Aliens in Your Native Land: 1 Peter and the Formation of Christian Identity - Hardcover

by Warner M. Bailey (Author), Stephen V. Sprinkle (Foreword by)

Living as an alien in one's native land is a familiar reality to marginalized communities. Cultural, economic, and political shifts can cause people to become alienated by a system of greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and media manipulation. How can Christians persist under a sustained threat within a social order diametrically opposed to them? This question drives Warner Bailey's investigation of 1 Peter. The mature Christology of 1 Peter yields a profile of Christian identity. This picture is funded by texts from the Book of the Twelve (Hosea-Malachi) and is counter-intuitive, in that it is able to create new initiatives for behavior that offer hope for redemption in the midst of oppression. Bailey explores how 1 Peter has been used in shaping the life of modern "aliens," such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, living in his own country under the oppression of Nazism, and feminist, black, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ readers. Placing 1 Peter within the crisis in U.S. political and economic life opens up fresh implications for faithful ecclesiastical practice and personal witness.

Author Biography

Warner M. Bailey is Director of Presbyterian Studies at Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University. He is the author of Living in the Language of God: Wise Speaking in the Book of the Twelve (2017) and The Self-Shaming God Who Reconciles: A Pastoral Response to Abandonment Within the Christian Canon. (2013)