:29). This hope generally extends to all believers: “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet. 1:8–9).
Postmodernism’s critique of the rational prepares the way for Christian apologetics to move beyond any mislaid confidence in classical and evidentiary defenses, the taking of refuge in reformed traditions, or any retreat into overly simplistic faith formulas. In many ways, the aftermath of postmodernism gives new impetus for confessing the limitations of intellect, while returning to the older, culturally rich wisdom of knowing God in the heart — the intimacy of relationship. When Adam knew Eve, she became pregnant. God knew Abraham by name. The Psalmist is amazed that God knows his existence intimately. And in the New Testament, knowing Christ is knowing God (John 14:7). The important distinction here lies in the difference between knowing something (as delineated by the postmodernist critique) and knowing someone (God in the story of the Bible).
Returning to the importance of language, it helps to understand that knowing in the New Testament connects with logos and suggests logic and persuasive techniques. In its Semitic context, it takes on the special meaning of relationship and the making of a covenant. Logos itself has a long history, with most thinking that Heraclitus, four or five hundred years before the Johannine Gospel, used it to refer to the cosmos. It then went through several reiterations, in which it gradually became the thought of God expressing himself in the universe, a kind of author-to-created-work relationship. When John uses the term, however, he connects it to a person: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1: 1–2).
In Genesis, Adam and Eve, although not explicitly identified as having a covenant relationship, were to be faithful as husband and wife. The prophet Malachi makes this association explicit: “Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant” (Mal. 2:14). In speaking of Abraham, the NASB translates known as chosen to express God’s relationship with Abraham: “For I have chosen him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring upon Abraham what He has spoken about him” (Gen. 18:19). King David understood himself as known by the God who had appointed him to the throne (Ps. 139). Jesus tells Philip directly: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
Any apology arising out of 1 Peter 3:15 should be about much more than proclaiming postmodernism’s self-defeat in making truth claims, while simultaneously denying the possibility of objective truth. Such is the strategy of logical games. Peter’s apology and reason carry the deeper, ancient wisdom of Proverbs, where “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Prov. 9:10).
The historical turn to the subjective and internal creates a pivotal moment to reintroduce people to Peter’s admonition to “sanctify Christ in the heart.” Apologists have an opportunity to redirect attention to the heart and its vital roles in feeling, willing, and knowing. Peter, of course, uses language metaphorically when he describes the heart as a sanctuary, but he also substitutes Christ for Isaiah’s “Lord of hosts.” This substitution stresses an old wisdom that moves well beyond a simple dependency upon ideals, universals, concepts, and systems of ideas. All of these are dependent on a human mind, of course, but ontologically, a mind that belongs to the body as a whole.
The point to be made remains simple: while almost everyone has a mental model of God, the God of the Bible cannot be reduced to conceptualization. Of course, apologists must engage in argument and persuasion within conceptual models, theologies, and doctrines. The point again, however, is that heilsgeschichte reveals God’s redemptive work in history in the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection. The pivotal truth about incarnation is the overcoming of the distance between God and human beings such that no “ugly broad ditch” (Lessing) any longer exists between the infinite and finite, eternal and mortal, the divine and human.
Conceptually, we search to understand the mystery of God as well as the living hope within our hearts as God’s sanctuary, and when we seek to defend our faith and account for this hope, we are to remember Peter’s admonition to do so “with gentleness and reverence.” He reminds Christians everywhere that the prophets themselves made careful searches and inquiries into God’s historical work as it was revealed to them, remembering “that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven — things into which angels long to look” (1 Pet.
1:10–12).
jeaniecrain 