At the end of his life, the American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was working on a massive summa that would show the beauty of the Triune God afresh. Edwards’s thesis was that the best way to see God’s beauty is to trace the history of how he redeemed humanity—from just after the Fall through the Old and New Testament and Church history until the new Jerusalem. He was convinced that because God is a God of history, revealing himself not in one blinding flash but over time, history must be the best way to see God and his attributes.
Edwards died, aged just fifty-four, before he could finish what he started in his 1739 sermon series, A History of Redemption. So, in a new book—my eighth on Edwards—I have tried to complete the story.
Hubristic? Perhaps. But writing the book also involved repentance for my intellectual sins. More than twenty years before, I had my own Copernican revolution when I realized I had previously missed the profound Jewishness of Jesus and the gospel. Then I discovered, to my delight, that Edwards also came to see that Israel is at the center of world history. That made me all the more determined to pick up where Edwards left off. Using recent scholarship, I decided to connect the dots, linking Israel, redemption by the Jewish Messiah, secular and sacred history, the world religions, and Jewish-Christian worship through liturgy and sacraments.
Most Christians have thought that the active work of Jesus among us as redeemer did not begin until the Incarnation in the first century. Salvation for people before that time, it has been assumed, came by active faith in God’s promises of future redemption through Jesus.
But Edwards was convinced, as were the Church Fathers before Augustine, that Jesus began his redemptive work in the garden of Eden, just after the Fall. Because the Father is all-holy, he cannot abide the direct presence of sin or sinners, as Scripture teaches. Thus the Son of God was appointed to be the mediator between a holy Father and a sinful humanity—to represent the Father before sinners. This is why, Edwards wrote, God did not destroy Adam and Eve after they defied his commands, and why they did not immediately suffer the full penalty of the curse they had brought on themselves.
There are many other lines of evidence for this in the Bible, said Edwards. Consider the repeated theme that God the Father is invisible; yet he is said to have been seen, even in the Old Testament. John tells us that “no one has seen God [the Father] at any time” (John 1:18). Yet Moses talked with God “face to face as a man speaks with his friend” (Exod. 33:11). The seventy elders at Sinai “saw the God of Israel” (Exod. 24:10). Whom were they seeing if God the Father has never been seen?
Furthermore, Edwards pointed to what the Bible says about the angel of the Lord. In the Old Testament, he is often identified with God himself. For example, after the angel of the Lord told Hagar that her offspring would be so many that they could not be numbered, she told him, “You are a God of seeing” (Gen. 16). After wrestling with the angel of the Lord, Jacob said he had seen God (32:30). The angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in the burning bush and told him, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Exod. 3).
The pattern emerges that this angel (the Hebrew can also be translated “messenger”) from God is somehow God himself. But if not the invisible Father, then who? Edwards argued that this was the second person of the Trinity, another person within God, which is suggested by the distinction between God and these messengers.
First-century Jews understood that there would be a mediator between them and God. Philo, the great Jewish philosopher who was a contemporary of Paul the apostle, wrote of the Logos or Word who stood as a middle person between God and his creatures. Many referred to this middle person as the “Son of God” who was often mentioned in the Old Testament. Caiaphas the high priest knew that the Messiah would be this Son of God, for he demanded of Jesus: “Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God” (Matt. 26:63). The Sanhedrin understood that Daniel’s vision of “one like a son of man,” who was with the Ancient of Days and given everlasting dominion (Dan. 7:13–14), was not of Yahweh himself but a divine figure. When Jesus told them that they would see the “Son of Man seated at the right hand of the power of God”—clearly citing Daniel’s prophecy—these chief priests and scribes connected the dots: “Are you then the Son of God?” (Luke 22:69–70)
In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the visionary Mordecai argues that Jewish monotheism changed the world. “The Shemah,” Mordecai says, “wherein we briefly confess the divine Unity, is the chief devotional exercise of the Hebrew”: It was this unity that “embraced as its consequence the ultimate unity of mankind.” The Jewish Messiah who brought a new redemptive unity embodied Israel: Both Jesus and Israel are God’s firstborn son (Exod. 4:22; Rom. 8:29); Israel is Yahweh’s vine and Jesus is the true vine (Ps. 80:8; John 15:1); Jesus is one with Israel in the Exodus: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1; Matt. 2:15).
Jesus, then, inspired Israel’s Torah and sacrifices, as Israel was the world’s priest for the world’s redemption. Israel’s Messiah in his twofold body continues to redeem the world through his body’s Word, sacraments, and fellowship—which anticipate the shalom of the renewed world to come.
Gerald McDermott is the author of A New History of Redemption: The Work of Jesus the Messiah through the Millennia (Baker Academic).
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Image from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.
