Ouweneel on the Letter to the Hebrews

Originally posted on September 19, 2005 – by Andre Piet

Elsewhere on the forum, a discussion is ongoing about the letter to the Hebrews. Below are a number of quotations from the two-volume work by Dr. W. J. Ouweneel on the letter to the Hebrews, Wij zien Jezus (“We See Jesus,” 1982).

“Paul’s apostleship, although he also had a task among the Jews, was explicitly an apostleship not to the circumcision, as Peter’s was, but to the nations (Galatians 2:7; Romans 11:13). Therefore, he could hardly appeal to his apostleship in front of Hebrew Christians…”
(Volume I – p.9)

“Peter, who in my opinion (…) in accordance with his calling, wrote his two Letters to Jewish Christians, states explicitly in 2 Peter 3:15ff that ‘our beloved brother Paul’ wrote a ‘Letter’ to those same Jewish Christians…”
(Volume I – p.9)

“Christ made special revelations to Paul from heaven—revelations not given to any of the other apostles—especially regarding the unity of the Church on earth and the glorified Christ. But these revelations are precisely not the subject of Hebrews.”
(Volume I – p.10)

“To help the Jewish Christians make the right decision, Hebrews was written. For forty years (as if it were a wilderness journey!), God had tolerated this Judaistic Christianity in Palestine (from 30 to 70 AD), but this had to come to an end. From that point on, there was room in God’s redemptive history only for the one Church, consisting of Jews and Gentiles (…) The Jewish Christians had to be prepared for the catastrophic end of the Jewish order.”
(Volume I – p.16)

“It is astonishing that so many Christians superficially assume that Hebrews 6:1–2 describes the foundation of Christianity. In fact, there is nothing in those verses that was not already known in Judaism…”
(Volume I – p.75)

“Still, the readers of Hebrews (and we as well) were indeed confronted with that new covenant;
– those readers constituted the remnant from Israel according to the election of grace in this present time (Romans 11:5), and thus received a preliminary fulfillment of what will soon apply to all (converted) Israel (cf. also the application of the prophecies to, in my view, the Jewish readers of 1 and 2 Peter).”
(Volume I – p.107)

“Hebrews makes it clear that although this covenant will only be formally established by the Messiah at the beginning of the Kingdom of Peace, the foundation of this covenant has already been laid because the Messiah has already shed His blood and brought His offering. And therefore, although the blessings will only come upon the united and restored nation in the future, they can already now fall to the believing Hebrews who, in this administration, have joined the Christian Church.”
(Volume I – p.110)

“… literally, the new covenant is only for the future restored Israel; spiritually (or Spiritually), it is also for us…”
(Volume I – p.111)

In the book De kerk onder de loep (“The Church Under Scrutiny,” 1979), W. J. Ouweneel (together with J. G. Fijnvandraat) engages in debate with the Calvinist A. Maljaars. On pages 116–126, the interpretation of the letter to the Hebrews is discussed. I quote:

“The letter to the Hebrews is addressed to Israel, namely to the converted remnant of it. The believers are therefore always treated and addressed in this letter as the faithful from Israel in this dispensation, and never as the Church. They are not the Church—though they certainly belong to it (a single reference to this can be found in 12:23)—but that is not the point of the letter. That is why every distinctive Christian truth is absent from this letter, such as the Church as the body of Christ…”

“Note well—lest there be any misunderstanding: of course, this letter discusses numerous blessings and privileges that, by God’s grace, also apply to Christians (members of the Church). But none of these blessings is the sole and exclusive privilege of the members of the Church alone. They share these privileges, for example, with the believers who will be on earth after the rapture of the Church into heaven. The blessings unfolded in this letter are therefore not based on new revelations (such as those in Ephesians and Colossians), but on the exposition of the Old Testament.”

“In fact, one cannot use this letter at all to prove whether or not the Church was foretold in the Old Testament, because the letter simply does not deal with the Church.”

Delen: