Catastrophes Happen but God Abides (If We Let Him)
Book Review: A New History of Redemption: The Work of Jesus the Messiah through the Millenia by Gerald R. McDermott. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024.) 426 pp., $44.99
Anglican scholar Gerald McDermott (above) has written a restorative and kerygmatic text that is of interest to scholars and lay Christians struggling to withstand the turmoil of the current age. (Photo by Dexter Van Zile).
In his penultimate book, The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy posits the widely held belief that the end is near for Western civilization. He offers this message through his aptly named protagonist, Bobby Western—whose father, a nuclear physicist, worked on the Manhattan Project. During a time of crisis, Western climbs to the top of a mountain near his childhood home in Wartburg, a town near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and contemplates “the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.”
The Passenger and its companion novel, Stella Maris, which details the tragic life of Bobby Western’s sister, Alicia, a brilliant mathematician who can’t overcome the disappointment of not being able to consummate her incestuous desires for her brother (who desires her in return), strike a powerful note of pessimism that’s hard to shake. By casting Bobby and Alicia Western as Jews, McCarthy seems intent on rendering the legitimacy of such pessimism unassailable, because if anyone has leave to think the worst of Western civilization, it’s Jews. But in Stella Maris, McCarthy assails such pessimism nonetheless by having a Jewish psychiatrist—Dr. Cohen—ask Alicia if she isn’t “given pause by the fact that the overwhelming majority of people find a way to deal with their disappointments?” (“No,” Alicia responds.) McCarthy could really hammer the point home by having Dr. Cohen declare, “Look, there’s a whole country of people who have been through a lot worse than you and they have gotten on with their lives. Why don’t you follow their example?”
For bien-pensants afflicted with Alicia’s pessimism, self-pity, and resentment, the evils that were unleashed in the 20th century legitimize all manner of contempt for the most materially abundant, free, and comfortable civilization to have ever existed. These folks regard the West as if it is some manifestation of another of McCarthy’s novels, The Road, which depicts a dystopia where people rob, rape, and kill one another like every day is October 7. (They also eat each other in The Road, which is one of the few things that Hamas apparently did not do to Israelis on that fateful day. Thank God for life’s little victories. But I digress.)
Yes, people have done bad things to each other in the West—as they have in every culture zone—but the savagery which McCormac depicts in The Road is so frightening because it depicts things that are so alien to our current circumstances. As legatees and beneficiaries of the Western tradition, we chafe against our unearned comfort and order even as we fear losing them.
In order to justify communal acts of cathartic violence against the public order that constrains us (and hey, we all have to get our freak on every once in a while), young people adopt false narratives about police officers killing huge numbers of African Americans in American cities, portray young men who want to dress up as women and use the girls’ bathroom as singular victims of oppression, or falsely portray Israel’s efforts to stop Hamas’s savagery once and for all as “genocide.”
But the fact is, life is pretty good in the West and still we chafe against the rules we must follow to maintain it—like don’t marry your sibling (or cousin for that matter), don’t carry on with someone other than your spouse, and if you must perform in drag, do it someplace other than a public library—even if the folks at the front desk say it’s OK.
Ominously enough, many of the folks who express disdain for the mores that built Western civilization are the ones so intent on demonizing it as a singular source of evil in the world. I’m starting to think that the urge to climb to the top of Bobby Western’s mountain and proclaim “All is lost” is merely a way to justify our licentious desires and legitimize our disdain for the folks who follow the rules, teach their kids to do the same, and struggle to get back on track after suffering the inevitable catastrophes that come from being alive on planet earth.
The Way Forward
Folks struggling to keep themselves happily and purposely rooted in the Christian nomos should get a copy of Gerald McDermott’s book A New History of Redemption: The Work of Jesus the Messiah through the Millenia (Baker Academic, 2024). For folks willing to engage in the venture of faith as described in the writings of William James, McDermott’s text is an antidote to the frantic pessimism over the fate of humanity, the West, and the United States spread around in a fine even layer by the folks Thomas Sowell would call the “anointed.”
McDermott recounts a pretty straightforward narrative about humanity and our place in the universe. God created the universe, the earth therein, and then humanity, to whom he gave free will. As it turns out, humanity abused its freedom, fell off the righteous path, and suffered catastrophes as a result. Instead of destroying humanity completely and starting over, God enlists the help of a faithful remnant to bring humanity back on track using his Son, Jesus Christ, as a mediator. Christ is present at every moment of crisis, fall, and restoration in both the Old and New Testaments, and post-ascension history.
Jews will likely take offense at, from their perspective, seeing Jesus Christ written into their scripture and history and into their faith narrative itself, but this line of thought opens up a powerful line of attack against Christian antisemites who keep forgetting that not only was Jesus a Jew, he is a Jew, and according to the Nicene Creed, it seated at the right hand of God the Father. This suggests to my simple mind that there’s a Jew at the top—or center—of the cosmos. Given that Jesus, a Jew, was present at creation, the universe itself can be described as akin to a Jewish conspiracy, and Christians are in on it, whether they like it or not. The supersessionist impulse, against which McDermott is profoundly opposed, is ultimately a denial of Jesus Himself and an attack on the Church.
McDermott then argues that God’s providential love has manifested itself in the Christian church in the epochs of history after Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension. Of course, he acknowledges that history is filled with catastrophes but that each act of restoration brings us closer to the end times when God’s purposes are finally and ultimately achieved.
The main thrust of McDermott’s book is that Christians worship a God who is able, willing, and intent on restoring humanity from whatever civilizational disasters that befall it. He’s done it before; He will do it again. He works this restoration through sinners who repent, like Moses, King David, St. Peter (who denied Christ three times), and through remnant communities that place themselves under His direction and demonstrate the authority of His presence in their lives. Instead of climbing to the mountaintop to declare “All is lost,” they, one way or another, declare, “Here we are your wonders to witness and in some small way, help bring about.”
For those of us who have struggled to enlist Sowell’s “anointed” into the fight to defend the civilization that has given them untold material benefits, but no sense of the transcendent, McDermott’s book is a shot in the arm. By giving readers a sense of the narrative upon which their heritage was founded, he gives them a path to follow—and defend. This path is more meaningful than a mere standard of living. The history of the modern state of Israel, which has been able to enlist multiple generations of young people in its defense despite numerous calamities, demonstrates the importance of such narratives and the work necessary to maintain them. This transcendent narrative give us the strength to move beyond the question of “Why me?” after a catastrophe to another, more fruitful question: “OK, God, what’s next?” The answer, for the faithful remnant is “Greater things than these.”
A New History of Redemption is a good book written by a good and decent man intent on helping his fellow Christians stay—or get back into—the nomos of Christian belief and action during a time of civilizational chaos and disorder. Its writing and publication qualify as restorative acts that are so badly needed in days like these.