Theology

In the winning entry of the Theology Slam competition, Amanda Higgin considers how the Letter to the Hebrews can inform recovery from trauma.

In the wilderness between pain and healing, God speaks: a living and active voice of hope, renewal, and Christ. We do not need to be afraid of the newness and uncertainty of wandering. And, like the author of Hebrews, I am standing in front of an audience, inviting you to do the same. By reading Psalm 95 as the living and active voice of God, the author of Hebrews discovers a message of rest and endurance for their traumatised congregation. The author encourages their congregation to endure as if they are stuck in the wilderness: “Let us hold fast to the hope we profess,” they say. But, in the same way that Hebrews goes back for old scriptures and reads them in new, life-giving ways, we can retrieve our wholeness while moving forwards to that promised rest. Later in this same chapter, Hebrews calls the word of God “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword”. They remind their audience how they suffered beatings, looting, and imprisonment: experiences which the members of the congregation carry in their souls and bodies as they listen. I first learned this from Madison Pierce; her work demonstrates how Hebrews reads Old Testament scripture as the voice of a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hebrews does this because they receive scripture as the voice of God. Hebrews draws those words from Psalm 95, which makes an example of that generation of Israel who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years after God rescued them from slavery in Egypt. This text was the subject of my aborted Master’s dissertation, and, as I struggled with my own pain, I started to see how uncertainty and trauma underpinned this masterful, anonymous, theological address.