It can cause no surprise, therefore, when the author declares that it was of the ‘ Son that God⁹ was speaking in the Psalm (45⁶), when He said, “Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever.” This is only to apply directly to the Son the name which is in the whole discussion implied to be His: for undoubtedly the very point of the whole argument is to the effect that Jesus Christ as the ‘ Son of God stands infinitely above every creature just because He is God Himself.¹⁰ We may leave undecided the question whether or no the doxology at the close of the Epistle is to be referred to Christ, treated here as the God He is recognized throughout the Epistle as being. Certainly there is no reason why this author should not have ascribed “eternal glory” to the Being he had described as in His very nature ‘ the effulgence of the divine glory,”³ and for that very reason it may be a matter of indifference to us whether he has done so or not. Nor is much added to this picture of the divine Christ by his designation of Him, without qualification, as the Firstborn (1⁶), or by his noticing that God has appointed Him Heir of all things” (1²). Firstborn and ‘ Heir are little more than specially honorific ways of saying Son. God’s Firstborn as such takes rank above all other existing beings: even all of the angels shall do Him reverence. God’s ‘ Firstborn is also naturally God’s Heir,” an heir whose inheritance embraces the universe, and whose tenure stretches to eternity. All these declarations are bound very closely together in their common relation to the fundamental conception of our Lord’s divine Sonship; and constitute items by the mention of which the contents of the idea of Sonship are developed. The statements of the opening verses of the Epistle seem to be arranged in a sort of climax by means of which the glory of the New Covenant, revealed in the Son,’ is more and more enhanced. The glory of the New Covenant is that it has been introduced by God the Son’—that ‘ Son who, despite His lowly manifestation on earth, has been appointed heir of all thingsthat is, Lord of all: by whom, indeed, the worlds were made in the depths of eternity,—that is, who is the eternal Creator of all that is: who, in fact, is in Himself the effulgence of God’s glory and the impress of His substance—that is to say, all that God is: and by whom, because He is all that God is,.the universe is held in being.

It is particularly noticeable that at this precise point a mention of Christ’s propitiatory work is introduced. This ‘Son of God,’ whose dignity has been thus expounded, “made purification of sins.” The soteriological interest is present, therefore, even in this ontological passage, and it is the soteriological interest, indeed, which gives its importance to this ontological discussion in the eyes of the writer. The soteriological titles by which he designates our Lord are therefore naturally as rich as the ontological ones. He is ‘ the Mediator of the New Covenant (8⁶ 9¹ 122⁴): He is the Ground of eternal Salvation (35⁹): He is ‘ the Author of Salvation (2¹⁰, cf. Acts 3¹ 5³¹): He is the Author and Perfecter of our Faith (12²): He is our Forerunner into that which is within the veil (6²⁰):¹² He is the Apostle and High Priest of our Confes-sion (3¹): He is ‘ the Great Shepherd of the Sheep ¹²’The αἴτιος of Salvation (5⁹) is merely He who is the Cause or Producer of Salvation. The ἀρχηγός of Salvation (2¹⁰9 cf. 122) is commonly supposed to be He who has Himself trodden the pathway over which our feet should pass, and to be so far equivalent to the πρό opopos (62). So, e. g. G. Vos in the Princeton Theological Review, July, 1907, p. 434, who classes ἀρχηγός and πρόδρομος together as implying identification in experience, in contrast with αἴτιος in which this is not present; but see to the contrary, Cremer, ed. 3 and subsequent edd.

Witness of Epistle to the Hebrews 283 (13²⁰): and, above all (for this is a favorite conception of this Epistle), He is our Priest (6⁶ 73¹¹,¹⁵,¹⁷,²¹ i.. BE [8⁴] 10²¹) or more specifically⁴ our ‘ High Priest lio¹⁷) 3¹ 4¹⁴,¹⁵ 2¹⁰ G²⁰ 0⁶ 3¹ gly, All these are great designations: and we see at a glance that they reflect , in their substance the high estimate put upon our Lord’s person as the Son of God.” It is only because I He is the Son of God that He may be fitly described . in His saving work by these high designations. It is also at once observable that the Messanic conception underlies and gives form to them all. If Jesus is con- ceived by the writer of this Epistle in His person fj fundamentally as the eternal Son of God’; He is I equally conceived in His work as fundamentally the Messiah appointed of God to inaugurate the new order of things and to bring His people safely into the ex- perience of the promised salvation. As ‘ Mediator of the New Covenant He gives His life for the redemption of His people, establishing new relations between them and God by means of His blood. As the Originator of Salvation,” He tasted death for every man, receiving in Himself the penalties due to them, not to Him. As Author and Perfecter of our faith He endured the cross, despising the shame that He might be not merely our example, but our Saviour. As the Great Shep-herd He laid down His life for His sheep. As the Apostle and High Priest He is the One appointed by God to make sacrifice of Himself for the sins of the people,—for every High Priest must needs have somewhat to offer, and this our High Priest has through His own blood obtained eternal redemption for us.

