In a celebrated essay, philosopher Robert Sokolowski observes that a “dimensional difference” can arise from Christian theological reflection. Such an alteration is “a new way of taking things” and it “introduces a new way in which the world as a whole, and everything in the world, can be interpreted.” Sokolowski’s topic was the doctrine of creation, but the revolution in personal understanding that he described may be a helpful analogy for appreciating the significance of Gerald R. McDermott’s newest book, A New History of Redemption: the Work of Jesus the Messiah through the Millennia.

The book’s title alerts the reader to three things central to McDermott’s project. The first is that this is a capacious account of the work of redemption through time. Second, the portrait he sketches is arranged not biblically or topically, but historically. The third feature is that this is not just a history of redemption, but a new history of redemption. McDermott is reprising an unfinished project commenced by Jonathan Edwards that attempted to trace the work of redemption throughout history.

McDermott’s central premise is that God is best understood when known through the chronological unfolding of his acts in history. The broad contours of the book move from prehistorythe covenant of Redemptionthrough the earliest stages of created history and on to the first chapters of human existence in the narratives of Genesis. From this point, McDermott sketches the early work of redemption in history, narrating the fall, the creation of the nations, the call of Abraham, the formation of the people of Israel, and their eventual Exodus and pilgrimage to the promised land. After recounting the rest of Israelite history, McDermott depicts the arrival of the Messiah, his life and passion, and the formation of the church. This section is by far the longest and consists of nineteen chapters, from the Resurrection to the present day. It addresses topics including Christ’s ascension and the church’s mission to the Gentile, the early monastic movement, the iconoclast/iconodule controversy and the rise of Islam, the Oxford Movement, and much more. Woven throughout the account is ample evidence of McDermott’s own considerable and wide-ranging expertise. The reader encounters a good deal on the place of Israel within God’s work, as well as the significance of other religions.

Much of the volume is delightful. McDermott focuses intently on how history manifests the beauty of God. He emphasizes the value of liturgy and sacramentality in worship, both historic and contemporary. Swaths of the prose are deeply fascinating and benefit from a full career’s worth of reflection and maturity. The accounts of Hellenistic philosophy, for instance, are particularly helpful and accurate. McDermott usefully notes the role of the logos in enlightening natural human understanding, and his descriptions of world religions and their theological significance are well-drawn and far from oversimplified. McDermott has produced a highly readable, warm, and encouraging account taking in both biblical and world history. The book is well written, even elegant in its prose, gently drawing the reader along. It is enormously ambitious, of course, but in many ways, this is a strength. 

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Some of the strengths come to the fore in McDermott’s carefully depicted accounts of biblical typology. Yet these form only a part of the vast endeavor. Its scale inevitably involves certain limitations. Perhaps most obviously, any task of this magnitudea theological accounting of all of historywill probably include not only robust conclusions solidly drawn, but also a range of inferences, methods, or arguments with which readers may disagree. At times, the volume’s approach is delightfully unfashionable, a product, no doubt, of a seasoned scholar comfortably clear about his convictions. At others, however, he advances potentially controversial arguments with greater confidence than some will find warranted.

Among the more intriguing comments is one found at the outset of McDermott’s work. He writes that “because God is a God of historyrevealing himself not in one blinding flash but successively through historyhistory must be the best way to talk about God and the world.” Two points invite comment. 

First, God certainly does make himself known in history. He acts in specific and decisive ways and at particular moments and places. God is indeed a “God of history” who reveals himself in historical acts. This premise, however, might lead only to the conclusion that God acts historically and might profitably be talked about in relation to those historical acts. It does not lead necessarily to the conclusion that history is “the best way to talk about God and the world.” This may be a possible conclusion, but other premises would be necessary to establish it. Additionally, there may be important limitations on the viability of history as a useful way to talk about God and the world.

Second, although God does reveal himself in history, this is not the sole domain of revelation. He reveals himself also “in the things that have been made.” God’s law reveals his character. These dimensions of revelation point to a need to synthesize the ways God reveals himselfhistorical, natural, and writtenand to order that revelation in a manner conducive to the knowledge of God. History would be one way to do this, of course, but it has certain attendant risks. Another might be accounts of God’s essence and processions as the grounds of the creative, redemptive, and perfecting work of the divine persons.

McDermott is reprising an unfinished project commenced by Jonathan Edwards that attempted to trace the work of redemption throughout history.

