Elect Exiles

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia…

— 1 Peter 1:1

Why Start Here?

Most Bible studies of Peter’s first letter begin with its famous opening passage on the living hope, or with its treatment of suffering, or with its remarkable baptism text at the end of chapter three. All of these are right to be drawn forward. They are among the richest passages in the New Testament. But this study will begin somewhere less obvious. It will begin with the address itself — the two verses that stand at the head of the letter and name its writer, its recipients, and its theme.

There is a reason for this. Every letter has a sender, a recipient, and a situation, and the letter cannot be read well until all three are in view. If we simply open Peter’s first letter and dive into the doxology of chapter one, we will miss what he is doing. We will not understand who he is writing to, or why, or what shape the hardship they are facing has taken. We will not understand why the letter says what it says about suffering, or about submission, or about baptism, or about the end of all things. All of these will be easier to see clearly once we have taken the time to understand the people Peter was writing for.

More than that, the address itself contains the theme of the whole letter. Elect exiles. Two words, set side by side with deliberate tension, and the rest of the letter flows from them. The Christians Peter writes to are the elect — chosen, beloved, foreknown by God, set apart by His Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ. They are also exiles — displaced, marginal, strangers in a culture that does not know them and often does not like them. These two truths are held together. The Christian is not the elect despite being an exile. The Christian is an exile because he is elect. Once we see how tightly these two truths belong together, the whole letter opens up.

This session will do the work of introduction. We will meet the apostle Peter. We will look at the five Roman provinces to which he writes and the mixed Jewish-Gentile congregations scattered across them. We will see what the situation of these believers actually was — not the empire-wide persecutions that would come later under different emperors, but the steady social hostility, slander, and economic pressure that comes from being known as a Christian in a culture that is not. We will situate the letter in its most likely time and place, sometime in the early 60s of the first century, written probably from Rome just before Peter’s own martyrdom. And we will draw out the theological theme that runs through all 105 verses of the letter — the tension of being chosen by God and displaced in the world, and the hope that sustains Christians who live in that tension. Only then will we open the letter proper and follow Peter into what he has to say to his suffering flock.

The Apostle Peter

We know Peter better than we know almost any other figure in the New Testament. The Gospels give us his story in detail. He is the fisherman Jesus called from his nets at the Sea of Galilee. He is the one who walked on the water and then sank. He is the one who confessed, at Caesarea Philippi, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. He is the one who, when Jesus spoke of going to Jerusalem to suffer and die, pulled the Lord aside and tried to talk Him out of it, and received the sharpest rebuke Jesus ever gave a disciple. He is the one who was at the Transfiguration and wanted to build three tents. He is the one who promised he would never deny the Lord and then denied him three times before the cock crowed. He is the one to whom the risen Christ came after the resurrection, asking three times, do you love me.

This is the man who writes this letter. And knowing his story matters, because the Peter of this letter is not the Peter of the Gospels. The impulsive, uneven, sometimes-brave and sometimes-terrified disciple has become something else. The voice in this letter is steady. It is pastoral. It is shaped by suffering, tempered by grace, confident in the Gospel it proclaims. The man who once drew a sword to defend Jesus now writes calmly to his flock about how to receive suffering without returning evil for evil. The man who once denied his Lord now writes urgently about the preciousness of Christ and the glory that will be revealed. The man who fled into hiding the night of the arrest now writes from Rome, facing his own imminent death, and tells his scattered readers to commit their souls to a faithful Creator.

What made the difference? The risen Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Peter who emerges from the book of Acts preaching at Pentecost, standing before the Sanhedrin, going to the Gentiles at the house of Cornelius — this is a transformed Peter. And the years between that Peter and the Peter of this letter only deepened the transformation. Decades of pastoral ministry, of travel through the provinces, of witnessing the spread of the Gospel and the suffering of its messengers, have produced in the apostle a voice that still bears the marks of his story but has become something his younger self could not have imagined.

