Hebrews' allegory of Christ as Priest

The writer of Hebrews presents an allegory that sees Christ achieving what the sacrificial system would have ideally liked to do but couldn't. The new covenant, as a result of Christ, has not only accomplished everything the old covenant did, but surpassed it in every way. I think such an allegory is not really the best place to be looking to learn how the new covenant actually works. But reservations aside, since I have been asked what I think the writer of Hebrews thinks about the atonement...

The first atonement motif in Hebrews is in chapter 2 and talks about him defeating the devil and freeing us from the fear of death, though this motif does not seem to reoccur. So I'm going to put it to one side.

The most common atonement motif is of Christ as an intercessor who submits prayers and supplications to God like an old testament priest. It is in this context that it is said Christ as priest submits to God "gifts and sacrifices" (5:1, 8:3, 9:9) along with his supplications. The idea of sacrifices as gifts to God in order to please him and thus have him view the petitions and prayers favorably was extremely common in the ancient world. The pleasant smell of incense and the giving of gifts other than animals were understood to function in much the same way, thus aiding the petitions of the worshipers.

In this sense in trying to "work out" the allegory, we could say that the writer sees Christ's life of obedience to God and his faithfulness to death doing God's will forms a pleasing gift to God, a sacrificial offering of himself and his life to the will of God ("I have come to do your will" 10:7-9), thus pleasing God and strengthening his petitions.

A second and different function of sacrifices is discussed later in Hebrews - that of purification. In the ancient world the life-force of of pure animals was considered to be able to purify that which it touched by virtue of its own purity. Thus comments are made about how things are washed clean and purified through blood, as if blood was a detergent. The Mosaic law contains long descriptions of how and where to spread the blood to achieve purification. Furthermore the eating of the holy meat of the sacrifice was also believed to bring purification.

Christ gets paralleled to this notion of sacrificial purification. He has achieved some sort of purification that is better and bigger than what the sacrifices could achieve. But how it works is somehow different - we neither are literally washed in Christ's blood nor eat his flesh (well there's the Eucharist, but it's not mentioned). The mechanics of how he achieved this purification are not specified unambiguously or clearly. It is therefore possible to link any atonement mechanism into this.

The mention of a defeat of Satan right near the start of Hebrews would suggest that Christus Victor or Ransom from Satan might provide the correct mechanism for understanding the author's thought here. On the other hand, what is occurring here is sacrificial supersession - ie the sacrificial system is being superseded and replaced by something else. Since cultural studies have indicated that sacrificial systems seem to be always superseded in cultures by morality and ethics this would seem to suggest an Ethical or Moralistic mechanism of atonement is most likely in mind. Throughout the rest of the new testament there is clear evidence of moral living as superseding sacrifices. The most famous being of course Rom 12:1 "present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship", but there are heaps of others.

It would be passing strange if the author of Hebrews saw CV or Ransom as providing the mechanism of supersession when the rest of the NT Christians thought moral transformation to living a moral life in obedience to the teachings of Christ and the imitation of his life was what brought about purification and hence superceded the sacrificial system. These ideas seem to make sense of Hebrews when applied to it. The author of Hebrews also seems to have a tendency to draw moral conclusions from sacrificial sentences, implying the same idea of morality as achieving purification and thus having done away with the need for sacrifices.

Without the shedding of blood

I am often surprised when people fail to distinguish properly between descriptive and normative statements, or between contingency and necessity. For those unfamiliar with philosophical terminology:

• Descriptive statement - a statement that simply describes how things are. It doesn't make any value judgments about whether things ought to be that way, it just observes the facts.
• Normative statement - a statement about how things ought to be. Rather than describing the facts of any given instance, it makes claims about what is ideal, correct, normal, or best.
• Contingent - something is contingently true if it happens to be true but didn't have to be true. ie if things could have happened differently, if something could have been done another way, then the fact that things happened in the way they did is called contingent.
• Necessity - this is where something that is true could never have been different.

The verse I observe people regularly making mistakes about is:

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. (Hebrews 9:22)

Many people read or quote this verse and assume that it is speaking of something normative or necessary. The assumed idea is that either "without the shedding of blood there can't be forgiveness of sins", or that the law is basically correct in its ideas about purification through blood. They implicitly assume the phrase is not a descriptive one describing a contingent truth.

Yet the phrase seems to me to be obviously descriptive. The writer is observing that "under the law" things are purified with blood and sins aren't forgiven apart from blood sacrifice. In this sentence he makes no value judgment about this fact, he simply makes an observational statement. Elsewhere he does make value judgments and those value judgments are negative, not positive! (Heb 10:4, "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.") Far from describing a necessary truth or a normative method of sin-removal in Heb 9:22, the writer is making a descriptive comment about how the law does things that elsewhere he makes clear he disapproves of. In his view, the law's method is neither the only method nor the best method - neither necessary nor normative.

Brondos on PS and Sacrifices

The part of Brondos' book Paul on the Cross which I have found most convincing and interesting so far is his case that Old Testament sacrifices were not understood to work by Penal Substitution (pp 20-30). Here are some of the arguments he gives against this idea:

1. In the Mosaic law, transgressions deserving of the death penalty are precisely those that cannot be atoned for by a sacrifice, whereas those that do not deserve the death penalty are the ones that can be. This is inconsistent with the idea that the sacrifice dies a substitutionary death.
2. Flour can be sacrificed instead of an animal if a person is too poor to afford one. It is hard to think of flour as undergoing substitutionary death.
3. In the 'peace offering' an animal is sacrificed, but there is no atonement or forgiveness taking place. So if sacrifices work by PS, then what's the point of killing this animal?
   
4. The only time sins are said to be transferred to the animal is on the day of atonement, where the goat specifically has two hands placed on it and the sins of the people prayed onto it and then is sent away alive rather than sacrificed.
5. According to PS, sacrifices should become impure as our sin is transferred to them. But they are described as "most holy" (Lev 6:29) and the priests eat the flesh.
6. There are plenty of instances of God granting forgiveness without sacrifices, and refusing it where sacrifices were given. Thus a substitutionary death appears neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for atonement and forgiveness. The bible depicts it being up to God alone whether forgiveness is granted, which he decides as he wills based on the condition of the human heart.
   
7. It was the Jewish belief that atonement and forgiveness came primarily through repentance and prayer, the sacrifices merely accompanied the prayers like the incense.
   

While Brondos' treatment of how sacrifices don't work was nice and thorough, I found him both brief and vague when it came to explaining just how sacrifices do work.

Also on the subject of sacrifice, I recently found a lengthy bibliography here of scholarly works on the meaning of sacrifices. Thank you Professor James Watts for making that available.