We see that the red thread of redemption in blood is woven into all the allusions to the saving work of the Son of God.” And we see that the chief “5.05 vehicle in this Epistle for the expression of this high teaching is the representation of our Lord’s work as priestly in its nature, and the proclamation of Him as the great High Priest.” The interest of this grows out of the circumstance that here at last in the New Testament the conception of “.Messiah as Priest comes to its rights. In their absorption in the conception of Messiah as King. the Jews gave scanty hospitality to the rich suggestions of the Old Testament of other aspects in which His office and work might be contemplated. It was characteristic of Christianity, under the illumination thrown back upon the promise by its fulfillment, to gather these neglected aspects together and note their fulfillment in Christ. Among them was the conception of Messiah as a priest performing the priestly work of propitiation. There seems to be little trace of the currency of such a conception among the Jews. There is also little use made of it in other books of the New Testament. But in the Epistle to the Hebrews it is given its full exposition; strikingly illustrated from the same Psalm which declares the Messiah David’s Lord not less than David’s son,—‘ Thou art a Priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”’; and made the vehicle for the inculcation of the fundamental doctrine of Christianity—the propitiatory death of Jesus, the reconciliation of God by His sacrifice of Himself, and His eternal intercession for His people. This is the great contribution of the Epistle to the Hebrews to the apprehension of the nature of our Lord’s work.⁵

---

← The Witness of the Catholic Epistles · Contents · The Witness of the Apocalypse →

Footnotes

1. Christ is used everywhere as a proper name—even when it has the article: cf. Davidson, Ep. to the Heb., 73, note 1. In some passages the term Son is almost or quite a proper name: cf. Riehm 272, Davidson, loc. cit., note 2. ↩

2. Cf. Sven Herner, op. cit, p. 41: “The usage by which κύριος is applied to Christ is not alien to Hebrews. We meet once (13²⁰) with the designation our Lord Jesus’: and at 7¹⁴ we read that the Lord springs from Judah. In 1¹⁰ God is represented as saying to Christ, Thou, Lord, hast laid the foundations of the earth,’ and 2³ speaks of the salvation which the Lord has announced. Finally Hebrews has a passage where we cannot decisively pronounce whether κύριος refers to God ‘or to Christ,… (((22¹⁴). 3 Cf. Riehm, Der Lehrbegriff des Hebraerbriefes, 1867, p. 271. “We shall see that the author emphasizes the true humanity of Jesus >” more than is found in any other N. T. book.” Accordingly, cf. 36, 37 38, 39, for details. ⁴ Cf. Riehm, pp. 270, 271: “He sees in Christ above all the Son of God in the eminent sense of that word.” 5 Cf. Riehm, op. cit., p. 276: “There is already contained in what has been said the solution of the second question which we were to deal with in this paragraph—the question, namely, whether the uniquely intimate relation of Christ to God, which is designated by the name of Son, is an ethico-religious or a metaphysical one. Since this name belongs to Christ on account of His pretemporal relation to God, the notion ‘ Son of God is plainly in the first instance a metaphysical one. … An unprejudiced exposition of the relative passages must lead to the conclusion that according to the doctrine of the author, it is precisely the metaphysical attributes which are attributed to Christ in 1² sed that make Him the Son of God.” ⁶ Riehm offers this illustration to clarify the notion of ἀπαύγασμα: “Should all the light which proceeds from the sun be united again in a second body of light, which radiates it out again a second time, there would be an ἀπαύγασμα of the sun in the sense in which the author has used the word here. All the rays of the manifold divine glory unite again in the Son, in order in Him, joined together in a new glorious Light-Being, to present the divine glory a second time and to make it through this second presentation visible even to the creature” (p. 288), Cf. also Davidson iz loc., who judiciously echoes Riehm. ⁷ Cf. Riehm, op. cit., p. 284: “What the writer wishes is to emphasize in this second predicate that the nature of the Son corresponds precisely with the nature of the Father; that there is no trait in the nature of the Father which does not find itself in perfection also in the nature of the Son, and vice versa.” Of the whole, he says (pp. 284-5): “The Son is then, according to the doctrine of the Ep. to the Heb., an independently existing Divine Person, whose substance is not created by God, but has proceeded out of the glory of the Father’s nature; a Divine Person to whom in consequence the same glorious nature belongs, so that every attribute of the Father repeats itself in the Son, and every attribute of the Son repeats itself in the Father; so that through the Son the whole nature of God is completely revealed.” Cf. the long “Note on the Son” in Davidson’s Commentary, pp. 73-79. ⁸ It is noticeable, however, that God is not called Father as over against the Son in this Epistle. Cf. Riehm, op. cit., p. 272: “As the author so frequently designates Christ as the Son of God, it is somewhat remarkable that he only a single time and that in a citation from the O. T. (1⁵) calls God the Father of Christ.” ⁹ For this is the significance of the formulas of citation to which 1⁸ goes back. ¹⁰ So Delitzsch, iz loc. (E. T., p. 76): “The very point of the argument for the superiority of the Son above the angels, drawn from Ps 45⁷ and foll,, lies surely in the fact that He is here twice, or at least ” once, addressed in the vocative as θεός.” Hofmann and even Riehm are unnecessarily subtle here. ↩