When you read this letter, read it with Peter’s whole story in view. The counsel to submit, to endure suffering without retaliation, to entrust ourselves to a faithful Creator — this is not abstract teaching from a remote philosopher. This is the testimony of a man who once failed at every one of these and has been made new. He knows what he is calling his readers to, because he has lived it. He knows the cost of suffering for the name of Christ, because he is about to pay that cost himself.

A Note on Authorship

Some modern scholars have questioned whether Peter himself wrote this letter. The Greek, they point out, is polished, not the Greek one might expect from a Galilean fisherman. The theological vocabulary is rich, and the echoes of Pauline thinking are notable. The question is legitimate to raise, and it has received careful answers over the centuries.

The traditional answer is that Peter, as he tells us at the end of the letter, wrote through Silvanus — the same Silas who had traveled with Paul and who was a skilled bilingual secretary capable of producing the kind of Greek this letter displays. The use of a secretary was standard practice in the ancient world, and the apostle would have dictated the substance while Silvanus rendered it into literary Greek. The letter’s content, theology, and voice are Peter’s; the polish is Silvanus’s contribution. This explanation has satisfied most readers across the centuries and is the position this study will assume.

More importantly, the letter identifies its author at its opening as Peter, and the early Church received it as such. The canonical status of First Peter has never been seriously contested. Whatever questions modern scholarship has raised, the letter comes to us as the apostle Peter’s word to the Church, and we will receive it as the apostolic witness it claims to be.

The Audience

Peter addresses his letter to those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion, scattered across five Roman provinces: Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. These names may mean little to modern readers, but they map a significant region. They cover essentially the whole of what we would now call northern, central, and western Turkey — an area of well over a hundred thousand square miles, including dozens of cities and untold numbers of small towns and villages.

The order in which Peter names the provinces is interesting. It is not geographical proximity alone; the order seems to suggest the route a messenger might take if carrying the letter by land, starting in Pontus on the Black Sea coast, moving south through Galatia and Cappadocia, then west across to the province of Asia on the Aegean coast, and back north through Bithynia. This is a large region to cover, and the letter would have been read and re-read in congregation after congregation over months and perhaps years as it made its circuit.

Mixed Congregations

The congregations Peter writes to are mixed — Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians together. By the time of this letter, the majority seem to have been Gentile converts, though with a significant Jewish-Christian presence and heavy influence from the Jewish Scriptures. Peter’s letter assumes a readership familiar with the Old Testament. He quotes from and alludes to it constantly — Isaiah, the Psalms, the prophets, the Torah. His readers know this material, even if many of them came to it through their catechesis as Gentile converts rather than through a childhood in the synagogue.

This mixed character is worth noting because it shapes how we hear the letter. When Peter calls his readers a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession — language drawn directly from Exodus — he is applying to a largely Gentile body of believers the language once reserved for Israel. This is a deliberate theological move, and it is one of the most important in the letter. The Church, gathered from every nation, has become the new people of God. The identity once given to Israel at Sinai is now given to Christians scattered across the Roman provinces. We will come back to this theme when we reach chapter two.

The Word Dispersion

Peter’s use of the word Dispersion (in Greek, diaspora) deserves a pause. This is a technical term in Jewish literature. It refers to the Jewish people scattered outside the land of Israel, living as minority communities across the ancient world — in Egypt, in Syria, in Asia Minor, in Rome. The Dispersion was a real phenomenon, and Jews living in it developed patterns of faithfulness that allowed them to preserve their identity across centuries in foreign cultures.

Peter takes this word and applies it to the Christian Church. His readers, whether ethnically Jewish or Gentile, are now the Dispersion. They are the scattered people of God, living as minorities in a world that does not share their faith. They have patterns of faithfulness to develop, too, and Peter’s letter is partly a guide to developing them. The word Dispersion is not incidental; it is programmatic. The Christian in the world, Peter is telling us, is a member of the Dispersion — scattered, minority, visibly different, faithful under pressure.

