Baptism as Spiritual Warfare

UNIT 8

Baptism as Spiritual Warfare

31. Issues in 1 Peter 3:14–22

32. The Context of 1 Peter

33. Typology

34. The Baptism Element

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Identify some of the significant questions emerging from 1 Pet 3:14–22

• Discuss the interpretive issues in 1 Pet 3:14–22

Introduction

First Peter 3:14–22 is one of my favorite passages in the nt. I’ll admit, though, that it’s really odd, and frankly it’s avoided by many. I actually had the experience, when I was in graduate school, when my wife and I were looking for a church to attend in Madison, Wisconsin—we went to a particular church where the pastor was a graduate of a pretty well-known seminary. He did a great job. He was in 1 Peter. We went away for few weeks and came back, and I thought, providentially we showed up on the day when he’s going to go through 1 Peter 3:14–22. Again, it’s one of my favorites. And he actually walked into the pulpit and looked at us and said, “This passage is just too weird. I have no idea what it means, so we are just going to skip it,” and he did! He was serious. I mean, I’ve never seen that happen before. Needless to say, we didn’t go back.

First Peter 3:14–22 is not that difficult. It’s not really a conundrum if you have a certain background to it in your head. In other words, if you thought like the writer was thinking, the passage actually is parsable and understandable and actually has a significant theological payoff. Let’s just take a look at it. Beginning in verse 14, we will read it.

The Text

“But even if you might suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed. And do not be afraid of their intimidation or be disturbed, but set Christ apart as Lord in your hearts, always ready to make a defense to anyone who asks you for an accounting concerning the hope that is in you. But do so with courtesy and respect, having a good conscience, so that in the things in which you are slandered, the ones who malign your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if God wills it, than for doing evil.”

Here is the odd part, coming up in verse 18: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, in order that he could bring you to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, who were formerly disobedient, when the patience of God waited in the days of Noah, while an ark was being constructed, in which a few—that is, eight souls—were rescued through water. And also, corresponding to this, baptism now saves you, not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, with angels and authorities and powers having been subjected to him.”

Emerging Questions

This passage raises all sorts of questions. Fundamentally, how in the world are all these ideas connected? Who are the spirits in prison? Why bring up the flood? Why bring up Noah? What does it mean that these spirits were formerly disobedient? Why is baptism connected with these spirits? It just seems like a catchall, a blender passage where you have all sorts of seemingly disparate theological ideas and points from passages in the ot just thrown into one and then out comes 1 Peter 3:14–22—at least, this section from 18–22. How in the world are we going to parse this?

Fundamentally, one of the questions that always pops up is, what about the outcome? What does it mean that baptism saves? And why does it end up that Jesus is exalted above angels and powers and so on and so forth? It just doesn’t seem that any of this belongs together. But in Peter’s mind, it all belonged together, and that’s the end to which we have to work. How do these things fit together? What is Peter thinking?

The Context of 1 Peter

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Explain why the flood is significant for interpreting 1 Pet 3:18–22

• Explain the identity of the disobedient spirits

• Discuss how typology provides an interpretive key for this passage

Introduction

Most of the initial focus when approaching 1 Pet 3 is really the disobedient spirits. We are going to focus on verses 18–22 because that’s where all the odd stuff starts to happen in the passage.

There are a couple of options. A lot of commentators think that the spirits that were disobedient, that are mentioned in 1 Pet 3, were the people who died at the flood, the human beings. That’s a very common interpretation. I don’t think that’s the case, because of what Second Temple Jewish literature does, and really, how it creates the background to understand the passage as a whole.

The Disobedient Angels

In the Second Temple period (that is, the intertestamental period), when Jewish writers there were talking about disobedient spirits, they don’t use that phrase of the people who died. They use it of the disobedient angels, the disobedient sons of God of Gen 6:1–4. If you remember that story, this is when they transgressed heaven and earth, and we have the issue with the human women and the Nephilim and all that stuff.

In the Second Temple period, those were the disobedient spirits, or the disobedient angels. This is the way to go, because 2 Peter, the second epistle that bears Peter’s name, actually talks about this same episode, connected with the flood that we’re looking at in 1 Pet 3, and it refers to the angels that sinned. Even more specifically than that, the idea that these angels that sinned (or these “disobedient spirits,” to quote 1 Pet 3) are imprisoned nails down what Peter is thinking about, because in all of the Second Temple Jewish traditions, the angels that sinned, the disobedient spirits (referring back to the sons of God who sinned in Gen 6:1–4)—in all the traditions, they are put in prison, in an abyss; they are locked away, so to speak.

The Flood Background

When Peter uses this language in both of his epistles, that’s significant. It tells us what the identity is, or who the identity belongs to, as far as the disobedient spirits. They are not the spirits of the human dead, they are the spirits who sinned, back as a precursor to the flood, and participated in God’s reason for sending the flood. That backdrop actually leads us to the key to how to understand this passage. If you don’t have that backdrop in your head and you don’t understand what I am going to go into now, you will never understand what’s going on in 1 Pet 3.

Typology: The Interpretive Key

The key, and where this leads—the key to understanding the passage is a concept called typology. You may have heard of typology before, because it is something that is used in the nt: this ot person or place or event is a type of something that [would] come later, in the nt time. Typology—I think it’s best to compare it with prophecy. We think of prophecy as, The prophet says something back in an ot book, it’s a verbal utterance that gets written down, and then it has a fulfillment. Typology is a nonverbal prophecy. It’s not a statement that has a fulfillment; it’s an event or a person or some institution that has a nt future counterpart.

Illustration: Romans 5

For instance, I think the best way to illustrate it is Rom 5. Paul very clearly thinks of Adam as a type of Jesus. What Adam did, who he was, prefigures, foreshadows what’s going to happen with Jesus later on, so Adam is a type of Jesus, a type of Christ.

We have other instances in the ot that might be just as clear. Paul talks about the rock that yielded water in 1 Cor 10. That was a type of Christ. We have Passover being a type of the sacrifice on the cross, an event or an institution in the ot that prefigures or foreshadows something yet to come. It’s a nonverbal prophecy.

Jesus as the Second Enoch

Let’s take all that to 1 Pet 3. What is Peter thinking? Believe it or not, what Peter is thinking of is the person of Enoch from the ot. That is going to be his type for Jesus. He is thinking of Enoch, and specifically the Enoch story and the flood story as articulated and as written about in Second Temple Jewish literature—even more specifically, in the book of 1 Enoch. What it comes down to is, just as Jesus was the second Adam for Paul, Jesus is the second Enoch for Peter. Enoch is a foreshadowing—for Peter—of Jesus, and that is what is in his head when we get to 1 Pet 3.

Typology

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Discuss the use of noncanonical texts by biblical writers

• Explain the connection between 1 Enoch and Peter

Quotations in Second Temple Jewish Literature

You may have been surprised to hear me say that what Peter had in his head, what informed him as he wrote this portion of 1 Pet 3, was a book that’s not in the ot—frankly, a book that’s not in the Bible at all, but rather a book from the Second Temple Jewish period. This actually happens quite a bit in both Testaments. In the nt, they are often quoting either secular Greek poets, like Paul does a half a dozen times, or they are alluding to or quoting some other Jewish tradition that helps them articulate what it is they’re writing about.

In the ot, the biblical writers do the same thing. They may quote the Baal cycle. They may quote a piece of Egyptian literature. This is common, just as it is today—that we read things, and they help us talk about certain things or help us express an idea about Scripture, maybe in a sermon or something like that. The biblical writers were the same. They read lots of things, lots of things that were known to their audience, and that comes out in what they write on occasion in the nt. Just because Peter is doing this, it doesn’t mean that 1 Enoch should be part of the Bible or that it’s canonical or anything like that. It doesn’t mean that at all.

Peter and 1 Enoch

First Enoch is not a canonical book, and in my view shouldn’t be, but a book can be useful even if it’s not canonical, and that’s what we have going on here. It’s actually especially clear in the case of 1 and 2 Peter, because when those books talk about the disobedient spirits, or the angels that sinned, they have some very specific ties back to the book of 1 Enoch. Probably the most obvious, at least to scholars, is in 2 Pet 2:4, when Peter writes about the angels that sinned being in Tartarus. That’s what the Greek text says. Your English translation might have something like “Hades” or “hell” or something like that. But that term comes from the Second Temple period, the Hellenistic—the Greek—literature of the period, and it’s a specific link back to the Enochian idea.

An Overview of 1 Enoch 6–15

To understand what we’re talking about, I said you had to have this whole episode, as it’s recorded in 1 Enoch—specifically chapters 6–15—in your head, so that you know what Peter is tracking on, as to how he could see Enoch as a type, a foreshadowing, of Jesus. Briefly, in 1 Enoch 6–15, we have the story of the flood. We have the sons of God; again, they sin with the women there. In the Enoch story, they are called “Watchers,” or “disobedient spirits,” “disobedient angels”—that sort of thing, and they are imprisoned.

What happens is, after God puts them in the abyss, in this little, special compartment of the underworld where they’re going to be held, they somehow contact Enoch and say, “Look, God loves you. You’re special. You were taken to heaven before your time”—all this stuff drawing on the biblical story. “Could you please go to God and ask Him to let us go? We are repentant. We want to be forgiven. We know what we did was wrong. We know that what happened here is a threat to God’s plan, the messianic plan,” and how that works out is a longer story that we won’t get into at this point.

They are very apologetic in Enoch’s story, and so they say, “Please, can you go to God and ask Him to forgive us?” Enoch says, “Okay, I’ll do that,” and he does. He goes to the throne of God and tells Him how repentant the Watchers are, the angels that sinned.

God says, “No, I am not changing my mind. You need to go back to them. You need to go back to the spirits in prison and tell them that they are going to be there until the time of the end. They’re going to be there until the day of the Lord, and then they will be released, but only really so that they can be destroyed when everything else evil is going to get destroyed. I am not forgiving them.”

The Realm of the Dead

Here is the connection point. Enoch has to go to the realm of the dead, back to the abyss. He has to go and preach, deliver a message, to the spirits in prison, that basically announced to them—remind them that, “You are doomed. There is no forgiveness here. This is where you are going to stay until the time of your destruction.”

If we take that to 1 Pet 3, if you recall the passage, Jesus, when He dies, descends into the realm of the dead. He is dead, and He preaches to the spirits in prison. And what’s His message? We are not given the specifics of the message, but it isn’t hard to piece together, because 1 Pet 3 mentions the resurrection. The message is essentially to mimic the Enoch story from the Second Temple period—is, “You might think that I am dead. You might think that evil has won. You rebelled against God. You’re stuck here. You are angry. You are an opponent to what God wants to do. And now I am here in the realm of the dead with you. You might think that you’ve won, but guess what? In a few days, I am out of here. You haven’t won anything. In fact, you are going to watch me be victorious.”

Pointing to Christ

When Peter is thinking about this, this is actually why the passage ends the way it does, because when Jesus is resurrected, verse 22 tells us that He ascends to the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, having been resurrected. He is over, He is superior to, He is Lord of angels and authorities and powers, who are subjected to Him. When Peter is writing this third chapter of his epistle, trying to describe the impact of the death and the resurrection of Christ, his mind goes back to Enoch, the Enochian story that he was familiar with, and says, “You know what? The resurrection, and Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God, was another message delivered to the powers of darkness—that you might think you’ve won, but you have lost. You are still doomed. Your fate is still the same.”

Remaining Questions

For Peter, oddly enough to us, baptism somehow symbolizes or represents or echoes this pronouncement about the resurrection to the powers of darkness. We still have two unanswered questions. That’s one of them. Why baptism? What does that specifically mean? The other question is, what about this talk about baptism saving? What’s the connection of baptism to all this, and why the reference to salvation in connection with baptism? The key to this is to have all this in your head and connect these ideas about preaching to the spirits in prison, to the powers of darkness, that they are still losers.

The Baptism Element

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Explain the meaning of the two significant Greek words in 1 Peter 3:21

• Discuss how Peter views baptism

• Identify the role baptism plays in salvation

Introduction

Once we have the episode from 1 Enoch in our head like Peter had it in his head, it’s easy to understand how for Peter what Enoch did was a foreshadowing of what Jesus would do, just like for Paul what Adam did was a foreshadowing of what Jesus would do. But the issue of baptism isn’t clear on the surface. What possible link does it have to these other ideas? Our focus for answering that question is really going to be two terms in verse 21: that baptism is “an appeal to God”—“appeal,” there, is our focus word (one of them). It’s “an appeal to God for a good conscience”—“conscience” is our second focus word—“through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” We don’t want to lose sight of resurrection, either, in all this.

Appeal

“Appeal” is the Greek word eperōtēma, and it actually has alternative meanings in Greek literature. In other words, it could have been translated in a different way other than “an appeal.” BDAG, the famous BDAG lexicon of Greek literature, has one of the options for translating this term as “pledge,” and I think that one actually fits the context better, as we’ll see when we go to the second word, “conscience,” syneidēsis in Greek. So we have a pledge, and it has something to do with syneidēsis, the conscience.

Conscience

We typically see that word, “conscience,” and we think of the inner voice of right and wrong—but that is not what syneidēsis in this passage is really pointing to. Just like lots of other words, and really any other word, there is more than one semantic option for this word. It doesn’t always mean the little inner voice that tells you right from wrong. There is another option, and I think the best option here is to consider the word refers to the disposition of one’s loyalties. This is a usage that is found in other Greek literature. BDAG has examples. In fact, BDAG puts it this way, that syneidēsis can mean an “attentiveness to obligation,” or “conscientiousness.” So it is not just this inner voice telling you right from wrong; it’s conscientiousness. It’s this attentiveness to some obligation.

A Pledge of Loyalty

Now, if you put those two lemmas together, you put those two Greek terms together, we have conscientiousness combined with this pledge idea. And what Peter’s getting at here—in his view, baptism is like a pledge of loyalty. It is a signification; it’s a telegraphing of where your loyalties are. Of course, when we think of baptism, it’s easy to see how that would fit, because we are aligning ourselves with Jesus in baptism. So that’s not a difficult connection to make.

In the context, though, of the Enochian story, the Enochian typology, baptism essentially would telegraph whose side you’re on. You’re either on the side of Jesus, who has died and has risen again and is at the right hand of God, or you’re on the side of the fallen angels, the Watchers, the disobedient spirits, whose sin put the messianic promise in jeopardy, and whose offspring—the Nephilim, if you know the ot story—were actually bent on exterminating the people of Israel. You’ve got to pick sides here.

Baptism’s Role in Salvation

In Peter’s mind, when a person gets baptized, that signifies that they are aligned with Jesus, and Jesus is the one who delivers the message to the powers of darkness that, “You are still defeated.” Baptism becomes a really important idea in connection with the rest of these ideas. If you go back to verse 21 and you look at baptism as a pledge of loyalty to God, if you translate it that way in your mind (a pledge of loyalty to God on account of, or in response to, the resurrection of Jesus Christ), that pledge of loyalty (now we’re combining it with resurrection)—that clarifies what the role of baptism is in salvation.

It is an announcement of a decision, a loyalty decision that you have made in response to the resurrection of Jesus. It telegraphs whose side you are on. You align yourself by proxy with those who believe in the God of Israel, who believe in Yahweh in the ot, who were like Noah. They were faithful. Noah, at his time, was the only one, with his family. But you get the idea, this notion of alignment with “Which God do you serve?” In the nt the object of that devotion, that loyalty, is Jesus. Baptism shows everybody whose side you’re on.

Early Church Baptismal Formulas

That’s why—this is sort of a point of historical curiosity—early Christian baptismal formulas, the ones you’ll find in the early church fathers, included a renunciation of Satan and his angels. I will give you an example of this. Tertullian, a very famous church father, wrote this: “When entering the water, we make profession of the Christian faith in the words of its rule; we bear public testimony that we have renounced the devil, his pomp, and his angels.”

Baptism and Spiritual Warfare

The result of all this, as Peter is thinking about baptism there in 1 Peter—and look at the wider context. They’re suffering unjustly—all sorts of bad things happening to believers. He is trying to encourage them, and he says, “Look, it’s been this way from the beginning. You have had to choose sides.” He thinks of Enoch when he thinks of Jesus, and it helps him to illustrate what’s going on here. When Jesus died and went, He preached to the spirits in prison and said, “You are still defeated.” When you are baptized in the name of Jesus, that aligns you with that event. It is as if to say, when a person gets baptized, they are reminding the powers of darkness that they are still defeated. They are still doomed. They haven’t won anything. In fact, they have lost you. They have lost someone, because you have aligned yourself with Jesus. All this concatenation of ideas goes back to, essentially, spiritual warfare in the ot. Now we have spiritual warfare represented by the act of baptism in the nt.