Hebrews 2:17 — “a merciful and faithful high priest”: expiation as priestly service, not penal payment

“Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people.”

Hebrews 2:17 (ESV)

Context: The road to the priestly office

Hebrews 2:17 concludes the first great train of thought in the letter. Chapter 1 had set the Son above the angels — as the one whom God appointed heir and seated at his right hand. Chapter 2 reverses the direction of view: this very Son was made “for a little while lower than the angels”, “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (2:9). The author is therefore not accounting for the descent of a heavenly being but for the ascent of a man: God makes “the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (2:10). Our verse draws the conclusion — the “therefore” (Greek hothen) binds it tightly to what precedes.

Decisive is the temporal structure of the sentence. Christ had to be made like his brothers — he was not so from all eternity; and he was made so in order that he might become a high priest — he was therefore not yet high priest when he became one. The verse describes an installation in office whose precondition is a humanity lived through to the end. This is exactly how the letter carries the thought forward: “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek” (5:8-10).

The letter does not merely grant him the office, it also locates it. Christ is high priest “in the service of God” (ta pros ton theon) — and this service has a place: the heavenly sanctuary. “For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands …, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24). And with dry sharpness: “Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all” (8:4). According to Hebrews, the earthly Jesus was not yet the high priest in office; he became so when he had “passed through the heavens” (4:14).

This gives the frame in which the verse asks to be read. It does not answer the question how God is to be brought to forgive, but why the saviour had to be a man who knows temptation, suffering and death: “For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (2:18). The mercy of the priest is not a side motif but the point of the verse — and it is a learned, experienced, tested mercy.

The Socinian core thesis: priest, not penal victim

The Socinian reading begins from an observation that the sentence itself forces upon us: Christ is here the subject of the priestly service, not the object of a punishment. The doctrine of satisfaction reads the passage as though his death were the thing by which expiation is made; the verse, however, says that he became high priest in order to make expiation. Priest and sacrifice are not the same thing in the imagery of the Day of Atonement: the high priest slaughters outside, but he performs the expiation only inside, before God, with the blood in his hand (Leviticus 16; Heb 9:7). Sozzini takes this comparison at its word — and observes that the decisive act lies after the dying.

From this follows the temporal thesis that carries the Socinian approach to the whole letter to the Hebrews: the expiation was not completed on the cross but begins there and is performed in heaven — continuing so long as the exalted one intercedes for his own. If the debt had been legally discharged on the cross, everything further would be superfluous: no appearing before the face of God, no intercession, no throne of grace at which one “receives” mercy (4:16). But the letter insists precisely on this, that Christ “always lives to make intercession for them” (7:25).

The second thesis concerns the addressee of the expiation. The verse does not say that God is appeased, but that the sins are expiated — the Greek hilaskesthai here has sins as its object, not God. With that falls the presupposition which the doctrine of satisfaction carries into the text: that a wrath must be averted before God can forgive. Read Socinianly, forgiveness comes from God, freely; what happens for expiation works upon us — it moves us to accept the divine bounty, and holds us within it.

The third thesis is christological. Only a real man could be made like his brothers in every respect; only one who has fallen silent, prayed, trembled and died can “sympathise with our weaknesses” (4:15). An eternal God who merely put on human nature like a garment would need no perfecting through suffering — and, on this verse, would have needed no road to the priestly office. Hebrews, however, expressly grounds the priesthood in this being made like his brothers. Whoever takes the verse seriously reads it as the description of a man whom God perfected through suffering and then installed as priest.

Core statement

Sozzini on Hebrews 2:17: expiation in heaven

In On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Iesu Christo Servatore) Sozzini treats our verse expressly — and indeed as the first scriptural proof that the expiation was not completed on the cross. He quotes Hebrews 2:17 (“that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the things that are to be done before God, to expiate the sins of the people”) and reads the sentence with an eye to its tense:

“From these words it is clear that Christ, after he has suffered, expiates our sins. Which certainly cannot be understood of the continuing effect of an expiation accomplished on the cross.”

Fausto Sozzini, “On Jesus Christ the Saviour”, section “Expiation in heaven” (on Heb 2:17)

The objection Sozzini rejects here is the classic one: one might after all say that Christ continues to expiate, because the satisfaction rendered on the cross keeps working. Sozzini replies that the text speaks of an action which follows the suffering, not of the after-effect of a completed act. If the debt had been discharged, there would be nothing left to do — a priest who merely administers the receipt is no longer a priest. He draws his conclusion from the imagery of the Day of Atonement itself, on which the priest had to carry the blood into the sanctuary and there perform the expiation:

“From this it is evident that the expiation of our sins was not brought about by Christ through satisfaction. For had it been completed through satisfaction, there would certainly have been no need of an offering before God in the heavens in order to perform it, but it would have had to be performed in full before the resurrection from the dead.”

Fausto Sozzini, “On Jesus Christ the Saviour”, section “Expiation in heaven”

This is no quarrel about deadlines but about the essence of the matter. A satisfaction is by its nature finished with the payment; a priestly service is not. Whoever reads Hebrews in satisfactionist terms must declare half of the letter’s second part — the entry into the sanctuary, the appearing before God, the intercession for his own, the throne of grace — a figurative postscript. Read Socinianly, precisely this heavenly service is the matter itself. And the ground of forgiveness remains where, according to Scripture, it belongs:

“On God’s side, therefore, nothing can procure expiation for us but his pure mercy and goodness alone; and what serves for the expiation of sins concerns not God, but us.”

Fausto Sozzini, “On Jesus Christ the Saviour”, section “Expiation in heaven”

The Racovian Catechism cast this reading into doctrinal form. In the section on the heavenly priesthood of Christ it quotes Hebrews 2:17 and draws the same conclusion — in a formulation that marks the distance from the doctrine of satisfaction most sharply:

“And in this way the sufferings and death of Christ were themselves not the actual expiatory sacrifice, that full and perfect one of which we speak, but in a certain manner a way and a preparation for accomplishing it, or a certain beginning of it. For the sacrifice itself could not be completed before the priest himself had also been made perfect.”

Racovian Catechism, section “The heavenly priesthood of Christ” (on Heb 2:17 and 8:4)

Whoever takes this for a devaluation of the cross has not read the sentence to its end: way, preparation and beginning are not dispensable quantities — without them there is no perfected priest. The Catechism does not dispute the necessity of Jesus’ death, but its interpretation as a penal payment. And it names what the priestly image is for in the first place:

“Christ is called a priest, and the priestly office is ascribed to him, so that it may be made manifest that he is king by the grace of God, and that all the goods which flow down upon us from his kingly office have their only source in the grace of God.”

Racovian Catechism, section “On the priestly office of Christ”

With that the Socinian point of Hebrews 2:17 is stated: the priestly office of Christ is the form in which God’s free grace comes to us — not the condition under which it first becomes possible.

Overview of the writings of Sozzini and the Polish Brethren

Exegesis: key terms

hilaskesthai — “to expiate the sins”

The verb occurs only twice in the New Testament: here and in Luke 18:13 (“God, be merciful to me, a sinner”). In Heb 2:17 it has the sins of the people as its object — not God. That is grammatically remarkable and theologically decisive: what is expiated is the guilt, not the one who is angry. The Greek Bible of the Old Testament speaks in the same way: the priest “makes atonement for” the sin, the sanctuary, the altar (Leviticus 16:16, 20, 33) — nowhere does he “expiate” God.

Pagan Greek certainly knew the appeasing of a deity; precisely for that reason it is striking that the biblical authors avoid this construction. Read Socinianly, this is no accident but a programme: God is the subject of reconciliation, not its addressee — “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Whoever reads the verse as an appeasement of wrath must give the word an object which the text withholds from it.

archiereus — “high priest”

In Hebrews the title is a term of office with a clear order: a high priest is appointed by God (5:1, 4), he stands before God on behalf of men, and he has a place of his service — the sanctuary. According to the letter, Christ fulfils all three determinations only as the exalted one: he was “designated by God a high priest” after he had been “made perfect” (5:9-10); he appears “now in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24); and “if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all” (8:4).

