Saturday, May 21, 2022

Yongbom Lee on God making us righteous, not simply declaring us righteous, in Romans 5:19

  

In contrast to the unique idea that God made Jesus perfect through suffering, the other components of Heb 2:10-11 may be authentic to the early church, considering two conceptual similarities between Heb 2:10-11 and Paul. Firstly, the statement in Heb 2:10 that Jesus brings many sons into glory has a conceptual similarity with Paul’s statement in Rom 5:17 that God provides grace and the gift of righteousness to believers through Jesus Christ and lets them reign in life (cf. Heb 2:10; Rom 5:17). As Attridge points out, “That believers will share eschatologically in Christ’s glory is a commonplace” (cf. Phil 3:21; Rom 8:17; 1 Cor 15:43; 1 Pet 1:11) (Attridge, Epistle to the Hebrews, 83) However, the fact that the glorification of believers in the context of the Adam-Jesus typology in Heb 2:5-9 resonates with that in Rom 5:12-17 cannot be taken for granted—cf. 1 Cor 15:22. Secondly, the statement in Heb 2:11—further explicated in Heb 2:17—that Jesus sanctifies (αγιαζω) his followers has a conceptual similarity with Paul’s statement in Rom 5:19 that Jesus makes his followers righteous (καθιστημι δικαιοι) through his obedience. These two conceptual similarities can be considered together as the larger theme of Jesu’s glorification or sanctification of his followers within the paradigm of “one” and “many” in which both Adam (Ps 8:4-6 cited in Heb 2:6-8a) and Jesus (Heb 2:5-9) function as the representative of humanity. (Yongbom Lee, The Son of Man as the Last Adam: The Early Church Tradition as a Source of Paul’s Adam Christology [Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick Publications, 2012], 69-70)