“You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with
the
error of lawless people and lose your own stability.”
What is the “error of lawless people” to which the apostle
Peter is referring, here at the end of his second letter? When an error threatens
to carry us away and make us unstable in our faith, it would seem useful to
correctly identify it.
That said, the answer is not necessarily straightforward. The
possibilities, I think, are two.
The Uniformitarian Error
First, Peter may be referring back to the error of the
scoffers he mentions in the first few verses of 2 Peter 3: that they
say, “Where is the promise of his coming?” Their error is uniformitarianism, in that the scoffers argue that “all things are
continuing as they were from the beginning”, so why would Christians look for
the return of Christ? Peter goes on to crush this argument rather convincingly,
pointing out that the histories of both our universe and our earth have consisted
of long periods of quiet punctuated with the occasional game-changing event — whether
these events be creative or catastrophic — and then declaring that God’s
future dealings with mankind will proceed right along these same lines, just as
the prophets have foretold.
In favor of uniformitarianism being the error to which Peter
is referring, it may be pointed out that this is the apostle’s major subject in
the chapter, making up most of its content, and therefore in greatest need of
reinforcement. In closing his letter, then, perhaps Peter veers away from his
most recent subject and goes back to summing up his earlier point.
Further, the error in question is said to be an error of lawlessness.
The uniformitarians are scoffers, and rejecters of a major tenet of the faith
delivered once for all to the saints. To call them lawless would hardly be
outrageous.
The Distortion Error
But there is a second possibility we should consider. Alternatively,
Peter may be referring back to the error he has only just mentioned. This
second error is an error of distortion,
in which certain ignorant and unstable teachers of the Bible take the difficult
passages of the apostle Paul’s letters and twist them to say what they would
prefer them to say, rather than what they actually do.
This is not a trivial error when we consider that the
apostle Paul wrote the bulk of the New Testament and gave us most of our
foundational theology, along with its practical consequences for godly living. Unsurprisingly,
the apostle Paul’s authority and the meaning of the things he wrote are very
much under attack today. And yet to call Paul into question — to
manipulate his words — is potentially to play havoc with almost any major
doctrine of the Christian faith. Peter again crushes any notion that this is an
acceptable way to proceed, calling Paul’s letters “scripture” or graphÄ“, a word up to this point
consistently
used by the writers of the New Testament to refer to the Hebrew Old
Testament, the authority and finality of which was unquestioned. Peter goes on to point out that the same ignorant and unstable
people engage in their distortions with the entirety of the word of God, not
just Paul’s letters. The implication may be that if Jewish Christians found the distortion of Moses or Isaiah offensive, as they should, then the distortion of apostolic teaching was equally to be deplored.
In favor of the error in question being the distortion of scripture in general, and Paul’s
letters in particular, we might note that Peter cautions that if this error is accepted, his readers will
lose their stability. The Greek
word he uses here comes from the same
root as the
word he uses to describe the “unstable” teachers themselves. It would
hardly be surprising for unstable teachers to produce unstable pupils. A
disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained
will be like
his teacher: in this case, theologically wobbly and inconsistent in practice.
Two Major Errors
The problems with both the uniformitarian error and the
distortion error are difficult to overstate. Uniformitarianism leaves us in a broken
world we must somehow fix for ourselves, a task some Christians naively assign
to the church, but for which it has turned out to be singularly ill-suited. The
church’s attempts to go political have given us the Inquisitions and the
Crusades, not to mention a good number of morally-dodgy English kings. These
constitute major theological and practical departures from orthodoxy, to be
sure, but the denial of the believer’s hope in his Lord’s coming for his people
and his ultimate glorification on earth is a truly catastrophic heresy.
And yet, as bad as that may be, it may be convincingly argued
that distorting the meaning of the epistles (and the other scriptures along
with them) is even worse, since it allows for error not just about the question
of the return of Christ to planet Earth, but about church practice, about godly
living, about husband-wife relations, about sex and self-control, about the
mechanics of salvation, about the security of the believer, about law and
grace, about the meaning of Christ’s words, the historicity and value of Christ’s
death and resurrection, his place in the purposes and counsels of God, his
deity, his impeccability, and a hundred other mission-critical, long-held and fundamental
truths which we all take for granted because we have read them dozens of times
in the Pauline letters.
A Problem with Authority
In fact, the common feature of both the uniformitarians and
the distorters is this: that they attack the authority of the word of God. The
first says the words of scripture are untrue because in practice we do not yet
see them fulfilled; the second says our beliefs about what scripture teaches are
not fit to be lived out because we have comprehensively misunderstood our
Bibles.
Either error is potentially destructive to faith. Both are
to be studiously avoided by believers. When you hear a so-called Christian tell
you “Paul was wrong” about this or that, you know the conversation is going
nowhere good.
So which error was Peter referring to when he said “take
care that you are not carried away”? Maybe identifying the specifics of the
error matters less than being able to identify the sort of person disposed to
bring error into the church in the first place.
After all, lawless and unstable people are not all that
difficult to spot. We ought to grant them exactly as much authority in our
churches as they grant to God’s word in their own lives.
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