The sentence “so that he might become a high priest” is thus no pious paraphrase for “so that he might die”. It names an office which is entered upon after the dying. From here Socinianism reads the whole of soteriology: what Christ does for us, he does as a living, exalted mediator — which is why the resurrection is not the confirmation of a finished work but its precondition.

ta pros ton theon — “in the service of God”

The phrase (literally: “the things directed towards God”) denotes the priest’s sphere of service — the realm of the cult, in which he acts for others. It recurs in 5:1: the high priest is appointed “to act on behalf of men in relation to God”. The priest thus stands between God and the people — he is neither the people nor God.

This too tells against reading the verse of a God-man suffering punishment. A priest who is at the same time the one to whom the service is rendered abolishes the very concept of a mediator. Hebrews maintains the distinction throughout: Christ “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death” (5:7). He prays to God — he is not the one to whom prayer is made.

homoiôthênai — “to be made like in every respect”

The passive (“to be made like”) with the addition “in every respect” (kata panta) is the strongest statement about the humanity of Jesus in the whole letter — limited only by 4:15: “yet without sin”. The word denotes a becoming: an assimilation which takes place in the course of a life and reaches its goal in death. The Racovian Catechism reads the verse in exactly this way — Christ was “not yet like his brothers in every respect — that is, in the sufferings and in death”, which is why he “still had finally to be made perfect”.

Traditional christology can grasp this only as a statement about the nature assumed. But the verse grounds in this being-made-like an experience which first makes mercy possible: “because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (2:18). Experience presupposes that something is new for the one who undergoes it. Whoever always already knew everything and could always already do everything learns nothing — not even obedience (5:8).

Comparison of the readings

Logical arguments

From the wording, the structure of the letter to the Hebrews and the testimony of Sozzini the following arguments follow:

1. Argument from the final clause. Christ was made like his brothers so that he might become high priest. The priestly office is the goal, not the precondition, of his being made like them — and what is a goal comes afterwards. The verse therefore dates the office after suffering and death.
2. Argument from the object of the expiation. What is expiated is “the sins of the people”, not the wrath of God. The grammar gives the verb no divine object — the doctrine of satisfaction has to supply one in order to obtain its meaning.
3. Argument from the place of the service. “If he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all” (8:4). If the verse declares the priestly office to be the purpose of his becoming man, yet this office cannot be exercised on earth, then its execution lies in heaven.
4. Argument from the priest-sacrifice distinction. On the Day of Atonement it is not the slaughtered animal that makes expiation, but the priest with the blood in the sanctuary (Heb 9:7). The verse makes Christ the priest; the expiation is therefore his acting, not his suffering.
5. Argument from the continuance. The exalted one “always lives to make intercession for them” (7:25), appears “now” before God (9:24), and at the throne of grace mercy is “received” (4:16). A penal payment already rendered would leave nothing to be received.
6. Argument from perfection through suffering. Whoever must “be made perfect” (2:10; 5:9) was not perfect before. A being that possesses divine perfection cannot be perfected — the verse presupposes a real man.
7. Argument from mercy. The purpose of his being made like his brothers is that he might be merciful (2:17) and able to sympathise (4:15). Mercy is a property of the priest towards the people — not a property of the sacrifice towards the judge.
8. Argument from the source of forgiveness. If the expiation is a satisfaction rendered, then God no longer forgives out of grace but out of legal obligation. The verse, however, names the mercy of the priest, not the payment of a debt: “On God’s side … nothing can procure expiation for us but his pure mercy and goodness alone.”
9. Argument from the direction of the effect. What serves for expiation “concerns not God, but us”: it moves us to accept grace and holds us within it. Hebrews itself draws this consequence — it ends not with a reckoning but with an exhortation to draw near (4:16; 10:22).

