Just No!

 

Just No!

January 5, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

This will sound like heresy or maybe even apostacy to some who think a Christian may not contradict anything in the Bible. So be it. It doesn’t change the fact that there are passages—quite a few of them actually—to which I can only say “Just No!” I came across one of them today. It is Hebrews 11:39-40. It comes at the end of a section of Hebrews in which the unknown author has been asserting that everything the characters of the salvation history of Israel they did, they did by faith. Shortly before the passage I’m disagreeing with we read:

 

And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions…. Hebrews 11:32-33

 

In this part of the letter (which isn’t really a letter, but never mind) the text goes on and on about how our ancestors in the faith had faith and therefore were able to accomplish great things.

But then we come to Hebrews 11:39-40:

 

Yet all of these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better, so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.

 

There’s more than one thing wrong in these two verses. One of them is the statement that the ancestors in the faith “did not receive what was promised.” Just what did God promise to these ancestors in the faith? Mostly that they would receive the land Yahweh had promised them from the beginning and that Abraham and Sarah would have an enormous number of descendants. These people did occupy the land Yahweh had supposedly promised them. The descendants of Abraham and Sarah, through Ishmael and Isaac, continue to this day more than three thousand years later. That is at least what Judaism and Islam claim, and I’m content to leave it at that. The Old Testament never has God promise salvation the way we understand it, so salvation cannot be a promise the ancient Jews didn’t receive. Hebrews 11:39 is just wrong here.

That, however, is not the biggest problem with these two verses. That problem lies in the verses’ claim that those ancestors did not receive what was promised. It says they did not receive it because “God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” I wasn’t sure what “made perfect” was supposed to mean. I did some quick research that reveals that the point of this verse is that perfection became possible only through Jesus Christ, so those who came before Christ didn’t get it. I take the word “perfection” to mean essentially the same thing as salvation. They are both full access to God’s grace, or at least that is the only way I can understand them. The claim here is at least that something desirable wasn’t available before Christ but became available after him and through him.

The more time I spend thinking about theology (and I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about theology) the more offensive I find that claim to be. The claim rests upon a belief that Jesus brought something substantively new into the world. He brought an access to God’s grace that hadn’t been available before him. The thrust of this passage is that though the ancestors of the faith had faith, they were not granted the fullness of God’s grace because Jesus Christ hadn’t come along yet. That is a contention I simply cannot accept.

Think about it for a minute. The heroes of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) had a faith appropriate for their time. They acted on that faith in ways appropriate for their time. The Old Testament asserts that God was with them all through the one thousand years or so that the Old Testament covers. Yes, our texts say that God was often angry with God’s Hebrew people. Sometimes, the texts assert, he punished them for worshiping gods other than Yahweh, or for what God took to be their failure to worship Yahweh properly, or because they failed to do distributive justice for the widows, orphans, and strangers among them. Yet God also restored them to Zion after their exile in Babylon, and many of the Psalmists knew that God forgives human sin simply because forgiving is what God does. Still, Hebrews and other ancient sources contend that those ancient Hebrew women and men were not saved, that is, they did not receive the fullness of God’s grace, simply because they lived before Jesus.

That contention simply makes no sense. It says that at a particular point in time God decided to make available t people a fullness of grace that God had withheld from people from the beginning of time to the time we now call the first century CE. Here’s the thing though. God is love and always has been. God expresses God’s love through grace and always has. The contention that the fullness of grace came only through Jesus says that at a particular time God changed, or at least it says that God changed the way God relates to creation. That is a contention I simply cannot accept. The God I know, love, and seek in my own humble way to follow would never withhold grace from anyone. God’s grace is and always has been unconditional. It has to be unconditional if it is truly to be grace and not an earned reward. Not even the coming of Jesus could impose a condition on God’s grace. Jesus Christ is the means by which we Christians come to know God’s grace. Following him is the way in which we respond to God’s grace and the way in which we seek to live into God’s grace. For all that I say, “Thanks be to God!” I do not say that the Christian way ever has been the only way into God’s grace. It can’t be that. If it were it would put a condition on God’s grace, namely, that to have it you have to be Christian. In other words, it would prevent God’s grace from truly being grace. Yet grace is who God is, and grace, if it truly is grace, is and always has been unconditional.

So I say to this passage from Hebrews “Just no!” No, you got this one wrong. Those biblical figures who came before Jesus had as much access to God’s grace as we do. Everyone has always had as much access to God’s grace as we do. That people may understand ultimate reality and how we relate to it differently than we do does not deprive them of God’s grace. It is pure arrogance on our part to say that it does. The ancestors in the faith of which the Hebrew Bible speaks had that access in a different way than we do. Most of them sought to live into God’s grace by following Torah law. That that is not our way to do it, but it is a perfectly legitimate way to do it. Especially given the horrendously sinful history of Christian anti-Judaism, it is inadmissible for us to say that the Jews who came before Jesus (or the Jews who have come after Jesus for that matter) were excluded from God’s grace but we have full access to it.

So once again I say to Hebrews, “Just no!” What you say may have been appropriate or at least understandable when you wrote it roughly two thousand years ago. It is not appropriate today. Asserting it today isn’t even understandable given the context in which we live that is so different from yours. So no, book of Hebrews. Just no!