Peter the Stoic

Propers: The Second Sunday of Advent, AD 2023 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

“Fire and Ice” is a famous little ditty by Robert Frost, though one might be forgiven for confusing it with this morning’s reading from the Second Epistle of Peter:

The heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it … all these things are to be dissolved in this way … the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire, but … we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

If you were to ask people, in a random poll, how the Bible says the world will end, they would probably point to something like this. They might not be able to cite 2 Peter, but a sudden, vast conflagration is the notion in our popular imagination. This, I suspect, is a product of the Cold War more than anything else. I was raised with the certainty that it was only a matter of time until the Soviets dropped the bomb.

Such pre-apocalypticism, plus the reëmergence of the modern state of Israel, turned twentieth century America into a hotbed of fundamentalism. We were halfway there already. But that heady combination, of nuclear weapons and Scofield Bibles, pushed us right over the edge. We started to look for Jesus riding in on a mushroom cloud.

It might come as a surprise, then, to hear that this idea—that the world as we know it would end in a dissolving wave of celestial fire—is in fact a minority position within the witness of the New Testament. Historically, Christians have not been overly eager for Armageddon. Last week’s sermon, you may recall, laid out all the ways in which the early Church believed the world had ended: the Crucifixion for John, the Ascension for Hebrews, Pentecost for Luke, the loss of the Temple for Matthew, and so on.

For them, the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus had now ended the old age and order of things in order to birth all anew. The victory of Christ had been accomplished in eternity. The end of the world was completed, in all of the ways that mattered, even if revealed events still had to spool out here below, in this fallen realm of time and space.

The Second Epistle of Peter probably was not written by St Peter. Scholars date it anywhere from AD 60 to AD 150, with its authenticity doubted as early as the second century. Origen thought it spurious, and the letter only made it into the canon with some difficulty. Yet the notion that 2 Peter might have an author other than Simon Peter ought neither to shock nor surprise us. This was actually quite common in the world of Jesus’ day, that a religious work would claim to be written by an earlier and prominent religious authority.

We call this pseudepigrapha, and there are some amazing pseudepigraphal works supposedly penned by everyone from Ezra to Adam and Eve. This wasn’t fraud, or even falsehood, but a literary trope, a genre of writing. When modern authors tell a story from King Arthur’s point of view, nobody expects readers a couple generations down the line to believe that Arthur himself wrote it.

One of the reasons to doubt the apostolic authorship of 2 Peter is its Stoicism. And I mean that literally. 2 Peter is Stoic in a formal philosophical sense. Stoicism originated about 300 years before Jesus, and grew to popularity under such masters as Seneca, Epictetus, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. There’s a lot that we could say about Stoic philosophy and its relationship to Christianity, but today I want to focus on the cosmos, on the Stoic understanding of our universe.

God, for the Stoics, was all in all. In the beginning, nothing existed that was not Him, and He and all there was burned as a perfect, white-hot, living fire. But the universe as we know it expanded, and as it grew, it cooled. The perfect tension binding everything to God relaxed, and so the cosmos emanated, precipitated, out from God. The perfect fire coagulated into fire as we know it, and that into air, and air into water, and water into earth, the basic elements of life. From the One came the many.

Yet even as the world differentiated itself from God—as it was, in a sense, created, while still being grounded in Him—it yet retained within itself the principle of reason, the divine purpose and plan that permeates all things. This they called the Logos, the Word of God. The Logos is in everything, but especially human beings, who are to live according to the Word. The primal undifferentiated divine substance also remained, for Stoics do not distinguish matter from spirit, binding the cosmos together, giving form and motion and life to all things. This they called the Pneuma, the Breath and the Spirit of God.

And so the Word of God and the Spirit of God create and sustain all reality, unifying and permeating everything, perfect in divinity even within crude matter. God, Word, and Spirit: this should all sound rather familiar to Christians who speak of Trinity.

Eventually the expanded universe will begin to retract, to return to its source, and as it does so it will heat up once again. The elements will dissolve back one into another, and finally into that divine fire, which does not consume, does not destroy, but purifies and perfects. This the Stoics termed ekpyrosis—some say the world will end in fire—that God at the last shall be all in all. Humanity, and all of Creation, returns to Him from whom we came.

After that, the Stoics believed, the cycle starts over again, an endless rhythm of creation, of emanation and restoration, of fallenness and forgiveness, of death and resurrection.

Now, St Simon Peter indeed was many things: a fisherman; a student of John the Baptist; an Apostle of Jesus Christ; a bishop, as we term him, of Rome; and ultimately a martyr. We don’t know how literate he may or may not have been. Even if he couldn’t write, he had secretaries such as John Mark to take dictation. Yet one thing I’m sure he was not, was a Greco-Roman philosopher. He wasn’t a Stoic. And the author of 2 Peter certainly seems to be, at least in part.

2 Peter uses the physics of its day, the Stoic cosmology of its day, to speak of Christian hope as regards the destiny of our world. And honestly, the spooky bit is just how similar it sounds to modern astrophysics: an expanding universe birthed in celestial light and fire, cooling until elements appear, expanding unto heat death or snapping back to the Big Bang in a Big Crunch. Scientists don’t always have the most expressive words.

Boil it down, and here’s what you get. The author of 2 Peter is responding to those who say, “So what? So Jesus came and went. What difference did He make? The world still turns and the sun still burns and I still have to get up, brush my teeth, and pay my taxes.” To this 2 Peter proclaims: Have faith. We have no conception of the timeline of the universe. Millennia to us is but a single day to God. Ultimately, all our petty concerns and worldly woes will melt away, dissolving into the fire of the Spirit, the fire of God’s love.

We are going to a better world. We are going back to God. So have peace. Live uprightly. Fret not about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. The destiny of all shall come as surely as the tide. The patience of God is a blessing. The patience of God is a mercy. Regard His slowness as salvation, though it can only be said to be slow from our perspective. In truth, God is never slow when it comes to fulfilling His promise. He fulfills it even now.

What difference did Jesus make? All the difference in the world, and below it, and above it. Some day the world shall end in fire, in the Word and the Spirit of God. This is not a threat, not a terror, but comfort for those who believe, peace for those who wait, and joy to all who hear the Word and exult in the love of the Spirit. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Such is the Evangelion, the heralding of Good News, which gathers the whole of everything back to the bosom of God.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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