TJieodore W. Jennings, Jr. The Meaning of ... - Quarterly Review

For convenience, we will refer to this as the University Christian
Church Capital Campaign Document, UCCCD. 2
The second
document I am asking you to read is the First Epistle of Peter.
Please read it now, in the New Revised Standard Version, keeping
UCCCD in mind.
In some ways, these two documents are very much alike.
Real Letters
Neither letter is an essay, a list of principles, an anthology of
resource materials for our spiritual lives, or a collection of laws or
wise sayings. As a letter, each document expresses particularity. A
letter is written by a particular person or group to a particular person
or group, using a particular form. Change any of these particulars,
and we no longer have a real letter. We have learned to recognize
machine-generated "letters" which, even though they try to appear
to be personal, we do not regard as letters at all. (Although everyone
who knows me personally addresses me as "Gene," in this age
when mailing lists are sold in the marketplace, I routinely receive
"personal" mail generated by computers that have run my first
name and initial together, "Dear Meugene. . . In trying to
address everyone in general, such letters address no one in particular
and thus lose the essence of a real letter.
Both UCCCD and 1 Peter address the particularities of a specific
historical situation, which they presuppose. They are written not to
the general public but to insiders who share the unique events of that
history. This particularity is also expressed in the fact that each letter
calls its readers to do something concrete for God and the church. It
is no accident that our New Testament is composed entirely of
Gospels and Letters. 3
Both the Gospel form and the letter form are
appropriate to the historical particularity of the Christian gospel. The
God represented in the teaching of Jesus is not a universal principle
of being that affirms, say, "the essence of birdness" but the
heavenly Father without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground
(Matt. 10:29). Such a God does not traffic in statistical head counts
of human life in general, but numbers the hairs of individual heads
(Matt. 10:30). The doctrine of the incarnation affirms not that God
became incarnate in humanity in general, but in one particular
first-century, Aramaic-speaking Jew who lived and died in a
90 QUARTERLY REVIEW/SPRING 1993