 

A depiction of God’s work that is heavily invested in the categories of history will probably be strongest when it draws on robust theological and metaphysical resources, and there are many good and encouraging signs in the vision of God depicted here. God’s internal actuality cannot be improved, McDermott notes. The economy does not affect God in himself. Yet at other junctures, McDermott draws on surprising quarters for support. He invokes Robert Jenson and Catherine Mowry LaCugna to reject a quest for “a transcendent being different from the God redeeming sinners through the work of the Messiah Jesus.” There are ways such a statement may be perfectly orthodox, yet it invites the question of what kind of relation, identity, or difference aptly narrates the relationship of God in himself to the work that God performs in space and times.

Along these lines, the reader encounters both traditional theological reflections and the occasional puzzling claim, like “growth in the knowledge of the Messiah and his redemption is at the same time growth in the Triune God.” To be sure, McDermott concedes that “God is eternally complete and perfect, fully actual and self-sufficient.” Yet this is then complicated when McDermott writes that “God’s external repetition of his own being [is] therefore a kind of self-enlargement.” These statements point to the possibility that God is growing, enlarging himself in a sort of mutual relationship with creatures. Here McDermott affirms that “what happens in space and time is really and integrally related to God’s own lifenot by adding to God’s being ad intra but by constituting the external extension of God’s internal fullness.” McDermott stresses that his account of “self-enlargement” is not about spatial expansion, but instead, “real involvement in history,” such that “God truly acts and does new things. God is not timeless self-identityas in some Platonic version of the Christian deity.” For God, “the incarnation was something new.” For all such narrations may add, readers might reasonably ask whether McDermott’s account comes with weaknesses not present in older ways of depicting divine agency.

The issue of theology proper and its importance to McDermott’s project arises elsewhere. At one point, McDermott critiques “[m]ost Christians in the global North” who affirm “a simple monotheism in which there is one God, the physical cosmos, and nothing else ‘between’” with the exception of angels, who are of no daily import to normal Christian believers. McDermott notes that ancient believers knew the cosmos to be “chock-full of beings both malevolent and divine.” It seems, then, that McDermott’s concern is that Christians in the global Northindeed most of themlack a sufficiently robust appreciation of spiritual beings both good and evil. Yet this is a strange problem to critique under the label “simple monotheism.” At other points McDermott argues in favor of relics, purgatory, and the possibility of salvation for the dead, sometimes appealing to majority opinion, but not engaging rigorously with standard arguments against these views.

Other idiosyncrasies of varying significance crop up. We are alerted to Newman’s concerns about the reformed principle of “private judgment” as a “cancerous growth,” which is contrasted with the Tractarian emphasis on the interpretive authority of the early church. Here, private judgment is depicted as “every Protestant deciding for himself what the Bible means based on sola scriptura,” a position that seems hard to reconcile with the reformed and Lutheran confessional spirit in the sixteenth century. Newman’s own intervention was, in fact, targeted at a specific eighteenth-century version of “private judgment” prevalent only in certain fringes of Protestant dissenting traditions, not something native to the reformed tradition on scripture and interpretation. Elsewhere, the reader is warned about the risk of “Gnosticism” if we conceive of redemption as an intellectual matter rather than a “matter of the sacraments and the bodies of other believers and their ministers.” Pelagianism attends if we focus on trying hard to follow Jesus rather than “yielding” to his deifying work. Similarly, the warning of the risk of “deception if we imagine that all that matters is an emotional experience years ago,” rather than a “long pilgrimage of self-denial and sacrifice,” raises the prospect that a significant motivating factor in the history McDermott sketches is that of reacting to recent popular evangelicalism. Does that spirit at times risk overreaction? McDermott states that “the essence of worship is the ongoing sacrifice of the Son” who is to be found in “his offering, which is the liturgy and sacraments of the Church.” 

A New History of Redemption offers a compelling narrative of God’s redemptive action throughout history. It is profoundly expansive in historical scope, in literary genre, and in conversation partners. Readers may find certain judgments surprising or questionable. All, however, will encounter a robust and confident portrait of how divine agency stretches into the sinews of historical circumstances to ground the work of the Messiah. 

McDermott’s central claim is surely right. In everything and in every place, God is providentially at work to effect redemption. If engaging with his work can foster this awareness in us as readers, then that is precisely a “dimensional difference” that will be all to the good, raising to greater consciousness the wonder and beauty of God’s work.

Image by Romolo Tavani and licensed via Adobe Stock.