Abstract
This paper, which opens the second suite, argues that a fair and biblically faithful account of authority must present the texts commanding obedience together with their qualifications and their reciprocal duties, rather than isolating the command, and that an account citing only the duties of the governed is by that very omission unbalanced and, by the standard established in the hinge paper, self-incriminating. Building on the demonstration that fair-minded hearers suspect partiality in defenses of authority, this study contends that the biblicist commitment to the whole counsel of God supplies both the obligation and the method for a balanced account. The argument proceeds in five movements. First, it establishes the methodological principle that fidelity to the whole text requires presenting the obedience texts in their full context, and that selective citation is a violation of the biblicist standard itself. Second, it sets the central obedience text of Hebrews 13:17 alongside its immediate companion in Hebrews 13:7, showing that the command to obey is framed by the requirement to consider the outcome of leaders’ conduct and to imitate their faith. Third, it reads the submission texts of 1 Peter 5 together with the duties they lay upon leaders, “neither as being lords over God’s heritage.” Fourth, it examines the Berean commendation of Acts 17:11, in which the testing of even apostolic preaching against Scripture is praised rather than rebuked. Fifth, it analyzes Paul’s withstanding of Peter to the face in Galatians 2:11–14 as the apostolic precedent for the correction of even the highest authority when it errs. The paper concludes that the whole-counsel account does not weaken biblical authority but establishes it on its true foundation, and that the balance it requires is the first and indispensable answer to the suspicion of partiality.
1. Introduction: Balance as a Biblicist Obligation
The hinge paper of this work established that fair-minded hearers bring to any defense of religious authority a suspicion of partiality — a wariness that the defender will cite the texts serving his purpose and suppress the texts complicating it, that he will be, in Malachi’s phrase, partial in the law. This paper takes up the first and most basic answer to that suspicion: the construction of a balanced account of biblical authority, one that presents the texts commanding obedience together with their qualifications and reciprocal duties rather than isolating the command. The thesis is that such balance is not a concession to skeptics or a softening of the biblical view but an obligation internal to the biblicist commitment itself, and that an account which omits the qualifying and reciprocal texts fails not merely as rhetoric but as exegesis, by the biblicist’s own standard.[^1]
The argument rests on a principle that the biblicist interpreter is uniquely bound to honor: fidelity to the whole counsel of God. The interpreter who claims to derive authority from Scripture claims to stand on the whole of Scripture, not on a selection from it. This is the heart of the biblicist commitment — that the text in its entirety is the standard, that no part may be elevated by suppressing another, that the interpreter’s task is to declare “all the counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) rather than the portions convenient to a purpose. An account of authority that cites only the duties of the governed therefore stands self-condemned by the very principle it professes. It claims to teach what Scripture says about authority while declining to teach the larger part of what Scripture says about authority, namely the qualifications hedging the command to obey and the duties the command lays upon those who lead. The partiality the fair-minded hearer suspects is, in such an account, real, and it is a partiality the biblicist is the least entitled of all interpreters to commit.[^2]
This framing transforms the task of balance from a defensive maneuver into a positive obligation. The interpreter does not present the reciprocal duties of leaders because skeptics demand it or because balance is a virtue of public discourse, though both may be true; he presents them because they are in the text, and because his commitment to the text requires him to present what is there. The balance is not added to the biblical account from outside; it is recovered from within, restored to an account that selective citation had truncated. And this is the deepest answer to the suspicion of partiality: not that the interpreter has chosen to be fair, but that the text he professes to honor was never partial in the first place, and that a faithful account simply transmits the balance the text already contains. The whole-counsel account does not balance the Bible; it reports the balance the Bible already has.[^3]
The paper proceeds by establishing this methodological principle in fuller form, and then by demonstrating it through the central texts in which the command to obey appears already hedged and already reciprocal: Hebrews 13, 1 Peter 5, Acts 17, and Galatians 2. In each, the paper will show that the text itself supplies the qualifications and reciprocal duties that selective citation omits, so that the balanced account is not the interpreter’s imposition but the text’s own teaching, recovered from the partiality that had obscured it.
