A New History of Redemption: The Work of Jesus the Messiah through the Millennia

By Gerald R. McDermott

Southwestern Journal of Theology 2024 Book Award (Honorable Mention, Church History / Historical Theology / Biography)

Although Jesus's work of redemption is often viewed as a singular event, a careful examination of Scripture reveals that the Messiah began his redemptive work just after the fall and will continue it to the end of the world.

In the spirit of Jonathan Edwards's History of the Work of Redemption, distinguished theologian Gerald McDermott traces the progress of redemption throughout the Bible and Church history. This book connects the dots surrounding Israel, redemption by the Jewish Messiah, secular and sacred history, the world religions, and Jewish-Christian worship through liturgy and sacraments. It shows how Jesus as Messiah was redeeming throughout Old Testament history, and it carries that story up through the last two millennia.

McDermott contends that it is only through a historical examination of the Messiah's redemption amid the turmoil of the world and the worship of his people that one can best see God's beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781493444434

Gerald R. McDermott

Gerald R. McDermott (PhD, University of Iowa) is Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also associate pastor at Christ the King Anglican Church. His books include The Other Jonathan Edwards: Readings in Love, Society, and Justice (with Ronald Story), The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (with Michael McClymond), A Trinitarian Theology of Religions (with Harold Netland), Cancer: A Medical and Spiritual Guide (with William Fintel, MD), Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods and World Religions: An Indispensable Guide.

Book preview

Cover of A New History of Redemption by Gerald R. McDermottA New History of RedemptionTitle Page

To my beloved wife, Jean,

whose love and support during these years of writing

have brought a new beauty to our union

______

© 2024 by Gerald McDermott

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

BakerAcademic.com

Ebook edition created 2024

Ebook corrections 04.16.2025

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-4443-4

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture translations are the author’s own.

Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Cover art: Christ Goes to the Mountain to Pray, James Tissot / SuperStock / 3LH-Fine Art

Cover design: Paula Gibson

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and postconsumer waste whenever possible.

Contents

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Dedication and Copyright Page

Detailed Contents

Preface

1. What Is Redemption?

Part One: From Eternity to the Dispersal of the Nations

2. Redemption Planned from Eternity

3. Redemption after Eden

4. The Spirit and Messiah from Enosh and Enoch to Noah and the Nations

Part Two: From Abraham to Moses

5. Abraham and the Patriarchs

Part Three: From Moses to the Incarnation

6. Moses to David

7. David to the Captivity

8. From the Captivity to the Messiah

9. The Authority of the Tanach

Part Four: The Incarnation

10. Coming into the World

11. The Messiah’s Work

Part Five: From Christ’s Resurrection to the End of the World

12. Resurrection

13. The Kingdom of God

14. Ascension and Church

15. Mission to Gentiles

16. Persecution

17. The Monastic Movement

18. Dogma and Theology in the Third and Fourth Centuries

19. Political Disintegration and Missionary Expansion

20. The Iconoclast Controversy

21. The Rise of Islam

22. The Medieval West

23. Messiah outside the West

24. Reformation and Counter-Reformation

25. The Western Church since the Enlightenment

26. The Oxford Movement

27. The Explosion of Pentecostalism

28. World Wars and Holocaust: The Problem of Evil

29. The Church’s New Center of Gravity in Asia and Africa

30. Israel Returned, Renewed, and Restored

Part Six: The Eschaton

31. The Messiah’s Return and Final Judgment

32. The New Heavens and the New Earth

33. God Glorified in the Church Glorified

Subject Index

Scripture and Ancient Writings Index

Back Cover

Detailed Contents

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Dedication and Copyright Page

Preface

1. What Is Redemption?

Theology as History

Righteousness and Redemption

The Scope of Redemption

The Parts of Redemption

The Purposes of Redemption

Part One: From Eternity to the Dispersal of the Nations

2. Redemption Planned from Eternity

Creation and Time

Then Why?

