e. Peace to all who are in Christ (5:14b)

e. Peace to all who are in Christ (5:14b)

14b. Peace to all of you that are in Christ is what these believers needed—peace within for troubled minds and hearts, and peace without when God grants them rest from their sufferings (cf. ‘peace’ in 1:2b). To be in Christ is to be united with him for all the benefits of redemption: it is the status of all true believers as soon as they have become Christians, and they remain in Christ for all eternity.

APPENDIX

CHRIST PREACHING THROUGH NOAH: 1 PETER 3:19–20 IN THE LIGHT OF DOMINANT THEMES IN JEWISH LITERATURE

Near the end of chapter 3 in this first letter, Peter writes,

¹⁸For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; ¹⁹in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, ²⁰who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.

The difficulties of this passage have given rise to a number of interpretations, especially of the meaning of verse 19, in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison.

The issues where commentators differ, as already stated on pp. 165f., are at least these:

Among all the possible answers to those questions, the following five views have been the most commonly held (the italicized words indicate the identity of ‘the spirits in prison’ in each view):

View 1: When Noah was building the ark, Christ ‘in spirit’ was in Noah preaching repentance and righteousness through him to unbelievers who were on the earth then but are now ‘spirits in prison’ (people in hell).

View 2: After Christ died, he went and preached to people in hell, offering them a second chance of salvation.

View 3: After Christ died, he went and preached to people in hell, proclaiming to them that he had triumphed over them and their condemnation was final.

View 4: After Christ died, he proclaimed release to people who had repented just before they died in the flood, and led them out of their imprisonment (in Purgatory) into heaven.

View 5: After Christ died (or: after he rose but before he ascended into heaven), he travelled to hell and proclaimed triumph over the fallen angels who had sinned by marrying human women before the flood.

There are other views than these but they are usually different combinations of the details listed above (offering salvation to unbelieving people and angels, or proclaiming triumph over sinners and complete redemption to believers, etc.). For our purposes this list is sufficient.

The following discussion will argue for View 1 (Christ preaching through Noah when the ark was being built), a view which has received the support of very few commentaries, and which is frequently dismissed in discussions of this passage because Augustine, who first proposed it, took in prison to refer to ‘the darkness of ignorance’ in which unbelievers lived—obviously a metaphorical (or ‘allegorical’, to use Dalton’s term) sense of ‘prison’ not intended by Peter. But this sense of ‘in prison’ is by no means essential to the view that Christ was preaching at the time of Noah, and a more common understanding (‘spirits in hell’) is certainly consistent with it (see below). The other common objection to this view is that it has no clear relationship to the context, but it will be argued that on closer inspection the context lends more support to this view than perhaps to any of the others.

Although most of the views mentioned above depend on backgrounds familiar to readers of the Bible generally, a word of explanation should perhaps be given regarding View 5. This view argues that certain extra-biblical Jewish traditions, especially the tradition in 1 Enoch about Enoch going and proclaiming a message of condemnation to disobedient angels, were well known to Peter’s readers. Therefore, when Peter said that Christ went and preached to the ‘spirits in prison’, his readers would immediately have recognized the allusion to 1 Enoch and known that Peter was portraying Christ as a ‘second Enoch’ who in a far greater way ‘went and proclaimed’ his victory over fallen angels, and announced to them, as had Enoch long before, that they were eternally condemned for their sin. The fact that they ‘formerly disobeyed’ is then understood to refer to the sin of angels who married human wives in Genesis 6:2, 4, a story well-attested in extra-biblical literature.

Dalton has performed a valuable service in his careful tracing of the history of different views, and in his gracious evaluation of those views which he rejects. Because his extensive arguments have convinced many scholars from a wide spectrum of theological positions, somewhat more interaction in the subsequent discussion will be with Dalton’s argument.

I shall consider the three questions mentioned above in the order given:

I. WHO ARE THE ‘SPIRITS IN PRISON’?

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