A New History of Redemption
Michael Giere, The Stream.
Book Review: Gerald R. McDermott, A New History of Redemption (Baker Academic, 2024).
If you’ve ever been on a cruise, river tour, or sailed along the coastline, you realize how dramatically your perspective changes. Instead of the confinement of limited personal space where you can only observe a small area at a time, out on the water looking in, your expanded view lets you take in the land’s beauty and the environment’s scope from a dramatically expanded scale.
Gerald R. McDermott has done this for us in his new book, A New History of Redemption (Baker Academic, 2024, 426 pages with subject and writings index).
McDermott, with his impressive credentials and expertise, is the captain extraordinaire for this journey. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and teaches at Jerusalem Seminary and Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia. Previously, he taught at Besson Divinity School and Roanoke College and has published two dozen books and hundreds of articles on Jonathan Edwards, world religions, Anglicanism, and the place of Israel in the Judeo-Christian narrative.
In an age of specialization, where experts dissect often unconnected bits and pieces to justify a position and social platforms pump out endless suppositions and bromides, A New History of Redemption provides the “receipts” for a new work that expands our vision and understanding of the magnificence and “beauty of the Triune God in a new, historical way.”
The Big Picture
In an audacious, humbling task, McDermott concedes, “[trying] to map the logic of the Bible and the Great Tradition that has given us a way to interpret the Bible” without undermining the Holy Scripture.
“I presume the coherence and beauty of the Christian vision of the Triune God, as passed down to us through Scripture and tradition [which I am seeking to], explain its coherence in a way that I’ve not seen previously.”
His motivation for the book was the enormously influential eighteen-century preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), whose sermon series “A History of Redemption” fit with McDermott’s realization that earlier in his studies, he “had missed the profound Jewishness of Jesus and the gospel.” Like Jonathan Edwards, McDermott was persuaded that we serve a “God of history” and that history was a transmission belt — through all cultures — to best display God’s beauty.
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