2. The Methodological Principle: Fidelity to the Whole Text
Before turning to the individual texts, the paper must establish the methodological principle on which the whole argument rests: that a faithful account of any biblical teaching presents that teaching in the full context the text supplies, and that the isolation of a command from its qualifications is a distortion of the command, not a faithful transmission of it. This principle is general to sound interpretation, but it bears with particular force on the texts of authority, which are unusually liable to isolation precisely because their isolation serves the interest of those who cite them.
The principle can be stated as follows. The meaning of a biblical command is determined not by the command in isolation but by the command in its literary and canonical context — by the clauses that surround it, the conditions that qualify it, the reciprocal duties that accompany it, and the wider body of teaching within which it stands. To cite the command without its context is not to transmit a smaller portion of its meaning; it is to transmit a distorted meaning, for the isolated command says something the contextualized command does not. “Obey them that have the rule over you” means one thing when cited alone and another when read, as the text presents it, alongside “whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation.” The isolation does not merely omit; it alters, converting a hedged and reciprocal command into an unconditional one. The interpreter who isolates the command has not given his hearers less of the truth; he has given them a different and false thing.[^4]
This distortion is the exact mechanism of the partiality the hinge paper identified, and the texts of authority are its natural target. The interpreter who benefits from being obeyed has an interest in the unconditional command and against the qualifications; the isolation that serves his interest is therefore the isolation he is tempted to perform. This is why the suspicion of partiality bears so heavily on defenses of authority: the structure of the temptation is transparent, and the fair-minded hearer, knowing that the interpreter benefits from the isolation, watches for it. The methodological principle is the interpreter’s only honest defense. He must present the command in its context, with its qualifications and reciprocal duties intact, not because doing so is strategically wise but because doing otherwise is exegetically false — a partiality in the law that the biblicist standard forbids.[^5]
The principle has a further consequence that the paper will develop throughout. Because the qualifications and reciprocal duties are in the text, the interpreter who presents them is not weakening the command but stating it accurately, and the authority that the accurately stated command establishes is the only authority the text actually confers. The interpreter who isolates the command does not establish a stronger authority; he establishes a false one, an authority the text does not grant, which collapses the moment the hearer consults the context. The whole-counsel account thus does not trade strength for fairness; it trades a false strength for a true one, replacing the unconditional authority the text never granted with the hedged and reciprocal authority the text actually establishes. And the true authority is the more credible, for it survives the hearer’s inspection of the context, while the false authority is discredited by it. The interpreter who states the command accurately gives the hearer no occasion to discover that he has been partial, because he has not been.[^6]
3. Hebrews 13: The Command Framed by Its Qualifications
The central New Testament text commanding obedience to leaders is Hebrews 13:17, and it is the text most often cited in isolation and most instructive when restored to its context. The verse reads: “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you.” Cited alone, the verse appears to command unconditional obedience and submission to leaders. Read in its context, the verse appears as the culmination of a passage that has already hedged the command with qualifications and framed it with reciprocal duties, so that the obedience commanded is obedience of a specific and conditioned kind.[^7]
The first qualification appears within the verse itself, in the clause that grounds the command: “for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account.” The obedience is commanded because the leaders watch for the souls of those they lead, and because the leaders themselves must give account — to God — for that watching. The command to obey is thus grounded in the leaders’ faithful exercise of a soul-watching responsibility for which they are themselves accountable to God. The obedience is not owed to leaders simply as officeholders; it is owed to leaders who watch for souls as those who must answer to God for their watching. The ground of the command is the leaders’ accountable fidelity, and where that fidelity is absent — where the leaders do not watch for souls, or do not regard themselves as accountable to God — the ground of the command is correspondingly weakened. The verse does not command obedience to leaders in the abstract but to leaders fulfilling the accountable, soul-watching function that the verse describes.[^8]
