The Main Message of 1 Peter
The Main Message of 1 Peter
This May, I completed the final course of my M.A. in linguistics, Greek Discourse Analysis. Discourse analysis is essentially the study of how people derive meaning from anything longer than a sentence. It is incredibly useful for biblical interpretation and translation. I worked for months on my final paper which examines how every piece of First Peter contributes to the message of the book. I started from the ground up, examining how each sentence contributes to its paragraph and building up to how the largest sections interact. The result of my analysis was a very precise set of summaries that approximate what the original audience would have taken away from 1 Peter as a whole.
The next several newsletters present highlights from what I found. Today’s post focuses on the big picture, describing how I formed the summaries and sharing my synthesis of 1 Peter.
The Cognitive Science of Summary Making
In his book Macrostructures: An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition (1980), Van Dijk presents the science behind how the brain generates summaries. He then posits that the most accurate way for researchers to approximate how people understand large sections of text is to follow the same rules that the brain follows and generate progressive summaries of the text. That is, the researcher can generate a summary of a sentence, then of a paragraph, then of a section, then of the entire work. The rules that he presents boil down to (1) synthesizing information into relevant abstractions, (2) generalizing information into relevant categories, and (3) deleting less relevant portions.
Here’s an example of how the brain does this from a situation most of us are familiar with: music.
When people in the West listen to music, they have the expectation that there will be lyrics that develop themes in the song and a refrain which contains the most important information in the song. They also expect that the title of the song will communicate a key aspect of the whole song. Thus, someone can accurately summarize a normal song by combining the title with the message in the refrain and a summary of the themes developed in the rest of the lyrics.
For example, following these general trends, it’s easy to say that the hymn “Amazing Grace” is a worshipful meditation on how God’s grace transforms and sustains those who trust in Him. The beauty, and problem, with the general rules for interpreting music, or any other type of communication, is that cultural insiders learn them through a lifetime of experiences and rarely discuss them. This creates a problem for biblical interpretation.
For the Bible, we only have comments on such assumptions from external ancient Greek and Roman handbooks on rhetoric. We in modernity often miss what were clear cues for cultural insiders. Van Dijk states that people must understand and apply these cultural assumptions to deduce an accurate summary of a text. Cultural context is an essential component of meaning. This is why I could spend a whole semester summarizing 1 Peter (and still feel like I need more time) but be comfortable reading and summarizing essays 5x longer in a bit over an hour.
My Summary of 1 Peter
For my final paper in Greek Discourse Analysis, I carefully studied the text in Greek, consumed Craig Keener’s entire commentary on 1 Peter, read multiple commentaries for difficult passages, and applied Van Dijk’s rules for generating summaries. This process resulted in the following ~150 word summary of the entire book:
I, Peter, greet the churches in the dispersion who are saved by the Godhead. Praise God for our eternal spiritual life in Christ, though trials necessary for future glory grieve you. This amazing salvation is grounds to hope in Christ’s revelation and mirror God’s holiness as blood-redeemed and Gospel-fathered children to practice faith, hope, and love. As you worship the rejected-yet-chosen cornerstone, Christ, you become God’s covenant people who declare His excellencies! Therefore, live honorably by submissively embracing your societal roles so that, after observing you, slanderous unbelievers may glorify God and perhaps be won over. Knowing suffering for Him is blessed, imitate Christ, who graciously suffered redemptively and was glorified. The summation of everything and God’s judgment are at hand: honor God with humble and loving mutual service, whether as an elder or laity, and resist the devil, knowing God will restore you. Through Silvanus, I have presented God’s grace and exhorted you. Stand firm in it! Greetings from Rome and greet one another.
Two brief comments on this summary:
First, the process of making the summary was much more gratifying than I imagined. I now have a solid grasp of how each verse in 1 Peter contributes to the message of the entire book. The truths of these verses are also much more deeply embedded in my head and my heart, frequently popping up in conversations I have with others and my personal times of prayer. I look forward to making similar summaries of other books of the Bible that I study and expect the process will yield the same fruit with those books.
Second, I hope to continue refining this summary as I lead a team in the Spoken English Bible to translate 1 Peter. Summaries like this are a great starting point for evaluating how well our translation communicates the message of 1 Peter. If people who listen to the whole translation come away with significantly different summaries of the material, then we know something has gone wrong.
Challenge for You
Just like I had two comments on the summary above, I have two challenges for you:
- Next time you are reading the Bible, try summarizing what you read in 30% of the words and then again in 10% of the words. You will undoubtably gain a deeper familiarity with the passage, the ability to explain it simply to others, and you may even be surprised at what you learn—I’ll share what surprised me in 1 Peter in later letters.
- If you are up for the challenge, read my summary closely and then read 1 Peter. Let me know if you think it should be summarized differently!