Week 5: Smear Campaigns and Counter-Identity
This week we will explore two little verses in chapter 2 of 1 Peter. Verses 11 and 12 serve as a heading to the major body of this letter. Peter calls his audience to “the way of goodness” over against the “worldly cravings that wage war against life.” In the midst of a society and empire that is created and sustained by ungodly desires, powers, and violence, the people of God’s own making can appear only as a body of “aliens and exiles” — those who do not fit the normal order of things (therefore, they are determined to be “out of order”). Peter calls us to enact a wholly other politics — the politics of good.