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by P. Andrew Sandlin

Redemptive history refers mainly to those miraculous events unleashed on the stage of human history by which God in Jesus Christ secures salvation for sinful men: Christ's virgin birth; His love-filled, law-keeping life; His sacrificial, atoning death; His victorious, bodily resurrection; and His resplendent second advent yet in the future.¹ We observe a proleptic version of this history in the redemptive history of Old Testament Israel. God sovereignly selected a particular race on which to shower His abundant, redemptive grace; and He gave them types and symbols of His coming Son in the form of an elaborate sacrificial system. There is, therefore, a distinction between, but nonetheless a unity with, the redemptive history recorded in the New Testament.

The great objective of the Bible is to reveal this redemptive history. The Bible says very little about eternity past and eternity future and, in any case, it does not define eternity in terms of timelessness. Rather, eternity is simply endless time.² The Bible begins with an account of God's creation of the universe and moves immediately to man's fall into sin. The rest of the Bible is an extensive account of redemptive history--of how God accomplishes salvation for man in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ. The book of Revelation is a fitting capstone to this disclosure in that it describes earthly salvation in its fullness, and it concludes with God's descent to earth to abide here with redeemed man eternally (Rev. 21:1-3). Simply stated, the Bible is a book about redemption; first, individual redemption within the sphere of the covenant community,³ and subsequently the redemption of creation (Rom. 8:19-23) and all of human society (Zech. 14:20-21). ⁴ The Bible was designed to be read and obeyed by redeemed communities--covenant Israel in the Old Testament era, and the multinational church in the New Testament era.

The Lure of Conservative Politics

As Christians observe the depraved world that surrounds them, they are tempted to opt for solutions to this depravity which subordinate or dismiss redemptive history. A prime example is Christian politics. It is not remarkable that so many unbelieving conservatives, for example, flock to a Christian political position--that is, one that (rightly) wishes to order the civil government along biblical lines.⁵ They enjoy the benefit of Christian society, but eschew Christianity. Being the unconverted "law and order" gang, they favor certain political parts of the Bible that support law and order. The Bible is quite clear that every area of life must be subordinated to Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:19-23), and this does not exclude civil government. In what has traditionally been designated His three-fold office, Jesus Christ is no less king than He is prophet and priest; and the mediatorial reign which His Father has bequeathed to Him includes the subordination of the nations to His authority, subordination that does not exclude civil government.⁶

A problem arises when the exercise of His kingship in the political sphere is severed from redemptive history--His role as redeemer, which is central. For one thing, the civil law enshrined in the Bible (notably in the Mosaic legislation) is no abstract political program designed for any society whatsoever. It is quite obviously a law-order designed for a redeemed, covenant people. This is why the imposition of biblical civil law in modern Western democracies is, as Rushdoony observes, futile and wrong-headed.⁷ Old Testament Israel was a voluntarily covenanted body (Ex. 19), and it stood as covenantally redeemed in God's presence.⁸ Israel's commission was not to impose their political law on the surrounding nations, but to expel the sinful nations in the land that God had granted to them, and to accept into their covenant membership individuals from those nations who met God's qualifications for covenant inclusion.

The Great Commission of the New Testament is to disciple the nations with the message of the gospel (Matt. 28:19-20). It is the gospel and biblical instruction, not political activity, which subordinates the nations.⁹

A Biblical Redemptive-Order

The attempt to create a biblical law-order in the civil sphere is doomed to failure if it is not preceded by a biblical redemptive-order in the social sphere. In other words, Christians cannot sustain (or even install) a biblical civil order unless a vast majority of the population is redeemed by Christ's blood and indwelt by His Spirit.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an account of His great redemptive work in history (1 Cor. 15:1-4) and the message that all who believe in Him will be saved (Rom. 10:9). These individuals are recipients of the new covenant (Heb. 8:9-13), a provision of which is the insertion of the law of God--the same objective law revealed in the Old Testament¹⁰$mdash;into their hearts. This includes the Old Testament civil legislation. Such Christians, properly taught, will willingly submit themselves to Christ's mediatorial authority as it is expressed in that law.

The modern secular state constitutes a rival law order. The state itself has become a means of earthly redemption and salvation.¹¹ The temptation to Christians is to attempt to overturn that law-order and to impose a biblically anchored law-order without the benefits of (supernatural) redemptive history. But that is to put new wine into old wineskins. The state cannot supply salvation, even a state anchored in Old Testament civil legislation. Salvation is in Jesus Christ alone. Only when that supernatural salvation transforms the lives of a vast majority of society can we expect extensive, godly political change. Otherwise, we are tacitly supporting the Marxist idea that men are changed fundamentally by coercion.¹²

Christian Libertarianism

Does this mean that we should return to the days where Christians did nothing but preach the gospel? Stay out of politics? By no means. The political goal of Christians living in an ungodly society dominated by politics is depoliticization. Christianity is not fundamentally a political phenomenon; it is a religious phenomenon with political implications. Christians in politics should work to disengage the tentacles of the modern state from the lives of individuals, families, churches, businesses, and other "private" spheres. The role of such Christians is to create vast political liberty for the church of Jesus Christ so that it can preach the gospel and declare the truth of God's authority in time and history, a "Christian libertarianism."¹³ At the same time, this liberty itself presupposes the basic elements of a biblical law-order--the prohibition, for example, of murder, theft, rape, pillage, and so forth. These aspects of the present Western law-order, vestiges of the older Christian civilization,¹⁴ are biblically attested; and Christians should work tirelessly to retain them. Christians in today's world should not attempt first to create a Christian state. They should attempt to create a Christian society at the center of which is the redemptive power of Jesus Christ disclosed in the preaching of the gospel. A Christian society will necessarily spawn a Christian state, but a Christian state apart from a Christian society is a cruel illusion. It is the gospel, not politics, which radically changes men.

P. Andrew Sandlin is Executive Vice President of the Chalcedon Foundation which since 1965 has been dedicated to applying historic, biblical Christianity in today's world. He is the editor of the Chalcedon Report and author of Christianity: Bulwark of Liberty and several other works.

Endnotes

1. Herman N. Ridderbos, When the Time Had Fully Come (Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada: Paideia Press [1957], 1982), pp. 44-60.

2. Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950).

3. Norman Shepherd, The Call of Grace (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2000), Part 2.

4. Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).

5. Rousas John Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1986).

6. William Symington, Messiah the Prince (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Still Waters Revival Books [1884], 1990), ch. 8-10.

7. Rousas John Rushdoony, Law and Society (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1986), pp. 468, 685.

8. This does not imply that every person was a believer. In fact, throughout much of Israel's history, the majority were unbelievers. It simply means that they were redeemed collectively by God's almighty hand. The great work of public redemption in their case was the Exodus from Egypt (Ex. 6:6).

9. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

10. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978), 233.

11. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies [1953], 1990), pp. 29f.

12. Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Wheel (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988).

13. Andrew Sandlin, "Christian Libertarianism," Chalcedon Report, September, 1996, pp. 3-8.

14. Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948), pp. 193-194 and passim.

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