Welcome to Marscast, the official podcast of Mid-America Reform Seminary, where faculty and friends explore the depths of faith, unpack biblical truth, and engage with the critical issues of our time. I'm Jared Luchaboard, Director of Marketing. Thank you for tuning in. You're listening to part two of our series with Dr. Marcus Mininger, New Testament professor here at Mars and author of the new book, Impossible to be Restored, Temptation and Warning in the Epistle of Hebrews. If you missed our first episode, go back and listen. We got to know Dr. Mininger as a scholar, and author of this new volume in the New Studies in Biblical Theology series. Today, though, we're going to roll up our sleeves a little bit and get into the meat of the book itself. Hebrews has, by some, been called, quote-unquote, the riddle of the New Testament. It's a text full of lofty Christology, but it also has stark warnings. Chapter 6 has left Christians scratching their heads. What does it mean that it is impossible to restore to repentance those who have fallen away? Is the author teaching that some sins are unforgivable? Is he contradicting the doctrine of perseverance? Or is something else going on entirely? These are the kinds of questions that Dr. Miniger tackles head-on in his book, So in this conversation, we're going to ask, why has Hebrews been considered such a puzzle? What was the particular temptation facing its first readers? And how does this help us make sense of those warning passages that have provoked centuries of debate? Dr. Miniger, in your introduction, you cite Harold Attridge, who calls Hebrews the most enigmatic text of first century Christianity. And Craig Kooster, who, if I'm pronouncing his last name right, describes it as the riddle of the New Testament. And you explain that much of this puzzlement comes from the fact that Hebrews tells us very little about itself. The author doesn't identify himself, the audience is somewhat anonymous, and yet the letter is deeply theological, deeply pastoral, but it's also elusive. So maybe elaborate a little bit more on why Hebrews is considered such a puzzle for interpreters, And what approaches have you found most helpful in making sense of it? Yeah, thanks. So you gave Craig Kester's name a nice Dutch pronunciation. I think it's Kester just for our listeners. Yeah. So at the opening of the book, there's so many citations we could make, and you mentioned some of them, that Hebrews kind of defies a lot of interpretive efforts. And I think the reason for that a lot of times is because of the typical expectations of scholars when you approach a text assuming the importance of, say, a grammatical historical Mode of interpretation then typically you want to be able to reconstruct particular things about the original situation Who was its author? Exactly, what audience is he writing to? When can we get a date for that? You know what particular things are going on and in the case of Hebrews, even though it's a very long book and letter It's actually quite sparing in details about that. It's one of the reasons why we have to talk about the author of Hebrews, because we don't know who he is, because he doesn't name himself, and he doesn't really say much about himself. We can gather a few things, partly based on how he writes, style-wise, and so forth, but they're very general and broad. And so that's one of the riddles, who wrote it, and then all kinds of questions can just be posed there. We also don't know a ton about the audience. Questions of date, when was it written, have been hugely debated. We did a podcast actually earlier for Marscast on the question of when the book of Hebrews was written, and so you can refer back to that. if listeners can, if they want to. But essentially, the author to the Hebrews doesn't seem to prioritize talking about the sorts of details that scholars wish he would have or tend to assume are very important. Is it a Jewish or Gentile or mixed audience? Did he write pre-70 or post-70? Different things, very few things by way of strong clues there. We might say some things are more likely than others, but essentially then, you know, conservatives have had a particular view. that they've commonly defended a pre-70 writing, Jewish Christians, that kind of thing. And then progressive scholars have oftentimes responded in kind with their own historical reconstructions that often question those things, proposing a much later date, very different set of issues going on. All of this, in the end, a lot of it points out how much we don't know, at least about certain types of questions. And so what I've described in the book and tried to practice myself is something that would be akin to a kind of a narrative approach to the text instead. This is something that Kenneth Schenck has described and practiced in his book, Understanding Hebrews, but others have done it as well. trying to work internally with the terms and concepts that the book does provide rather than continuing to ask our own questions about topics that it seems so reticent about. In other words, allowing its anonymity as a book and its relative lack of historical specificity, not to dominate our conversations in a way that leads to frustration, but instead trying to say, okay, if we're going to reconstruct the world of thought of Hebrews, if the book isn't going to answer the questions we initially came to it with, what questions does it answer? How does it render for us a view of history and of the cosmos and of its listeners in what really in the end becomes more of a redemptive historical way than the way that people might classically approach it. So a narrative approach, I think, provides a lot of benefits for working with the grain of the text and letting the text determine the categories of importance for interpreting it, understanding those from within. Now within that broader scope of Hebrews, perhaps no passages are more infamous than the warnings, especially Hebrews 6. Christians through the centuries have struggled with those verses, asking questions like, do they teach that you can lose your salvation? Do they imply that repentance can become impossible? Or do they simply warn against something hypothetical? So you know in your preface that this very passage, Hebrews 6 verses 4 through 6, was the issue that first gripped you. And you wanted to know, what do we do with the claim that it's impossible to restore to repentance those who have fallen away? So why do you think the warning passages, especially Hebrews 6, have been so difficult for interpreters historically? Yeah. Um, it's a, it's a good question because, um, it's a question about, um, what are we missing, right? Why is this so challenging? Um, and a lot of times, again, that comes around to figuring out maybe our expectations or assumptions, or, uh, at times related to that, um, our own definitions of terms and whether the definitions we're used to fit with the definitions of similar terms in a given scripture passage. Sometimes our usage of a theological term like repentance is very much the same as what a given passage of scripture uses it as, but other times that or other passages use a term differently than we're used to. But I would say More specifically than that, why this has been hard, there's really four things. One is that the passage, Hebrews 6, 4 through 6, clearly describes a lot of blessings that the people being described in the passage have experienced, having been enlightened, having tasted the heavenly gift, having shared in the Holy Spirit, and so forth. And so it's not a thin description. It's a very fulsome description of blessings. You start there. It does give a very thin brief description of the apostasy involved. It just says, and then have fallen away. That's been a challenge. Thirdly, it then follows that up with a strong categorical statement of the impossibility of being restored. And so the combination, lots of blessing, very sparse description of falling away, and then strong categorical statement of impossibility of restoration has been at the heart of this, why it's gathered so much attention. Generally speaking, Interpreters have tried to reconfigure one or the other of those. They've tried to downplay the blessings involved and say, well, this was just very minimal or shallow blessing or they've tried to maximize their description of what the falling away is. It's some kind of special sin. particular sort of sin that leads to an unusual hardness. Well, you know, the description in the book doesn't show a lot of specialness to the falling away, and so it doesn't seem like the right track. Or they've tried to downplay the statement of impossibility to say, It doesn't really mean it's impossible, but it means it's difficult to restore them, or it's not impossible for, it says it means it's impossible for man, not for God, all these kinds of qualifiers, which again, there's not really evidence for them. In fact, there's evidence against them. But the fourth thing, and this is one I think is really important to grasp, is that the wording of the text is, It's impossible to restore again to repentance, meaning that the repentance it says is impossible is a repentance that the audience or the people being described here had experienced before but can't experience again. That's a very crucial observation to figuring out what has changed and what does any of this mean. Now, you mentioned a bit ago questions of does this mean Christians can lose their salvation and so forth, but when read carefully, this passage not only presents a lot of questions for, say, a Calvinistic view of salvation, but it actually also presents just as many difficult questions for an Arminian vantage point because It does describe circumstances under which it's impossible for someone to do a particular thing, to be restored to repentance, which doesn't fit with sort of a classic free will theology either. So all of that leads to my question was, you know, what's really going on here and have we just fundamentally misunderstood something? How can we make good sense of this the way it's stated? Right. So let's talk about some of the central arguments of your book. You seem to have a sequence of thought throughout the book that we can't really understand the warnings until we identify the temptation that the audience was facing, and that's key. Traditionally, interpreters have said, well, they must have been tempted to go back to Judaism or something like that. But in recent scholarship, that view has been heavily challenged. Revisionists argue that Hebrews never explicitly warns against Judaism and instead is only urging its readers to move forward in faith. So how would you describe the particular temptation facing the original audience of Hebrews and why is it so important to identify that temptation if we want to interpret the warning passages rightly? Yeah, I mean the background of the warning, put it this way, since the specific words in the warning have been so puzzling, what exactly does this mean? It becomes very important to understand as much as possible, you know, what brought this warning about? Why is the warning needed? So therefore, in order to understand the author's response in his warning, it's helpful to understand what he's responding to. My answer is more or less a traditional one at this juncture. So like I said before, there's two main topics in the book, the temptation, what is the nature of the temptation exactly, and then the warning. On this first topic of the temptation, my conclusion is a pretty typical traditional one. I believe that they are tempted to leave their current Christian profession of faith A faith, of course, that's a new covenant informed faith, understanding of Christ's work and so forth, and to seek to go back to live underneath the old covenant alone. So it's pretty similar, some differences of detail, but of saying sort of tempted to go back to Judaism. I think a focus on the old covenant rather than a focus on Judaism is preferable because that's the way the author speaks and there's some sort of details that might help us navigate. What's different about what I say in my book on this topic of the temptation isn't my conclusion but really more the reasons and so it was Notable as you mentioned that recent revisionist scholars scholars who were seeking to put something forward That's different on this topic than traditionally has been commonly believed they've really strongly emphasized that Prior, older scholarship thinks that Judaism or the Old Covenant is the problem in Hebrews, is the temptation in Hebrews because the prior scholarship was biased in that direction by their own assumptions. Then you get into questions of anti-Semitism, sort of a post-Holocaust reassessment of trends in scholarship and so forth. And one of the big things that they then light on is, The book of Hebrews never says that's the threat, Judaism or the old covenant. And so this has just been kind of, you know, rigged by what we expected it might have said. My book tries to lay out a clear case for saying no, actually the book does state directly that what faces the audience is the temptation to go back to the old covenant and that it says that in chapter 6, 1 and 2. where it not only makes clear that the audience is tempted to relay a foundation, meaning start all over from the ground up and redefine themselves with a new foundation laid under them, dismantle their current profession of faith and start again from the ground up, relaying a foundation entails starting over in the way that metaphor is used in the ancient world. But also that what they're specifically tempted to do is to start all over again with only materials drawn from Old Covenant revelation and with nothing that's specific to the New Covenant and even most importantly, nothing about Christ. If you look at all the other descriptions of a New Covenant foundation of belief in the New Testament, all of them are explicitly Christological. The 1 in 6, 1 in 2 is devoid of that, but also it includes things like laying on of hands and most particularly the practice of various washings, plural, that within Hebrews itself clearly represent cultic elements of the Old Covenant that contrast the New Covenant. So it's Old Covenant only material, some of which contrasts, stands in distinction from the new, and this is what they want to start all over with. Again, you know, the book lays out the evidence, but foundations in the ancient world were meant to define buildings and define the essence of the building. So if you want to start all over again, and define your building only in Old Covenant terms, as the book of Hebrews sees it, that's a problem. And what that means is they're tempted to go back. It's stating directly, if we have ears to understand what that wording means in 6.1 and 2, it is directly stating that this is what tempts them to go back to the old. So then the author says it's impossible to restore again to repentance those who have fallen away. For many Christians, that's quite an unsettling phrase. What do you mean impossible? No second chance? How can that be reconciled with the radical forgiveness that we see in the gospel with Peter, Paul, or the thief on the cross? And yet you argue that when we read Hebrews on its own terms, in its covenantal framework, this statement actually comes into a much clearer focus. So, take our listeners through that phrase, impossible to restore to repentance. What does that mean in the covenantal context you lay out in your book? Yeah, so the key issue here is, I think, the way that the author uses the term repentance. The term repentance doesn't occur frequently in Hebrews, only three times, and it never occurs in the ways that you might see at some other places as a description of a part of conversion or new covenant belief. The way it occurs is in the context of that list in 6, 1, and 2 is where the first place it occurs, where it's clearly part of this Old Covenant foundation. In other words, repentance in Hebrews as a term, is a summary term that describes how to come into right standing in the old covenant. That's what I try to explain in the background for that and so forth in the book. And if you look, for example, at Acts chapter 20, verses one through seven, Paul encounters a group of disciples, it says, who only knew of the baptism of John. They didn't know of anything that happened after John the Baptist's ministry. So they had been baptized into John's baptism, what, for the repentance, for a baptism of repentance. to prepare for the Messiah who would come in the future. And so that would be an example of where the term repentance stands as a summary term for proper Old Covenant belief, right standing within the Old Covenant. And then Paul contrasts that to the message of the New Covenant which tells that even more has happened because the Christ has come and the Spirit has been poured out in Pentecost and so forth and so he tells them the message of the Holy Spirit's coming and so forth and then they're baptized into the new covenant and so forth and so In that context, I think it's very much like the context of Hebrews 6, 1 through 6, the impossibility of being restored to repentance means the impossibility of going back to an Old Covenant-specific form of faith and practice, going back from the New Covenant to the Old Covenant to be restored to it, the Old. It would be like those same disciples in Acts 20 that Paul talked to and told the good news of Christ having come to, it'd be like them professing Christ and being baptized, which is what the text describes. And then later on going and saying, you know, we've had some second thoughts or we're experiencing persecution or whatever. We want to go back to just the baptism of John and use everything from that previous but nothing subsequent, right? Again, we want to go back from those additional things that Paul told us have now happened, and we want to have a do-over. That's what it's talking about when it says being restored to repentance. It means being restored to walk again, as it were, through the gateway, the entry point into right standing in the Old Covenant alone. So, if you understand the covenantal context of Hebrews, Repentance is connected to the old covenant, so being restored to repentance means being restored to the old covenant, and that's what Paul is saying is impossible. He's specifically saying that a person cannot go from right-standing in the new covenant back in a retrograde way back to right-standing in the old alone in contrast to the new. It just simply won't work. If the Old Covenant itself is part of the temptation for the audience of Hebrews, how should our listeners navigate this question of how Hebrews presents the Old Covenant? Because it can come across as if Hebrews is presenting the Old Covenant negatively. Is there a more careful way of understanding its relationship to the New in the way that Hebrews is being written? Yeah, so this is a huge part of why scholars in recent decades have wanted to distance themselves, wanted to negate and deny that Judaism or the Old Covenant or anything Jewish is the temptation. Because usually we associate temptation with something bad, with something sinful. with something that's opposed to God. And so, is the Old Covenant opposed to God? Is Jewishness bad? Lurking here is always the question of anti-Semitism, also the question of what's called supersessionism, kind of a replacement theology where, you know, Israel was God's people for a while, but now God's gone in a different direction somehow and displaced them, replaced them with Gentiles or the church or whatever. Of course, those topics need more definition already, but that's been the concern. One of the key issues here though is that, well, to say a few things. One is that the author of Hebrews is clearly not anti-Jewish. We don't know his ethnicity, but he is steeped in the Old Covenant. He brings example after example of proper belief and persevering faith out of the Old Covenant. He describes it as good and as gracious, and it's not something he views as legalistic or negative. He simply says, though, that the old covenant, which was good and given by God and filled with grace, was designed to lead to the new covenant, which has now come and fulfilled it, and so to go back to the old alone in contrast to the new would be to misuse the old in its very design. It was designed to be temporary, to provide promises and types and shadows leading to the new, to try to have it as an end in itself is to misunderstand its proper purpose as given by God, to misuse it. And so this is an example really of how many good things in life can become temptations if misunderstood or misused out of their proper place. So we need to say emphatically, we could put it in this way in a sense, and I try to describe this in the book, the Old Covenant is a temptation for the audience precisely because of how good it was. and how gracious it was, and their thought is if it was good enough before, maybe it can still be good enough before, maybe it can still be good enough now, especially under the supposition most likely that they're now facing greater persecution for their specifically Christian faith, a persecution in a greater way for naming the name of Christ. You know, if it was good enough for Abraham and Moses previously, and David and so forth, and even most likely for them themselves earlier in their lives before they knew about the new covenant, why can't we just return to it? And again, the basic answer is not, oh, that's bad. The answer is it's insufficient for salvation. It was good, but designed to lead to Christ. So you can't have it as a replacement for Christ. Well, that's a good place to pause for now. In our final episode, we'll take everything we've learned and ask the most important question. What difference does this make today? If the temptation Hebrews addressed was historically unique, how can its warning still apply to us? And how do these passages encourage rather than terrify modern believers? That's all coming up in part three. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or a colleague who might find it helpful or interesting. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. And if you have a moment, consider leaving a rating or review. I'm Jared Luchabor, and this has been another episode of Marscast. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.