This is a useful frame for modern Western Christians to recover. We have had centuries in which our faith was the majority religion in many places, and the patterns of a Christianity that assumed cultural dominance have shaped our imagination. Peter’s first readers did not have that assumption, and increasingly, neither do we. Whatever the twenty-first century holds for the Church in the West, we will serve our congregations well by recovering the Dispersion frame. We are strangers in a land that is not our home. We have patterns of faithfulness to develop. Peter knows something about this, and he has written for exactly our situation.

The Situation

Running through Peter’s letter like a dark thread is the reality of suffering. The readers are suffering. The letter presupposes it. Chapter one speaks of trials that have grieved them. Chapter two speaks of being accused and slandered, of receiving unjust treatment. Chapter three speaks of suffering for righteousness’ sake, of being prepared to give an answer to those who ask about the hope within them, of following Christ’s example of suffering without retaliation. Chapter four speaks of the fiery trial that has come upon them, of sharing Christ’s sufferings, of being reviled for the name of Christ. Chapter five speaks of resisting the devil, of the reality of suffering endured by their brethren throughout the world, of entrusting themselves to God through it all.

What kind of suffering was this? It is important to be careful here. This letter was not written during one of the great imperial persecutions that would later mark the history of the early Church. It was written before Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome in A.D. 64 took on its most vicious form, and long before the later imperial measures against Christianity, which culminated in the empire-wide persecutions under Decius and Diocletian. The kind of suffering Peter describes is different from the arena and the flames that would come in later centuries.

The suffering of Peter’s readers was primarily social. They were neighbors and shopkeepers and slaves and wives and craftsmen who had become followers of Jesus Christ in a world that found their faith baffling and, increasingly, offensive. Their households had been disrupted — sometimes a wife had become a believer while her husband had not, or a slave had been baptized in a household that did not know Christ. Their work relationships had become strained. They were accused of being secretive, of holding bizarre rituals, of refusing the civic religious duties that were expected of good Roman subjects. They were slandered as atheists because they would not worship the gods of their city. They were suspected of disloyalty because their ultimate allegiance was given to a Galilean carpenter who had been executed by a Roman prefect.

This social pressure took concrete forms. A Christian craftsman might lose his commissions. A Christian slave might be treated more harshly by his master. A Christian wife might face ostracism from her husband’s circle or her neighborhood. A Christian free man might find that the offices of civic life were no longer open to him. None of this was formal legal persecution in the later sense. All of it was real, and all of it weighed on the daily lives of Peter’s readers in ways that made faithfulness costly.

For modern Western Christians, this situation is not remote. We have not typically faced what our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world face — the arena of persecution, imprisonment for faith, violent martyrdom. But we increasingly face what Peter’s readers faced — the social cost of being known as a Christian in a culture that finds our faith strange at best and threatening at worst. The loss of professional standing for holding Christian convictions. The ostracism in certain social settings. The slander of being called bigoted or ignorant or regressive for believing what Christians have always believed. The economic pressure that attaches to visible faithfulness in some industries. Peter’s letter was written for this situation. His readers’ circumstances are closer to ours than our grandparents’ circumstances were.

Suffering and Election

Peter does not address the suffering of his readers as a problem to be explained away. He does not tell them that true faith will make their troubles disappear. He does not suggest that if they are suffering, something must be wrong with their walk with the Lord. Instead, he gives them a deeper framework for what suffering means in the Christian life. Their suffering is part of what it means to be elect exiles. The suffering is not a sign that God has abandoned them. It is, in a certain sense, the mark of the calling they have received.

This is a radically different framework from the one many Christians bring to suffering today. Much of modern Western Christianity has absorbed a view in which the Christian life should basically work, and if it doesn’t, something has gone wrong. Peter’s view is different. The Christian life, lived in a fallen world, involves suffering as a normal feature. The world the believer lives in does not belong to the believer, and the displacement that faith produces has real costs. These costs are not failures of faith; they are faith’s ordinary inheritance until the coming of the Lord. Once we see this, we can receive Peter’s letter as the deep encouragement he meant it to be.

The Date and Setting

Most careful interpreters place the writing of First Peter in the early to mid-60s of the first century A.D. The letter does not date itself precisely, but several indicators converge on this period.

Peter, at the end of the letter, sends greetings from someone he calls she who is at Babylon. Babylon was a well-known code name in early Christian usage for the city of Rome — the great imperial capital, the new Babylon, the center of worldly power that stood in contrast to the city of God. Revelation uses the same code later in the century. Peter’s use of Babylon places him in Rome at the time of writing.

We also know, from Church tradition, from early witnesses such as Clement of Rome, and from the Lord’s own word to Peter in John 21:18–19, that Peter’s life ended in Rome by martyrdom, probably during Nero’s persecution in the aftermath of the great fire of 64. The tradition is that Peter was crucified upside down, refusing to be executed in the same manner as his Lord. If this is correct, Peter’s letter was written sometime before this martyrdom, in the shadow of it, by an apostle who must have known his time was growing short.

This is worth sitting with. Peter writes this letter as a dying man. Not in the sense of one who is ill or weak in body, but in the sense of one whose remaining time is short and who knows it. The steadiness of the letter’s tone, the care of its pastoral instruction, the urgency of its hope in the coming of the Lord — all of this is the testimony of an apostle preparing to leave his flock. He wants them to be grounded. He wants them to know the Gospel deeply. He wants them to be able to endure when he is no longer around to encourage them. This is the apostolic voice in its mature form, and the letter carries the weight of a last testament.

The Theme: Elect Exiles

Now we come to what will be the interpretive key for the whole study. Peter’s opening describes his readers with two words held in deliberate tension: elect and exiles. Both are present in the very first verse, and both receive careful theological development in the second. Let us look at each in turn, and then see how they fit together.

Elect

The word elect means chosen. It is one of the most important words in the theological vocabulary of the Bible. It is the word used of Israel, whom the Lord chose out of all the peoples of the earth to be His own possession. It is the word used of the Messiah, the Lord’s chosen Servant. And it is the word Peter uses here of the Christians scattered across Asia Minor. They are chosen. They are the elect.

Peter expands the meaning of this election in verse 2. They are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with His blood. Each phrase matters.

Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. Their election is grounded in the eternal knowledge and purpose of the Father. It did not begin when they believed. It did not begin when they were baptized. It did not begin when Peter came to their region. It is older than their coming to faith. It reaches back into eternity, into the purposes of the Father from before the foundation of the world. This is a deeply comforting truth for believers under pressure. Their standing with God is not a recent arrangement that might be easily undone. It is grounded in the eternal decision of the Father to call them to Himself in Christ.

In the sanctification of the Spirit. Their election is carried out in history through the work of the Holy Spirit, who sets them apart for God. The Spirit is the one who has made them holy in the sense of separated — marked off as belonging to God. This sanctification is not first the fruit of their own effort; it is the operative work of the Spirit through the Word and the sacraments, by which they have been made new. The new birth Peter will describe in the next section is precisely this work.

For obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with His blood. The purpose of their election is twofold: they are chosen for obedience — for the new life lived in conformity with Christ’s lordship — and for the cleansing of His blood, the sacrificial language recalling the Day of Atonement and the whole Old Testament system of sacrificial cleansing. The election that begins in the Father’s eternal purpose and is carried out in the Spirit’s sanctifying work reaches its purpose in a life lived under Christ’s lordship and covered by His atoning blood. This is the whole Gospel in miniature, compressed into a single verse of greeting.

Exiles

But this same people, chosen of God, reconciled through Christ’s blood, set apart by the Spirit — is described by Peter with another word. They are exiles. The Greek word suggests sojourners, resident aliens, those living in a place that is not their own. The word does not describe their spiritual condition; it describes their social situation. They are in the world but they do not belong to it. Their citizenship, to borrow Paul’s language from elsewhere, is in heaven. Their true homeland is the kingdom of God that will be revealed at the coming of Christ. In the meantime, they live as strangers in the world that presently is.

This exile status is not optional for the Christian. It is not a spiritual posture some Christians adopt while others get to feel at home in the world. It is the structural condition of the Christian life as long as we are in this age. The world has its own values, its own loyalties, its own idols, its own priorities. The Christian, having been given a different citizenship and oriented toward a different kingdom, cannot simply settle into the world without betraying the faith he has received. He lives in the world. He works in it, raises his family in it, serves his neighbors in it, uses its goods, obeys its rightful authorities. But he does so as a sojourner, with his heart set on another country.

This is the honest diagnosis of the Christian condition. It does not deny the goods of this life. It does not treat the present world as worthless. It does not commend withdrawal from ordinary vocations and responsibilities. Peter’s whole letter will move through ordinary life with care — marriage, slavery, citizenship, work, the life of the congregation. He is not calling his readers out of the world. He is calling them to live in the world as the people who belong to another. The exile frame does not empty daily life; it relocates it. The Christian’s life in the world is real, and it matters, but it is the life of a stranger in a land not his own.

The Two Held Together

Here is where Peter’s genius as a pastor shows. He does not separate these two realities. He does not tell his readers to rejoice in being elect while also telling them to despair at being exiles. He does not treat the election as the good news that offsets the bad news of their suffering. He holds the two tightly together, as two sides of one calling.

Their exile is the form their election takes. The fact that they do not belong to the world is precisely because they belong to God. The social displacement they experience is the outward sign of the inward reality of their election. If they were not chosen, they would not be strangers. If they did not belong to another kingdom, this one would not find them strange. Their suffering and their election are not competing truths; they are the same truth seen from two angles.

This reframe changes everything. Suffering no longer becomes a sign that something has gone wrong. Suffering becomes, in some real sense, the visible mark of the invisible election. The suffering Christian is not farther from God because he is suffering. He is, in a certain sense, exactly where faithful Christians have always been — as strangers in the world, bearing the cost of an identity that does not fit. This is not a masochistic celebration of suffering. Peter will be clear that suffering, when it comes, is not welcome in itself. But suffering for the name of Christ is not a catastrophe; it is a participation in the calling that has been given.

A caution belongs here. Suffering for Christ is a consequence of bearing His name in a hostile world, not independent proof of election. The Christian does not search his hardships to learn whether he is chosen. His assurance rests in God’s promise in Christ, given to him in Word and Sacrament.

This is the theological move that will sustain Peter’s readers. And it is the move that will sustain us, as we find ourselves increasingly in circumstances where our faith costs us something. We are not abandoned. We are elect. And our exile status is not a failure of our election; it is its expression. The coming of the Lord will resolve everything. In the meantime, we live where we have always lived — as strangers in a land not our own, kept by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

What This Letter Has Meant to Lutherans

It is worth pausing briefly to note how First Peter has been received in the Lutheran tradition. Unlike James, which Luther had famous reservations about in his 1522 Preface, First Peter is among the books Luther most highly prized. He called it one of the noblest books of the New Testament, ranking it with John’s Gospel and Paul’s epistles as a book that shows Christ clearly and preaches the Gospel without obscurity. For Luther, First Peter belonged with the books a Christian could read to learn everything necessary for salvation.

There are several reasons for Luther’s high regard. First, the letter is pervasively Christological. Peter’s Christ is not an abstract figure; he is concrete, crucified, risen, glorified, coming again. The Christian life in this letter is organized around the person and work of Christ from beginning to end. Second, the letter has a rich doctrine of baptism, culminating in the remarkable statement in chapter three that baptism now saves you. For Luther, who put such weight on the efficacy of the sacraments as means of grace, this text was a treasure. Third, the letter’s treatment of vocation — the Christian’s calling in marriage, work, and civic life — gives Lutheran two-kingdoms theology some of its richest biblical material.

Over the centuries of Lutheran piety, First Peter has been a steady source of comfort for the suffering believer, a guide for the Christian in ordinary vocations, and a handbook for baptismal spirituality. Its emphasis on the already-and-not-yet of salvation — kept by God’s power for a salvation ready to be revealed — has shaped Lutheran hymnody, liturgy, and devotion. To read First Peter as a confessional Lutheran is to find oneself in deeply familiar territory, in a letter the tradition has loved and used for five hundred years.

How We Will Read First Peter

With the groundwork laid, we can set out the interpretive framework for this study. Three commitments will guide us across the ten sessions.

First: We Will Read First Peter as Pastoral Letter, Not Systematic Theology

First Peter is, like all New Testament epistles, a letter written to a specific situation. Peter is a pastor. His readers are a real congregation facing real pressure. His theological teaching is in the service of their endurance and faithfulness, not a stand-alone system for detached analysis. We will read him accordingly. We will ask what the letter’s words would have meant to its original hearers before we ask what they mean for us. We will let his pastoral voice shape our own reading, rather than reducing his teaching to abstract doctrine. The theological richness of the letter is real, but it is always in the service of Christian endurance in the world.

Second: We Will Let Baptism and Vocation Surface as Central Concerns

Peter’s letter addresses many topics, but two concerns come to the surface repeatedly and with particular depth. The first is baptism. Peter speaks of Christians as those who have been born again, who have been sanctified by the Spirit, who have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood. He will speak of baptism explicitly in chapter three, in one of the most important texts in the New Testament for baptismal theology. The confessional Lutheran reading of First Peter sees baptism as the defining reality of the Christian life, the moment in which the new birth takes visible form, and the foundation on which the whole Christian life is built.

The second concern is vocation. Peter walks through the ordinary circumstances of his readers’ lives — their relationships with civil authorities, their work situations (including the hard reality of slavery in the ancient world), their marriages, their life within the congregation — and gives pastoral instruction about how to live faithfully in each. This is not peripheral to his letter; it is central. Peter’s doctrine of vocation holds together with his doctrine of baptism to produce a deeply Lutheran picture of the Christian life: the baptized Christian faithfully present in the ordinary callings of his life, bearing witness to Christ through his conduct in a world that is not his home.

Third: We Will Read First Peter as Scripture for the Suffering Church

Peter’s first readers were suffering. We have said that already. But the letter is not only for them. It is Scripture — the inspired Word of God given for the Church across all times and places. It has been read and prized by Christians enduring far sharper persecutions than Peter’s original readers faced, and it will continue to be a steady companion for the suffering Church until the coming of the Lord.

For us, the letter speaks to a situation that increasingly looks like Peter’s own. The cultural position of the Christian Church in the West is changing. What was once a majority faith is becoming a minority one, and the social costs of visible Christian faithfulness are rising. We are not the last generation of Christians. But we are a generation that needs to recover the patterns of Dispersion faithfulness that Peter’s first readers developed. This letter can help us do that. We will read it not only as historians of the first century but as Christians of the twenty-first, who find in Peter a pastor who knew exactly our situation and wrote exactly for us.

Gathering the Threads

We have done a great deal of introductory work in this session, and it is worth gathering the threads before we open the letter itself.

We have met Peter — not the impulsive disciple of the Gospels, but the seasoned apostle writing from Rome at the end of his life, his voice steady and pastoral after decades of ministry. We have located his readers across the five Roman provinces of Asia Minor, mixed congregations of Jewish and Gentile Christians scattered through cities and villages, facing the steady social pressure that comes from belonging to Christ in a culture that does not. And we have heard the situation Peter is addressing on its own terms: not the empire-wide persecutions of later emperors, but the slander, the suspicion, the economic pressure, and the daily hostility that come from the discovery that one’s neighbors and family members are now Christians.