The framing qualifications appear in the surrounding verses, and they are decisive. Ten verses earlier, the same passage has commanded: “Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation” (Hebrews 13:7). This verse, addressing leaders of an earlier time, establishes the criteria by which leaders are to be regarded, and the criteria are searching. The leaders to be remembered and followed are those “who have spoken unto you the word of God” — leaders whose teaching was the word of God, not their own devising. They are to be followed in their faith — “whose faith follow” — and the following is conditioned on “considering the end of their conversation,” that is, on examining the outcome of their conduct, the manner and result of their lives. The command is not “follow your leaders” but “follow the faith of leaders whose teaching was God’s word and whose conduct, examined, proved worthy of imitation.” The following is conditioned on examination, and the examination concerns both the leaders’ fidelity to God’s word and the integrity of their lives.[^9]
The juxtaposition of verses 7 and 17 within a single passage is the heart of the matter. The same passage that commands obedience (v. 17) commands the examination of leaders’ teaching and conduct (v. 7), and it presents these not as competing principles to be balanced against each other but as a single coherent teaching: obey leaders, having considered their faithfulness to God’s word and the outcome of their lives, and following them as they prove worthy of following. The obedience of verse 17 presupposes the examination of verse 7; one obeys leaders one has considered and found faithful, not leaders accepted without examination. To cite verse 17 without verse 7 is to command the obedience while suppressing the examination that conditions it — to convert “obey the leaders you have examined and found faithful” into “obey the leaders,” which is a different and false command. The text itself supplies the examination; the partial citation removes it.[^10]
The reciprocal dimension completes the picture. Verse 17 does not only command the led; it describes a duty of the leaders, who “watch for your souls, as they that must give account.” The leaders are under obligation — to watch for souls, to give account to God — and the command to obey is set within this reciprocal structure of obligation. The leaders owe the led a faithful, accountable watching; the led owe the leaders an obedience grounded in that watching. The relationship is mutual, each party bound to the other under God, and the command to obey is one half of a reciprocal whole. The account that cites only the led’s obligation, omitting the leaders’ accountable duty, presents half of a mutual relationship as though it were the whole, and so distorts the relationship into the unilateral submission the text does not teach.[^11]
4. First Peter 5: Submission and the Duties of Leaders
The pattern established in Hebrews 13 — the command to the led set within a reciprocal structure that binds the leaders as well — appears with even greater explicitness in 1 Peter 5, where the apostle addresses elders and those they lead in a single passage that lays heavy duties on the leaders before it commands submission from the led. The passage is a model of the balanced account, and its order is itself instructive: Peter addresses the leaders first and at length, and the led second and briefly, reversing the emphasis that selective citation typically produces.[^12]
Peter’s charge to the elders is searching and specific: “Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2–3). Three duties, each stated as a contrast with its corruption, define the leaders’ obligation. They are to oversee willingly, “not by constraint” — the oversight is to be a glad service, not a grudging or coerced one. They are to serve “not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind” — the explicit exclusion of the greed that the third paper of the first suite identified as a characteristic priestly abuse. And, most pointedly for the present argument, they are to lead “neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” — the explicit exclusion of domineering authority, of the lording-over that treats the people as the leader’s possession rather than as God’s heritage entrusted to the leader’s care.[^13]
The phrase “neither as being lords over God’s heritage” is the crux, and it deserves emphasis because it directly addresses the suspicion of self-serving authority. The flock is “God’s heritage” — God’s possession, not the leader’s. The leader is a steward of what belongs to God, not an owner of what belongs to himself, and the manner of his leadership must reflect this: he leads as a steward and an example, not as a lord. The exclusion of lordship is not incidental; it is central to Peter’s conception of legitimate leadership, which is defined precisely against the domineering authority that treats the people as the leader’s own. The leader who lords it over God’s heritage has, by Peter’s standard, corrupted his office at its root, for he has taken to himself a possession and a mastery that belong to God alone. The duty laid on the leader is the duty not to do exactly what the suspicious hearer fears the leader will do — and the text lays this duty explicitly, before it commands any submission from the led.[^14]
Only after this extended charge to the leaders does Peter address the led, and he does so briefly: “Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility” (1 Peter 5:5). The submission is commanded, but it is commanded in a specific frame. It follows the charge that has already bound the leaders to non-domineering, non-greedy, willing service; it is set within a mutual subjection — “all of you be subject one to another” — that qualifies the hierarchical submission with a reciprocal humility binding leaders and led alike; and it is grounded in the humility before God that the passage goes on to enjoin upon all (1 Peter 5:6). The submission of the led is thus the counterpart to the stewardship of the leaders, one element in a structure of mutual humility under God, not a unilateral subjection to leaders who stand outside the structure of obligation. The account that cites the submission of verse 5 while omitting the charge of verses 2–3 presents the led’s duty while suppressing the leaders’ far weightier and more extensively stated duty, inverting the very emphasis the text establishes.[^15]
The order of the passage is itself an argument against partial citation. Peter addresses the leaders first, charges them at length, and excludes precisely the corruptions of greed and domination that the abuse catalog identifies, before he turns briefly to the led. An account faithful to this text would reproduce its order and emphasis, dwelling on the leaders’ duties as the text dwells on them and treating the led’s submission as the text treats it, briefly and within the frame of mutual humility. The partial account reverses this, foregrounding the brief command to the led and omitting the extended charge to the leaders, and in doing so it does not merely select from the text; it inverts the text’s own structure, presenting as primary what the text presents as secondary and suppressing what the text presents as primary. The partiality is not only in what is omitted but in the reversal of emphasis, and the fair-minded hearer who consults the passage discovers both.[^16]
5. Acts 17 and Galatians 2: The Testing and Correction of Authority
The texts examined thus far establish that the command to obey is hedged with qualifications and set within reciprocal duties. Two further texts establish something more pointed: that the testing of authority’s teaching against Scripture is positively commended, and that the correction of even the highest authority, when it errs, is not rebellion but fidelity. These texts move the argument from the qualification of obedience to the positive warrant for examination and correction, and they are indispensable to a balanced account because they address directly the suspicion that the biblicist interpreter will frame all testing as disobedience and all correction as rebellion.
The Berean commendation of Acts 17:11 is the decisive text on the testing of teaching. Luke records that the Jews of Berea “were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” The Bereans tested the preaching they received — and the preaching they received was Paul’s, apostolic preaching, teaching of the highest authority available to the early church. They did not accept it on the authority of the preacher; they searched the Scriptures daily to determine “whether those things were so,” subjecting even apostolic teaching to the test of the written word. And Luke’s verdict on this testing is unambiguous: it made them “more noble” than those who did not test. The testing of authority’s teaching against Scripture is not merely permitted; it is commended, held up as the more noble course, praised as the mark of a readiness of mind that the non-testing Thessalonians lacked.[^17]
The significance of this text for the balanced account is difficult to overstate. The Bereans establish, by apostolic example and Lukan commendation, that the proper response to teaching — even the highest teaching — is to test it against Scripture, and that this testing is honorable rather than rebellious. The biblicist interpreter who claims that his teaching should be accepted on his authority, without testing, stands directly against the Berean commendation; he asks for what the Thessalonians gave and the Bereans, more nobly, withheld. The whole-counsel account must therefore include the Berean text, for it is the text’s own answer to the suspicion that testing is disobedience. Scripture commends the testing of teaching against Scripture, and the interpreter faithful to Scripture must commend it too, inviting the very examination that the partial defender resists. The Berean text converts the testing of authority from an act the interpreter tolerates into an act the interpreter, if faithful, positively encourages.[^18]
The correction of erring authority is established by Paul’s withstanding of Peter at Antioch, recorded in Galatians 2:11–14. Paul reports: “But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11). The occasion was Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentile believers under pressure from those who came from James, a dissimulation that Paul judged to compromise the truth of the gospel (Galatians 2:12–14). Peter was an apostle, a pillar of the church, the recipient of a unique commission; yet when he erred, Paul, also an apostle, withstood him publicly, “before them all” (Galatians 2:14), and the rebuke is recorded in Scripture without any suggestion that it was rebellion against legitimate authority. On the contrary, Paul presents the correction as a defense of the truth of the gospel, an act of fidelity rather than insubordination.[^19]
The principle the Antioch incident establishes is exactly the one the balanced account requires: that the correction of authority, when authority errs, is not rebellion but fidelity, and that no office is so high as to be beyond correction when it departs from the truth. Peter’s apostolic standing did not place him beyond Paul’s rebuke; his error, not his office, determined the response, and the rebuke was directed at the error precisely because the office was high and the error therefore consequential. The text thus distinguishes sharply between the office and the conduct: Peter’s office remained legitimate and honored, but his conduct in this instance was “to be blamed,” and the blame was rightly assigned. This distinction — which the third paper of this suite will develop at length — is implicit in the Antioch incident and indispensable to the balanced account, for it shows that correcting a leader’s error is compatible with honoring the leader’s office, and that the framing of all correction as rebellion is itself a distortion the text refutes.[^20]
Together, the Berean commendation and the Antioch incident supply what the qualified obedience texts alone could not: the positive warrant for testing and correction. Hebrews and 1 Peter show that obedience is hedged and reciprocal; Acts and Galatians show that testing is commended and correction is faithful. The balanced account requires all four, for the suspicion of partiality is answered not only by qualifying the command to obey but by establishing, from the text, that the examination and correction of authority are themselves biblical duties. The interpreter who presents only the texts of obedience, even with their qualifications, has not yet given the whole counsel; he must also present the texts that commend testing and vindicate correction, for these too are in the text, and their omission is a partiality the hearer will detect.[^21]
6. Conclusion: The Balanced Account as the True Account
This paper has argued that a fair and biblically faithful account of authority must present the texts commanding obedience together with their qualifications and reciprocal duties, and that this balance is an obligation internal to the biblicist commitment rather than a concession imposed from outside. The methodological principle is that fidelity to the whole counsel of God requires presenting commands in their full context, and that the isolation of a command from its qualifications is not a faithful transmission of a smaller truth but the transmission of a distorted and false one. The texts themselves supply the balance: Hebrews 13 frames the command to obey (v. 17) with the requirement to examine leaders’ teaching and conduct (v. 7) and grounds the command in the leaders’ accountable, soul-watching duty; 1 Peter 5 lays extended duties on the leaders — willing service, freedom from greed, and above all the prohibition of lording it over God’s heritage — before commanding, briefly and within a frame of mutual humility, the submission of the led; Acts 17 commends the Bereans for testing even apostolic preaching against Scripture; and Galatians 2 vindicates Paul’s correction of Peter as fidelity rather than rebellion. In every case, the balance is the text’s own, recovered from the partial citation that had obscured it.
The deepest conclusion is that the balanced account is not a weakened account but the true one. The interpreter who isolates the command to obey does not establish a stronger authority; he establishes a false authority that the text does not grant and that collapses upon inspection of the context. The interpreter who presents the command with its qualifications and reciprocal duties establishes the only authority the text actually confers — a real authority, grounded in accountable fidelity, hedged by the requirement of examination, set within a structure of mutual obligation under God, and subject to testing and correction when it errs. This true authority is the more credible precisely because it is the more accurate: it survives the hearer’s inspection of the whole text, because it is the authority the whole text establishes. The balanced account thus answers the suspicion of partiality not by a rhetorical concession but by a recovery of the truth — by giving the hearer the whole counsel the interpreter is bound to give, and trusting that the authority the whole counsel establishes needs no partiality to defend it. The first answer to the suspicion that the interpreter will be partial in the law is simply not to be partial in the law; and the biblicist, of all interpreters, is the one most bound, and most able, to give that answer. The succeeding papers of this suite build on this foundation, taking up in turn the typology of the self-serving tell, the distinction between office and person, the anatomy of a misused text, the logic of costly authority, the practice of surfacing the strongest objections, and the integrated model of earned legitimacy. But the foundation is laid here, in the recovery of the whole counsel, for an account that is partial in the law can establish nothing that the law itself will not, upon examination, overturn.
Notes
[^1]: On balance as an obligation internal to the biblicist commitment rather than an external concession, developed here as the paper’s thesis; see the discussion of the whole-counsel principle in relation to the hinge paper’s analysis of the partiality suspicion, and compare the treatment of canonical context in interpretation in Carson (1996, pp. 23–47).
[^2]: On “all the counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) as the standard binding the interpreter to the whole text, see Bock (2007, pp. 626–630) and Peterson (2009, pp. 565–570); on the application to the ethics of selective citation, compare Vanhoozer (1998, pp. 455–468).
[^3]: On the principle that the balanced account recovers the text’s own balance rather than imposing balance from outside, developed here from the methodological commitment to whole-counsel interpretation; compare the discussion of contextual interpretation in Fee & Stuart (2014, pp. 23–38).