Seven Components

The How of God’s Glory

Glory Manifested in God’s Justice

The Second Reason for Creation

No Joy in Wrath

Delight in Lovingkindness

Forgiveness because of Love

Judgments for Love

Two Purposes Become One

How It Works

3. Redemption after Eden

Prophecy and Mediation

The Angel of the Lord

First Glimmers of Hope

Taught by God

The First Redeemed Souls

The First Soul in Heaven

4. The Spirit and Messiah from Enosh and Enoch to Noah and the Nations

Communal and Liturgical Worship

The Spirit and Revivals

Redemption of Bodies

Sons of God and the Nephilim

Noah and the Flood

The Noahic Covenant

The Noahic Commandments

The Righteous Remnant

The Nations and Other Religions

Rebellion at Babel

Disinheriting the Nations

Rule by Fallen Angels

Real Gods in Masquerade

Not a Backup Plan

Part Two: From Abraham to Moses

5. Abraham and the Patriarchs

God Separates a Person

The Center of Idolatry

A New Foundation

New Revelations of Redemption and the Redeemer

More Details about Redemption

God’s Protection of His People

Terrors of the Law

Renewals of the Covenant of Grace

Joseph a Type of the Redeemer

Locating the Messiah

Early Hindu Tradition

Part Three: From Moses to the Incarnation

6. Moses to David

Redemption from Egypt

Rejection of Other Peoples

Shortening of Human Life

The Law at Sinai

The Written Word of God

The Journey to Canaan

Prophecies of the Messiah

Pouring Out the Spirit

Settlement in Canaan

Liturgical Worship and Sacraments

Preserving the Church and True Religion

Appearances of the Messiah

Early Prophets

7. David to the Captivity

Anointing of the King

Enlargement of the Biblical Canon

Samuel’s Role

Jerusalem

The Covenant of Grace

The Land

Jewish Worship

Miraculous Preservation

The Glorious Religion

Decline of the Kingdom

The Preservation of Judah

The Prophets

8. From the Captivity to the Messiah

The Age of Revolutions

The Babylonian Captivity

Return of the Jews

Outpouring of the Spirit

Diaspora

Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabees

Messianic Expectation

Religions of the Far East

Greco-Roman Religion

China, Athens, and Jerusalem

Preparation for the Messiah

9. The Authority of the Tanach

The New Marcionism

The Authority of Tanach for the New Testament Authors

The Gospels

Paul and Other New Testament Authors

The Wisdom and Necessity of Each Book in Tanach

Redemption throughout Tanach

The Beauty of the Messiah

Part Four: The Incarnation

10. Coming into the World

Purchase of Redemption

The Necessity of the Purchase

Conception

Birth

Timing

The Greatness of the Incarnation

The Lowliness of the Incarnation

The Return of the Spirit

Great Notice

Jewish Fulfillment

11. The Messiah’s Work

Satisfaction and Merit

Every Part of the Incarnation for Two Purposes

Merit

Obedience to All Divine Law

Perfect Obedience

In All Phases of Life

The Works of the Messiah

The Messiah’s Virtues

Satisfaction

Last Humiliations and Sufferings

Completion of the Purchase

Part Five: From Christ’s Resurrection to the End of the World

12. Resurrection

Centrality of the Resurrection

Plausibility of the Resurrection

Necessity of the Resurrection

The Meaning of the Resurrection

Bodily Resurrection

Salvation and Joy

Glory to the Father and the Son

Glory to the Saints

13. The Kingdom of God

Political and Visible

Davidic Kingship

Daniel and His Influence

In the New Testament

The Father’s or the Son’s?

Present or Future?

What We Know

The Restoration of Israel

Gradual Emergence

Why Gradual?

14. Ascension and Church

Beginning of the New Creation

The Ascension’s Necessity

Building the Church

The Mystical Body of the Redeemer

Apostles as Foundation

Ministry

Sacraments

Early Liturgy

Gifts of the Holy Spirit

The New Testament Canon

The Apocrypha

15. Mission to Gentiles

Massive Numbers of Gentiles

Rapid Growth

Translation

Redemption and Revelation

God’s Expanding Glory

16. Persecution

The First Century

Rome’s Rationale

The Second Century

The Third Century

The Great Persecution of Diocletian

Philosophical Enemies

Against Jewish Roots

Parting of the Ways

Theology of the Cross

17. The Monastic Movement

Anthony

Pachomius

Kinds and Extremes

Basil of Caesarea

Martin of Tours

Jerome

Augustine

John Cassian

Benedict

Monasticism and the Way of Redemption

18. Dogma and Theology in the Third and Fourth Centuries

Athanasius

The Incarnation Was Necessary

The Incarnation Really Happened

How Athanasius Defeated the Arians

The Biblical Challenge

Scripture and Tradition

Divine and Human . . . and Compromise

The Cappadocians

Understanding the Trinity

Trinity and Redemption

19. Political Disintegration and Missionary Expansion

Revival of the Empire in the East

Sanctification of Place

Missionary Expansion by Eastern Churches

The Rise of the Papacy

Gregory the Great

The Book of Pastoral Rule

Missionary Expansion

The City of God and the City of Man

Killing the Christ-Killers

Lessons for the History of Redemption

20. The Iconoclast Controversy

John of Damascus

The Materiality of Redemption

Development of Liturgy and Sacrament

Augustine

After Augustine

21. The Rise of Islam

The Arab Conquests

New and Old

Muhammad and His Beliefs

The Qur’an

The Five Pillars

Sunnis and Shi’ites

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

God as Warrior: The Crusades

Muhammad and Redemption

22. The Medieval West

The Church as Thick and Visible Body

Tradition as the Bible’s Talmud

Tradition II

Faith and Reason

Nature and Grace

Justification

Natural Law

Sacraments

Rome versus Jerusalem

Redemption and the Medieval West

23. Messiah outside the West

Thomas Christians in India

Nestorians in China

How Africa Shaped Theology and the Church

African Roots of Christian Theology

The History of Redemption outside the West

24. Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Late Medieval Theologians

Breakthrough

Inner versus Outer

Calvin on Justification

Anglicans

Anabaptists

The Council of Trent

Causes of Justification

Rejection of Protestant Justification

Redemption and Justification

25. The Western Church since the Enlightenment

The Eighteenth-Century Awakenings: Revivals and the History of Redemption

Liberalism and Human Experience

Edwards and Schleiermacher on Experience

Modern Science and Creation

Religious Pluralism and the Uniqueness of the Messiah

Looking Back: The Development of Doctrine

New Revelation?

26. The Oxford Movement

A Brief History

Dominant Themes

The Oxford Movement and Redemption

27. The Explosion of Pentecostalism

Azusa Street

Worldwide Spread

The Character of the Movement

Appeal

Who Is the Holy Spirit?

The Spirit in the History of Redemption

28. World Wars and Holocaust: The Problem of Evil

World Wars

Holocaust

Moral Relativism?

Augustine on Radical Evil

Where Was God?

The Two Cities

Power to the Good and the Wicked

Evil in the History of Redemption

29. The Church’s New Center of Gravity in Asia and Africa

Primal Religions

The Communion of the Saints

Subordination Is Not Subordinationism

Honor and Shame

Priestly Mediation

Intermediate Powers

Continuous Redemption, Contested Pluralism, and a Different Bible

Freedom from Enlightenment Categories

The Future of the History of Redemption

30. Israel Returned, Renewed, and Restored

New Developments after the Reformation

The 1960s

Zion and the Church

One Body of Messiah in Two Expressions

Zionism and the Jewish State

Israel’s Restoration

The Grand Story

Part Six: The Eschaton

31. The Messiah’s Return and Final Judgment

The Manner of the Return

One Return

Soon Is Not Imminent

Signs

Until Then

Judgment and Glory

Images of the Judgment

The Judges

The Judged

Degrees of Judgment

Sequence

Purgatory?

Not Satisfaction but Sanctification

Preparation

A Millennium?

32. The New Heavens and the New Earth

The Beginning of Heaven

Geography

Bodies

Animals

Beatific Vision

Seeing Others’ and Our Sins

Seeing Hell

Levels and Degrees

Criteria

Envy in Heaven?

Work

Happiness

Prayer and Time

Sex in Heaven?

Preparing for Heaven

He Will Make All Things New

33. God Glorified in the Church Glorified

Whose Kingdom?

Glory to God

Greater than the Creation

The End of History

History and Redemption in a Higher Order

The Glory of the Messiah

Subject Index

Scripture and Ancient Writings Index

Back Cover

Preface

I wrote this book because I was inspired by what Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was trying to do at the end of his life. He was working on a massive summa that would show the beauty of the Triune God in a new, historical way. Edwards, who was fixated on God’s beauty more than anyone else in the history of Christian thought,1

was convinced that because God is a God of history—revealing himself not in one blinding flash but successively through history—history must be the best way to talk about God and the world. He was also convinced that God used the world’s cultures, which at root are religious, in his design to use history to show his beauty. Since I had already written a book about his fascination with religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition—plus other books on his system of spiritual discernment, his typological view of reality, his public theology, and then with Michael McClymond a big survey of his thought—and had myself written seven books on world religions, I wanted to see if I could finish what he started in his 1739 sermon series, A History of Redemption, which was to have become a theological story using a historical method.

More than twenty years ago I had my own Copernican revolution when I realized that I had previously missed the profound Jewishness of Jesus and the gospel. Since then I have put out three books and many articles on this subject. Not too long into this new research I discovered that Edwards also realized that Israel is the center of history, the world, and the gospel. Then when I returned to his 1739 sermon series, I was delighted to discover that these insights were very close to the major themes of that series. So I determined to pick up where Edwards left off and to continue his narrative using recent scholarship to track an Israel-centered history of redemption through biblical and church history until the new heavens and new earth. This book became my attempt to connect the dots surrounding Israel, redemption by the Jewish Messiah, secular and sacred history, the world religions, and Jewish-Christian worship through liturgy and sacraments. I have tried to argue that it is only through this historical method tracing the Messiah’s redemption amid the turmoil of the world and the worship of his people that one can best see God’s beauty.

Readers who were formed by the Enlightenment and its historical-critical method will be frustrated and perhaps impatient when I launch immediately into biblical interpretation without considering questions of historical fact in and behind the biblical story. To them I would advise patience. Let them listen to the narrative for four or more chapters before they conclude whether all of this hangs together. At its heart this book is biblical theology. It is a big picture in which every part is connected to every other part, with the whole being more than the sum of its parts. In an important book published recently, neurologist/philosopher and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist argues that most scientists and philosophers in the last few hundred years have restricted knowing to the left brain, which apprehends and manipulates, without attending to the right brain, which comprehends the big picture.2

I think the same has happened in biblical and theological studies. When considering the meaning of redemption through the Jewish Messiah, we need to listen to Fichte on method: It will be necessary first to obtain a view of the whole before any single proposition therein can be accurately defined, for it is their interconnection that throws light on the parts; a method which certainly assumes willingness to do the system justice, and not the intention of merely finding fault with it.3

This book is biblical theology carried up through the last two thousand years, applying the big picture to some of the big events of these last two millennia. It is not a book privileging the methods of religious studies. I ask how, for example, Genesis makes sense of human origins, not whether anthropology can tell us about the relations of prehominids to Adam and Eve. I don’t quarrel here with the Genesis account of long life spans and its numbers of generations, and I don’t think its writer(s) were being anything but literal in their intentions. I want to explore what all this meant to them and to their billions of readers and listeners over the last three millennia. In other words, I am trying to map the logic of the Bible and the Great Tradition that has given us a way to interpret the Bible. I am not interested in what religious studies claims for what is behind the Bible or is the actual story of human origins. Those claims change every few decades. Instead, I have tried to decipher what the biblical authors, and then their traditional interpreters, have meant by human origins and ultimate reality, which means the God of Israel and the working of his redemption through history. These have remained much more stable over the last few millennia.

