The book of Samuel was written long before Peter's epistle.
Irrelevant.
You'r task is to demonstrate where the Bible instructs you to interpret 2 Samuel 22 Figuratively, but Interpret Peter Literally.
The reason you can't, is because it doesn't.
You're creating a red herring. Stick to what Peter said
I am appealing DIRECTLY to what Peter said.
He uses (as all the apostles and Jesus also use) the langage and imagry of universal cataclysm, God being SEEN riding a cloud to earth, personaly fighing His enemies on the battlefield,
figuratively to describe a local judgment upon a nation EXACTLY the same way the OT prophets before them used it.
The fact remains, There is no scripture instucting you to interpret Jesus' and the apostles' use of this same language in a
Polar Opposite way from How you interpret the OT prophets' use of it.
Which is why, it seems, you are taking the greatest pains to avoid honestly answering the question.
and to what the earliest ECF wrote after the apostles' time.
The ECFs after AD 70 were not inspired in their writings as were the apostles. We must prefer the apostolic teaching over later inventions where they are shown to be in contradiction.
We must recognize that they were not inspired nor reliable from any consensus standpoint.
If you want the truth, you must trust the ECFs of AD 30-70 that wrote the New Testament letters.
There would be some record somewhere of Christ having returned.
Fine, Since you asked so nicely...
From The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom
(A.D.347-407)
Archbishop of Constantinople:
[1] "O God of spirits and of all flesh, who
hast trampled down death and overthrown the devil, and given life to thy world, do thou, the same Lord, give rest to the souls of thy servants, names, who have fallen asleep, in a place of light, in a place of verdure, in a place of repose, whence all sickness, sorrow and sighing are fled away. Pardon every sin committed by them in word or deed or thought, for thou art a good God and Lover of man, for there is no man that liveth and sinneth not, for thou only art without sin and thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and thy word is truth."
[2] "Remembering this saving commandment and
all those things which have come to pass for us: the cross, the grave, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the sitting down at the right hand,
and the second and glorious coming"
[3] "Attend, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, from thy holy dwelling place and from the glorious throne of thy kingdom, and come to sanctify us, O thou that sittest with the Father above, and that are
invisibly present here with us. And vouchsafe, by thy strong right hand to impart to us thine immaculate body and thy precious blood, and through us, to all thy people."
(On The Fulfillment of Prophecy)
"It is proper and just to sing hymns to You, to bless You, to praise You, to thank You, to worship You in every place of Your kingdom; for You are God ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever existing, yet ever the same. You, and your only Son and Your Holy Spirit; You brought us forth from non-existence into being, and raised us up again when we had fallen, and left nothing undone until you
had brought us to heaven and bestowed upon us your future kingdom." (Prayer of the Anaphora - Eucharistic Prayer)
For certain, the greatest number of the earliest Christians believed that a number of, if not all, prophecies of the Olivet Discourse were fulfilled in the first century destruction of Jerusalem.
The challenge, in fact, is to find even one early Christian that didn't teach the Preterist interpretation of Matthew 24. The earliest and most significant writers were in
unanimous agreement, proclaiming the fulfillment of these prophecies in the time of the AD70 destruction of the Jewish city, temple and nation.
Here's a couple more snippets:
Origen - Against Celsus | John | Matthew
"I challenge anyone to prove my statement untrue if I say that the entire Jewish nation was destroyed less than one whole generation later on account of these sufferings which they inflicted on Jesus. For it was, I believe, forty-two years from the time when they crucified Jesus to the destruction of Jerusalem."
Chrysostom - Homilies on
Matthew 24 "Was their house left desolate? Did all the vengeance come upon that generation? It is quite plain that it was so, and no man gainsays it."
The ECFs recognized:
(1) that the great tribulation is past, transpiring at AD 66-70
(2) that AD 70 involved a coming of Jesus Christ in judgment
So, while they did not establish a biblically consistent preterism, they were far more preteristic in their understanding of eschatology than most modern futurists. The fact is that the ECFs had their hands full with formulating a consistent Christology, and didn't spend as much time formulating an orthodox, systematic eschatology. We know that the ECFs had mostly assigned
Matthew 24 to the past, and the Protestant Reformers had a majority view that all
Matthew 24 was fulfilled in the first century.
Classical preterism (i.e. The Catholic Preterism of the likes of James Aiken, Scott Hahn, St Cryssostom, St Thomas Aquinas, Eusebius, etc...) sees AD 70 as a temporal judgment coming of God/Christ.
St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Eusebius all understood this basic principle of bible eschatology, and we really ought to take their words to heart.
As St. Thomas Aquinas taught:
The signs of which we read in the gospels, as Augustine says, writing to Hesychius about the end of the world, refer not only to Christ's [future] coming to judgment, but also to the time of the sack of Jerusalem, and to the coming of Christ in ceaselessly visiting His Church. So that, perhaps, if we consider them carefully, we shall find that none of them refers to the coming advent, as he remarks: because these signs that are mentioned in the gospels, such as wars, fears, and so forth, have been from the beginning of the human race (Thomas Aquinas; Summa Theologica, Supplement Question 73, Article 1)
And even St. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (AD 336-395) - My signature line:
"Do we romance about three Resurrections? Do we promise the gluttony of the Millennium? Do we declare that the Jewish animal-sacrifices shall be restored? Do we lower men's hopes again to the Jerusalem below, imagining its rebuilding with stones of a more brilliant material? What charge like these can be brought against us, that our company should be reckoned a thing to be avoided?"
Regardless, again, it's the views of the ECF from AD30-70 who's views we ought to prefer when they are shown to contradict the views of the Later ECF.
