Hebrews 3:6b And 3:14 Revisited -- By: Andrew J. Wilson

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 62:2 (NA 2011)
Article: Hebrews 3:6b And 3:14 Revisited
Author: Andrew J. Wilson


Hebrews 3:6b And 3:14 Revisited

Andrew J. Wilson

Summary

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.

1. Introduction

The warning passages in Hebrews have attracted a great deal of attention through church history.1 They have drawn the attention of exegetes and commentators, who rightly perceive these strong admonitions as being at the heart of the letter’s purpose. New Testament theologians have often reflected on their apparent difference of perspective from that of Paul, and wondered aloud whether reconciliation is possible, or indeed desirable. They have produced more than their fair share of systematic-theological controversy, as one of the chief battlegrounds for Calvinist and Arminian systems on the question of perseverance in salvation. And of course pastors, with churches and individuals in mind, have wrestled with them across the

centuries, as they have attempted to apply them to the lives of their contemporaries.

All this attention has produced a large number of different ways of handling the warnings; to date, at least eighteen distinct interpretations of Hebrews 6:4-6 alone have been proposed.2 But within contemporary scholarship, two views predominate. The mainstream view, shared by the majority of critical scholars and a number of others, is that the author believes Christian believers can apostasise and forfeit eternal salvation, and that he is warning them against doing so in the strongest possible terms. The largest minority view, which tends to be held by scholars from a more Reformed background, is that the warnings refer instead to ‘professors not possessors’: people in the church community who appear to be true believers but whose conduct, in the end, may prove that they are not. From time to time,...

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