1

On the “Neglect” of 2 Peter1

Introduction: A Short Story Let me begin by telling you a short story. I tell it to provide this seminar with a narrative context that may help you understand better the unfolding nature of my own canonical approach to the shape and shaping of the NT’s CE collection.

My story begins in Pretoria, SA, in the summer of 1999 at the annual meeting of the SNTS. A small group of colleagues who hardly knew one another but who had read each other’s work met together during a reception both to lament the Society’s lack of interest in the CE but also to strategize on proposing a new SNTS seminar that would work on the collection in hopes of rehabilitating the academy’s interest in them. There were five of us: Ernst Baasland from Norway, Reinhard Feldmeier and K-W Niebuhr from Germany, Richard Bauckham from the UK, and myself from the US. Most of us James people. It was agreed for political reasons that Niebuhr, a German Lutheran, and I, an American Methodist, propose a new bi-lingual seminar beginning with the 2001 meeting in Montreal, titled “The Catholic Epistles and the Tradition.” It was approved by the program committee and Niebuhr and I were selected to co-chair the seminar. Whilst I had mentioned to the group my interest in the significance of a sevenfold collection of writings—perhaps signifying the church’s early impressions of its overall coherence of content and function—the steering committee wanted a more wide-open seminar specializing in the innovative study of

1 Note change in title.

2

individual CE. And so began our seminar 15 years ago this past summer. A collection of our main papers was subsequently published in 2009 by Baylor UP to which was added the evocative subtitle, “A New Perspective on James to Jude.” Most reviewers agree that what was really “new” about that collection’s reading is the attempt to read them together as diverse although integral members of a discrete, theologically coherent canonical collection.

The introduction to the Baylor collection narrates the seminar’s history from its early ambition to rehabilitate the academy’s interest in individual CE to its many faceted study of a sevenfold canonical whole. The trigger mechanism for this movement, at least as Niebuhr retells it, was the reading and discussion of an early draft of my essay, “The Unifying Theology of the CE,” at the 2003 meeting in Bonn. Although mostly intuitional and interested in a theological reading of a canonical collection without attending to a hermeneutical history of its formation and earliest reception—these elements were added later and it’s work still ongoing—this initial attempt to rehab the academy’s interest in the CE seeks to shift modern criticism’s atomistic reading of individual CE to a reading of the CE as a whole collection ordered the theological grammar of James as the collection’s “frontispiece” and the church’s ecumenical creeds. I subsequently added Acts to this theological analysis, pressing Irenaeus’s observation that scripture’s role for Acts—quite apart from the modern invention of a Luke-Acts—is to supply a narrative setting for the church’s reading of both the fourfold Gospel on the one hand and Paul’s letters collection on the other. Much later, of course, mss. evidence suggests the production of a discrete volume of writings, the so-called Apostolos, which consisted of Acts and the CE collection to pair

3

with the Pauline canon.2 What I attempted to do in an initial series of seminar papers was to make the case that the church intends for the CE to be read as a discrete collection with an indispensable role to perform as a member of a canonical whole. The book I published with my colleague, David Nienhuis, in 2013 is an attempt to add Dave’s study of earliest Christianity’s “shaping” of this CE collection as a phenomenon of the canonical process to the mix consisting of my stuff on the collection’s final “shape” and internal “canon logic.” My use of the trope, “aesthetic excellence,” is intended only to commend an approach to the collection that is guided by its purposeful arrangement into a sevenfold collection. The impress of reading the collection as a theologically coherent and substantive contribution to the NT’s witness to God’s redemption of creation in Christ is the holy end of our study.

But our book is only an initial argument to frame the hermeneutical importance of shifting the focus of the academy’s interpretive work away from the biblical point of composition (and its interest in reconstructing the communicative intentions of a particular text’s “real” author as a point of reference for reading it) to the postbiblical point of canonization (and its interest in the church’s communicative intentions for a whole collection and scripture’s own profile of a text’s “canonical” author)3—a shift of 2 See. D. C. Parker, New Testament Manuscripts and their Texts (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 283-310. But now see W. Grunstaudl and T. Nicklas, “Searching for Evidence: The History of Reception of the Epistles of Jude and 2 Peter,” in Reading 1-2 Peter and Jude (E. Mason and T. Martin, eds., SBL, 2013), 215-28. I would only remark in response to Parker’s reconstruction that he omits canon lists already from the 4th century that places Acts and the CE together (e.g., Athanasius). 3 No one doubts the importance of a reader’s understanding of the author of a text in guiding how that text is read and understood. What I dispute, however, is where we might find this author’s résumé in order to understand him and so the texts attributed to him. See R. W. Wall, “A Canonical Approach to the Unity of Acts and Luke’s Gospel” in Rethinking the Reception and

4

interest that I had already explored in various articles and in my commentaries on Acts and the Pastoral Epistles for both theological and practical reasons. On the “Neglect” of 2 Peter: Another Perspective This afternoon I want to add a modest chapter to this story, which features the embattled CE 2 Peter as a case study. Earlier this year I was asked to add the capstone chapter to an interesting collection of essays on the “muted” texts of the NT, consisting of studies about Christian identity in the CE and Hebrews. The trope, “neglect,” is frequently used by scholars in this collection to assess the academy’s lack of interest in these letters, including 2 Peter. And so they present their studies on a relevant topic as a means of encouraging the respect they deserve but often do not receive by their colleagues.

In fact, 2 Peter might be a good case study in what Michael Legaspi avers is “the death of scripture and the rise of biblical studies.” Surely Käsemann’s announcement of 2 Peter’s demise is a good illustration of the letter’s current status in the academy despite the fine commentaries offered by the likes of Bauckham, Davids, and more recently Frey and the series of fine PhDs on 2 Peter produced by a cadre of young German scholars under the tutelage of Professor Tobias Nicklas.

But the more I tried to explain the academy’s neglect of 2 Peter with its trickle-down effects in the church’s lack of use of 2

Unity of Luke-Acts (A. Gregory and K. Rowe, eds. University of South Carolina Press, 2010) 172-91. On our use of “scripture,” see M. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford, 2010), pp. 3-26. We use of “scripture” instead of “the Bible” as a trope attempting to capture the force of Legaspi’s narrative of the loss of scripture’s formative roles in worship, catechesis, and mission in modern criticism’s “biblical studies.”

5

Peter in its worship and catechesis, the more I became dissatisfied with the use of “neglect” as a trope of the inattentiveness we observe—even though Dave and I used it repeatedly to introduce our book on the “neglected” CE!

My disquiet springs from different sources. In the first place, it wells up from a theology of scripture that regards the “neglect” of any part of the inspired whole to be sinful and theologically dangerous. I take it that the late John Webster was right to describe the canonical process as an integral stage of the holy Spirit’s protracted activity in forming sacred scripture for use as an auxiliary in forming a holy people of the risen One.4 The variety of choices the church’s magisterium made during the canonical process, both to intuit the enduring usefulness of an authoritative proto-canon consisting of a fourfold Gospel and Pauline letter collection by the end of the second century and to select and collect together a complement of non-Pauline writings, including 2 Peter, to complete the NT canon by the end of the fifth or sixth century, may be interpreted as a covenant-keeping response to the Spirit’s communicative presence according to the promise Jesus made to his disciples in John 14:26. It was the holy Spirit (and not any biblical author) who attracted and secured the interpretive community’s recognition of a text’s apostolicity and catholicity required for inclusion in the church’s biblical canon; and it is this same Spirit who continues to illumine the reception

4 J. Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 58-67. According to Webster, the other theological tract that helps interpret the church’s canonization (and composition) of holy scripture “could well be described in terms of the divine providential acts of preserving, accompanying and ruling creaturely activities, annexing them to God’s self-revelation” (p. 10).

6

of this same text that forms the theological understanding of today’s community of believers.

Canonization viewed through this pneumatological lens, then, might be interpreted as a Spirit-led process of discernment, which recognizes the sanctification of particular apostolic texts at different moments and with different levels of attentiveness along the way. The various phenomena of the canonical process, which all involved human choices, and its final literary product may be accepted by the church as a divinely order event—an event that occurred in the “fullness of time” for the gracious benefit of God’s people until that time when scripture is rewritten on their hearts and is no longer needed to communicate God’s living and active word (cf. Jer. 31:33).5 In this case, the de-canonization of a canonized text, whether by its neglect or by criticism’s verdict, may be interpreted as quenching the Spirit’s presence.

A caveat. In my own Methodist communion, two CE, 1 John and James, function as our canon within the Canon. Wesley even uses 1 John as hermeneutical of scripture’s Pauline witness! I take some comfort in noting that in the Pentecostalism of my Swedish grandparents, Acts is front and center, whereas in my wife’s Lutheran communion and the dispensationalism of my own religious upbringing and training, Paul is the starting point for a confession of faith and practice, often to the exclusion of the rest 5 The neglect of CE in the academy has had a trickle-down effect upon the church’s academy-trained clergy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the studied disregard of biblical texts such as 2 Peter in the clergy’s theological education has shaped a bias against their use in parish worship, catechesis, and mission. Even when the Lectionary, for example, includes NT lessons from non- (and deutero-) Pauline books, they are rarely the focus of the church’s preaching or teaching ministry and are, in fact, typically ignored—at least in my experience—even when appointed for ecclesial use to thicken the canonical context for hearing God’s word in the gospel of Christ. One may assume that this disregard is typically justified for critical reasons and ecclesial practice.

7

of scripture. Even within a single communion, different social settings require that adjustment of its levels of attentiveness. My point is that the increased attentiveness to one portion of scripture when compared to other portions may be shaped within differing ecclesial communions and social locations. End of caveat.

I want to argue to this seminar that the dynamic practice of an imbalanced reading of scripture is not necessarily a sin of omission6, but may in fact instantiate a property of the canonical process. If so, then it may be apropos of a canonical approach to privilege certain canonical volumes over others—the NT over the OT, Pauline over Catholic Epistles, or the fourfold Gospel over all other canonical collections in a way that facilitates a Spirit-led performance of scripture’s appointed roles in worship, catechesis and mission. Of course, the church inherits this imbalanced reading strategy from the Synagogue, which grants superlative attentiveness to the canonical Torah. My point is this: such a strategy may be a faithful response to God’s providential ordering of the church’s reception of God’s biblical word so to help the Spirit plot the divine economy. Imbalanced toward Paul, but not to the neglect of the CE collection.

Most recent historians who have attempted to reconstruct the formation of the NT canon—a project that began in earnest with the Reformation even if with sparse evidence in hand—admit to its dynamic nature that unfolded over an extended

6 I would allow that criticism’s tacit de-canonization of various texts, such as the so-called “deuteron-Pauline” writings, subverts the Spirit’s sanctifying activity and may thus be considered “sinful” or, less harshly, wrongheaded, primarily because of its attachment of a text’s apostolicity with criticism’s judgments about a text’s “real” author rather than its content and soteriological effect.