This means, among other things, that I also accept the Scriptures that the Church has passed down to us as its governing canon without detailing the development of that canon (which was long and sometimes messy) and the nature of their authority. Discussion of that process involves questions for historical criticism, consideration of which would make this a much longer and very different book. What matters for me is that the universal Church has used the biblical canon and its accompanying traditions through which to see all of reality and to live and worship accordingly. Just as the Great Tradition (something close to what C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity) has not sought to justify its existence by Enlightenment criteria, neither do I try to argue for the validity of either the biblical canon or the Great Tradition. I presume the coherence and beauty of the Christian vision of the Triune God as passed down to us through Scripture and tradition, and in this book I seek to explain its coherence in ways that I have not seen previously.

All the biblical quotations in this book are my own translations unless indicated otherwise.4

Readers might be surprised to find that I have transliterated the Tetragrammaton, God’s sacred name, as YHWH, in order to reproduce in English form what is in the Hebrew text and in the Jewish Siddur (prayer book). I have done so in order to signal that we worship not an amorphous Lord but the very particular God of Israel. Jews keep the Tetragrammaton in print in their Bibles and prayer books but when reading out loud replace it with Adonai (Lord) or HaShem (the Name) out of reverence for the Creator and obedience to the commandment (Exod. 20:7).5

We Christians might want to do the same.

For similar reasons I have translated Christos (Greek for the anointed one) in the New Testament as Messiah, since this is what came to mind for first-century readers and listeners, who knew immediately that the anointed one is a Jewish term for their Messiah. I have used caps for both Jews and Gentiles since they are coequal but distinct sorts of people in the Messiah’s Body. Fairly early in this book, following Edwards’s example, I have referred to the Jewish Church, indicating the continuity between God’s people in the First (Old) Testament and the Second (New) Testament. Instead of Old Testament I frequently use the Jewish term Tanach (an acronym for its three parts, Torah/Pentateuch, Nevi’im/Prophets, and Ketuvim/Writings) in order to remind readers that these are Jewish Scriptures delivered to us by a Church founded by a Jewish Messiah and his Jewish apostles. Jesus and the apostles used these Hebrew words for its parts.

I have used the masculine pronoun for God, for a number of reasons that I have summarized in a previous book as follows:

I must explain why I use the masculine pronoun for God when some Christians argue that such use renders God sexual and diminishes the worth of females. On the one hand, it is true that masculine language for God should not be used to the exclusion of all feminine imagery. The Bible itself uses feminine imagery (Num 11:12; Ps 22:9–10; 71:6; 139:13; Is 49:15; 66:9, 13; Mt 23:37); use of feminine imagery and language in prayer can enrich our apprehension of God’s self-giving l ove.

But when it is suggested that the masculine pronoun for God be excised because of women’s oppression by men, the cure proves worse than the disease. Avoidance of the masculine pronoun for God often forces us to use ungainly expressions like Godself, which is not only awkward but also theologically problematic because it undermines the notion that God is a person. It is particularly important to highlight God’s personhood when discussing religions that deny it. Philosophical Hindus and Buddhists, for example, insist there is no personal God because there is no final distinction between God and the cosmos.

Second, . . . the problem with Godself is that it is too inoffensive, and as a result assumes too much. It runs the risk of avoiding the scandal of particularity (the Christian God is the Father Who sent His Son to die on Pilate’s cross), and it suggests that we can know the divine essence behind the biblical Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But Scripture tells us that we know the Father truly only through the Son, and the creeds inform us that God is known first not as some amorphous essence but as Father. In other words, we don’t know anything about any god but the God Who has revealed Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We don’t know a supposed divine essence behind the Father and Son that can be named without the name Father and Son. All we know is that God has given us His name as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And when God alone is invoked by Scripture, that God is the Father. Hence Father and Son are not simply metaphorical but literal names—indeed proper names—of the deity.6

As my sons (and now some of our grandchildren) know, I could not have written this book without my beloved wife, Jean, who not only discussed much of this with me but also cleared space in our home and lives so that I could think and write. This book was started at Beeson Divinity School under Timothy George’s wise direction and continued during Doug Sweeney’s first year at the helm. But most of it has been written while I served as teaching pastor at St. John Lutheran Church in Roanoke during the first summer of COVID-19, teaching at Nashotah House for a semester, and while I helped homeschool six grandchildren in Pittsburgh for nearly five months. It resumed with intensity in 2022, when I battened the hatches and tried to look neither left nor right.

I am grateful to all those who have read part or all of the manuscript and made suggestions: Dan Juster, Malcolm Lowe, Mark Graham, Alan Pieratt, Michael Giere, Blake Johnson, Drew Thomas, Mike McClymond, Bruce Ashford, Os Guinness, Sean Rubin, and Briane Turley. My deep appreciation goes to Dave Nelson, who encouraged this project from its first mention at Baker and gave valuable advice in early and later stages. Bob Hosack helped me negotiate later bottlenecks, and James Korsmo and Robert Banning provided prodigious polishing to a penultimate text. All my failures to take their suggestions, and of course all my other mistakes, are my responsibility alone.

Pentecost 2023

Select Bibliography

Fichte, J. G. Preface to The Foundations to the Entire Science of Knowledge. In The Science of Knowledge, edited and translated by P. Heath and J. Lachs, vii–xviii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. First published 1774.

