This has taken quite a while to write. It's been a very busy two months or so. It was tough to get this out by Christmas. I apologize for content that's not exactly relevant to the Advent. –mem
We are in Hebrews in church, and we came upon chapter six today (ed. now a long time ago). It proved a fertile ground for questions, which is hardly surprising: it comes up in eternal security debates all the time. It's practically de rigueur for anyone opposing eternity security, and so most of the conversation about the passage seems to revolve around the subject—especially on the Internet.
If we take a bit of a step back, though, it seems that there's more here than we might usually think. Establishing any sort of detailed context is really beyond the scope of my blog, but I think we can successfully argue that the warnings here are directed primarily to Christian Jews who were tempted to return to their Judaism.
The elementary principles enumerated in chapter six really continue from the rebuke of chapter five ("For though by this time you should be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God," 5:12).
I think we can find parallels to the principles in chapter 6 in the Old Testament. So for example (non-exhaustive list):
