The Evangelical Universalist Forum

How can Perfected People be Continually Sanctified?

Theology Biblical Theology
#1

I am a bit puzzled over the following verse:

The word translated as “perfected” is a perfect active indicative. The perfect tense indicates a completed act. The word might also be translated as “completed”.

The word translated as “are being sanctified” is a present passive participle. “Are being sanctified” is the literal meaning of the word, or perhaps “are being made holy.”

The word translated as “perpetually” literally means “carried through”. This fact led me to think that perhaps “perpetually” (or as some render it “for all time” and others “forever”) may not be a good translation. Perhaps it means that God has carried through the perfection of those who are being sanctified. But if they are already perfected, how can they be in the state of ongoing sanctification?

One possible solution may be that the word translated as “perfection” may, in this context, mean “maturity”. After all, the adjectival form of the same word is rendered as “mature” by most translators in the following sentence:

Could the verse in question mean?

I came to the above possibility just as I was writing this post. I had never thought of it previously. This solution makes sense to me. What do YOU think?

#2

Maturity would make sense in context of NT focuss of maturing into the family inheritance (especially in Paul, and the Hebraist is Pauline one way or another). As MacD pointed out long ago, we aren’t adopted by someone who isn’t our father, but rather the term for adoption used by Paul (as pretty clearly explained by Paul himself in Galatians 4) refers to the father granting the rights and responsibilities of representing the family to sons and daughters who have properly matured, until which time the children have the legal status of slaves and are under tutors. (Possibly with implications elsewhere that some of our tutors rebelled and have led us astray!)

Jesus talks quite a bit about this concept, too, as do His religious opponents, but the terminology usually isn’t translated that way in English: often they’ll be disputing about “enjoying the allotment of the inheritance” or something like that.

(Relatedly, the term translated “perpetually” is an explicit prepositional phrase “into/toward the finality” {eis to diênekes}, not a term like aidios. You’ll know that of course; that’s for other readers. :slight_smile: )

My main complaint is that I wouldn’t want to hang an exegetical interpretation on what might amount to a guess of a difficult meaning elsewhere. But fortunately the term is {teleos}, which any quick check through a concordance will show tends to have a meaning of completion through growth, in other words maturity!

So yep, in context of how the NT talks about maturity in relation to the inheritance, “carried through to maturity those who are being sanctified” seems like a better translation to me, too. :slight_smile:

(To which I’d add that the NT texts tend to regard sanctification and justification as the same thing, whereas traditional Protestant theology has interpreted them being different things. But that’s another discussion.)

Note by the way that the Hebraist goes on immediately after this to launch one of the strongest condemnation warnings in the New Testament, at people who from their description would fall into the category of the “mature/perfected”! So obviously the term doesn’t refer to people permanently safe from divine wrath, nor to people who are now morally perfect, or even merely regarded (by a convenient legal fiction) by God as morally perfect.

Which naturally leads to frantic disputes among soft Arminians and hard Arminians and Calvinists of various sorts, against and among each other – because they all regard that punishment to be finally hopeless (though the Hebraist is citing a prophecy from Deuteronomy where the punishment, even if fatal, isn’t hopeless at all), and a hopeless punishment here would make an important constraint on interpreting who those people being hopelessly punished ‘really’ are. Whereas if the punishment isn’t hopeless, then it’s only (though still fearful) the difference between a punishment for responsible adult children (who ought to know better and who have been given rights and responsibilities to act in the family name as representatives of the family) vs immature children.

#3

Thank you, Jason. I really appreciate your reply. It is both explanatory and encouraging.

I also fully agree with what you and GMD said about “adoption”. But why call it “adoption”? And why is it so translated? Doesn’t “υιοθεσια” mean “sonship”?

#4

Isn’t the term “son-placement”, not just “sonship”? It doesn’t occur often.

Someone who was not the child of the father, such as an actual slave, or a husband of a daughter, could be brought into the family as heir and representative by this method, too; so it can refer to our more limited notion of adoption (of a child not actually theirs) by a father and/or mother. (One Marian theory is that Joseph was adopted this way into Mary’s family, becoming the eldest son of (h)Eli, thus explaining GosLuke’s geneology and some of its differences from GosMatt’s, including the verbal differences.)

But Paul in Galatians is certainly referring (for metaphorical illustration) to the socio-cultural status change of actual children of a father, not adoption in our more limited sense.

I always find it odd now when I see Calvinists arguing that the elect don’t start off as children of the Father, but start off just as totally outside the family as the non-elect: not only does it break their occasional attempts at foisting some kind of intrinsic difference between the elect and the non-elect, but one would have thought the quite explicit discussion of son-placement by St. Paul would feed their notions of special election – the elect are the true children of the father (still by the father’s grace of course), though treated like slaves while immature and under tutilage, the non-elect are slaves in the house not children of the father at all. (Though Paul doesn’t talk about the non-elect that way; but I could see a Calvinist attempting the extension.)

#5

It may be worth noting that Papyrus46, even if not original, testifies to one understanding of Heb 10:14 in the early church to the effect that the persons being brought to perfection or maturity are not merely being set apart {hagiazomenous}, but are being saved together or restored back to their original condition, or rescued or made healthy or whole again == {anasôzomenous}.