McDermott, Gerald. Appendix: God and the Masculine Pronoun. In God’s Rivals: Why Has God Allowed Different Religions? Insights from the Bible and the Early Church, 169–73. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007.

McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. 2 vols. London: Perspectiva, 2021.

Sherry, Patrick. Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics. Birmingham, UK: SCM, 2002.

1

. Edward Farley, Faith and Beauty: A Theological Aesthetic (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 43; Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Birmingham, UK: SCM, 2002).

2

. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2 vols. (London: Perspectiva, 2021), 431–500.

3

. J. G. Fichte, preface to The Foundations to the Entire Science of Knowledge, in The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1774]), 90, quoted in McGilchrist, Matter with Things, 16.

4

. Any italics in Scripture quotations are added for emphasis.

5

. Thanks to Jewish theologian Pesach Wolicki for helping me think through this.

6

. Gerald McDermott, Appendix: God and the Masculine Pronoun, in God’s Rivals: Why Has God Allowed Different Religions? Insights from the Bible and the Early Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 169–70. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com.

1

What Is Redemption?

Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) is widely regarded as the greatest Christian theologian in the history of North America. He is becoming increasingly known for having made beauty more central to his vision of God than any other thinker in the history of Christian thought. In 1739 he preached a sermon series on the history of God’s work of redemption that he intended eventually to expand so that it would include other religious and cultural phenomena in human history. He wanted it to unfold "the grand design of God, and the summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees, which, beginning from eternity, encompassed the chief events coming to pass in the church of God, and revolutions in the world of mankind, affecting the state of the church and the affair of redemption."1

Reaction to a smallpox vaccine, however, cut Edwards down in his prime and prevented the completion of this project. This book is an attempt to imagine what would have resulted if Edwards had had more time and the benefit of later scholarship.

Fear ye not the reproach of men,

neither be ye afraid of their revilings.

For the moth shall eat them up like a garment,

and the worm shall eat them like wool:

but my righteousness shall be for ever,

and my salvation from generation to generation. (Isa. 51:7b–8 KJV)

In these verses from the King James Version of the Bible, Edwards found the key themes for his History of the Work of Redemption: while today’s Church is suffering and persecuted, her people need to remember that the prosperity of her enemies is temporary, and God will constantly be merciful and faithful to her. He will continue to work salvation for her, protecting her from the attacks of her enemies and carrying her safely through all the changes of the world until her final victory and deliverance.2

These verses appear in a portion of Isaiah’s prophecy where the eighth-century-BC prophet is comforting his distressed people. They are defeated. Many have been killed and driven into exile. But Isaiah gives them hope. Since they are God’s people, in whose heart is [his] law, their future is joy and gladness (Isa. 51:3, 7). God’s righteousness, which is God’s faithfulness to his promises to save his people (Neh. 9:8; Pss. 36:10; 51:14; Dan. 9:16), is drawing near for them (51:5a). His salvation has already gone out on its way to work (51:5b). It will continue to save and succor his people through all of history and into eternity.

But this will not be the case for those who despise righteousness. Those who reproach and revile God’s people in this life will be eaten up just as a moth eats a garment and a worm eats wool (51:8). They will die and be no more, just as clouds in the sky vanish like smoke and clothing wears out (51:6). God will pour out his wrath on the Church’s tormentors. He will punish those who have stepped on his people and make them stagger in the same way they persecuted the saints (51:22–23).

Theology as History

These are the overall themes of Edwards’s History, and they are also the themes of this New History: the happiness of the Church and the destruction of her enemies.3

This book will follow much of Edwards’s historical outline for its first fourteen chapters but stop at more places in the history to reflect on the theological meaning of what has happened. Edwards did little, for example, with the world religions; I will do more. Edwards spoke more than many of his predecessors about the Jewish roots of Christianity, but I will go further. Edwards did relatively little with liturgy and sacraments in the history of redemption; I will go a bit deeper.

The upshot is that while this is a history of God’s saving work in his creation, it is not a systematic theology that proceeds by loci or topics (such as God, creation, sin, etc.). It starts with the counsels of redemption in which the three divine Persons conspire to create a world. It proceeds with God’s work of redemption immediately after the fall, the chaos of the first generations until Babel, the flood of judgment on those generations, and the calling of Abraham to start over with a family. Then it moves through the history of Israel and its surrounding world and the coming of the Jewish Messiah and his establishment of a Church. It touches on important moments in two thousand years of Church (and world) and ends eventually in the new heavens and new earth.

Topics will be treated as they arise in history. For example, I won’t discuss the sources and nature of Scripture until it starts to be produced after the rise of Moses in the thirteenth century before Christ. But along the way I will discuss not only the history of God’s people in Israel and the later Christian Church as we know them in the Scriptures but also their relation to the rise of other civilizations and religions such as those of the Far East. So Islam will be treated not as a religion in the abstract or a recent phenomenon but as a new heresy within the Christian world of the seventh century. I will also try to think about the relation between secular and sacred history. For example, what import did the history of Israel and the Church have for the great kingdoms of the ancient Near East—and medieval and modern Europe?

