Thursday, February 4, 2010

In which I indulge my darlings

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

I was writing a post on Mark Salomon and I began to digress into an exegesis of Hebrews 12:1-2, and I decided that this was one of my darlings, totally inappropriate for the Saints of Doubt post, but instead of killing it, I made it another post.

Pathetic.

Whatever.  If you’re interested, here’s a quick word study/exegetical remark on the passage that explains why I prefer “trailblazer” or “pioneer” to “author” or “founder.”

Older translations render ἀρχηγὸν as “author” or “founder,” but the word does literally mean “one who goes first down the path.”  And so the description makes more sense, because Hebrew 12 follows—you guessed it—Hebrews 11, which is a recitation of great heroes of the faith.  But if Jesus comes after guys like Enoch and Abraham, how can he be the “first one down the path” of faith?  Older translations “fix” the problem by inserting a less common meaning, namely, “author.”  Of course, that doesn’t really solve the problem, because how can Jesus be the “founder” of something that has been going on since ancient times?  The translation reflects a theological/historical bias.  Surely the author of Hebrews is musing on a new dispensation of faith, a new era, in which faith *for us* is different than faith *for them*.  To which I say nay.

The book of Hebrews is set in the context of “these last days", when God “has spoken to us by his son.”  Possibly meaning that post-Easter faith is somehow new, different, of changed content.  Another, better, possibility is that Jesus has shown us the first fulfillment of the promise of faith.  Meaning that Jesus’ faith was not qualitatively different from Abraham’s, but, rather than just dying in faith (as did all the faithful in Hebrews 11), Jesus “pioneers” the experience-of-coming-into-the-promise-of-faith.  This makes better sense of “the joy” of being “sat at the right hand” as well as the end of Hebrews 11 which reminds us that all those other guys died and that was it.  Nothing else.  They did many heroic deeds, suffered martyrs deaths, and stayed in the grave.  Jesus follows their example of death by torture, but “pioneers” the deepest fulfillment of faith, namely, the joy of glory and vindication.

For our purposes, Jesus’ “pioneering work” should be seen as a continuation of OT/Apocryphal faith—that is, the life of a martyr—with a certain knowledge of “what comes next” in these “last days”: resurrection, glory, and new life.

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