Objections and Socinian answers

Objection 1: “‘To expiate’ means to appease the wrath of God.”

The objection argues past the object of the verb. In Heb 2:17 the word stands with the accusative “the sins of the people” — what is expiated is the guilt, not the one who is angry. This construction is the rule in biblical Greek: the priest makes atonement for sin, altar and sanctuary (Leviticus 16:16, 20, 33); nowhere does he make atonement for God. Where the Bible speaks of reconciliation in relation to God, God is the one who acts, not the recipient: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19) — not: Christ reconciled God to the world.

Behind this lies a question of substance: must God first be put in a position to forgive? Hebrews knows no such necessity; on the contrary, it presupposes that God gives the priest (5:4-5) and opens the throne of grace (4:16). Sozzini therefore holds that on God’s side nothing can procure expiation “but his pure mercy and goodness alone”; what serves for expiation concerns “not God, but us”. The wrath is thereby not denied — it is God’s earnest No to sin — but it is not bought off; it ceases where sin gives way.

Objection 2: “The sacrifice was offered on the cross — once, once for all (Heb 9:28; 10:10).”

The once-for-all character is not in dispute — what is disputed is only that it ends at the cross. The letter itself joins the two: Christ “entered once for all into the holy places” “by means of his own blood” (9:12). The entry into the sanctuary is part of the one sacrificial course, not its repetition; and the Levitical order, with which the letter is working throughout, knows precisely this duality: slaughter outside, expiation inside — one rite, two places. Sozzini appeals expressly to this comparison, which the author of Hebrews himself draws (9:7).

What the objection presupposes — that with the dying the matter is settled — makes the second half of the letter unintelligible. Why should Christ have to “appear now in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24) if there is nothing left to do? Why does he “always live to make intercession for them” (7:25)? Sozzini formulates the alternative sharply: had the expiation been completed through satisfaction, “there would certainly have been no need of an offering before God in the heavens”. The once-for-all character is directed against the daily repeated sacrifices of the temple — not against the continuing service of the one priest.

Objection 3: “The verse presupposes the incarnation of God.”

The text does not say that a pre-existent being assumes flesh, but that he who belongs to the brothers had to be made like them “in every respect” — and the letter itself spells out wherein this likeness consists: in temptation, suffering and death (2:18; 4:15; 5:7-8). What is meant is not the assumption of a nature but the living through of a history. The Racovian Catechism consistently reads the verse as a statement about an experience still outstanding: Christ was “not yet like his brothers in every respect — that is, in the sufferings and in death”, and therefore “still had finally to be made perfect”.

Above all, however, the incarnational reading would carry the verse too far. If the purpose of his being made like his brothers is to be a merciful and experienced priest, then the verse presupposes that this experience was really new for him. An omniscient God who merely plays along with temptation from outside gains no mercy through suffering — and “learns” no obedience either (5:8). Hebrews holds fast to both: Jesus is appointed by God, tested and exalted — and therefore, as a man, our priest.

Objection 4: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (Heb 9:22).”

Hebrews 9:22 does not speak of a general condition for the validity of forgiveness, but of the order of the law: “almost everything is purified with blood under the law” — and the “almost” is the pointer, for the law itself knew exceptions (Leviticus 5:11-13: flour instead of blood for the poor man). The statement describes the rite of the covenant, not a necessity in the essence of God. And the same Scripture attests forgiveness without any sacrifice at all: Nathan pronounces forgiveness to David before any animal is slaughtered (2 Samuel 12:13), the father of the prodigal son demands no price (Luke 15:20-24), and Jesus forgives sins on his own authority (Mark 2:5).

The Socinian answer therefore distinguishes carefully: the death of Christ is not the cause from which God’s readiness to forgive arises, but the way by which the priest comes to his office and we come to the certainty of that forgiveness. It is precisely in this sense that the Catechism calls suffering and death “a way and a preparation” — indispensable, but not as a purchase price. Whoever makes a necessity out of 9:22 places God under a law which he himself has given, and turns grace into a legal consequence.