The theological theme of the letter has come into focus. Elect exiles. Two truths held together with deliberate tension, each requiring the other. The Christian is not the elect despite being an exile. The Christian is an exile because he is elect. The God who has chosen us has set us apart from the world that does not know Him, and that setting-apart is felt in the body — in friendships strained, in opportunities lost, in the small daily ways that the world reminds those who belong to Christ that they are not its own. Peter is writing to people who feel this tension acutely, and the whole letter is shaped to give them the resources they need to live faithfully within it.

For the Lutheran Christian, this letter has always held a special place. Luther loved it. He found in it the same Gospel he found in Paul — justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers, the sufficiency of Baptism, the suffering Servant who ransomed us with His blood. The Lutheran tradition has read 1 Peter not as a secondary letter but as a centerpiece of pastoral theology, returning to it again and again in preaching, in catechesis, and in the ordinary care of souls. We open it as those who have been given a beloved letter, ready to receive its pastoral wisdom for our own time.

The interpretive framework is now in place. We will read 1 Peter passage by passage, attending to its structure and argument. We will read it as the apostolic letter it is — the Word of God spoken through Peter to the Church of every age. And we will read it confessionally, listening for how its teaching converges with the rest of Scripture and with the Lutheran tradition’s reception of the same. With these commitments named, we are ready to turn to chapter one.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection. As you begin this study of First Peter, use them to surface what you are bringing to the text — your questions, your experience, your expectations — so that the conversation over the next ten sessions can engage what is actually on your heart.

Before this session, what did you know about Peter? What had shaped your impression of him — the Gospels, church tradition, Catholic teaching about him, sermons you had heard? How does the picture of Peter as the dying apostle writing this letter from Rome strike you?
The word Dispersion is central to how Peter frames his readers. Do you experience your own faith as a kind of displacement or exile in the culture around you? In what specific areas of your life is that experience most real to you?
Peter writes to Christians facing social hostility rather than imperial persecution. Do you see parallels between that kind of suffering and what Christians in your own context face? Where do you see it most clearly?
The key theme of the letter is elect exiles — two words held together, where election and exile are understood as two sides of the same calling rather than competing realities. How does that framing sit with you? Does it help you make sense of anything you have been wrestling with?
Luther regarded First Peter as one of the noblest books of the New Testament. If you have read First Peter before, what has drawn you to it? If this is your first time engaging it carefully, what are you hoping to learn or receive over the next ten weeks?
As we set out, what questions do you bring to this letter? What do you hope to understand better, or be comforted about, or grow in, by the end of our study together?

Looking Ahead

Next week we open the letter proper. Peter, having introduced himself and his readers, launches into one of the most extraordinary doxological passages in the New Testament. In 1 Peter 1:3–12, he blesses the God who has caused us to be born again to a living hope, an imperishable inheritance, a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. The passage is dense with theological glory. It contains Peter’s treatment of the new birth, of the trials that test genuine faith, of the preciousness of Jesus Christ whom we have not seen but love, and of the prophets and angels who longed to see what we now see.

Before next session, read 1 Peter 1:3–12 at least twice. Read it slowly. Notice the accumulation of descriptions — the living hope, the imperishable inheritance, the salvation ready to be revealed. Notice how Peter speaks of joy in the midst of trials, and of faith more precious than gold. And remember the frame we have laid this week: Peter is writing to elect exiles. Every word of the doxology that follows is spoken to scattered Christians in Asia Minor who are feeling the weight of their exile. The living hope Peter celebrates is the hope that sustains the suffering, and Peter wants his readers, from the very first paragraph of his letter, to know what they have been given.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, who according to Your eternal foreknowledge have chosen us in Christ, who by Your Spirit have sanctified us, and who by the blood of Your Son have sealed us for Yourself: we give You thanks. Grant us, as we open this letter of Your apostle Peter, to receive it as Your Word to us. Make us faithful in our exile, firm in our hope, and patient in our suffering, that we may live as those who know to whom we belong. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with You and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and forever. Amen.