Of course this is a book of theology and not history or politics. Its goal is to think theologically about the meaning of Israel and Christ (Messiah) for the nations, even those not directly affected by Jews and Christians. This will force us to consider questions about the salvation of those who did not hear of revelation from the God of Israel, the Father of Messiah Jesus. It will also require us to think about the material content of redemption. In other words, not just the fact of redemption from sin, death, and the devil but the manner and means by which that redemption is carried out over the whole lives of saints. That is, what have been the vessels of redemption through life for the billions of Jews and Christians? How has the life of the Triune God sustained them through the course of life with its ups and downs? How have they received new faith and love and joy? For most of these billions, growing in God was unthinkable apart from liturgy and sacraments. We will trace—briefly of course—their development in the history of redemption.

Righteousness and Redemption

But before we start all this history, we must define some important terms. I have already used the words redemption and salvation. This book will show that while most Christians think of salvation as rescue from eternal death, redemption for Scripture (and Edwards) meant more, as we shall see below. But what is the relation of righteousness, which I have defined as God’s acting to fulfill his promises, to salvation or redemption? One is the cause of the other. God’s righteousness, which could also be called his covenant mercy, is the cause of redemption. God made a covenant or determination to redeem his people, and he has been faithful through history to fulfill his promises to redeem them through all of their lives and for eternity. It is his righteousness—his commitment to fulfill those promises—that causes him to redeem. Redemption is the sum of all his works for his people by which he showers them with love and mercy.

The Scope of Redemption

So how much history is involved in the history of redemption? Scripture sometimes uses the word redemption for simply the purchase of salvation by the life, death, and resurrection of the Messiah, particularly by his death (Isa. 44:22; Rom. 3:24–26; Gal. 3:13; Eph. 1:17; Heb. 9:12 ). In these uses, we say that his resurrection is when he finished the work of redemption.

But Scripture also uses the word to refer to all of God’s works that contribute to the end of the salvation of his people (Luke 21:28; Rom. 3:24; 8:23; Eph. 4:30; Titus 2:14). That means not only the purchase of redemption but also everything God arranged to prepare for that purchase and also everything that applied the fruit of the purchase to the people of God. So all of the preparation in history for the incarnation plus the imputation (assigning to a person’s account) and application and success of the Messiah’s redemption are summed up as the work of redemption. This involves not only Messiah in his offices as Prophet, Priest, and King but also what the Father and the Holy Spirit have done in their united plan (with the Son) to redeem sinful men and women. This is the meaning I use in this book for history of redemption: all of history as means through which the three divine Persons brought sinful human beings back to their Creator and filled them with the divine character.

This means even history before the fall of humanity and creation itself. For there was a planning for the world before the creation in what theologians call the counsels of redemption among the three divine Persons. It was their covenant to redeem a world that they knew would go awry. They agreed, as we shall see in the next chapter, that the best Person to procure redemption would be the Son of God. Because this covenantal planning by the divine Persons took place in eternity, where there is no time, we can say that God’s electing love had no beginning. His love for his people always was.4

The creation itself was for the purpose of redemption. For the building of a house is only for the purpose of the use of that house, which use is therefore greater in value than its building process. Jesus told the sheep in Matthew 25 that the kingdom was prepared for them from the foundation of the world (v. 34). The foundation—or creation—of the world was designed for the purpose of God’s kingdom, where God applies to his people the purchase of Christ’s redemption.

If the history of redemption includes planning for the creation, it includes the long history of humanity before the incarnation of the Messiah. All of that history helped pave the way for the incarnation. And the history of the Church until the new heavens and new earth is the history of the Triune God’s applying redemption to his people. The work of redemption is ongoing insofar as it administers the fruits of the Messiah’s redemption to men and women throughout the long history of the Church. At the end of the world, the work of redemption will be finished. But after the end of the world, when the Body of the Messiah (his Church) will continue on the renewed earth, she will continue to enjoy those fruits forever. In that sense the fruits of the work of redemption will have no end.

The Parts of Redemption

For the sake of clarity, I will make a few other distinctions. There are parts of the fruit of redemption and parts of the work of redemption.5

We can see parts of the fruit when we think about the Israelites being redeemed under Moses. They were redeemed first from slavery in Egypt. But then forty years later the next generation was brought by God into the promised land. In the individual Christian’s life, the first part of the fruit corresponds to being saved from eternal punishment for sin, eternal death, and the power of the devil through the life, death, and resurrection of Messiah Jesus. This is what most Christians mean by salvation. But redemption involves more, and specifically this second part of the fruit—the Spirit’s enabling each soul gradually to grow in holiness (sanctification) and then to be glorified in heaven. So the whole work of redemption means far more than what is commonly called salvation. It means all of the following: God regenerates a dead soul to give it new life, justifies it by blotting out its sins and accepting it as righteous in his sight through the righteousness of Jesus Messiah, fills it with his Spirit and gradually conforms it to the likeness of Messiah, comforts the soul with the consolation of his Spirit, and finally after death bestows upon the soul eternal glory (Rom. 8:30).6

The work of redemption can also be divided into two parts—individual redemption, which takes place in each soul by the process we just described, and corporate redemption of the whole people of God, which is carried out through history. Individual redemption is done in much the same way for billions of souls in every age of history—sinners deserving hell are forgiven and given the Spirit and Word to grow into the Messiah. But corporate redemption is an infinitely complex process consisting of innumerable stages and phases, each one fitted to make its contribution to the whole. Some of this fittingness is explained in Scripture, such as the ways that Judaism prepared the way for the Messiah and his Church. Other things in history such as the radical evils of the Holocaust and Gulag are far from clear. Yet we are taught that every part of history is used in God’s mysterious sovereignty for the ultimate redemption of his people (Rom. 8:28).

The Purposes of Redemption

Finally, let us look briefly at the purposes of redemption. These will show us not only God’s ultimate designs but also the meaning of redemption. Each of these purposes will show one depth-dimension of this cosmic phenomenon of redemption.

First, redemption is the defeat of evil. God sent his Messiah to reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet (1 Cor. 15:25). Jesus the Messiah came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). He was sent as the seed of the woman to bruise the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). After the creation and fall of humanity, Satan set himself up as god of this world instead of the God who had made it. He enticed the first man to sin, which brought guilt and death and all kinds of misery into this world. But the Father sent his Son by the Spirit to defeat all these works of evil. Because of his resurrection the Messiah’s own being can heal human corruption, blot out human guilt, reverse human demerit from sin, and prevent eternal death. He triumphed over the devil and his principalities at the resurrection and his ascension, and this triumph will be displayed to all the cosmos at his second coming. This demolition of the prince of evil and all his works will be gloriously visible through all of eternity.

Second, redemption means the restoration and renewal of all that was ruined by the fall. Because of sin, the human soul was ruined and the image of God in man was blighted. Human nature was corrupted, and every new human being born in history came into life dead in sin. Creation itself was subjected to futility and given over to bondage to decay (Rom. 8:20–21). But in the long work of redemption the Triune God comes to billions of souls through history and brings them out of death into life. He restores their souls, renews in them the image of God, gives them new bodies at the general resurrection, and renews the face of the earth itself. The end of the work of redemption is the new heaven and new earth (Isa. 65:17), when the New Jerusalem, which was fashioned in heaven, comes down to the renewed earth for God’s elect people (Rev. 21:1–5). Redemption is restoration of not only God’s people but God’s world.

Third, redemption means uniting all things together in the Messiah, things in both heaven and earth (Col. 1:20). This world is plagued by division and conflict. Nature is often at odds with humanity, nations go to war against nations, cultures are sometimes at each other’s throats. Even nations are often internally divided. So are families. But redemption means harmony among God’s people, reconciling all the divides among nations and tribes and cultures and families. By the history of redemption God’s elect people are joined to the Messiah by the Spirit, and he brings them to the Father as one Body under one head. Because of the work of redemption even the powers of nature serve God’s people, united in history’s grand purpose, the worship of the Triune God. This work began after the fall, continues through all of human history, and will be finished at the end of the world.

Fourth, redemption is the work of perfecting the glory and beauty of God’s elect people, the Church. God wants not only to forgive the Church of its sins but also to share his divine nature with his people (2 Pet. 1:4). He intends them to shine with spiritual beauty, and he intends to fill them with the pleasure and joy that spiritual beauty brings (Dan. 12:3; Zeph. 3:14–17). God wants his human creatures to share the glory and joy of the angels at their highest pitch under their common head, the Jewish Messiah. Measures of that beauty and joy can be seen in most saints during history, but the fullness of that joy and beauty will be seen on the renewed earth after the end of history. Toward this end of the perfection of their beauty God began to work immediately after the fall and has kept on working throughout the history of redemption. It will be perfected at the end of the world.

Fifth, redemption means the glory of God. God designed the history of redemption in order to glorify himself in all three of his Persons. In other words, not only is God’s glory a purpose of the work of redemption, but it is brought about by every part of that work. Edwards wrote that God first decided to glorify himself, and then selected this history and work as the best means to accomplish his purpose of self-glorification. Both the Son and the Father were glorified by redemption’s climax at the cross: Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself (John 13:31–32). Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you (17:1). All of this was accomplished by the Holy Spirit, and Christ’s resurrection was by the Spirit (Rom. 8:11). So the Spirit too was glorified in those fateful three days of redemption in the first century AD. But those three days were (only) the means of all the work of redemption that started after the fall and will continue until the end of this world.

Select Bibliography

Edwards, Jonathan. A History of the Work of Redemption. Edited by John F. Wilson. Vol. 9 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

———. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008.

———. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. Edited by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. An additional 47 vols., for a total of 73 vols. http://edwards.yale.edu/.

McClymond, Michael, and Gerald McDermott. The Concept of a History of Redemption. In The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 181–90. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

1

. Edwards, letter to the Princeton trustees, quoted in Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, vol. 9 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 62. From here forward, this Edwards volume will be abbreviated as HWR.

2

. Edwards, HWR, 113.

3

. Edwards, HWR, 113.

4

. Edwards, HWR, 118–19.

5

. Edwards, HWR, 119–20.

6

. Edwards, HWR, 121.

Part One

From Eternity to the Dispersal of the Nations

2

Redemption Planned from Eternity

God is infinitely happy and always has been. The Father has always loved the Son with infinite love, and the Son has always rejoiced in that love: I was beside the master Craftsman, delighting him day after day, rejoicing before him at all times; Father, I wish those you have given to me . . . would see my glory which you gave me because you loved me before the foundation of the world (Prov. 8:30; John 17:24). The Father has always been delighted by the Son: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased (Matt. 3:17). He loves the Son and shows him everything he is doing (John 5:20). And the Son has always loved the Father with perfect love: he surrendered in love to the Father’s plan before the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:20) and wanted the world to know that I love the Father. I do whatever he commands me (John 14:31).

