Tuesday, June 14, 2022

1 Peter 5:5 and Being Clothed with Humility

  

In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." (1 Pet 5:5 NRSV)

 

It is common for some Protestants to appeal to clothing imagery as if it is proof of imputation. However, clothing imagery in the Bible and other Jewish-Christian texts is an outward sign of an inward reality. On this, see, for e.g.:


Timo Eskola on the Enthronement of Enoch in 2 Enoch and Clothing Imagery Denoting Transformation, not Imputation





The Petrine text quoted above further refutes the misunderstanding of clothing imagery: Peter is hardly instructing Christians to have the mere appearance of humility; it is to be a inward reality, as even Protestant commentators note:


 

Humility. For both the older and the younger generation, humility ought to be the hallmark of Christian living. Peter writes, “All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another.” Is the word all restrictive or comprehensive? In the restrictive sense it applies to the younger men, so that verse 5a and 5b form one unit. But this combination leaves the rest of the sentence grammatically unrelated to the preceding. Most translators, therefore, have opted for the comprehensive meaning of all. They have combined verse 5b and 5c, so that 5a forms a separate sentence.

 

“Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another.” The Greek gives an interesting description of the act of putting on humility. The word clothe means to tie a piece of clothing to oneself. For example, slaves used to knot a white scarf or apron over their clothing to distinguish themselves from freemen. The suggestion is that Christians ought to tie humility to their conduct so that everyone is able to recognize them. Peter exhorts the readers to fasten humility to themselves once for all. In other words, it stays with them for the rest of their lives.

 

What is humility? Jesus invites his followers to learn humility from him. He invites all those who are weary and burdened to come to him and learn. For, he says, “I am gentle and humble in heart” (Matt. 11:29). Humility comes to expression when we consider others better than ourselves (Phil. 2:3). Humility is one of the Christian virtues, next to compassion, kindness, gentleness, and patience (Col. 3:12). Scripture also warns against false humility, which has the appearance of wisdom and demonstrates its worthlessness in a show of “self-imposed worship” (Col. 2:18, 23). And last, Peter instructs his readers how to live as Christians by telling them, among other things, to “be compassionate and humble” (3:8). (William Hendriksen, Exposition of the Epistles of Peter and the Epistle of Jude [New Testament Commentary 16; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1987], 196)

 

Peter’s directive to everyone counters the possibility of blind submission to authority just as it sabotages all attempts to exercise authority on the basis of status: “Clothe yourselves with humility.” In antiquity, what one wore was an index of one’s social position. “One’s garment announces what one is for another, not what one is in and for oneself.” That Peter would instruct everyone to wear the same garment, irrespective of its color or quality or texture, is itself already a startling negation of the social distinctions that among people in Roman antiquity would have been worn like uniforms in a parade.

 

But Peter goes much further, identifying the one garment to be worn by all as “humility”—or, better, given the relative rarity of the term he uses, as “that way of thinking, feeling, and acting associated with the lowly.” In his citation of Prov. 3:34 (“God opposes the arrogant but gives grace to the humble”), Peter will use a term more at home in the Greek Bible: ταπεινός (tapeinos, “humble, lowly,” used 77 times in the Greek Bible), but here he uses ταπεινοφροσύνη (tapeinophrosynē, used 7 times in the Greek Bible). Conscripting a word built on the root of one of his favored terms (φρονέω, phroneō, “think”), Peter thus concerns himself, and his audience, with a frame of mind or pattern of thinking that belongs to persons who have done with positioning themselves in the world’s social hierarchy in order to ensure that they are treated with appropriate esteem by their social underlings. When so much of life is directed by the compass of social stratification, with honor and shame the north and south poles, the consequences of this metamorphosis are practically infinite. The form of one’s greeting, such gestures as the averting of the eyes and the raising of the chin, the range of one’s information-sharing, the material and color of one’s clothing, the nature of economic exchange with others, one’s treatment before the courts, possibilities for friendship and matchmaking, invitations to share a meal and the quality of food to place before others, the obligation to truth-telling, assumptions about seating arrangements, who can speak to whom and under what conditions—the list of affected expectations and interactions is practically endless. All these forms of behavior are set aside in favor of a single disposition within the family of believers: to comport oneself in ways that esteem others.

 

In today’s world, care must be taken lest we assume that the opposite of humility is or can only be self-promotion or self-assertion. In the world of Peter, believers may have chafed at their marginal status out of a concern to claim the status that would have been theirs by heredity, and in the Christian communities to which Peter addresses himself some may well have (erroneously) positioned themselves above the rest. In such contexts, pride or arrogance is indeed sinful. Not least on account of Peter’s assumptions regarding the marginal status of most if not all of his audience, however, it is worth inquiring into how sin of this nature might manifest itself in marginalized persons and communities. In fact, among some, sin can take the form of a numbing of the self just as easily as, among others, it is displayed as self-assertion—as a failure to embrace one’s personhood rather than as a predisposition toward extending it at the expense of others. “To subordinate oneself,” we cannot forget, is the opposite of “withdrawal,” and is not a form of resignation. It is active engagement. A world build around social stratification works only if those who are of high status exhibit disrespect toward those of lower status and if those of low status esteem those of higher status. Manipulation of others and other forms of coercive behavior, moreover, can be performed by those who seem to be powerless as well as by those whose power is more visible and muscular. Seen in this way, “pride” is more pervasive than its popular identification with machismo or conceit might suggest. Although sin related to the honor-shame continuum might be expressed as machismo, it also has its shadowy sides, as persons at all points of the continuum of power and privilege refuse to embrace either only or fully their places as equals within the household of God.

 

Peter’s citation of Prov 3:34 provides further warrant (“for” or “because”) for his admonition to humility of thought and life. It does so by allowing the antithesis of God’s behavior toward the arrogant and the humble to demonstrate Peter’s desired outcome. “Arrogance” is a widely denounced vice—e.g., Sir 10:7: “Arrogance is hateful to the Lord and to humans.” In a Greco-Roman setting, at least, not the denouncing of “arrogance” but the opposition of “arrogance” to “humility,” as if these were the only available options, would have been troubling. It is one thing to urge against arrogance and ludicrous presumption but quite another to encourage among all persons slavish ways of thinking and acting in the world; “humble” describes the enslaved, after all, not the free. Favor (or “grace”) is due the esteemed, not the lowly. The lowly are the objects of antagonism, not the esteemed. But Christians are slaves, “slaves of God” (2:16), so “lowly” is an appropriate descriptor. What is more, if the apportioning of honor is God’s prerogative, then worldly conventions are neutralized; new canons are in place; the social order has been rewritten. (Joel B. Green, 1 Peter [The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007], 170-71)