Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 32:3 (Summer 2018)
Article: The “Weaker Sex” Or A Weak Translation? Strengthening Our Interpretation Of 1 Peter 3:7
Author: John C. Nugent

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PP 32:3 (Summer 2018) p. 8

The “Weaker Sex” Or A Weak Translation?
Strengthening Our Interpretation Of 1 Peter 3:7

John C. Nugent

John Nugent teaches Bible and theology at Great Lakes Christian College in Lansing, Michigan. He holds an MDiv from Emmanuel Christian Seminary, a ThM from Duke Divinity School, and a PhD from Calvin Theological Seminary. He is well published, including the book, Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church (Cascade, 2016).

First Peter is a subtle and subversive letter. Scholars are increasingly coming to recognize its subversive nature.1 This is especially evident in 2:13–17, where the author asks readers to submit to human authorities—all the while referring to those authorities as fools, insisting that believers live as free people, and granting the emperor only the same honor that is due everyone else but not the love he craves or the fear he expects. Peter reserves such love and fear for fellow believers and God, respectively. This is not run-of-the-mill social conservativism. It is what John Howard Yoder called revolutionary subordination.2 It is the power of God demonstrated from a posture of apparent weakness.

It is increasingly common for scholars to roll this subversive trope forward into the following two subsections, which ask slaves to submit to their masters and wives to their husbands. These slaves are not asked to be doormats, but Christ followers who subvert injustice the way Jesus did—by bearing up under it and leveraging it for our salvation. Likewise, wives do not submit to unbelieving husbands from a posture of inferiority, but from one of triumph that wins over their husbands by the superior power of godly conduct.

Yet Peter’s subversive engine appears to have run out of steam by 3:7. There he highlights the weakness of women—referring to them as weaker vessels—and implores men to give them, like the emperor, only the same basic honor that everyone else deserves. For God offers women the gift of life, too, and these men would not want anything to hinder their prayer lives.

Fortunately, Peter wakes from this apparent patriarchal slumber in the very next verse and begins exhorting the entire community not to get sucked into pagan notions of power and retaliation, but to repay evil with a blessing and so ultimately to triumph like Jesus did—the Jesus, he points out, who suffered for a little while, but is now seated at God’s right hand with all “angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him” (3:22).

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