Nick Brennan. Divine Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews

Is a divine Christology absent in Hebrews, possibly evident in a few isolated texts, or is a divine Christology part of the deep structure of the epistle’s argumentation, undergirding major claims throughout? Nick Brennan’s central claim is that “the divinity of the Son in Hebrews is present, pervasive and salient to the Epistle and deserves more attention than has been afforded it in recent scholarship. This is principally because the Pastor both at times argues explicitly for the Son’s divinity and, even more frequently, argues from such a concept, assuming the equal divine nature of the Son with his Father, as an essential element in the shape of theology and discourse” (p. 199).The opening chapter introduces some of Brennan’s primary interlocutors in three groups. First, scholars have variously argued the Son is divine but focused only on the exordium (Bauckham, Peeler, Rascher, and Rowe). Second, others argue there are not ontological abstractions in Hebrews and thus focus on the career of the Son in time, concluding the Son is an agent of God’s wisdom who assumed an eschatological office and eternality as God’s intermediary but is not necessarily or personally preexistent when compared with the Christology of John or later pro-Nicenes (Dunn, Schenk). Last, others recognize that Hebrews evinces a divine Christology where the Son is addressed as God, but their broader readings of the whole epistle render the divinity of the Son relatively insignificant, holding scant explanatory power for salvation or how the argumentation of Hebrews works rhetorically (Moffitt, Compton).Chapter 2 explores the use of Deut 32:43 in Heb 1:6, where Christ is the delivering God who saves his people and is worshipped by angels, and Ps 101:27–28 (LXX) in Heb 1:10–12, where Christ’s ascension contrasts the eternal and unchangeable Son with the transient creation. Hebrews employs “a hermeneutical trope of applying to the Son texts that, in their original horizon, are directed to Israel’s covenant God” (p. 199). Here, “the Pastor has recognized in the work of the Son the eschatological achievement of divine salvific prerogatives, which in his source texts mark out and identify the one God of Israel as the only true and living God” (71).Chapter 3 focuses on Christ as builder of an eschatological house in Heb 3:3–4, where Jesus is accorded more glory than Moses as builder of God’s eschatological house as a son. Pre-critical readers of Hebrews such as John Owen and Thomas Aquinas found something like a syllogism in these verses: Who could build such a house, except one who is God? (pp. 77–78). Brennan argues that there is an allusion to the Nathan oracle in 2 Sam 7:14/1 Chr 17:14 in Heb 3:1–6, about a Davidic son who rules over God’s house, requiring something akin to the christological premises in Owen’s syllogism since the glory of the Son befits the Creator (p. 112).Chapter 4 argues that a divine Christology is evinced in the discussion of Christ’s priesthood as predicated upon an “indestructible life” in 7:16, patterned after how Melchizedek is described in Israel’s Scriptures and as an allusion to Ps 110:4. Brennan notes that most scholars tend to understand this description of the Son’s priesthood as predicated on an “indestructible life” as referring primarily to either the Son’s humanity or divinity, but Brennan argues “neither categories of humanity or divinity are by themselves sufficient to exhaust the nature and significance of Christ’s priesthood in Hebrews” because the Son, in contrast to other priests, “lives forever as the bearer of the divine life, now incarnate, and fittingly raised from the dead, [he] may thereby save his people to the uttermost” (pp. 143, 144).Perhaps the strongest and most creative case is chapter 5, where the Son himself is “divine surety.” Hebrews 6:13–20 notes how, in making a covenant with Abraham, God “swore by himself” in guaranteeing the promise, “having none greater by whom to swear.” Brennan observes that in Heb chapters 7–10 not only is this covenant enacted in the work of Christ, but Christ himself is the one who guarantees those realities God promised and assured by himself, such that Christ himself is the object of faith and himself is divine surety; Brennan also notes ways that a reading of these texts informed the pactum salutis formulations of post-Reformation Protestant scholastics.Chapter 6 describes the “polyvalent sonship” of Jesus, since Hebrews uses the language of humanity as sons, the Davidic ruler as son, and Jesus as the eternal Son of the Father (p. 197). Against quasi-adoptionist readings, the Son is both eternal and also “becomes” Son when his antecedent and eternal status is eschatologically revealed in time (pp. 175–79). As such, “the story of the Son’s enthronement in Hebrews” is “both legitimately a becoming of what he was not before and a demonstration of what and who he has always been and is” (p. 197).Brennan has developed a plausible and generative reading of Hebrews wherein a divine Christology is not only evinced in a few verses at the epistle’s opening but is operative and distributive across the dialogical unfolding of the epistle as a whole. Hebrews has received far less attention than other New Testament writings in the history of scholarly research on Christology, and Brennan’s study represents a well-substantiated challenge to Dunn’s approach by showing how virtually every aspect of salvation and new life in Christ depends or relates in some crucial and determinative way to the divine Son throughout the scripturally intertextual argumentation of Hebrews. As a contribution to Hebrews scholarship more broadly, if the argumentation of the epistle at its deep structures indeed relies on a divine Christology, then to offer an account of sundry topics in Hebrews—such as salvation, faith, atonement, priesthood, covenant, warnings, angels, and more—in a way that functionally or explicitly regards the Son’s divinity as dispensable is to neglect something vital, and thus, possibly misunderstand them or hold unbalanced accounts of them. Hence, “to hear and heed the Pastor’s word is not only to understand that the Son is true God, but to begin to understand why, in fact, this must be the case” (p. 203).However, methodologically, what are we looking for when we ask if a text evinces “a divine Christology”? Is “divine” one among other recognizable, historical categories in ancient Jewish messianic discourse traditions—if not, what are the essential characteristics of “a divine Christology”? Brennan, rightly so, foregrounds that the New Testament authors reevaluated everything, including influences from their Jewish and Greco-Roman historical contexts, in light of Jesus Christ: “In coming to the conception of who the Son is, it is clear that, for NT authors, their Christology does not represent a tacked-on understanding of the Son to an otherwise unmodified Jewish system of thought, and, in particular, to an unreconstructed doctrine of God. Rather, the concept of divinity and the doctrine of God proper become themselves reconfigured through the understanding of who Jesus Christ is” (p. 21). Hermeneutically, then, Brennan concludes that “the primary ruler for establishing divine criteria in assessing the Christology of Hebrews must first and foremost be the theology of Hebrews itself” (p. 21). The canons of conventional historical-criticism might judge such an outlook as anachronistic or circular; how can the content of a field of study itself determine rules for the same field of study? However, a more explicitly theological description of his hermeneutical methods—perhaps appropriate, given Brennan’s insightful conversation throughout with theological interpreters of Hebrews such as Owen and Aquinas—might preclude questions about historical tautology. If our reading of a divine Christology in Hebrews were framed as an act of theological interpretation within the hermeneutical spiral of listening to God the Trinity continue to speak in Holy Scripture, then the metaphysics of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ could account for how the content of Hebrews itself creates rules for interpretation—not least because the Christology of Hebrews is inexhaustible. An ever-present “Today!” urges listeners to continually hear afresh, again and again, the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture about the Son sent from the Father, the Son who—unlike the ever-changing creation that can be shaken—is the same yesterday, today and forever, and who now himself is the source, ground, goal, and rule of life (Heb 3:7, 13; 12:2, 28; 13:8)

Christology · Divinity · Hebrews · Theology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy