Sunday, April 30, 2023

Nick Brennan on on the Personal Preexistence of Jesus in light of Hebrews 1:10-12's use of Psalm 101 (LXX)

 

Though there is certainly an interest in the eschatological tone of Ps 101 LXX, and its connection to Christ’s role in winding up the present creation, the unchangeable character of the Lord of the quotation is grounded to his protological standing. He does not wear our like the world, because he was there before it. This suggests that in attributing the quotation to Christ it cannot be made to terminate only on eschatological categories, it must also involve the protological. In this regard, Schenck’s equivocation on pre-existence is unhelpful, sometimes seeming to claim that the Son was son at all points of existence, but at other times seeming to reconfigure this as the “pre-existence” of a principal or plan in the mind of God which reaches its goal in Christ. In the context of Hebrews, such a thesis proves far too much, for the exaltation of Christ is not the only fulfilment of this divine plan. Though Christ may play a singular role, as Schenck notes, the accomplishment of human destiny in toto is at work here. Does this then mean that, because the glorification of the many sons was foreordained in the mind of God, the audience ought also to draw from the catena a sense of their own “pre-existence” in the divine wisdom? Or that, on such grounds, they might see the address as Creator Lord of Ps 101 as somehow being applicable to the hearers themselves? Such questions demonstrate that to deny a personal and protological existence to Christ as necessitated by the quotation of Ps 101:27, 28 is to loosen the connection to him from its moorings and make it too far-ranging. (Nick Brennan, Divine Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews: The Son as God [Library of New Testament Studies 656; London: T&T Clark 2022], 64, emphasis added)