Hebrews Revisited

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You might be interested to know that my first peer-reviewed journal article has just come out, in Tyndale Bulletin 62.2 (2011), on the warnings in Hebrews. Some will find this slightly interesting; many won’t, but I won’t take it personally!

Hebrews 3:6b and 3:14 have been central to Reformed interpretations of the warnings in Hebrews for several centuries. Today, however, there is something of an impasse in scholarship: on one side, there are those who see these verses as an interpretive key to the letter, and thus understand the warnings to refer to spurious or false believers; on the other, there are those who argue that since Hebrews warns real believers away from real apostasy, these two verses cannot mean what, at a grammatical level, they appear to mean. In this paper, I appraise the scholarly discussion so far, identify three key issues relating to grammar and context, and then propose a way through the impasse that has not been considered in modern scholarship. (Can you tell that entire paragraph was from the article abstract?)

My conclusion is as follows:

With this paper, we enter uncharted waters. Scholarship has generally concluded one of two things about Hebrews 3:6b and 3:14 in relation to the rest of the warnings: either we have two cause-to-effect conditionals alongside warnings to true believers, or we have two evidence-to-inference conditionals alongside warnings to ‘false’, ‘spurious’ or ‘transitory’ believers. But in this paper, we have argued that the former does not fit well with the grammar and logic of 3:6b and 3:14, and the latter does not fit well with the context and language of the other warnings. Therefore, we have concluded, we are probably dealing with two evidence-to-inference conditionals alongside warnings to true believers: holding fast one’s confidence is evidence of partnering with Christ, and persevering in faith is essential if one is to inherit salvation. The warnings in Hebrews, then, should be treated like many other warnings in the New Testament—as genuine admonitions, whose purpose is to exhort the readers to persevere, and which serve to ensure this happens by highlighting the danger of falling away. And 3:6b and 3:14, read this way, mean exactly what the major translations make it look like they mean—that we have become, and are now, God’s house and Christ’s partners if indeed we hold fast our confidence.

Without reading the article, can anyone guess the only person in history, so far as I can tell, who argued for this position on the warnings in Hebrews? His name is an anagram of Gross Leprechaun.

 

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