3. Riehm says (p. 286): “Still how can it occasion surprise that the author in 13²¹ praises Jesus Christ with the doxology, ᾧ ἡ 00a els rods αἰῶνας, which, according to O. T. notions, is due to Jehovah only, but in the N. T. passages is also transferred to Christ? It is recognized by all recent commentators that the relative (ᾧ) refers to Christ and not to God.” So also Bleek, Liinemann, Maier, Kurtz, Lowrie: contra, Delitzsch: zon liquet, Davidson. ↩

4. Dr. Vos (Princeton Theological Review, July, 1907, p. 432), I supposes the use of the simple priest to be due in general to the appeal to Ps. 110 (5¹⁰ being exceptional), while High Priest is the real preference of the author, resting on a reference in his mind to the entrance of the High Priest into the Holy of Holies on the day of f the atonement, which prefigures what is to him the central act of Christ’s I priestly ministry,—the entrance into Heaven. “The Saviour is a high priest because in the discharge of His ministry He enters into Heaven. il… The inference lies near that the whole discussion of the subject ultimately serves the purpose of showing the necessity of the ! heavenly state of existence of the Saviour.” On the other hand, cf. Davidson, p. 147: “According to the representation of the Epistle, there is no difference in principle between priest and high priest”; . and Denney, Hastings’ B. D., Iv. p. 98 a: “In the New Testament it is only in the Ep. to the Hebrews that Jesus is spoken of as ἱερεύς, μέγας ἱερεύς and dpytepsbs—terms which are not to be distinguished from each other, the last two only signifying Christ’s eminence in the priestly character.” ↩

5. On the conception of the Messiah as Priest, cf. Stanton, The Jewish and Christian Messiah, 1867, pp. 128-9; and esp. pp. 294 seq.; also Hastings’ B. D., 11, 356 b: and cf. Swete, Hastings’ B. D., II, 406: “The Jewish Messiah, however, was chiefly the Anointed King; the conception of Messiah as the Prophet was less distinct, and that of a Christ-Priest (ἱερεὺς 6 yptoros, Lev 4⁵,¹6 6²²) entirely wanting, until it presented itself to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah, p. 293 ff.).” On the idea of our Lord’s priesthood see the “extended note on the priesthood of Christ” in Davidson’s Com. on Heb., p. 146 seq.; and cf. Denney in Hastings’ B. D., iv., 98 seq., and especially Vos, as above, pp. 423 seq., who adduces the passages which show that although the term priest is not explicitly applied to the Messiah by the Jews, nor to our Lord elsewhere in the N. T., the idea is not alien to either the Jews or the N. T. writers. ↩