Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Church in Hebrews 5

In conclusion to the (1st) half of my essay devoted to the nature of the Church in Hebrews I wrote:

We may summarise what we have discovered about the ecclesiology of the letter to the Hebrews as follows. In Christ a word is spoken and a salvation achieved, which word and salvation stand as a teleological climax to the word and salvation offered in the Old covenant to Israel. Through right response to his word, the Church stands in a similar teleological and climactic relation to old covenant Israel. What Israel was promised, what faithful Israelites looked for, is the possession of the Church by virtue of Christ’s completion in his death-resurrection-ascension of what Israelite religion foreshadowed. That the Church is the eschatological Israel is arguably the key concept in the writer’s theology of the nature of the Church.

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