The Connection between Knowing God and Our Own Works
The Apostle Peter also builds a connection between our own works and the revelation of Christ: rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever. Here, St. Peter brings up the corruptible/incorruptible theme, which in context, when taking both his epistles together, is referring to the life in Christ, the process of uniting ourselves to him, which ultimately is knowing God.
And again, we see St. Athanasius making the connection between our own works and participation in God, and like the apostle, using language of corruption and incorruption—the assumption is that Athanasius’s language comes directly from Peter and from his own experience as confirmation. Athanasius says, “God has...granted us by the grace of the Word to live a life according to God. But human beings, turning away from things eternal and by the counsel of the devil turning us towards things of corruption, were themselves the cause of corruption in death, being, as we already said, corruptible by nature but escaping their natural state by the grace of participation in the Word, had they remained good. Because of the Word present in them, even natural corruption did not come near them, just as Wisdom says, God created the human being for incorruptibility and an image of his own eternity; but by the envy of the devil, death entered into the world.
Indeed, once we start looking back at the epistles of the Apostle Peter, the foundational ideas of life in Christ and the resulting knowledge of God are all there, just not in the same clarified form as we see in the Cappadocians, but it is helpful to look back to the scriptural sources that fathers like St. Athanasius and St. Basil relied upon. Peter’s first epistle seems to set the stage for the second. He begins to take us to the doorstep of a life in God, saying, For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.
Then, he makes an important point, one which we can so easily miss if thinking of earth and heaven in separated terms: I who am a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that will be revealed. If Peter is already a partaker of that glory, clearly, he does not conceive life in Christ and partaking of his glory as something reserved only for the “afterlife”. And to properly prepare us for the beginning of his next epistle and the monumental step he takes in the first verses of it, he ends his first epistle with this word: Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time. No knowledge of God is possible without humility.
Comments
Post a Comment