8

period of time and in different geographies, West and East. On the one hand, there were always in play two relatively stable collections, Gospel and Pauline, in wide circulation early on. No conciliar confirmation was needed. It would seem the church’s steady and effective uses of this proto-canonical core, which soon eclipsed the LXX in use (see Barton), was forged by an ecclesial intuition (I believe Spirit-formed) of their catholic, enduring authority. Certainly the collected nature of the fourfold Gospel tradition and a Pauline letters collection produced a sustained and substantial effect among congregations of mostly converted non-Jews already in the first half of the second century.7 The failure of the church’s mission to Jews, both in Roman Palestine and the Diaspora, only exacerbated this effect—an effect that implicitly slowed the reception of the writings of the Jewish apostolate, “James, Cephas, and John” (cf. Gal. 2:7-9). In any case, this proto-canon of Gospel and Apostle, even if not in response to Marcion as Harnack imagined it, reified the overall aesthetic of the NT’s final redaction. What must be said, however, is that the church’s earliest canon lists, which began to appear once this proto-canonical core stabilized by the end of the second century, envisage a considerably more fluid “second stage” of the canonical process that extended at least into the fifth century when uncial manuscript collections envisage greater stability that roughly corresponds to our current 27-book NT canon. In light of this

7 My principal conversation partner in this regard is David Trobisch, both his published and presented work and in private conversations, regarding the ms. evidence that sustains his reconstruction of the four canonical volumes that came to make up the “final edition of the New Testament,” the Gestalt of each volume in place early on but then achieving its canonical form over time.

9

historical datum, it would seem a mistake for us to argue against the formation of a fixed and closed biblical canon that, with the ecumenical creeds finalized during this same time period, helped to regulate the continuing growth of “one holy catholic and apostolic church.”8

I find Albert Sundberg’s distinction between “scripture” and “canon” useful in understanding the fluid nature of this second stage of the canonical process. The relevant phenomena of the third and fourth centuries evinced the church’s wide-ranging use of edifying texts useful in forming an apostolic faith, including non-canonical writings (Hermes, Letters of Clement, Didache, Apocalypse of Peter, et. al.), which Sundberg refers to as “scripture.” Among these texts some were recognized as having the added utility as a doctrinal and moral metric when defining or defending the church’s apostolic faith. These texts, Sundberg suggests, were received into the emergent NT “canon.” It would seem the relevant issue in this selection process was more than the frequency of a text’s religious use but the manner of its usefulness for “canonical” performances (i.e., to warrant particular teachings or practices as “Christian”).9 8 See R. W. Wall, Why the Church? (RNTT, Abingdon, 2015); also Daniel Castelo and R. W. Wall, “Scripture and the Church: A Précis for an Alternative Analogy” Journal of Theological Interpretation 5.2 (2011): 197-210. 9 Professor John Barton called my attention to the work of Franz Stuhlhofer who counted the number quoted or alluded Christian texts found in extant second and third century works. Barton uses this numerical analysis to present a more functional definition of canon. That is, the more frequently a text is used, the greater its importance or authority. Stuhlhofer is also able to index the expansion of the NT canon by the statistical increase in the uses (as recorded in ancient Christian postbiblical texts) of specific biblical books during the first several centuries of the CE; see Barton’s summary of this idea in Holy Writings, Sacred Text (Westminster/John Knox, 1997), pp. 14-24. A concern I share with Barton is the absence of agreed-upon criteria that would guide careful readers to distinguish between a writer’s appeal to a text in a way that performs a genuinely “canonical” role (such as Irenaeus’s use of Acts in Book Three of Against Heresies) and

10

Moreover, the spotty inclusion of Acts and some Catholic Epistles in the early canon lists into the third century, or mention of a discrete volume of CE at least until Eusebius (320-30 CE) nor of a stable volume of the Apostolos until the sixth, may reflect the church’s hesitancy to valorize any text outside of its proto-canonical core.10 Added to this is the sparse use of this volume of apostolic writings in ancient lectionaries—especially 2 Peter, which isn’t used at all—leads me to suggest the early church was engaged in a practice of privileging the “proto-canon” (Gospel and Paul) relegating those outside this core, such as 2 Peter, to a “second string” status—a pattern of reading that continues to this day.11 Indeed, the dialectic this collection envisages between scripture’s privileged core and all “others” was present from the very beginning of scripture’s formation and may even be hermeneutical in relating the different collections of the whole canon.

As a former athlete and now attentive fan, allow me this crude analogy from my experience playing, coaching, being coached, and now watching team sports. Every successful team is constituted by two groups of athletes. There is a core of star players who play the most minutes, who attract the most attention from the press, and who are paid the highest salary other more mundane uses. Stuhlhofer’s counting is a necessary first step but finally an insufficiently critical line of evidence in making this distinction. 10 I am grateful for private conversations over many years with Lee McDonald who recently shared with me “Appendix C” of a forthcoming work that presents the most recent findings of earliest Christianity’s earliest canon lists, compiled by Edmon Gallagher and John Meade, in The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis (Oxford UP, 2017), in press. 11 Note that the final order of the Gospels collection remained somewhat fluid as was also true of the Pauline collection, which added the three Pastorals toward the end of the second century to complete its canonical edition; R. W. Wall, 1 and 2 Timothy & Titus (THNTC, Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 15-27.

