Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 80:1 (Spring 2018)
Article: Ascension and Atonement: The Significance of Post-Reformation, Reformed Responses to Socinians for Contemporary Atonement Debates in Hebrews
Author: Benjamin J. Ribbens

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Ascension and Atonement:
The Significance of Post-Reformation, Reformed Responses to Socinians for Contemporary Atonement Debates in Hebrews

Benjamin J. Ribbens

Benjamin J. Ribbens is Associate Professor of Theology at Trinity Christian College in Chicago, IL.

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on Hebrews has highlighted the role of the ascension in the atonement so that Christ’s offering includes his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. For scholars who affirm this position, the entire sequence of events is necessary for and part of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. However, these sequence approaches to atonement have been met with resistance and questions. In particular, some scholars have noted that Socinus and his followers also emphasized Christ’s ascension and affirmed a sequence approach as part of their larger scheme of denying Christ’s divine pre-existence and refuting that Christ’s death was a satisfaction. This article appeals to two seventeenth-century Reformed exegetes, Johannes Cocceius and John Owen, who were contemporaries of Socinian thinkers and authors and who both wrote commentaries on Hebrews, in which they went to great lengths to differentiate their views from their Socinian counterparts. Cocceius and Owen therefore become interesting case studies that reframe the modern debate and help disentangle Socinus from sequence approaches, because their detailed exegesis of Hebrews responds and reacts to Socinian claims throughout, elaborating what they consider valid readings of Scripture and what leads into Socinian error. The article concludes with a handful of implications for modern Hebrews studies.

I. Introduction

A fracas has broken out in Hebrews studies over the where and the when of atonement. Does Christ achieve atonement exclusively on the cross, or does Christ’s atoning sacrifice include his post-resurrection ascension into the heavenly sanctuary? In Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, David

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Moffitt highlights the importance of the resurrection in Hebrews’s argument, and he emphasizes that the author of Hebrews places Christ’s offering (or presentation) of his sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary. Just as the Levitical sacrifice began with the slaughter of the victim and ended with the presentation of the blood by the priest in the earthly tabernacle, so Christ’s offering begins with his slaughter on the cross and ends with his presentation of the offering in the heavenly tabernacle.1 As a result, Moffitt contends that one must understand “Jesus’ atoning offering” in the context of “a proto-creedal sequence”: “...