Christ as champion: Hebrews 12:1-3 as an appeal through which the writer instills narrative vision in order to reorient readers

This dissertation explores the way that Heb 12:1-3 uses a narrative world to instill vision in order to reorient readers who are in a crisis of faith.;The first chapter explores the exhortation in Heb 12:1-3 as key to understanding how the writer seeks to reinterpret readers' struggle by using an agon metaphor. The writer's use of archegos in Heb 12:2 is significant for helping readers since, it is the second of two related occurrences in Hebrews. The other occurrence in 2:10 presents Jesus as champion-leader who inaugurates an eschatological exodus through his redemptive journey. This context forms the backdrop for interpreting the meaning of archegos in Heb 12:2 ("champion"). Both passages present Jesus as leader and as victor. The one focuses on his redemptive journey (2:10) and the other on his example of courageous faith in response to hardship (12:1-3).;The second chapter endeavors to analyze the narrative world as it is directed toward the needs of readers in a particular struggle. Since Hebrews is a "word of exhortation" (13:22) with a narrative substructure, we use John Frame's normative, situational, and existential perspectives to separate out and organize the material in Hebrews. We discuss the background and story of the community under the situational perspective, the condition of the readers (vis-a-vis Heb 5:11-14) and their need for vision under the existential perspective, and finally, we analyze the structure of the narrative world and its plot theme, which reinterprets the situation in terms of God's involvement in their situation under the normative perspective..;The third chapter develops a methodology based on insights drawn from both Ricoeur and Aristotle by James Fodor to answer the question, "How do narratives reorient readers?" Building on Fodor's notion of narrative judgment, our methodology looks at how tragedies in ancient Greece aimed at training spectators in judgments by emplotting reversals through an error in judgment. It also looks at how plot themes reframe tensions in the story of a reader to consider how Hebrews warns against blindness and offers vision for deliberating well.;The fourth chapter applies our methodology to Hebrews to determine how the narrative world aims at instilling vision to reorient the readers. First, the writer seeks to warn the reader using the wilderness generation as a case study to explore the dynamics of unbelief. Second, he retells the story of the readers in terms of covenant benefits as the result of the eschatological exodus that Christ pioneered. Third, he uses the agon imagery and a paideia metaphor to inspire and exhort readers to courageous faith that imitates Christ.;The fifth chapter uses this methodology to demonstrate that Hebrews' retelling of redemptive history aims at persuading readers of the certainty of their hope. It does so first, by grounding hope in promise and fulfillment using a covenantal hermeneutic, which argues via typological interpretation for the arrival of a new order, an order that guarantees covenant blessing to those who respond in faith. But a warning of judgment comes to those who willfully refuse its claim in unbelief. Second, the narrative world fuses archegos imagery (based on Moses typology) and reverse-Adam typology (Ps 8 in Heb 2) to characterize the eschatological reversal that the historical exodus typified to instill identity and help readers envision kingdom hope.;The conclusion explores possible implications for counseling. Use of a narrative world is relevant for retelling the story in order to move people toward hope and toward wise judgments, when they suffer from hermeneutic disorientation due to discouragement. We also argue that narrative judgment guided by a biblical-theological hermeneutic for doing conceptualization offers Christian counselors a corrective to the drift toward techne-driven methodologies in modern psychology.