Maybe more importantly, the preceding context has curious connections to Christian universalism, contrasting the limited and temporary sacrifices of the high priests (which not even once had power to take away the sins which surround us) to the sacrifice of Christ over sins, Who after sacrificing Himself continuously takes hold with the hand to embrace and welcome sinners from out of the rest, one after another, until His enemies can be placed in humble support of Him. (Credit to Jonathan Mitchell for the translation options there.)

Meanwhile, whatever “into/toward the finality” {eis to diênekes} means, it must also apply to Christ being in/at the right-hand] of the Father, since the Hebraist mentions that, too, back in verse 12, in relation to Christ’s power and assurance to save sinners from sin (unlike the impotent high priests).

#6

You are quite correct. That would be more accurate than “sonship”. Or how about “placing as sons”?

Yes, I suppose that a person outside the family could have been placed as a son. But this would be unusual, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t the usual placement be that of which Paul wrote to the Galatians?

#7

Certainly! – I don’t know that the other was particularly unusual around the Mediterranean and the Ancient Near Middle East, but what Paul was writing about would be naturally far more common.

More to the point, Paul was VERY OBVIOUSLY talking about a father raising up his actual children to accept the inheritance, not adopting unfathered children into the family.

If I recall correctly, the father would have to pay a raising-up price, too, or a “ransom” as we tend to translate it. :slight_smile:

#8

What is this “raising-up” price or “ransom,” Jason?

#9

In the original culture it was paying a nominal fee to the government to register a person as a free man or woman; much the same thing had to be done for freeing a slave, too.

Obviously the basic concept also works for our usual meaning of ransom, where a wealthy person – often the family head or possibly the patron of another family – pays an enemy to set free a captured prisoner. That happened a lot more back then than now, of course, and the ancients were aware of the implications because they often imagined Christ’s descent into hades as a sneak attack along this line, offering Himself as ransom to the devil to free prisoners held by the devil. And then NUKING THE HELL OUT OF HELL once Satan let Him in. :laughing: :mrgreen:

Theologically that didn’t comport with any kind of high theology (much less with any kind of high Christology), so the poetry changed over to the idea of Christ outright raiding hades instead of tricking Satan into letting Him in. It also didn’t fit scriptural imagery, including occasional mention of the descent into hades, which has nothing to say of Christ having to trick Satan into letting Him in, nor of there being a barter arrangement of Christ for us. But some of the imagery (including, for what it’s worth, in the incident of Christ announcing the sin against the Holy Spirit to the Pharisees) does fit the idea of a military raid on a bandit-chief’s fortress to free prisoners. Paying the cost for such a raid, like Abraham putting together a coalition of allies to go rescue Lot (one of whom was the king of Sodom, by the way!), could also be considered paying a ransom cost: the cost for raising up someone enslaved to freedom.

I suspect there was also some kind of connection, in the terminological usage, between raising someone to freedom/maturity, and resurrection out from the dead-ones into eonian life.

Anyway, the situation Paul is talking about in Galatians 4 isn’t anything so drastic or colorful. The father is only making a nominal payment as a public symbol of his committed recognition that his child is ready to take on family responsibilities and representations (in marriage, politics, business, etc.)

However, sooner or later the allotment of the inheritance would go a lot farther than a nominal public gesture, namely once the father dies. You’ll probably have heard this is a big underlying theme Westerners are likely to miss behind the parable of the prodigal son: the younger son is demanding that the father go the full distance now in dividing up the inheritance, as though he has already died. Horribly, horribly insulting, and only made worse by how irresponsibly the younger son behaves afterward – not with mature responsibility like the older son. Part of the radical reversal surprise of the parable (as you’ve likely read already :wink: ), is that Mediterranean and Ancient Near Middle Eastern cultures would have been primed to be 100% on the side of the older son, disappointingly shocked at how his father out of gratuitous love for the younger son is willing to dishonor himself – and then the older son hits back with BLATANT FREAKING LIES about how stingy his father has been toward him all this time.

Granted, there’s no overt ‘ransom’ payment in that parable – except perhaps in the father voluntarily paying extreme personal dishonor without a qualm in order to love both his ungrateful sons. But the normal cultural ‘ransom’ of children would be standing behind the story details: the father raises up his sons to the status of family representatives, and then deals with their culturally (and spiritually) horrifying ingratitudes, manifested in different ways. He would have been perfectly within his rights to have both of them slain, or worse, except of course in the parable he has voluntarily given up all his rights in a culturally simulated death. What the father is more concerned about than the dignity of his rights, is true justice: the reconciliation of the brothers to each other, and to himself, and the proper maturity of both children.

Jesus could have told the parable in such a way that the father leads the elder son in a raid to rescue the younger son and to smite the hell out of the son’s abusive master – and Jesus does tell a parable rather like that during the unforgiveable sin incident! – but He had other ideas He wanted to emphasize there. :slight_smile:

(Me being me, however, waaaay back in my early days as a Christian universalist I rejiggered this and several other parables into that eschatological situation, as an exercise. :slight_smile: Not sure I ever posted that here…)

#10

Thanks, Jason :smiley:

I really appreciate your thoughts on this. I think the whole son placement thing is both fascinating and important. Adding in the ransom concept just makes it all the richer. I’d like to learn all about this – do you suppose it might make a good discussion topic? Or have you pretty much covered it here already?

#11

I don’t know that I’ve fully covered it – it’s a huge topic. But I’m kind of busy elsewhere, so eh. :slight_smile: