GOD HAS SPOKEN
“a new covenant”((Heb. 8:8, 13.)
(Hebrews Twenty-Five)(The following outline is that of Kevin L. Anderson, Hebrews: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition,
New Beacon Bible Commentary (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2013), 5-6. As in the previous lessons
we will document our quotations from Anderson by the page number in a parenthesis. Our dependence on
his work, however, is not limited to quotations.
I. Hearing the Apostle and High Priest of Our Confession: Hebrews 1:1—4:13
II. Jesus’ Superior High Priesthood: Hebrews 4:14—10:18
A. The Qualifications of the Great High Priest (4:14—5:10).
B. Preparing for Advanced Teaching on Christ’s High Priesthood (5:11—6:20)
1. The Great High Priest (4:14-16).
2. Qualifications of Ordinary High Priests (5:1-4)
3. Qualifications of the High Priest like Melchizedek (5:5-10)
1. Reproof Concerning Arrested Spiritual Development (5:11-14)
2. Exhortation to Go On to Maturity (6:1—3)
3.Warning About Irreversible Apostasy (6:4-8)
4.Words of Reassurance (6:9-12)
5. Powerful Encouragement Based on God’s Trustworthiness (6:13-20)
C. The High Priest like Melchizedek: The Son Perfected Forever (7:1-28).
D. The Superior Ministry of the Son’s High Priesthood (8:1—10:18)
1. Introduction to Christ’s Superior Ministry (8:1-13).
2. The Better and More Perfect Tabernacle (9:1-14).
3. Christ’s Sacrificial Death Inaugurated the New Covenant (9:15-28).
4. Christ’s One Obedient Offering Perfects Worshippers Forever (1:1-18).
III. Call to Persevering Faith and Acceptable Worship: Hebrews 10:19--13:25)
Hebrews 8:6-13 But Jesus’ priestly work far surpasses what these other priests do, since he’s working from a far better plan. If the first plan—the old covenant—had worked out, a second wouldn’t have been needed. But we know the first was found wanting, because God said,Heads up! The days are coming
when I’ll set up a new plan
for dealing with Israel and Judah.
I’ll throw out the old plan
I set up with their ancestors
when I led them by the hand out of Egypt.
They didn’t keep their part of the bargain,
so I looked away and let it go.
This new plan I’m making with Israel
isn’t going to be written on paper,
isn’t going to be chiseled in stone;
This time I’m writing out the plan in them,
carving it on the lining of their hearts.
I’ll be their God,
they’ll be my people.
They won’t go to school to learn about me,
or buy a book called God in Five Easy Lessons.
They’ll all get to know me firsthand,
the little and the big, the small and the great.
They’ll get to know me by being kindly forgiven,
with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean.
By coming up with a new plan, a new covenant between God and his people, God put the old plan on the shelf. And there it stays, gathering dust.
Hebrews 8:10b:
“I will put my laws in their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God.”
He belonged to all of us who bear the name of Christ.
Every part of Christ’s Church is a debtor to him.
Introduction
On January 25, 1974, a historic and unique event took place in Westminster Abbey. In this monument of the established church, the Church of England, a memorial service of thanksgiving was held for a Free Church minister, a Welshman out of Dissenter background. The final blessing and commendation was said by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the address by a minister of the Church of Scotland. The Dean of Westminster Abbey said of the honored minister,
He belonged to all of us who bear the name of Christ. Every part of
Christ’s Church is a debtor to him.(F. W. Dillistone, C. H. Dodd: Interpreter of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1977), 238.)
The Congregational minister was Charles Harold Dodd, ordained in 1912, known in the academic world simply as C. H. Dodd. He was born
on April 7, 1884, in Wrexham, Denbighshire, Wales, and died at 89 on September 22, 1973, just as the folk of Pasadena College were traumatically settling into their new home in San Diego as Point Loma College, an Institution of the Church of the Nazarene.
C. H. Dodd was an accomplished New Testament scholar and prolific
author in the field. But that was not all:
‘We realized,’ writes one of his students, ‘that we were sitting at the feet of a man who was not only a first-class scholar, but who owned a deep – and deeply simple – allegiance to God through Jesus Christ.’(Dillistone, C. H. Dodd, on the flyleaf.)
Dodd himself writes of his early faith:
I was born into a Christian home and in my earliest years prayer
became a natural and a real thing for me. . . . I recall, in quite a simple and childish way, giving myself to Christ, and some years later, with fuller knowledge, I registered my faith in Him and purpose to serve Him by joining the fellowship of Pen-y-bryn Congregational Church, in which I had grown up from childhood. I left home for Oxford with the consciousness of being in faith and purpose a disciple of Jesus Christ.(Dillistone, C. H. Dodd, 36-37.)
Although academia claimed his life for thirty-five years (1915-1949), C. H. Dodd served as a minister in Warwick, Wales, for three years after his ordination in 1912. As a student he had studied classics at University College, Oxford, and after graduating in 1906, he had spent a year in Berlin where he was impressed and no doubt inspired by Adolf Harnack’s attitude toward history as “a supreme teacher-historian”(Dillistone, C. H. Dodd, 55, quoting Wilhelm Pauk’s description in Harnack and Troeltsch, 17f. Harnach was the author of What is Christianity (1957—in German 1900). It received both “enthusiastic acclaim and bitter antagonism, called by Rudolf Bultmann “a theological-historical document of the greatest
importance.”) and a devoted man of faith. Dodd’s own academic career was spent at Oxford (1915--),(In the fall of 1927 C. H. Dodd declined the invitation of Dean Luther to a prestigious Chair in New Testament at the Divinity School of Yale University and remained at Oxford. He did lecture that fall at Yale Divinity School, Hartford Theological Seminary, and Oberlin College.) the University of Manchester (1930--), and at the University of Cambridge (1935-1949).(Dodd in 1936 had been elected to the Norris-Hulse Chair of Divinity in the University of Cambridge that only recently allowed one new chair to non-members of the Church of England. Here for the first time a non-Anglican was accorded full status within an ancient university, the only continuing restriction being that he was not permitted to exercise the privilege accorded to his Anglican colleagues of preaching
University sermons in Great St. Mary’s Church. The restriction was later removed and on January 25 1942, Dodd preached his first university sermon in Cambridge. Dillistone, C. H. Dodd, 145-146.)
In retirement he continued his research and writing and served twenty years (1950-1970) as director of the scholarly committees that produced the New English Bible (1970).
The “why” of our beginning today with him leads to the consideration of the contribution of the University
I.
C. H. Dodd to Our Study of Hebrews 8
During the formative years of my academic studies and early teaching career, C. H. Dodd’s writings impacted my thinking. First, was his seminal work, The Apostolic Preaching and its Developments (1936) that interested me deeply in the nature of preaching as seen in the New Testament. His distinction between kerygma (proclamation) and didache (teaching) indelibly impressed me with the kerygmatic character of the New Testament, particularly the four gospels, that is, they are “witness” documents and should be treated and taught and preached as such, as witnesses to the gospel!.Second, was C. H. Dodd’s The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel
(1953), his magnum opus, published in retirement. This work contributed early to my career-long fascination with the Johannine literature. In fact, as I began to teach the Gospel of John it became the verbatim source of many a lecture! His later companion work, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (1963) was an admirable study that was an enjoyable read.
And we cannot overlook his earlier The Parables of the Kingdom
(1935) where he launched his emphasis on “realized eschatology” onto the interpretive scene. By “realized eschatology” Dodd meant that the Kingdom of God is not only “yet to come,” but in a very real sense “already realized,” already here! “The absolute, the ‘wholly other’, has entered into time and space.”(C. Dodd, as quoted in Dillistone, C. H. Dodd, 119,) Nuanced by the German scholar, Joachim Jeremias (1900-1979), it was a realisiendre eschatologie, an eschatology in the process of realization.
All this background, which I trust you may have found interesting, is to set the stage for our use of C. H. Dodd’s According to the Scriptures; The Substructure of New Testament Theology (1952) as our approach to Hebrews 8:7-13. I realize, as far as biblical scholarship goes, Dodd has passed on and his book is dated--over sixty years ago. New Testament research has moved on! But to be “dated” does not always or necessarily mean “out of date”—no longer significant or useful!
In Hebrews 8:7-13, as the writer continues to argue for the superiority of Christ’s high-priestly ministry (8:1-13), he supports his point by quoting an Old Testament prophetic text which he introduces with “God finds fault with them when he says . . .” (v. 8). What does it mean for a New Testament writer to quote from the Old Testament, in this case from Jeremiah 31:31-34 (LXX)? What were C. H. Dodd’s perspectives on this significant issue? We look to his According to the Scriptures to find out! We will share from Chapter V, “CONCLUSIONS” how he views the quotation of Old Testament passages in the New Testament.(10 C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures; The Substructure of New Testament Theology (London: Nisbet & Co., Ltd, 1952), 126-139. We will indicate pages within the brackets [ ].)
Dodd’s conclusions are four: First, he posits a post-New Testament
existence of the composition of Old Testament “testimony-books” that he sees as the result of the work of the earliest biblical scholars. He writes that
the evidence suggests that at a very early date a certain method of biblical study was established and became part of the equipment of Christian evangelists and teachers. This method was largely employed orally, and found literary expression only sporadically and incompletely, but it is presupposed in our earliest sources [126].
Second, and of prime significance for New Testament interpretation, is that this method included
the selection of certain large sections of the Old Testament scriptures, especially from Isaiah, Jeremiah and certain minor prophets, and from the Psalms. These sections were understood as wholes, and particular verses or sentences were quoted from them rather as pointers to the whole context than as constituting testimonies in and of themselves [126].
In addition, isolated sentences could be detached from other parts of the Old Testament and used to elucidate or illustrate the meaning of the larger section. But, Dodd insists, “in the fundamental passages it is the total context that is in view, and is the basis of the argument” [126].Third, these relevant Old Testament Scriptures when referenced in the New Testament
were understood and interpreted upon intelligible and consistent
principles, as setting forth ‘the determinate counsel of God’ which
was fulfilled in the gospel facts, and consequently as fixing the
meaning of those facts [126-127].
Fourth and finally, this whole body of Old Testament passages with their application to the meaning of the gospel is shared by all the main parts of the New Testament. This is true in particular as providing “the starting point for the theological constructions of Paul, the author to the Hebrews, and the Fourth Evangelist.” This body of material is then “the substructure of all Christian theology and contains already its chief regulative ideas”[127].
The remainder of Dodd’s chapter on his conclusions deals with the
question of whether the methods and principles “followed by the early oral tradition of Old Testament interpretation lying behind the New Testament have continuing validity as a means to the theological understanding of the gospel facts” [127]. Dodd’s answer views the New Testament writers as interpreting the Old Testament on the basis of an understanding of history, history not
in the sense of a pre-ordained sequence of events, but in the sense of a kind of master-plan imposed upon the order of human life in this world by the Creator Himself, a plan within which his freedom works [128].
The prophets denied that history moves under its own steam, but that there is a mysterious factor, the living God himself whose impact on humanity “reveals itself negatively as judgment upon human action, positively as power of renewal, or redemption” [129]. Further, the earliest thinkers of Christianity, taking up this view of history, declared that
in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ this act of
absolute judgment and absolute redemption had taken place. This
complex event therefore becomes the center from which the whole
history of the people of God, both backwards and forward in time, is to be understood, and ultimately the history of all mankind [129-130].
The question now is, how does our text contribute to this end? The opening and closing lines (7-8a and 13) indicate that the main purpose for quoting the prophecy from Jeremiah 31:31-34 is the need for a new covenant. So our author brings us to
II.
“The Promise of a New Covenant”(Johnson, Hebrews, 203.)
(8:7-13)
As readers of Hebrews we remember that our “main point” is that “we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, a minister in the sanctuary” (vv. 1-2). And this high priest, Jesus, who “has now obtained a more excellent ministry” has become “the mediator of a better covenant . . . enacted through better promises” (v. 6).(The term “covenant” will appear throughout the chapters that follow (9:4, 15, 16, 17, 20: 10:16, 29; 12:24; 13:20).)
The theme of a new covenant becomes as prominent as that of a new
priesthood: “for Hebrews the two are intertwined.”(Johnson, Hebrews, 203,)
As the writer, in the text now before us, presents the “better
promises,” his opening line contains
1.
A twofold negative evaluation
(8:7-8a)
7For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one. 8God finds fault with them when he says: . . .
The first negative evaluation concerns the covenant mediated by Moses on Mount Sinai. Interestingly, the author does not challenge the covenant made with Abraham—his mention of Abraham is positive and the promises to him foundational for Israel (2:16; 6:13-15; 11:8-12). The Sinai covenant, however, and the priesthood under its law is said to be not “faultless”; if so it would not have been necessary for the prophets to look for “a second” covenant.
Then, somewhat illogically, the writer attributes the failure of the first covenant to a second negative evaluation: “God finds fault with them.” As Johnson expresses it, “it is important to remember that for the author, it is precisely the failure of the people to keep it that reveals the inadequacy of the first covenant.” The reason is that it is “the author’s conviction that the worth of a covenant is measured by its efficiency in perfecting persons.”(Johnson, Hebrews, 205.) The writer sees this negative judgment corroborated by the accusation in Jeremiah’s prophecy of the “new covenant” that God will make “with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” will not be
like the covenant that I made with their ancestors,
for they did not continue in my covenant,
on the day when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of the land of Egypt;
and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord.(In the warning passage of 3:7-19 the author has already expressed this conviction in strong language with Psalm 95:7b-12: “Now who were they who heard and yet were rebellious? Was it not those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses? But with whom was he angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief” (vv. 16-19),)
These two negative evaluations—that the first “first covenant” and those who received it are flawed—the writer to the Hebrews supports by his quotation of
2.
Jeremiah 31:31-34
(8:8b-12)
The days are surely coming, says the Lord,
when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel
9not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors,
for they did not continue in my covenant,
and with the house of Judah;
on the day when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of the land of Egypt;
and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord.
10This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
I will put my laws in their minds,
and I will be their God,
11And they shall not teach one another
for they shall all know me,
12For I will be merciful toward their iniquities,
after those days, says the Lord:
and write them on their hearts,
and they shall be my people.
or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’
from the least of them to the greatest.
and I will remember their sins no more.
The announcement that “the days are surely coming” find their fulfillment in writer’s opening declaration that “in these last days he [God] has spoken to us in a Son” (1:2). These are the “Today” days (3:7, 15; 4:7) in which the Holy Spirit is now speaking, “that is, the evangelical era” (239), in which the readers—and we--are now graced to live. The benefits of “the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord,” in our privileged “Today” era, are fourfold.
First, “says the Lord, . . . I will put my laws in their minds, and
write them on their hearts.” The new covenant administered by the “more excellent ministry” of Jesus our high priest, our “minister in the sanctuary,” brings all the way home to us the “the transformation of the inner person toward obedience or conformity to God’s will.” As succeeding chapters of Hebrews will show, this is accomplished by “the cleansing of the conscience through Christ’s self-offering” (240).
Second, “says the Lord, . . . I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” This promise, following on the transformation of the heart “echoes the covenantal pledge sounded throughout the Hebrew Bible”:(Johnson, Hebrews, 208.)
Moses was instructed to say to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt: “I will
take you as my people, and I will be your God” (Exod. 6:7);
In Leviticus 26:12: “And I will walk among you, and will be your
God and you shall be my people”;
Jeremiah’s earlier word from the LORD was an admonition: “Obey
my voice and I will be your God, and you shall be my people.”
The word of the LORD to the prophet Ezekiel was a like promise:
“My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and
they shall be my people” (37:27);
The apostle Paul picked up all these promises and applied them to the dysfunctional Corinthian Christians: “For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,
I will live in them and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people (2 Cor. 6:16).
Our writer sees these Old Testament promises now fulfilled in the constitution of a holy family of God: “those who are sanctified all have one Father. . . . Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters (2:11).
The third benefit of the new covenant, “says the Lord, . . . and they shall not teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” The knowledge of the Lord will be available to all by the grace that “goes before,”(In Wesleyan terms, this is prevenient grace.) in some real sense, “universally shared,”(Johnson, Hebrews, 208,) “from the least of them to the greatest.” Anderson (240), hopefully gingerly, brings 6:4-5 to bear here with “those who have once been enlightened.” In a similar warning passage, the Hebrews’ writer speaks later of the hearers as “having received the knowledge of the truth” (10:26). John Wesley taught that
there is no man that is in a state of mere nature; there is no man,
unless he has quenched the Spirit, that is wholly void of the grace of God. . . . it is more properly termed “preventing grace.” . . . Everyone has some measure of that light, some faint glimmering ray, which sooner or later, more or less, enlightens every man that cometh into the world.(Albert C. Outler, The Works of John Wesley, Volume III: Sermons 71-114 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 207.)
In the Gospel of John, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world”! (John 1:9).Fourth and finally, “for I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” The prayer that Jesus teaches us to pray, “forgive us our sins” (Luke 1l:4), is answered! Mercy has long been an essential ingredient of God’s covenant with his people as Moses heard on Mount Sinai when “the LORD descended in a cloud” and proclaimed,
“The Lord, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exod. 34:5-7).
“Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7). Forgiveness is at the very heart of the gospel, the spiritual reality crucial to the author’s“arguments in chs 9-10 concerning the superiority of Christ’s high-priestly ministry” (240): “he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself” (9:26).
With this thrilling prophetic quotation from the prophet Jeremiah, the writer to the Hebrews brings us to
3.
“The logical conclusion”(Anderson, Hebrews, 240.)
(8:13)
In speaking of “a new covenant,” he has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.
The weight of the author’s closing comment is “difficult to assess.”(Johnson, Hebrews, 209.) The translations vary:
KJV: In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old.
Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.
NASB: When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first
obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is
NIV: By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one
obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.
NRSV: In speaking of “a new covenant,” he has made the first one
obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.
TM: By coming up with a new plan, a new covenant between God and his people, God put the old plan on the shelf. And there it stays, gathering dust.
But is “vanish” or “disappear” the correct translation in the Hebrews’ context of the Greek aphanismou? Both the noun and its cognate verb aphanizō can equally mean “destruction” and “destroy.” Johnson accepts this connotation and translates the verse as
By saying “new,” he has made the first old (pepalaiōken). And that
which has been made old (palaioumenon) is also aging (gēraskon) to
the point of destruction (eggus aphaismou).
According to Johnson, the Hebrews’ author is saying that “the first covenant is not only old and weak, it is destined for an imminent destruction.”(Johnson, Hebrews, 210.) Johnson takes this as the view of the writer to the Hebrews in that for the latter the earlier covenant was not able to bring about the perfecting of persons, that is, the transformation that Jesus accomplished in the new covenant for those who look to him (12:2). This was likewise true of early Christian experience, and therefore that of the entire New Testament—and for the most part that of Christendom from the first into the twentieth century.
Conclusion
But in our post-World War II time, today, in the twenty-first century, in what sense or to what degree do you think that the Old Testament covenant is old, set aside, obsolete, and to be completely done away with? How are we in our time, in terms of God’s age-long covenant with his people beginning with Abraham, to view the Jewish world-wide community?These are serious questions in our post-Holocaust age with which
many have been and are dealing.(For example, see Johnson, Hebrews, “Excursus 5: Old and New Convents,” 210-215. The technical term at the heart of the discussion is “supersessionism.” Michael Lodahl speaks to this issue in his published dissertation: Shekina/spirit: Divine Presence in Jewish and Christian Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 1992). Lodahl’s first chapter, “Christian Pneumatologies and Anti-Judaism.” sets up the problem of Christian exclusivism. In a recent review by Alexandra Brown of N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God (Fortress), she asks that if “in Paul’s view, did Christians—Jews and Gentiles alike—join Israel, replace Israel, or form a second elect beside Israel? Or has God created in Christ a people utterly new, radically distinct from any prior identity?” Christian Century (October 29, 2014), 38.)
There are some who would say that “Christianity finally reaped its harvest in the Holocaust.”(Lodahl, Shekina/spirit, 25: “An attentive reading of history reveals that Christian anti-Judaism, while hardly the sole factor, was a prominent and necessary factor in the socio-economic, ideological and historical forces which converged in the secularized anti-Semitic policies of the Nazus prior to and during World War II. The deeply rooted anti-Judaic bias in the Christian tradition also hindered the exercise of Christian compassion toward European Jews during the thirteen years of Nazi persecution and mass murder” (32). Witness, for example, the concerns of Dietrich Bonhoeffer early in the Nazi period about the German church’s attitude toward the Nazi’s treatment of the Jewish populace.)
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