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EarlyActs
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There are nearly as many categories for 'stoicheia' as NT passages using the term. Heb 5-6, 2 Peter 3, Gal 4 and Col 2 all make use of it. One question here will be whether 2 P 3 establishes an 'ordinary' meaning--since the others are using it as a metaphor.
In Heb 5-6 it is synonymous with 'arche' or initial/beginning steps. This is in reference to basic initial steps a Christian makes:
repentance
washings
belief about resurrection
belief about coming judgement
The writer was intent and confident that the readers would realize more 'solid food' that he was declaring: the new covenant's once-for-all atonement for sin in Jesus Christ, and how the old covenant was to be let go of, in light of the new.
In Gal 4, 'stoicheia' actually gets connected first with beliefs the Galatians had before anything from Paul or Judaizers. The four elements (earth, wind, fire, air) was a belief that was partly pantheist, in that a human was merely an advanced form of those, but as Paul says 'they aren't really gods.' They do have in some literature a spiritualist power. The reason Paul mentions them is to go on to compare the Judaizers efforts with such elements. There is no real power or value in them. But Paul could not have made that comparison without referencing them first.
Unlike that comparison, in Col 2, Paul says outright that the Law is the basic elements of the world and powerless. this is a case of dealing with neo-Judaism. It was so elaborated that they were telling Christians that the Pauline type of Christian is 2nd class or otherwise devalued because of a lack of practice of torah; their teachers claimed to have communicated with the same angels who delivered torah.
So in 2 Peter 3, perhaps the latest use of the term 'stoicheia' it is interesting to find no analogy involved at all, just the direct, ordinary reference to the elements of the natural world. I can't see where there would even be a nature-spiritism about it. The passage all through stays on an ordinary level about creation, the cataclysm, the final judgement. The last verb about the elements is usually rendered 'dissolved' but 'revealed' is better. In some metallurgy that would be both.
In full preterist eschatology, the meaning of 2 P 3 about the destruction of the elements is shifted to describe only 1st century Jerusalem and the destruction. I cannot see this as the intention of Peter.
There is a type of uniformitarianism in Greek thinking already; indeed, the 'stoicheia' keeps the natural world that reliable way (without surprises), and conforming to the elements, even worshipping them, will 'preserve the world.' This kind of belief must have arisen after the Cataclysm, in some kind of mass denial even of the Greek's own Cataclysm account Deucalion. They did not want that to happen and they appeased the 4 elements regarding this.
In Heb 5-6 it is synonymous with 'arche' or initial/beginning steps. This is in reference to basic initial steps a Christian makes:
repentance
washings
belief about resurrection
belief about coming judgement
The writer was intent and confident that the readers would realize more 'solid food' that he was declaring: the new covenant's once-for-all atonement for sin in Jesus Christ, and how the old covenant was to be let go of, in light of the new.
In Gal 4, 'stoicheia' actually gets connected first with beliefs the Galatians had before anything from Paul or Judaizers. The four elements (earth, wind, fire, air) was a belief that was partly pantheist, in that a human was merely an advanced form of those, but as Paul says 'they aren't really gods.' They do have in some literature a spiritualist power. The reason Paul mentions them is to go on to compare the Judaizers efforts with such elements. There is no real power or value in them. But Paul could not have made that comparison without referencing them first.
Unlike that comparison, in Col 2, Paul says outright that the Law is the basic elements of the world and powerless. this is a case of dealing with neo-Judaism. It was so elaborated that they were telling Christians that the Pauline type of Christian is 2nd class or otherwise devalued because of a lack of practice of torah; their teachers claimed to have communicated with the same angels who delivered torah.
So in 2 Peter 3, perhaps the latest use of the term 'stoicheia' it is interesting to find no analogy involved at all, just the direct, ordinary reference to the elements of the natural world. I can't see where there would even be a nature-spiritism about it. The passage all through stays on an ordinary level about creation, the cataclysm, the final judgement. The last verb about the elements is usually rendered 'dissolved' but 'revealed' is better. In some metallurgy that would be both.
In full preterist eschatology, the meaning of 2 P 3 about the destruction of the elements is shifted to describe only 1st century Jerusalem and the destruction. I cannot see this as the intention of Peter.
There is a type of uniformitarianism in Greek thinking already; indeed, the 'stoicheia' keeps the natural world that reliable way (without surprises), and conforming to the elements, even worshipping them, will 'preserve the world.' This kind of belief must have arisen after the Cataclysm, in some kind of mass denial even of the Greek's own Cataclysm account Deucalion. They did not want that to happen and they appeased the 4 elements regarding this.
