Christian theologians have paid careful attention to history since the earliest days of the church. This attention is entirely warranted, of course, since the Christian faith depends on historical events, with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection among the most important. Theology and history are thus inseparable, but theologians and historians have nearly worn themselves out searching for the central theme or themes of Scripture and history. Even in the now century-old biblical theology movement, which has championed a biblical-historical method, and in which scholars often have shared very similar commitments to the veracity and authority of Scripture, there is no consensus on what the central biblical theme is, or whether there is one, except perhaps for agreement that Scripture presents a broad-stroke storyline of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. When theologians search the Scriptures for the central theme or themes, they find disparate, though not necessarily incongruous, elements. And so there are significant biblical-historical tomes expounding one or more of the themes of covenant, kingdom (or even kingdom through covenant), Israel (or the people of God), temple, salvation, and the glory of God.
In A New History of Redemption: The Work of Jesus the Messiah through the Millennia, Gerald R. McDermott brings his extensive experience in the academy and pastoral ministry to bear on the question of God’s work in history. It is no exaggeration to say that this book is comprehensive in its scope. McDermott describes it as an “Israel-centered history of redemption through biblical and church history until the new heavens and new earth” and an “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.” In some ways, it is, as one reviewer has opined, a “history of everything.” Part biblical theology, part theological history, and part church-history survey, A New History of Redemption is not limited to biblical theology, the biblical storyline, or even mere history. In this way, it transcends the biblical theology discipline and its methods. Rather, McDermott pursues a world theology and a world storyline, of which biblical history and theology are only parts. The book is, therefore, not merely a history of everything but a theology of everything.
It is also an expansion and development of Jonathan Edwards’s unfinished 1739 sermon series on the history of redemption. McDermott draws most on Edwards in the early chapters on biblical history, but the unfinished nature of Edwards’s work, and the nearly three hundred years of human history that have transpired since his death, provide ample opportunity for McDermott to develop his own history of redemption in new directions. For the comprehensive task of telling the story of God’s work through all of history, McDermott follows Edwards in selecting the term (and concept) “redemption,” which refers not only to Christ’s purchase of salvation but also to “everything God arranged to prepare for that purchase and also everything that applied the fruit of the purchase to the people of God.” Thus, the history of redemption is understood as “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.”
McDermott pursues this history of redemption in a unique way by weaving biblical history seamlessly into world history. Readers used to a neat disciplinary division between works of biblical theology (or biblical history) and works of church history may be surprised to find themselves—somewhere in the midst of chapters 15 and 16—taken, without announcement, from a discussion of biblical texts and events into a discussion of patristic sources and the Roman persecution of the early church. This movement might go unnoticed by some readers, and it might give some scholars whiplash, but it communicates an essential feature of McDermott’s project: there is no epochal divide in God’s work or in God’s people. To be sure, McDermott views the incarnation and the roughly thirty-three-year life of the Messiah as “the most important and influential period that ever was or ever will be,” but that era was not the beginning of the Messiah’s work. The work of the Messiah extends “back” into the eternal divine society of the Trinity, and the Messiah was already at work at the dawn of human history. Jesus was saving a people for himself from the very beginning, and his work continued unhindered through the past, to our day, and into the future.
The unity of God’s work and people throughout the ages also means that there is no place in Christian theology for denigration of the Jewish people or for “replacement theology” (supersessionism), in which the Christian church is said to replace Israel. The essential and ineradicable Jewish background of Jesus and the church is a note that McDermott sounds repeatedly in this work, and which is a recurring theme in his other writings. This theme is, as it were, a chorus in the book’s redemption motif, since it is “Messiah Jesus” (McDermott’s preferred rendering of Jesus’ name and title), namely, the Jewish Messiah Jesus, who accomplishes and applies redemption through the ages for God’s chosen people. Into this covenant people the gentiles were “grafted,” despite being “strangers to the covenants of promise” (see Rom. 11:17; Eph. 2:12). Here McDermott is in effect recentering Christian history and theology on the Pauline and broader biblical motif that Israel is in the first instance the focus of God’s redemptive work, which then through time expands to include the nations, bringing the world’s cultures, wisdom, and diversity into the people of God and, ultimately, enhancing the glory of God and the beauty of his Messiah.
In an unexpected way, perhaps, this refocusing of the story on Israel actually results in a broader vision of God’s work in history among the nations. McDermott would have us see beyond the Western Christian tradition in which so many of us are rooted, and which, like every tradition, brings with it both insights and blind spots. Specifically, McDermott helps us see the work of the Messiah in the east and south, from the early church’s centers of spiritual life in Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople; the missionary expansions to India, China, and Africa; the modern global expansion of Pentecostalism; and the church’s “new center of gravity” today in Asia and Africa.
McDermott’s broader vision does not, however, preclude his giving expression to his own tradition’s perspectives. McDermott is an Anglican theologian and parish priest, and one can detect his Anglican accent, as it were, at points in the book. Every author writes from within a particular tradition and there is nothing wrong with doing so. (By the end of this review, readers will likely detect my own Reformed accent.) In McDermott’s case, there appears to be a kind of via-media (“middle-way”) inclusiveness in his handling of traditional doctrinal distinctives and divides. The chapter on the Reformation, for instance, finds positive and negative points in the theological expressions of both Catholics and Protestants, suggests that later Lutherans have misunderstood Luther himself on justification, presents the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker as a mediating voice, and closes by citing the Lutheran and Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification and the statement on justification by Evangelicals and Catholics Together. This chapter, while commendable for its affability, paints a doctrinal landscape that many confessional Protestants and traditional Catholics will not recognize as true to life, and it is curious that nothing is said in this chapter or elsewhere about any Protestant confessional statements except the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles. In another place, McDermott’s accent is perhaps detectable in his dedicating an entire chapter (ch. 26) to the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement in the Church of England. This would not of itself be notable in a comprehensive history of redemption except for the fact that this movement receives roughly the same amount of attention—one chapter—as more extensive and massively influential swaths of church history, such as the monastic movement (ch. 17), the rise of Islam (ch. 21), the entire medieval era (ch. 22), and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (ch. 24).
These idiosyncrasies aside, McDermott’s call to a broader vision of God’s work and people is one that the church today needs, especially in the West. The comprehensive scope of A New History of Redemption asks us to lift our eyes from the minutiae of our little lives to the grand purposes and promises of God. Indeed, the history of redemption is the history of God’s faithfulness to his promises throughout all that has or ever will happen. This was the divine plan from the beginning. God created the world to “demonstrate his perfections” and to “share his goodness and beauty with his creatures.” It is striking how close McDermott’s theme of redemption is to the traditional doctrine of God’s providence—a connection that McDermott himself makes: “Scripture promises and this history has shown that just as the course of providence has redeemed God’s people in the past, typically snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, so too in the future all the wandering streams of providence will unite in the ocean that is God.”
The jaws of defeat, however, sometimes seem large and voracious. McDermott is therefore clear-eyed about the reality of suffering and evil in the world, particularly as experienced by God’s people. A New History of Redemption includes a chapter on the persecution of early Christians and a chapter on the bloodiest century in history, the twentieth, which included the two world wars, genocides, more than one hundred million deaths worldwide at the hands of communists, and the Holocaust. Any history of redemption must grapple with ravenous and radical evil, especially as perpetuated in the modern era. Here McDermott draws on the wisdom of Augustine—not to somehow give a final answer to the ultimately unanswerable question, “Why did God allow these things?”—but to encourage Christians to see and experience life in this world, even when at its ugliest, through the eyes of faith. For example, Augustine counseled humility and warned us not to attribute the good of history to Christian empires and the evil of history to secular ones. As McDermott summarizes, “True history is not a matter of Christian empires versus secular empires, but an internal, secret history between the City of God and the City of Man.” We should not assume, therefore, that we can read specific divine purposes, such as rewards and punishments, off the vicissitudes of history. Further, the suffering of God’s people, in a mysterious and sublime way, can be a doorway to closer fellowship with our suffering Messiah. Suffering and evil, writes McDermott, “have a way of opening us up, in ways impossible while we are strong, to the deep and invisible power of the Messiah.” In fact, as we see everything through the eyes of faith, we know that nothing can separate us from ultimately experiencing God’s love for eternity, and “we also know that the path toward that final redemption often wends its ways through dark days of evil.”
If, despite the jaws of defeat, all the wandering streams of providence serve God’s purposes of redemption, then God’s people have great reasons for confidence and boldness even in the face of wars and rumors of wars, whether of the cultural or military varieties. And there are plenty of both in our day. In his now-classic work The Providence of God, theologian and philosopher Paul Helm defended what he called a “risk-free” or “no-risk” view of providence, by which he meant, first, that “there is no sphere” of created existence “in which [God] is less in control, or less interested, than in some other sphere.” For God, there are no no-go areas. Second, Helm meant, in the strongest sense, that God does not take any risks. In the whole history of the entire universe, no event “turn[s] out in a way other than the way that God believes that it will.”. Similarly, McDermott contends for what we might call a no-risk view of redemption. But whereas Helm emphasized that God does not risk, because God has purposed all things, and all things turn out as he intends, McDermott emphasizes that God’s people experience no ultimate risk, because Jesus the Messiah reigns over all things and has won and secured their salvation even in the midst of historical circumstances that look like defeats. Christians stand, therefore, on the bedrock of a no-risk redemption—a redemption without defeaters—purposed from eternity, executed in history, and directed toward God’s glory and our good. This is the theology of everything. It’s what we need in our tumultuous times. And most importantly, it’s true.
Andrew M. McGinnis (Ph.D., Calvin Theological Seminary) is the Assistant Director of Research at the Center for Religion Culture & Democracy and a Research Fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity & Politics.