11

because the effectiveness of the entire team is predicated on the consistency of their performance. These are the players who are most intensely recruited because the team’s owners and manager know that their success rises and falls on their performance. Yet, no team can compete successfully over an entire season without a group of role players each of whom offer special talents that a manager can call upon at a moment’s notice to fill a needed gap—to substitute for an injured player at a moment’s notice, for example, or to come off the bench in the final minutes to apply a particular skill that defends against a competitor’s strength or exploits its weakness. Even though these role players do not receive the same attention or salary of the star players, they are essential to the team’s success.

The two stages of the canonical process initially formed a proto-NT of star performers—the fourfold Gospel and Pauline letters collections—but then selected another collection of “role players” to complement this core in a way that made the entire NT canon more effective in accomplishing what the church intends its scripture to do: to teach and train its membership in the Christian faith and to refute and correct error that would distort the community’s theological understanding or subvert its moral formation. This division of labor, so to speak, is characteristic of the canonical whole; it is what it is. Even though the Catholic Epistles collection, along with Hebrews whose orphaned status compromises its reception, do not receive the same press or “compensation” in either the church of academy as scripture’s star performers, their complement role is critical to the effective reception of the whole canon. To mute the voices of their collective chorus will surely have a deleterious effect on the canonical performances of the whole.

12

In my mind the renewal of the academy/church’s study and proclamation of those texts placed purposefully outside the NT’s own “canon within the Canon” should be of a particular kind. In the first place, we should not expect the academy and its publishing houses, nor the church to grant the CE collection the same level of importance and scrutiny that is accorded the Pauline letters collection or fourfold Gospel. The effectiveness of the biblical canon to perform its appointed roles in study and worship depends mostly upon the church’s privileged use of the NT’s proto-canon. The publishing lists of the academy and the Lectionary of the church testify to this, which envisage an imbalanced tilt toward the Gospels and Pauline letters along with their ancillary concerns.12

This observation allowed, the formation of a canonical collection of CE in the fourth century remains a remarkable achievement that resulted in more effective performances as scripture than any sum of its seven more modest parts. But we must still consider the role of this collection within the biblical canon, when received as part of this “second stage” of the canonical process. I propose, then, this hermeneutical principle: the CE collection was added to the proto-NT to perform an ancillary yet complementary role as part of the biblical canon’s final redaction.

In a brief conclusion to this paper let me unpack this hermeneutical principle, again using 2 Peter as a rough type of the entire collection.

12 Wesley’s own practice was to read and preach the appointed lesson, typically from Paul, but then interpret it through a Johannine lens!

13

Observation 1. I think we can all admit that the history of 2 Peter’s reception in the church evinces a supporting but not a starring role, especially as the proof-text of indispensable matters, whether church doctrine (e.g., scripture’s inspiration, apostolic tradition, virtue ethics, apocalyptic eschatology), evidence for the early existence of a Pauline letter collection (cf. 3:14-15), or relevant features of earliest catholic Christianity’s post-apostolic trajectory, and so on. 2 Peter may be neglected as a superstar of Christian formation but must not be neglected as a trustworthy supporting player.

In fact, had canonization unfolded on an individual, case-by-case basis, the lack of 2 Peter’s theological distinctiveness may well have doomed its inclusion in the NT. I find that today’s scholars (e.g., see Jens Schröter, Jesus to NT, pp. 333-41) routinely admit that 2 Peter is no more special in its theological content or practical effect than texts the church by-passed for canonization, such as Shepherd or Clement’s letters. Nor do we find a canon list or uncial where 2 Peter is detached from 1 Peter (or from Acts, which bears reflection) even though sometimes it goes unmentioned or mentioned as disputed in lists where 1 Peter is accepted. Claromontanus’s list (4th cent) strangely preserves 2 Peter with 1 Peter but within its Pauline corpus where it is presumably taken as correspondence from Paul to Peter!

This artifact from the canonical process infers that 2 Peter was not selected for inclusion in a canonical collection because of its individual merit. Were this the case, it is likely that Jude, 2-3 John, some would say even James would have joined 2 Peter on the sidelines. Rather it is critical for us to observe that the church’s recognition of what books to include in its biblical canon was cued by their performance as integral parts of whole

14

collections and received as such into the church’s biblical canon.13 The essential phenomenology of canonization is the formation of collections, which over time were arranged into a particular sequence that both facilitated dialog between them and articulated the apostolic proclamation of the gospel in its most effective form for forming each generation of Christians of a catholic church—a sequence of collections that envisages its “aesthetic excellence.” The canonization of 2 Peter not only depends upon its “fit” within a collection but also upon its subsequent role under the Spirit’s aegis to inspire the entire collection as God’s word for God’s people. Observation 2. I would argue that 2 Peter’s role within the CE collection is bridge-building—a point already made in other words by David Trobisch and again in our book.14 The linguistic and thematic connections between 1 and 2 Peter15 and between 2 13 See Grunstaudl and Nicklas, “Searching for Evidence.” The manuscript tradition suggests that the both letter collections, Pauline and Catholic, were never transmitted as single letters but as parts of unfolding collections of letters from the very beginning. Moreover, the two collections were kept separate in their reception and canonization (however, see p72!). 14 Nienhuis and Wall, Reading, pp.95-114. 15 R. W. Wall, “The Canonical Function of Second Peter,” Biblical Interpretation 9/1 (2001) 64-81. Updating that earlier study, I would now illustrate the effect of reading 2 Peter with 1 Peter under the following rubrics (forgive this long explanatory footnote): (1) Theology: 2 Peter 3 appeals to apostolic tradition in responding to disputations over the timing and manner of a patient Creator’s realization of the promised new creation. Much of the debate over the canonicity of 2 Peter since Käsemann has concentrated on theodicy, and in particular on 2 Peter’s Hellenized depiction of an eschatological theodicy. At its most basic level, 2 Peter’s narrative of the apocalypse continues 1 Peter’s conception of theodicy in which the innocent suffer as resident aliens of a hostile social world that ridicules their faith in Israel’s God. By submitting to the example and destiny of Jesus (1 Pet 2:21-25; 3:18-22), the faithful anticipate God’s coming victory over the very social evils responsible for their suffering.

The focus of 1 Peter is on the present age in which the suffering of God’s elect people, purified from sin to be a holy people, tests their covenant relations with God. An existential theodicy, then, in which the spiritual and moral performances of God’s people passes the

15

testing of their faith and assures their participation in kingdom come. The paraenetic cast of 1 Peter underwrites this overall sensibility. The unjust suffer justly, while saints resolve the problem of suffering by their obedience—evil will not have its due in them. While the demise of evil is signaled already by the risen Messiah whose suffering fulfills God’s prophetic promise of salvation (1 Pet 1:10-12), 1 Peter reminds readers that God’s endtime judgment is based on why people suffer whether or not according to God’s will (1:17; 3:13-17).

But the images of God’s future in 1 Peter are faint and abstract. There is no expression of worry about its delay, even if the resurrection intimates that creation’s salvation has a future. This lack of attention may fall trap to the dangerous tendency Paul corrects in 1 Thess. in which an abstract eschatology has led to moral laxity. A people without a keen sense of God’s future judgment, Neyrey allows, allows people who feel at home in this fallen world.15

One imagines this same tendency may be the effect of reading 1 Peter without 2 Peter. Käsemann’s complaint over the retributive sense of 2 Peter’s eschatological theodicy is precisely the point: 2 Peter’s shift from the past inauguration of God’s promised salvation (1 Peter) to a vivid narrative of the future apocalypse of new creation rounds out a Petrine response to theodicy and makes the promise of new creation decisive and concrete. Moreover, the blatant ridicule of an unrealized parousia to which 2 Peter responds may reflect the negative effect of reading 1 Peter without 2 Peter. Indeed, the letter’s rhetorical upgrade that envisages a decisive and expansive apocalypse of God’s salvation—“the salvation revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:5)—makes more clear the historic fulfillment of God’s promise without which there is no hope (cf. 1 Pet. 1:6). Finally, by not bringing 2 Peter’s eschatological theodicy to bear upon 1 Peter, the tension between present and hope for but still future experiences of God’s salvation is removed for a one-side preoccupation on the present.15 (2) Christology: 2 Peter appeals to the apostolic tradition when defeating the Christological error of false teachers. Scripture’s Petrine witness, if 1 Peter is received without 2 Peter, certainly would diminish its Christological affirmation. This seems counterintuitive given 1 Peter’s significant contribution to NT Christology: what can 1 Peter’s Christology possibly lack even without 2 Peter? Again, we are reminded of Käsemann’s principal criticism that 2 Peter’s eschatological theodicy “lacks any vestige of Christological orientation” (178) but harbors a “degenerate Christology” in which the primitive church’s proclamation of Jesus’ dying and rising has receded into the background.15 This verdict, of course, has been overturned by Bauckham, Fornberg, Frey, and others.

But if we suppose that 2 Peter was added to 1 Peter’s Christological affirmation, the impress of doing so is to shift 1 Peter’s exclusive emphasis on the past of Jesus to include his present role as the exalted power-broker of God’s salvation; the ascended Christ is now “the Savior” (1:1, 11; 2:20; 3:2, 18). A Petrine witness without 2 Peter, then, lacks this thickened sense of a living Christ’s participation with God in the outworking of the church’s salvation (1:11). In fact, significantly, 2 Peter’s apostolic affirmation is confirmed by God’s testimony that “the Lord Jesus Christ…is my beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased” (1:17).

The effect of participating in this heavenly audition secures the epistemic criterion according to which the Lord Jesus Christ is known by his apostolic representatives in terms of his “power and parousia” (1:16) rather than only in the past of his obedient suffering and

16

atoning death—points already covered by 1 Peter. Appropriately, unlike 1 Peter the theological crisis 2 Peter addresses is internal to the community and concerns the denial of Jesus’ lordship (2:1) and “commandment” (3:2), both of which are linked to the denial of his parousia when he will mediate the apocalypse of God’s judgment and repair of creation.

A canonical approach to 2 Peter affords, then, this observation: the effect of reading 1 Peter without 2 Peter impoverishes Petrine Christology especially as it relates to the dynamic of God’s unfolding redemptive plans for the world. The tension that now exists between two discrete periods of Christ’s messianic mission would be tamed. As things now stand, the rhetorical effect of 2 Peter’s Christology constructs an inclusio, bracketing and concentrating 1 Peter’s suffering Servant and his messianic death and resurrection by its prophecy on the holy mountain on one side, and by its cosmic and ultimate results at the coming triumphant of the Creator on the other. In doing so, the Petrine witness as a whole not only refuses to isolate Christ’s importance in the past and on the cross but then carries the results of the Christ event into the future in a way that continues to judge the present moment in salvation’s history.

