Finding a Home "in Christ"
1 Peter Locates an Audience, Then and Now (1)
A question lurks just under the surface of 1 Peter. It’s both subtle and crucial: Where do you live?1
Of course, I’m not thinking of your street address, your city, or your province. I’m after a deeper question, one of basic orientation: What determines your sense of belonging, your habits of life, the community whose judgment matters to you most?
Peter’s answer is deceptively simple and profound when it locates its audience in Christ. To gauge the weight of Peter’s response, we turn to the remarkable ways he maps the identity of his readers.
Strangers in a Strange Land
The letter opens with a map of sorts: “To God’s chosen strangers in the world of the diaspora, who live in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1:1). Peter pictures the broad sweep of northern Asia Minor, ancient Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. But he doesn’t address his readers primarily as residents of those regions. Instead, he addresses them as strangers or exiles, even immigrants (1:1; 2:11)—as folks who don’t quite belong to the territory they occupy.
He’s not using extravagant images to catch our attention. The terms Peter reaches for—παρεπίδημος and πάροικος (parepidēmos and paroikos—resident alien, stranger, people living somewhere that isn’t really home, sojourner, immigrant)—carry a lot of weight, socially. Typically, such people made their lives on the margins of the empire’s household.
There’s something strange about these strangers. 1 Peter doesn’t describe readers and hearers who have been forcibly relocated. No army had dragged them from their homes or relocated them into settlements reserved for foreigners. They were living in the same towns and villages where they’d grown up. The strangeness of their situation wasn’t geographical. It was theological. They had been “given new birth” (1:23), and that new birth had transformed their relationship to the world they previously inhabited.
They belonged, but they didn’t belong.
Theologian Miroslav Volf puts it like this:
they weren’t immigrants trying to assimilate into a new culture, or
colonizers trying to reshape the landscape in their own image, or even
residents carving out a comfortable enclave of like-minded friends.
Their situation was peculiar and more demanding than any of those options. On account of their “new birth,” they were now strangers—outsiders, really—in their own neighborhoods.2
Who Are You When Nobody Honors You?
To understand what was at stake for these communities, we need to grasp the currency of Rome’s social world: power, privilege, honor. In spatial terms, these are the important questions: Who’s up? Who’s in?
Status was the oxygen of social life in the ancient Mediterranean. It was maintained through conformity—to society’s conventions, household expectations, civic obligations, and religious rituals, the unspoken codes of “what everyone knows” and “what everyone does.” Deviance wasn’t just socially and religiously awkward. It was dangerous. It invited slander, contempt, ostracism, and worse.
Peter’s readers had, through their allegiance to Christ, forfeited that currency. Their transformed practices and loyalties—redirecting their allegiances, refusing the everyday norms of religious observance, reshaping household relationships, living by a different set of commitments and values—had won them reproach rather than respect. According to the empire’s accounting system, they were bankrupt. If status is the oxygen of social life, they were gasping for air.
In terms of their social footing in their ancestral homes, these Christ-followers are shriveling. So Peter pours on them a veritable deluge of alternative, unconventional identity markers. They are chosen, a holy nation, God’s own people, a royal priesthood, honored. He wraps them in familial language—children, siblings, beloved. He hands them a lineage: They share in Israel’s ancient story as participants in exodus and New Exodus.
In a world that honored deep roots and ancient tradition, Peter was doing something shrewd and substantial. He was giving his marginalized readers not just comfort, but identity—a strong, deeply rooted sense of who they were that didn’t depend on the empire’s (or their neighbors’) verdict about them.
The Center, Not the Perimeter
One of the more important moves Peter makes—and one most easily missed—is that he doesn’t primarily define Christian life over against the surrounding culture. He doesn’t catalog the sins of the empire (though he’s hardly naive about them). We don’t find 1 Peter setting out the contours of faithful life with a list of “don’ts.”
To be sure, he tells his readers and hearers not to be like their former selves. But he never compares them with what we might call those “others,” those “outsiders.”
What he does instead is something more consequential, more hopeful: He defines Christian identity positively, constructively, from its center rather than its boundaries. His readers are to be holy not because they are against something, but because they are something. They are a people shaped by the pattern of Christ.
Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct, for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1:14–16)
Apparently, ongoing formation is a given. But what sort of formation? Formation along the lines of one’s former life, marked by craving and ignorance? Or formation into godliness, into the divine image, the image of Christ?
Consider the word pattern or model or even prototype: “Christ suffered on your behalf, leaving you a pattern so that you might follow in his footsteps” (2:21 AT). The term in question, ὑπογραμμός (hypogrammos), referred to a writing template—the letters a schoolchild would trace to learn to write: A a B b C c, Α α Β β Γ γ…. There’s something wonderfully mundane at work here. Following Christ isn’t an Olympic-like achievement for spiritual athletes. It’s not the World Cup or World Series. It’s the daily discipline of tracing a template already provided. It’s a lengthy apprenticeship to the Master Pattern Maker. It’s learning the patterns of thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving already modeled by Jesus.
For 1 Peter, the shape of that template is unmistakable: new birth, suffering, death, resurrection, exaltation. The logic of Peter’s entire letter runs along that arc. Living like Christ in this age may mean going with the grain of God’s creation, but cutting against the grain of imperial life. And that can lead to suffering. Such suffering is not a sign of God’s abandonment. It is the very pathway your Lord walked before you. And it leads to honor—not from imperial elites but from God.
“In Christ”
The letter ends where it begins—with a geographical declaration. Where do Peter’s readers and hearers live? The final geographical reference Peter gives isn’t, say, Pontus or Cappadocia. Where does Peter’s audience find their true home? “In Christ” (5:10, 14).
In a way, that little phrase carries the force of the whole letter. Invoking the basic metaphor of “container,” Peter locates his audience here: “In Christ.”
Residing in Bithynia or Galatia (or Bartlesville or Green Bay), their real home is “in Christ.”
“In Christ”—a place, a household, a community of belonging that no empire can grant or revoke. “In Christ”—it names where these people actually live, a domicile beneath and behind whatever province they happen to occupy.
This means that Peter’s decisive image for his readers isn’t exile or alienation—though those experiences are real and must be named. The decisive image is habitation. Dwelling. Life found within a story and a community defined by Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, his return and his judgment.
The question Peter leaves with his audience, then and now, isn’t simply: Are you willing to live as strangers in this world? It’s a more searching question: Don’t you know where you actually live?
Adapted from “Faithful Witness in the Diaspora: The Holy Spirit and the Exiled People of God according to 1 Peter,” in The Holy Spirit and Christian Origins: Essays in Honor of James D. G. Dunn, ed. Graham N. Stanton, Stephen C. Barton, and Bruce W. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 282–95. Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptural citations follow the CEB.
See Miroslav Volf, “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation between Church and Culture in 1 Peter,” Ex Auditu 10 (1994): 15–30.
Thank you for writing this
This is so needed and necessary. In a world where our identities are all but displaced or misplaced, to be found “ἐν Χριστῷ” is everything; the sum of our new life.