The Atonement In The Epistle To The Hebrews -- By: Stephen S. Smalley
Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 07:1 (Jul 1961)
Article: The Atonement In The Epistle To The Hebrews
Author: Stephen S. Smalley
TynBul 7:1 (1961) p. 28
The Atonement In The Epistle To The Hebrews
Being the substance of a paper read at the Tyndale Fellowship’s New Testament Group, July, 1959. First published in The Evangelical Quarterly, January 1961, pp. 34ff., and reprinted by permission.
ONE OF THE many hymns written by Charles Wesley, that active member of the Oxford Methodists who none the less remained faithful to the Anglican Church, perfectly and vigorously expresses the quintessential nature of the reign and priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Beginning ‘Hail the day that sees Him rise’, the hymn continues:
‘Still for us He intercedes,
His prevailing death He pleads,
Near Himself prepares our place,
He the first-fruits of our race:
Alleluia!’
Here, in a moment, we are brought face to face with what is for the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews his central category of thought and interpretation, which draws together the theology of the Epistle and gives it its distinctive character. For him, ‘priesthood’ is more than a mere springboard for some disquisition on moral truth; it is life and spirit. It is no precious accident, indeed, that Dr. Alexander Nairne’s famous work on this Epistle, an Epistle which almost begins as it ends with a reference to the priestly work of Christ, is called The Epistle of Priesthood (1915) .
We shall not quarrel, I imagine, with those scholars who wish to place the Epistle to the Hebrews in a Judaic-Alexandrian setting. M. Clavier, in the new volume in memory of T. W. Manson, New Testament Essays (1959), notes that this ascription is scarcely contestable, ‘et rarement contestée’. As it happens the Dean Emeritus of Jesus College in this University has queried the presence of a Jewish hand in the Epistle — ‘a very strange Jew, if so’ — but we may grant without doubt that
TynBul 7:1 (1961) p. 29
our consideration of the Atonement in Hebrews must proceed against a background of contrasted world-orders as Platonic as it is Philonic. This will govern the writer’s total conception of reality and finality with reference to the death of Christ, and give us the clue to his understanding of its significance.
In his article on ‘The Eschatology of the Epistle to the Hebrews’ in the Dodd Festschrift, to which we shall return, C. Kingsley Barrett has pointed out the link which exists in this Epistle between atonement and eschatology, and the close contact which is maintained as a result with the line of primitive Christian theology. We are, of course, already aware of the characteristic tension in Hebrews between ἐφάπαξ
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