1 Peter 3:20

which sometime were disobedient The words that follow, however, appear to limit the range of the preaching within comparatively narrow boundaries. The "spirits" of whom St Peter speaks were those who had "once been disobedient:" the "once" being further defined as the time when "the long-suffering of God was waiting in the days of Noah." We naturally ask as we read the words, (1) why the preaching was confined to these, or (2) if the preaching itself was not so confined, why this was the only aspect of it on which the Apostle thought fit to dwell? The answer to the first question cannot be given with any confidence. It is behind the veil which we cannot lift. All that we can say is that the fact thus revealed gives us at least some ground for seeing in it a part of God's dealings with the human race, and that it is not unreasonable to infer an analogous treatment of those who were in an analogous condition. The answer to the second question is, perhaps, to be found in the prominence given to the history of Noah in our Lord's eschatological teaching, as in Matthew 24:37-38; Luke 17:26-27, and in the manifest impression which that history had made on St Peter's mind, as seen in his reference to it both here and 2 Peter 2:5; 2 Peter 3:6. It is a conjecture, but not, I think, an improbable or irreverent one, that the disciple's mind may have been turned by our Lord's words to anxious enquiries as to the destiny of those who had been planting and building, buying and selling, when "the flood came and took them all away," and that what he now states had been the answer to such enquiries. What was the result of the preaching we are not here told, the Apostle's thoughts travelling on rapidly to the symbolic or typical aspect presented by the record of the Flood, but the notes on ch. 1 Peter 4:6 will shew that his mind still dwelt on it, and that he takes it up again as a dropped thread in the argument of the Epistle. It will be noted, whatever view we may take of the interpretation of the passage as a whole, that it is the disobedience, and not any after-repentance at the moment of death, of those who lived in the days of Noah that is here dwelt on.

Such is, it is believed, the natural and true interpretation of St Peter's words. It finds a confirmation in the teaching of some of the earliest fathers of the Church, in Clement of Alexandria (Strom. vi. 6), and Origen, and Athanasius (cont. Apollin. i. 13), and Cyril of Alexandria (in Joann. xvi. 16); Even Augustine, at one time, held that the effect of Christ's descent into Hades had been to set free some who were condemned to the torments of Hell (Epist. ad Euodium, clxiv.), and Jerome (on Matthew 12:29; Ephesians 4:10) adopted it without any hesitation. Its acceptance at an early date is attested by the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, nearly the whole of which is given to a narrative of the triumph of Christ over Hades and Death, who are personified as the Potentates of darkness. It tells how He delivered Adam from the penalty of his sin, and brought the patriarchs from a lower to a higher blessedness, and emptied the prison-house, and set the captives free, and erected the cross in the midst of Hades, that there also it might preach salvation. Legendary and fantastic as the details may be, they testify to the prevalence of a wide-spread tradition, and that tradition is more naturally referred to the teaching of St Peter in this passage as the germ out of which it was developed than to any other source. As a matter of history, the article "He descended into Hell," i.e. into Hades, first appeared in the Apostles" Creed at a time when the tradition was almost universally accepted, and when the words of the Creed could not fail to be associated in men's minds with the hope which it embodied.

It must be admitted, however, that the weight of many great names may be urged on behalf of other interpretations, and that some of them display, to say the least, considerable ingenuity. The common element in all of them is the desire to evade what seems the natural inference from the words, that they point to a wider hope of repentance and conversion as possible after death than the interpreters were willing to admit. They divide themselves into two classes: (1) those who accept the words as referring to a descent into Hades, and (2) those who give them an entirely different interpretation. Under (1) we have (a) the view already noticed that the "preaching" was one of condemnation, anticipating the final judgment. It has been shewn to be untenable, and has so few names of weight on its side that it does not deserve more than a passing notice, (b) The view that Christ descended into Hades to deliver the souls of the righteous, of Seth, and Abel, and Abraham, and the other saints of the Old Testament, can claim a somewhat higher authority. It entered, as has been seen, into the Gospel of Nicodemus. It was adopted by Irenæus, Tertullian, Hippolytus. It was popular alike in the theology of many of the Schoolmen, and in mediæval art. It was accepted by Zwingli and Calvin among the Reformers, and receives a partial sanction from the teaching of our own Church as seen in the original form of Art. iii. as drawn up in 1552; and in the metrical paraphrase of the Apostles" Creed which was at one time attached with a quasi-authority to the Prayer-Book, and in which we find the statement that Christ descended into Hell that He might be

"To those who long in darkness were

The true joy of their hearts."

It is obvious, however, that whatever probability may attach to this speculation as such, it has scarcely any real point of contact with St Peter's words. He speaks of "the days of Noah:" it takes in the whole patriarchal age, if not the whole history of Israel. He speaks of those who had been "disobedient." It assumes penitence and faith, and at least a partial holiness. The touch of poetry in Calvin's view that the word for "prison" should be taken as meaning the "watch-tower" upon which the spirits of the righteous were standing, as in the attitude of eager expectation, looking out for the coming of the King whom they had seen, as afar off, in the days of their pilgrimage, cannot rescue it from its inherent untenableness. (c) A modification of the previous view has found favour with some writers, among whom the most notable are Estius, Bellarmine, Luther, Bengel. They avoid the difficulty which we have seen to be fatal to that view, and limit the application of St Peter's words to those who had lived in the time of the Deluge, and they make the preaching one of pardon or deliverance, but, under the influence of the dogma that "there is no repentance in the grave," they assume that the message of the Gospel came to those only who turned to God before they sank finally in the mighty waters. It need hardly be said that this was to strain Scripture to make it fit in with their own theories, and to read into the words something that is not found there. St Peter, as has been urged above, would have said, "to those who were sometime disobedient and afterwards repented" if this had been what he meant to say.

(2) The other interpretation avoids all these minor difficulties by going altogether on a different track. It has the authority of some great representative theologians, Augustine among the Fathers (ut supra), Aquinas among the Schoolmen (Summ. Theolog. iii. Qu. LII. Art. 3), Bishop Pearson among Anglican divines. It starts with denying that there is any reference at all to the descent into Hades. Christ, it says, went in Spirit, not in the flesh, i.e. before His Incarnation, and preached to the spirits who are now in prison under condemnation, or were then in the prison-house of selfishness and unbelief, or simply in that of the body. He preached in Noah's preaching, and that preaching was without effect except for the souls of Noah and his household. There is something, perhaps, attractive in the avoidance of what have been regarded as dangerous inferences from the natural meaning of St Peter's words, something also in the bold ingenuity which rejects at once that natural meaning and the Catholic tradition which grew out of it: but, over and above the grave preliminary objection that it never would have suggested itself but for dogmatic prepossessions, it is not too much to say that it breaks down at every point. It disconnects the work of preaching from the death of Christ with which St Peter connects it. It empties the words "he went" of all significance and reduces them to an empty pleonasm. It substitutes a personal identification of the preaching of Christ with that of Noah for the more scriptural language, as in ch. 1 Peter 1:11, that the Spirit which prompted the latter was one with the Spirit which Christ gave to His disciples. The whole line of exegesis comes under the condemnation of being "a fond thing vainly invented" for a dogmatic purpose. A collection of most of the passages from the Fathers bearing on the subject will be found in the Notes to "Pearson on the Creed" on the Article "He descended into Hell," and in the Article Eschatologyby the present writer in Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography.

wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water The last words admit of being taken either locally "they were saved, i.e. were brought safely, through the water," "were delivered from the destruction which it brought to others," or instrumentally, "they were saved by means of the water." The latter interpretation presents, at first, the difficulty that it represents the waters of the deluge, as well as the ark, as a means of deliverance. The parallelism between the type and the antitype in the next verse, leaves, however, no doubt that this was the thought which St Peter had in his mind. He saw in the very judgment which swept away so many that which brought deliverance to others. In the stress laid upon the "few" that were thus saved, we may legitimately recognise the impression made by our Lord's answer to the question, Are there few that be saved? (Luke 13:23). The Apostle looked round him and saw that those who were in the way of salvation were few in number. He looked back upon the earliest records of the work of a preaching of repentance and found that then also few only were delivered. In the reference to the "long-suffering" of God as waiting and leading to repentance, we find a striking parallel to the language of 2 Peter 3:9, and in both we cannot doubt that the thought present to the writer's mind was that "God was not willing that any should perish."