Objection 5: “An expiation that concerns us and not God is mere morality.”

The objection assumes that only a legal act really works. But Hebrews describes a working that is neither a legal act nor a mere example: the exalted one has received power, he intercedes for his own, he “is able to help those who are being tempted” (2:18), he “will appear a second time … to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (9:28), and he has the authority to give eternal life. The Racovian Catechism therefore calls the priestly office the reverse side of the kingly one: it is ascribed to Christ “so that it may be made manifest that he is king by the grace of God, and that all the goods which flow down upon us from his kingly office have their only source in the grace of God”. That is not an example, that is dominion for our benefit.

And redemption remains God’s work from beginning to end: he sends, he tests, he perfects, he raises, he installs as priest, he forgives. What changes is not God’s disposition — it was always mercy — but our standing: we have a mediator who knows us, and an access we did not have before (10:19-22). Whoever calls this “mere morality” confuses the question whom the expiation concerns with the question who brings it about. It concerns us — God brought it about.

Biblical cross-references

The following passages open up Heb 2:17 in its context:

• Hebrews 8:4 — “Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all.” The clearest sentence in the letter on the location of the office: Christ’s priestly service begins in heaven — exactly the point on which Sozzini’s reading of 2:17 hangs.
• Hebrews 9:11-14 — Christ enters the sanctuary “through the greater and more perfect tent”. The sacrificial course is one, but it leads through death into the sanctuary — slaughter outside, expiation inside.
• Hebrews 9:22 — “Almost everything is purified with blood under the law.” The verse describes the order of the covenant, not a necessity in God — the “almost” forbids making a natural law of forgiveness out of it.
• Hebrews 10:10 — Sanctified “through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”. The once-for-all character is directed against the repetition of the temple sacrifices, not against the continuing service of the one priest.
• Mark 10:45 — “To give his life as a ransom for many.” The same structure: the service of the Son of Man leads through death to authority — not to a payment made to the one who is angry.
• 2 Corinthians 5:19 — “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.” God is the subject of reconciliation, not its addressee — the grammar of expiation in a single sentence.
• 1 Timothy 2:5 — “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” The mediator stands between the parties — he is not himself the party to whom the service is rendered.
• Romans 3:25-26 — Christ as hilastêrion, “place of expiation”. The image is the same as in Heb 2:17: the mercy seat of the sanctuary, at which God forgives — not the altar at which he is paid.
• Acts 2:36 — “God has made him both Lord and Christ.” The exaltation is an installation in office — the same movement that Heb 2:17 describes with the title of priest.

Theological consequences

Summary

Hebrews 2:17 says why the saviour had to be a man: so that, having been made like his brothers in every respect, he might become a merciful and faithful high priest and expiate the sins of the people. Every part of the sentence points beyond the cross — to an office that is entered upon after the suffering, in a place the earthly Jesus had not yet set foot in, with an aim that concerns the sins and not the one who is angry. The verse is thus no proof of the doctrine of satisfaction, but its sharpest objection from within Scripture itself.

Sozzini developed this out of the text itself in On Jesus Christ the Saviour: “From these words it is clear that Christ, after he has suffered, expiates our sins” — and what happens after the suffering cannot be the mere after-effect of a legal act settled on the cross. Had the expiation been a satisfaction, “there would certainly have been no need of an offering before God in the heavens”. The Racovian Catechism made a doctrinal formula out of this: the sufferings and death of Christ were “not the actual expiatory sacrifice …, but in a certain manner a way and a preparation” — for “the sacrifice itself could not be completed before the priest himself had also been made perfect”.

Read Socinianly, the verse loses nothing of its weight — it regains its direction. It is not God who must be changed, but we; no debt is paid, but sin is taken away; and the one who does it is no distant judge but a brother who knows temptation and death and now “appears in the presence of God on our behalf”. The mercy of which the verse speaks is therefore no property that first had to be wrung from God — it is the source from which everything comes, and the priest is the shape in which it reaches us.