The Paradox of Sonship

Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews

R. B. Jamieson, Vanhoozer, Kevin J., Daniel J. Treier, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Treier, Daniel J.

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780830848867
• eBook ISBN: 9780830848874
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Biblical Foundations Book Awards Runner Up and Finalist

What does the epistle to the Hebrews mean when it calls Jesus "Son"? Is "Son" a title that denotes his eternal existence as one person of the Trinity? Or is it a title Jesus receives upon his installation on heaven's throne after his resurrection and ascension?

In this Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (SCDS) volume, which promotes fresh understandings of Christian belief through creative, faithful readings of the canonical text, pastor and New Testament scholar R. B. Jamieson probes the complexity of the Christology presented in the epistle to the Hebrews.

Exploring the paradox of this key term, Jamieson argues that, according to Hebrews, "Son" names both who Jesus is eternally and what he becomes at the climax of his incarnate, saving mission. Jesus is, in short, the eternal Son who became the messianic Son for us and for our salvation. This volume thereby offers a case study showing how the church's core convictions about Christ lead us not away from the text, but deeper into it.

Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture, edited by Daniel J. Treier and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, promotes evangelical contributions to systematic theology, seeking fresh understanding of Christian doctrine through creatively faithful engagement with Scripture in dialogue with church.

A Classical Christological Toolkit

I RECENTLY INSTALLED a protective, retractable gate in the doorway in front of the stairs to our basement. To bore holes for the gate’s wall mounts, I needed to use a two-millimeter drill bit. By chance, I happened to have a bit that size stashed with a few pieces of hardware on a storage shelf. If it were not for that spare bit, I would have had to dig out a full kit of drill bits from underneath half a dozen heavy bins. Sometimes the right tools are near to hand but out of sight. It can take extra work to get at them.

Given the narrative, incarnational shape of Hebrews’ Christology and the state of scholarly disagreement over its use of “Son,” in this chapter I propose a new yet old set of tools for the task, a cluster of theological possibilities and exegetical strategies borrowed from classical christological writings of the church fathers. My use of these tools does not presuppose that these writers got everything right. Nor will my argument proceed on the assumption that their conclusions are essentially correct. Instead, this chapter will provisionally show how each classical concept and reading strategy fits the text of Hebrews. And I will argue that each helps us to read with the grain of the text and to say coherently all that Hebrews says about who Jesus is.

As we saw in the introduction, scholarly conversation on Jesus’ sonship in Hebrews is not at a total impasse; some find ways to affirm that Jesus both is Son and becomes Son. Nevertheless, the three zero-sum approaches surveyed in the introduction can fairly be described as dominant. Given the relative precedence of these approaches and the prevalence of the presupposed zero-sum perspective, it may prove helpful to bring a more theologically calibrated set of tools to the exegetical task. I draw these tools from writers who shaped, refined, and reflect the church’s orthodox conciliar tradition—in brief, classical patristic Christology and its later tradents such as John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas.

SIX CLASSICAL CHRISTOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND READING STRATEGIES

This chapter will introduce six distinctions, concepts, and reading strategies that I will use as heuristic tools with which to engage Hebrews and its modern interpreters. The first three are christologically unique answers to basic questions: who, what, and when? The second three are strategies of reading and predication that seek to account for the paradoxical fullness of what a text like Hebrews says about Jesus. For each tool, I will show how it responds to some kind of pressure from Hebrews itself, whether from a particular assertion or from its portrait of Jesus as a whole.1 Much of what this chapter asserts will necessarily precede its full exegetical justification in chapters to follow. At this stage I am simply attempting to show enough of a fit between the tools and the text to warrant bringing them into the operating room. Further, this chapter will show how each tool is employed by classical interpreters, often in their exegesis of Hebrews itself.

After discussing these six tools, the following section will clarify how I understand the relationship between Hebrews’ Christology and that of the church’s ecumenical creeds, a topic to which we return in the conclusion.2 Finally, I will both answer modern critics and critique what I am calling classics. That is, I will provisionally answer objections to my use of these tools as resources for reading Hebrews, and I will discuss the two primary respects in which I hope to improve upon these classical readings.

1. Who? A single divine subject. As when we meet anyone, the first question we tend to ask on encountering Jesus naturally is, Who is he? And the answer that conciliar Christology gives, and that I will argue the text of Hebrews gives, is God the Son.

Whether we are talking about the Son’s divine activity of creating and sustaining all things (Heb 1:2-3, 10) or his human acts of speaking (2:3), suffering (2:18), dying (2:14), and so on, we are speaking of a single divine subject. The divine Son is Son eternally, and he remains Son when he takes on flesh and blood (2:14-15); else it would not be he—that is, the Son—who becomes incarnate.

The leading, though by no means only, witness in Hebrews to this identification of a single divine subject is the prologue. In 1:2-4, the author of Hebrews describes the Son with a series of seven relative and participial clauses (ὅν . . . διʼ οὗ . . . ὅς [hon . . . di hou . . . hos], and so on) that range from the distinctively divine to the necessarily human.3 In these clauses the Son’s agency varies from passive recipient (“whom he [God] appointed,” 1:2), to instrumental co-agent (“through whom also he created,” 1:2), to active-voice agent (“he upholds . . . he sat down,” 1:3), to middle-voice “undergoer” (γενόμενος [genomenos], “becoming,” 1:4). Yet it is the same Son who acts and undergoes and is acted upon. It is one and the same Son who made all things, sustains all things, made purification for sins, and sat down at God’s right hand. The unfathomably different types of activity entailed in creating all things and placing one’s body on a throne are performed by the selfsame subject: the Son.4

We have now briefly measured the pressure Hebrews puts on its readers to speak of Jesus as not just a single acting subject but as a single divine subject. Classical Christology responds to this pressure by confessing, in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 381, often simply called the “Nicene Creed”), that there is “one Lord Jesus Christ” who is not only “begotten from the Father before all the ages” and the one “through whom all things came to be,” but also “for us humans and for our salvation . . . came down . . . and became incarnate.” This same one “suffered and was buried and rose up on the third day . . . and he went up into the heavens and is seated at the Father’s right hand.”5 In avowed continuity with this Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon confesses “one and the same [ἕνα καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν, hena kai ton auton] Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same [τὸν αὐτόν, ton auton] perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man.”6 The single subjectivity of Jesus Christ is one of the prime factors in the entire classical tradition of Christology.7 Cyril of Alexandria in particular made the unity of Christ a keynote of his entire theology and, endorsing Cyril’s point, the Chalcedonian Definition confesses “one and the same Son.”8

This insistence on Christ as a single divine subject has deep roots and wide branches in classical Christology. Irenaeus, for instance, counsels that “we should not imagine that Jesus was one, and Christ another, but should know them to be one and the same,” and asserts that the prophets announced “one and the same Son of God, Jesus Christ.”9 Gregory of Nazianzus insists that “we affirm and teach one and the same God and Son, at first not man . . . but finally human being too, assumed for our salvation.”10 And John of Damascus summarizes the conciliar consensus: “And so, we confess that even after the incarnation he is the one Son of God, and we confess that the same is the Son of Man, one Christ, one Lord, the only-begotten Son and Word of God, Jesus our Lord.”11

This conviction that Christ is a single divine subject frequently proves crucial in patristic readings of Hebrews. For instance, Athanasius argues that “he did not become other than himself on taking the flesh.” This same one who created all things “afterwards was made high priest, by putting on a body which was originate and made.” These observations serve Athanasius’s exegesis of Hebrews 3:1-2 in the context of 2:14-18:

And this meaning, and time, and character, the apostle himself, the writer of the words, “Who is faithful to him that made him,” will best make plain to us, if we attend to what goes before them. For there is one train of thought, and the passage is all about one and the same [μία γὰρ ἀκολουθία ἐστί, καὶ περὶ τοῦ αὐτοῦ τὸ ἀνάγνωμα τυγχάνει, mia gar akolouthia esti, kai peri tou autou to anagnōma tunchanei].12

The linchpin of Athanasius’s incarnational reading of the time when and means by which Jesus became priest is the fact that the phrase “he was faithful to him who made him” (Heb 3:2, my translation) is spoken of the same one who was just said to have taken on human nature.

For Athanasius, classical Christology more broadly, and the reading I will pursue in this work, that Jesus is a single subject who is none other than God the Son is crucial to perceiving the narrative continuity of Hebrews’ Christology. What Chesterton said of tragedy is equally true of the protagonist of Hebrews’ drama: “The basis of all tragedy is that man lives a coherent and continuous life. It is only a worm that you can cut in two and leave the severed parts still alive.”13

2. What? One person with two natures. It is also natural to ask of Hebrews’ Jesus, What is he?

As our narrative sketch above makes clear, Jesus is certainly human, and he is also more than human. As I have suggested above and will argue in chapter two, what he possesses that is more than human is divine in the fullest sense of the word. Richard Bauckham, for instance, concludes that Hebrews affirms “both the divinity and the humanity of Jesus.” He continues, “That phrase, patristic-sounding though it is, seems fully justified by the systematic way in which the first two chapters of Hebrews depict the divine identity of Jesus in distinction from the angels and his identification with humanity in distinction from the angels.”14 And again, “Hebrews portrays Jesus as both truly God and truly human, like his Father in every respect and like humans in every respect.”15

This use of nature to describe Jesus as divine and human does not necessarily carry heavy metaphysical baggage. In fact, as David Yeago argues, even those who in the sixth century refined the Chalcedonian legacy did not use terms equivalent to person and nature as tools of metaphysical speculation. Instead,

The christological problem . . . is rightly understood not as a metaphysical puzzle about how the divine and the human might be one, but as the more modest problem of explicating coherently what the Bible and the liturgy say about Jesus. It is said of this single subject that he created the world and died on a cross, that he healed by a word of command and hungered, thirsted, and grew weary. What’s going on here? What shall we make of this? How shall we explicate this language?16

Therefore,

I would suggest that the distinction between ousia/physis and hupostasis/prosopon, which is central to the Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, is at bottom a simple, commonsensical distinction, grounded in observation of the way we talk in ordinary language. We talk about things in two different registers, the register of ousia and the register of hupostasis, which might be described roughly as prov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Simon J. Gathercole
• Acknowledgments
• Series Introduction: Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (SCDS)
• Abbreviations
• Author’s Note on Sources
• Introduction: The Son Who Became Son
• 1 A Classical Christological Toolkit
• 2 “Son” as Divine Designation
• 3 The Son’s Incarnate Mission
• 4 “Son” as an Office Christ Enters at His Enthronement
• 5 Hebrews’ Theandric Messiah
• Conclusion: The One Word Needed
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Ancient Writings Index
• The Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture series
• Notes
• Praise for The Paradox of Sonship
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright