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Richard J. Ounsworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology. Edited by Richard Bauckham, Daniel R. Driver, Trevor A. Hart, and Nathan MacDonald., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1, April 2011, Pages 330–332, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flr046
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As MacDonald’s introduction to this book hints, this book is perhaps as important for its existence as for its content: it is a collection of papers given at a conference with the same title at St Andrews University in 2006, the second of what is hoped will be an ongoing series of conferences bringing together biblical scholars and systematic theologians. It is testimony to the fact that, despite prevailing tendencies among both groups, there are modern Christian theologians who see their task as originating in, and necessarily anchored to, the interpretation of Scripture. Even more surprisingly, there are biblical scholars who consider their primary task to be doing theology, rather than the history of religions or literary appreciation.
The essays are collected into sections according to theological themes: Christology, cosmology, soteriology among others. What stands out immediately is that the two largest sections are ‘The problem of Hebrews’ supersessionism’ and ‘The call to faith in Hebrews’, each with five essays (the latter also concludes with a final sermon by Ben Witherington III). The two sections overlap, moreover, inasmuch as Markus Bockmuehl’s contribution to the latter deals in large part with the question of whether the faith of Abraham is superseded by Christian faith—he concludes that it is not, but rather that they are identical, ‘the same faith in the same life-giving God’ (p. 369), for all that the Christian and Abraham are at different points along their faith journeys. Indeed, where this volume comes closest to presenting a shared vision rather than a disparate collection of ideas is in proposing that Hebrews can be rescued from the taint of supersessionism, with the spectre of anti-Semitism ever looming, and therefore can be allowed to make a positive contribution to Christian theology.