[^4]: On the principle that meaning is determined by context and that isolation distorts rather than merely diminishes, see Carson (1996, pp. 115–140) on the exegetical fallacies attending decontextualized citation, and Klein, Blomberg, & Hubbard (2017, pp. 243–268) on the role of literary context.
[^5]: On the structural temptation to isolate the command in defenses of authority, and the methodological principle as the interpreter’s only honest defense, developed here in connection with the hinge paper’s analysis of the conflict of interest in self-interested citation.
[^6]: On the accurately stated command establishing the only authority the text confers, and the greater credibility of the true authority that survives inspection, developed here as the paper’s constructive claim; compare the treatment of the authority of Scripture and its faithful interpretation in Thompson (2006, pp. 21–40).
[^7]: On Hebrews 13:17 as the central obedience text and the importance of its context, see Lane (1991b, pp. 549–560), Ellingworth (1993, pp. 718–725), and O’Brien (2010, pp. 524–532).
[^8]: On the grounding clause “for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account” and its conditioning of the command, see Lane (1991b, pp. 552–556) and O’Brien (2010, pp. 526–530).
[^9]: On Hebrews 13:7 and the criteria for regarding leaders — those who spoke God’s word, whose faith is to be followed, considering the outcome of their conduct — see Lane (1991b, pp. 526–531), Ellingworth (1993, pp. 703–708), and O’Brien (2010, pp. 514–518).
[^10]: On the juxtaposition of Hebrews 13:7 and 13:17 within a single passage and the conditioning of the obedience of v. 17 by the examination of v. 7, see Lane (1991b, pp. 549–560) and the structural analysis in O’Brien (2010, pp. 510–532).
[^11]: On the reciprocal structure of Hebrews 13:17, binding leaders to accountable watching as the led are bound to obedience, see Lane (1991b, pp. 552–558) and Ellingworth (1993, pp. 720–725).
[^12]: On 1 Peter 5 as a model of the balanced account, addressing leaders first and at length, see Jobes (2005, pp. 301–315), Michaels (1988, pp. 277–295), and Davids (1990, pp. 175–190).
[^13]: On the threefold charge to the elders (1 Peter 5:2–3) and its statement of duties against their corruptions, see Jobes (2005, pp. 303–310), Michaels (1988, pp. 279–288), and Davids (1990, pp. 177–185).
[^14]: On “neither as being lords over God’s heritage” (1 Peter 5:3) as the explicit exclusion of domineering authority and the central element of Peter’s conception of legitimate leadership, see Jobes (2005, pp. 306–312) and Michaels (1988, pp. 284–290).
[^15]: On the submission of the led (1 Peter 5:5) set within the frame of mutual humility and following the extended charge to the leaders, see Jobes (2005, pp. 310–315) and Davids (1990, pp. 185–190).
[^16]: On the order and emphasis of the passage as an argument against partial citation, developed here from the structure of 1 Peter 5:1–6; compare the discussion of the passage’s rhetorical shape in Michaels (1988, pp. 277–295).
[^17]: On the Berean commendation (Acts 17:11) and the testing of apostolic preaching against Scripture as the more noble course, see Bock (2007, pp. 555–560), Peterson (2009, pp. 487–492), and Marshall (1980, pp. 280–283).
[^18]: On the significance of the Berean text for the warrant to test authority’s teaching, and its bearing on the interpreter who resists testing, developed here from Luke’s commendation; compare the treatment of the Bereans as exemplary in Peterson (2009, pp. 489–493).
[^19]: On Paul’s withstanding of Peter at Antioch (Galatians 2:11–14), see Bruce (1982, pp. 126–135), Longenecker (1990, pp. 64–78), and Moo (2013, pp. 142–158).
[^20]: On the Antioch incident as establishing the correction of erring authority as fidelity rather than rebellion, and the distinction between Peter’s office and his blameworthy conduct, see Longenecker (1990, pp. 72–78), Moo (2013, pp. 150–158), and the third paper of this suite.
[^21]: On the combination of the Berean and Antioch texts as supplying the positive warrant for testing and correction that the qualified obedience texts alone do not, developed here as the paper’s synthetic claim.
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