The love between the Father and the Son is, and always has been, so perfect that it is a third divine Person, the Holy Spirit. He is love itself, the divine Person who is the energy of love between the Father and Son: God is love; I have made known to them your name, and will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me might be in them and I in them; Hope does not disappoint us because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (1 John 4:8; John 17:26; Rom. 5:5). Scripture never says that either the Father or the Son loves the Spirit; this is a principal reason why the Western tradition has thought of the Spirit as the Person who is the love between the Father and the Son.

This perfect love in the Trinity, which is another way of speaking about the beauty of God in his inner life, has always been perfect and boundless. The divine society that the Christian tradition has called the Trinity has always been infinitely happy and full of joy. And this was the case, if we can think of it that way, in the eons and eons before the creation. But this infinite happiness begs the question of the time of the creation.

Creation and Time

Since, as Augustine most famously put it, time as we know it started with the creation of the world, eternity before the creation is a realm that we cannot probe with our finite conception of time.1

Yet Scripture suggests that the Trinity made plans for the creation during that time-that-was-not-our-time and that that planning came before the creation. Even if there was no before and after as we think of it, there was nevertheless planning for the creation and so, as far as we can imagine it while recognizing that our sense of before does not hold then, before the creation.

Mention of creation will cause some readers to wonder if we will wrestle with questions posed by modern cosmology and anthropology to biblical chronology. As I indicated in the preface, those are matters for a different sort of book. This volume seeks to understand the logic of the chronology that we have in the text, the same logic that the tradition has interpreted for upward of three thousand years. However, readers might want to flip forward to chapter 25 for discussion of modern scientific questions about the how of creation rather than the when.

But if we can say just a bit about the when, the bigger question is the why. If God was already infinitely happy in eternity before the creation, why would he create a world that he knew would bring excruciating pain, both physical and spiritual, to his beloved Son? Why would he create a world of creatures, both angelic and human, many or most of whom he knew would be ungrateful and defiant across millennia?

I should add that speaking about God’s pain is problematic theologically. The Christian Fathers of the first seven centuries emphatically repudiated the idea that God in his essence suffers pain, arguing that the deity per se does not suffer but that the human (as opposed to the divine) nature of one of the Three suffered. So we can speak about God’s pain but remember that it is restricted to the human nature of one of the three Persons in God.

Then Why?

Now back to our principal question, Why did God create the world? Scripture teaches that the short answer to this question is that God created the world for himself: All things were created by him and for him; From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! (Col. 1:16; Rom. 11:36). That last verse by Paul at the end of Romans 11 illustrates what Scripture means by God making the world for himself—that he creates and administers the cosmos for his glory. Another example of this is in Isaiah chapter 48: doing something for himself means getting glory for himself. He told Isaiah that he was refining Israel: "For my sake I am doing it, for my sake. How can I let [Israel be] polluted? I will not give the glory to anyone else!" (Isa. 48:11).

The rabbis taught the same in the Mishna, which was the first major collection of Jewish commentary on Torah (the Pentateuch). They argued that the creation was for God himself, which means for his glory: "Whatever the Holy One, blessed is he, created in his world, he created it only for his glory, as it is written, Everything that is called by my name and that I have created, I have formed it, yea, I have made it [Isa. 43:7]" (Avot 6:11, Danby trans.).

Seven Components

That is the most simplistic answer to the question of why God created the world: for his own glory. But what does that mean? Scripture suggests that the meaning has seven different components: that God created the physical cosmos (1) and all human beings (2) but especially the saints (3) for the purpose of demonstrating his goodness and greatness and beauty. This was the purpose of his work of redemption (4) and even the virtues (5) that he put into his people. The apostles (6) made this their purpose. Finally, even God’s judgments on evil and its perpetrators (7) were for the purpose of demonstrating the divine glory—in this case, his justice.

Let us look a bit more at each of these. God says that he created this cosmos so that it would testify in all its parts to his glory. The heavens recount the glory of God and the sky above declares his handiwork (Ps. 19:1). God created so that his human creatures would exclaim that his majesty could be seen in all the world (Ps. 8:1, 9). They would see that majesty radiating from the heavens with their sun, moon, and stars (8:3); in marvelous works of nature—clouds, springs in the mountains, grass and plants that feed livestock and human beings, trees, birds, mountains, oceans, and the marvelous renewal of the face of the ground every spring (104:3, 10, 17, 24, 30); and in the ways he uses the cosmos to satisfy the desire of every living thing (145:16).

But it is not only his human creatures that God moves to praise him for the wonders of the physical world. God calls on angels and inanimate creation itself to give him glory. Praise YHWH . . . , all you [angel] armies. . . . Praise him, O sun and moon, praise him all stars that give light, praise him O heaven of heavens, and you waters that are above the heavens. . . . Praise YHWH you sea creatures and deep waters, fire and hail, snow and mist, storms that obey his word, mountains and hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all livestock, reptiles and birds. . . . Let them all praise the name of YHWH (Ps. 148:2–4, 7–10, 13). One gets the sense that the physical world was created by God not only because its beauty and wonder would evoke praise from angels and humans but also because in some way that we cannot yet perceive, those lifeless (to most eyes and ears) parts