Of importance in this regard is the shift of the pivot point back from the resurrection but the transfiguration of Jesus, which confirms the “power and parousia of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:16-17) according to the Apostle’s eyewitness authority (cf. 1Pet.5:1). This appeal may well carry more rhetorical clout in the letter’s argument against the scoffers of the parousia (3:3-4), who suppose that this article of Christian faith is a clever fiction (1:16) rather than a delayed reality (3:8-13), and so disbelieve that God is capable of either creation’s destruction or its new beginning (3:3-4). The heretical teachers suppose on this basis that they can act with impunity as though the Lord issued no moral command (3:2; cf. 2:21). (3) Ecclesiology: 2 Peter appeals to the righteousness witnessed in Jesus to correct the social identity of a community too accommodating of its secular moral economy. The first half of 1 Peter concerns the formation of the church’s social identity as a community of non-Jewish converts set within a pagan world, ironically by reclaiming key images from the synagogue’s Bible. In continuity with Israel’s calling and destiny, the church is chosen by a holy God for a salvation hoped for but yet to arrive; such a salvation obligates a people to form a counter culture of exiles and foreigners who suffer ridicule because of their beliefs and lifestyle.

1 Peter shapes a community’s identity that assumes its marginal existence within a hostile environment, which forms patterns of interaction between its members and outsiders. The confidence required to endure a hostile setting, even to challenge it, is predicated on its theological claims: the church is a people chosen and reborn by a holy God to instantiate a “living hope” that heralds God’s coming victory over evil (1 Pet. 4:1-6) by its acts of doing right (1 Pet 3:13-17). In this sense, the church’s moral practices transcend cultural norms and are rather are inspired by prophetic witness of Israel’s Scripture and by the testimony of the historical Jesus whose suffering Peter is eyewitness.15

The question might be raised, what effect on the reception of Petrine ecclesiology if there is “no 2 Peter.” Bauckham has carefully located the crisis to which 2 Peter responds a generation later for a new day in which the church no longer views itself as resident aliens of a hostile pagan world. In fact, the elect community is cleansed from past sins (1:9) to participate in God’s power (1:3) and nature (1:4), not in Christ’s sufferings, so that they are capable of living in the

17

world apropos of pagan ideals (1:5-11). The conflict over social manners found in 1 Peter (cf. 1 Pet. 4:1-6) has been replaced by a surprising agreement over the virtues of a well-lived life in 2 Peter.

Yes, the church of 2 Peter remains embroiled in conflict; but the struggle has moved indoors. The opponents are no longer pagans but other Christians who have diluted the gospel by relaxing its moral demands (thus compromising the very virtues of the pagan world it seeks to reach) and by voicing public skepticism about the apostolic proclamation of the community’s “living hope.”15

The crisis 2 Peter continues to address faces any congregation whenever it seeks to translate the moral and theological goods of the gospel for a new cultural setting. The real opponents of change are not unbelieving outsiders—as 1 Peter would have it—but are those within the community among who struggle over competing versions of the apostolic word. Reading 1 Peter without 2 Peter would compromise the church’s reflection over those theological and moral agreements of the apostolic tradition that are most vulnerable to internal compromise. Perhaps not apocalyptic eschatology as in 2 Peter but other elements of the church’s Jewish legacy that have been Gentilized and muted.

Moreover, de-canonizing 2 Peter would vacate an important check on the church’s potential drift from the moral rigors of a covenant-keeping life, set out in the second part of 1 Peter, to a morality compromised either by an over-determined desire to meet the pagan world halfway or by the spiritual laziness of an elect community whose living hope comes without conditions so that its participation in the new creation is a foregone conclusion. 2 Peter doesn’t so much complete 1 Peter’s ecclesiology but corrects a possible appropriation of it that foregoes Israel’s calling as a light to the nations.

Perhaps nowhere is Käsemann’s theological criterion more keenly expressed than by his criticism of 2 Peter’s moral dualism. Not only its stunning eschatological claim that believers participate in God’s nature (1:4), which is then clarified by a catalog of moral virtues, 2 Peter argues that moral rectitude is the norm by the false teachers’ departure from the apostolic heritage is recognized and condemned. The teachers deny the essentially ethical nature of apostolic religion: they refuse to live the “way of rectitude” (2Pet. 2:21; cf. 1:11; 2:2) which evinces the denial of the theological agreements of apostolic religion.

But doesn’t 2 Peter’s claim of theosis complete 1 Peter’s emphasis on moral rectitude (see 1Pet.2:14-15, 20; 3:14; cf. 2:24)? 2 Peter elaborates this emphasis by elevating it as a feature of eschatological theodicy: those who imitate God’s rectitude share in God’s nature (theosis) and will naturally oppose the moral abuses of false teachers (1:2, 3, 5, 6, 8; 2:20; 3:17). It is not orthodoxy, then, but “godliness” (1:3, 6, 7; 3:11) that delivers God’s people from eschatological judgment.

Without 2 Peter’s elaboration a principal check in resisting the modern tendency of reading 1 Peter (and Scripture’s Petrine witness) as though of a single piece with the Pauline witness is lacking. Indeed, whereas the Pauline witness also speaks of “righteousness (or rectitude) by faith”, the Petrine witness, especially inclusive of 2 Peter, emphasizes a “righteousness (or rectitude) of life”: the moral character of a virtuous life marks a people out as belonging to God. Indeed, character matters in the reception of truth (cf. Acts). For this reason,

18

Peter and 1 John envisage its role as a lynchpin in the final edition of the NT.16 Recently, Nienhuis studied nine points of correspondence between 2 Peter and 1 John that circles back to the fourfold Gospel’s witness of the historical Jesus to secure the normative importance of his exemplary life but also as a warning against false prophets (cf. Matt 7, et. al.). Indeed, 2 Peter and 1 John when read together press the point that the CE collects the written deposits of the church’s apostles who were with the risen One from the beginning (read: Paul not included!) and were eyewitnesses of his revelation of God’s word that issues in the gospel’s authoritative definition.17 the community must take responsibility to guard its theological borders but also its moral formation.

According to the deeper logic of the Pauline gospel, this same “righteousness” is a natural result of Christ’s death in which the believer participates as beneficiary by faith; sharply put, Paul does not require the rigors of a spiritual discipline (1:5; 3:14) that habituates faithful acts of obedience to God’s rule (1:9) called for by 2 Peter. Clearly, the deification of believers (1:4) does not result in an inevitable obedience to the commandment of the Lord (2:20-21). The church’s appropriation of Paul at this point, even though perhaps uncritically (cf. 3:15-16), justifies a self-indulgent lifestyle (2:2, 10, 13, 18) that pursues personal pleasure (2:13) and private property (2:15-16) instead of a rigorous obedience to the “commandment of the Lord” (3:2; 2:21). 16 At least from Eusebius forward, the church (both East and West) has recognized the sevenfold shape of the CE collection although sometimes in a different internal order and in a different placement within the NT (East = with Acts after fourfold Gospel [Praxapostolos] and in West after Pauline corpus). Prior to the fourth century, there is awareness of a second collection of “catholic” letters but not always as a fixed sevenfold tradition; for this see D. R. Nienhuis, Not By Paul Alone (Baylor). What is also clear is that even though Eusebius claims that Clement knew and used the CE collection, there is no evidence than Clement knew 2 Peter. No mention of 2 Peter exists in the extant writings of either Irenaeus or Tertullian, and the Muratorian Canon doesn’t mention 2 Peter either. This lack of attestation from the later part of the second century strongly suggests that 2 Peter is recognized and received with the CE collection once finally formed. It’s eventual canonization (perhaps even its composition as a “canonical pseudepigraph”!) depended upon it. 17 D. R. Nienhuis, “’From the Beginning’: The Formation of a Catholic Apostolic Christian Identity in 2 Peter and 1 John,” in Muted Voices: Neglected Texst and Early Christian Identifies (K. Hockey, M. Pierce, F. Watson, eds.; Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 2 Peter’s appeal to this apostolic

19

Finally, I’m inclined to follow Jorg Frey’s suggestion in this year’s Radboud Lectures that 2 Peter’s “surprising” mention of a collection of Paul’s letters in its benedictory may implicate still a third connection between 2 Peter and the Pauline letter collection.18 He argues the identity of the anonymous false prophets of 2 Peter are inspired by the “beloved” (and canonical) Paul—Irenaeus would surely have nodded agreement at this suggestion!—and especially the interpretive freedom he seemingly grants to those who are “in Christ.” In addition to its polemic against those who mock the prophetic word of the apostolic tradition regarding the Lord’s return, Frey contends that when also stripped of the bits it borrows from Jude, the letter’s concluding and novel mention of Paul enters into dialog with the letter’s opening riff on virtue ethics.

Following Frey, then, 2 Peter’s conclusion is not so much a Petrine affirmation of a Pauline canon but is hermeneutical for testimony, followed by 1 John, aims readers to an epistemic criterion external to the community’s scriptures (cf. 2 Pet 3:16). We might assume, for example, that Peter’s witness clarifies the Pauline canon because its effectiveness for doing so is grounded in an eyewitness’s “knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:8)—something, of course, the Pauline tradition cannot claim.17 It is striking to me that various recent efforts to survey the theological goods of the CE collection (e.g., Lockett, Moyise, Davids, Jobes) either omit the Johannine Epistles altogether or treat them as independent from the other CE, often in relationship with other Johannine writings (fourth Gospel and sometimes the Apocalypse). The typical substitution of “General” for “Catholic” to title these writings sometimes carries with it the connotation of “miscellanea”—i.e., a catalog of independent, non-Pauline letters without connection to one another, sometimes even including the so-called “deutero-Paulines” and Hebrews. Perhaps the variety of links between 2 Peter and 1 John (see Nienhuis) has the effect of adhering the Johannine Epistles to the CE collection as a whole, thereby preventing this kind of reductionism. 2 Peter’s admission into the biblical canon stipulates with Acts a complementary way of reading the extant Pauline canon with the Jerusalem Pillars, monitored by the theological agreements of the apostolic witness. 18 See Frey’s yet unpublished “Second Peter in New Perspective” and in particular his third lecture titled, ‘Faith, Knowledge, and the Call for Christian Virtues: Soteriology and Ethics in 2 Peter.’

20

reading 2 Peter as a correction of those who misread the Pauline witness by dividing a faith that saves from the practical virtues of covenant-faithfulness. 2 Peter maintains a reverent distance from Paul’s emphasis on pistis, which is rarely mentioned in the letter, to correct the opponent’s fideistic reading of Paul. One might suppose, then, that 2 Peter is read as scripture as a kind of bit player that comes off the bench at crucial moments in the church’s life to help the CE collection defend the Pauline gospel against those who use it to warrant an antinomian heresy.19

Observation 3. This reading of 2 Peter does not require an assessment of its particular origins as an authored composition. Frankly, my canonical approach to 2 Peter has no interest in challenging the current consensus about the details of the letter’s origins as a composition: its supposed fictive authorship, the late date of its composition, its linguistic or stylistic oddities, its literary dependence on Jude and the Apocalypse of Peter,20 its

19 2 Peter’s reception of Jude shows up in its polemic against false teachers in chapter 2, although applied differently to their disdainful rejection of the Lord’s return. Wrapped around 2 Peter 2 is its presentation of apocalyptic eschatology in chapter 3 along with the transfiguration tradition of chapter 1, both likely received from the Apocalypse of Peter, which offers an apostolic rebuttal of the teachers. Finally, the surprising mention of a Pauline epistolary canon at the end of the letter, while perhaps connected in some way to the false teachers, is more likely linked to the opening paranaesis of 2 Peter 1:3-11. In fact, Frey argues that this passage demands the production of virtuous works for eschatological salvation, much more in line with James than Paul. I would suggest this sensibility is true of the entire CE collection and so captures nicely the intracanonical dynamic between the two epistolary collections. Indeed, the effect of reading the CE collection, with its keen emphasis on saving works, is to secure the authority of the Pauline witness from those who, like the false teachers of 2 Peter, are ignorant and spiritually weak and so twist Pauline instruction to suit their own needs. 20 Contra Bauckham; for this now see W. Grunstaudl, Petrus Alexandrinus. Studien zum historischen und theologischen Ort des Zweiten Petrusbriefes (WUNT II/353, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2013); followed by J. Frey, Der Brief des Judas und der zweite Brief des Petrus (ThHK 15/II,

21

post-Petrine social location and the theological conception shaped by it, and so forth. I’ll leave criticism’s historical prolegomena to others, with the impression that most of the historian’s work remains indeterminate and very little of it is decisive in any case to a theological interpretation of 2 Peter as Christian scripture. Moreover, I think the atomism of criticism’s interests has the effect of silencing a book like 2 Peter rather than reading it with 1 Peter within the bounds of an entire collection and in relationship with other collections.

For this reason, I would rather that we shift the historical project away from the point of composition to the point of canonization to get a closer look at the church’s communicative intention for 2 Peter, since the letter’s point of origin as scripture seems more decisive both pneumatically and practically for a Christian congregation’s ongoing use of 2 Peter as scripture in worship, catechesis, and mission.

The social world that shaped the canonical process was unsettled precisely because of an epistemic conflict over competing visions of genuine Christianity.21 For this reason, 2 Peter’s reception of the apostle Peter, introduced by the Peter of Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015) and, especially, his Radboud Prestige Lectures, “Second Peter in New Perspective,” 2016. 21 In this regard, one notes the similarities between 2 Peter and the Pastoral Epistles (esp. 2 Timothy), not only in terms of their testimonial genre but also in terms of their canonical function. Both perform similar roles within their respective canonical collections—a point I seek to develop in my recent commentary on the Pauline Pastorals; R. W. Wall, 1&2 Timothy and Titus (Eerdmans, 2012), 32-36; cf. Childs, NT as Canon, 472. In particular, the portrait of a canonical Paul drawn by these letters, complemented by the Paul of Acts, underwrites not only the church’s reception of Pauline tradition Titus presents the revelation of Paul’s gospel as a decisive event of salvation’s history (Titus 1:3; cf. 1 Tim. 1:11-17) to secure the imperative of its transmission into the next generation and beyond (cf. 2 Tim. 1:12-13; 2:1-2). On this basis, the Pastorals’ Paul is the exemplary apostle, the personification of spiritual authority for the church’s future whose instruction of God’s word is canonical for the nations (so 1 Tim 2:3-7).

22

Acts, is pressed into service as the definitive eyewitness of Jesus’ transfiguration (1:17), including God’s audition of his divine majesty, and so knows full well the Christological foundation that secures the Christian faith and lifestyle (1:12). And it is this same canonical Peter who has the chops to announce and defend the apocalypse of God’s salvation at the end of history and so corrects the theodicy of all those who scoff at this truth (3:1-14), even today. And, again, it is Peter’s biblically-shaped apostolate that helps make crystal clear the enduring importance of Israel’s inspired prophets (1:19-21; cf. 1 Pet. 1:10-12) and even of the sometimes confusing letters of Paul (3:15-16). That is, if we allow 2 Peter to function typologically of the manner a genuinely biblical theology negotiates diverse apostolic traditions, we might then also allow a theological reading of scripture that includes Petrine and Pauline accounts of the gospel, even if in ways inclined toward Paul in complement ways. 2 Peter’s benedictory assumes an apostolic heritage complements, not supplants, Israel’s scripture, which seems an especially crucial point to score at those moments of intramural conflict when the church’s confessed faith appears confusing, contested, or even no longer viable to a growing number of disaffected Christians. It was so in the fullness of time when God’s Spirit providentially guided the church’s formation of its scripture precisely to engage in this kind of intellectual struggle.

Bible scholars tend to work on isolated bits of scripture, distinguishing each bit from others to explain and rank them in order of perceived importance. Yes, we are now able to see and explain more clearly and even appreciate the differences between biblical books; but it strikes me that modern criticism subverts what we might retrieve from a mutually-glossing apostolic whole

23

greater than the sum of their individual and diverse apostolic parts. Such is the nature of the church’s apostolicity and so also of the church’s scripture, which like the church that formed it, is marked out by its oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity.22 Robert W. Wall Seattle Pacific University & Seminary Seattle, WA USA 98119

22 Castelo and Wall, “Scripture and the Church.”