Published March 12, 2025
The late great Henry Ford famously argued that “history is bunk.” The past, so the reasoning goes, is a millstone around humanity’s neck, a depressing, Old World obstacle to progress. And that’s clearly one of the conceits buried deep in the American psyche. We Americans are different. We’re a “city upon a hill,” the kind mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount. We’re an entirely “new order of the ages” – words, in their original Latin, that are stamped right on our nation’s Great Seal.
We haven’t had a war on our home soil in 160 years. We’re the wealthiest, most successful republic turned de facto empire in, well, history. We’re also the greatest toolmakers. The result is predictable: Optimism is baked into our national assumptions. It drives our faith in technology, a faith with astonishing achievements, a faith with now global adherents.
Later this year the Australian biotech company Cortical Labs will introduce the CL1 – the world’s first “body in a box” biological computer – for a mere $35,000 per unit:
The CL1 consists of a silicon chip with lab-grown human neurons cultivated on its surface. These neurons are capable of responding to electrical signals, forming networks that process information similarly to a biological brain. . . .A notable aspect of the CL1 is its ability to learn and adapt to tasks. Previous research has demonstrated that neuron-based systems can be trained to perform basic functions, such as playing simple video games. Cortical Labs’ work suggests that integrating biological elements into computing could improve efficiency in tasks that traditional AI struggles with, such as pattern recognition and decision-making in unpredictable environments.
CL1 is the tip of a new-wave technological iceberg. Brain-computer interface (BCI) research is now a robust and expanding field. And isn’t that good news? What could possibly be wrong with tools that might one day cure paralysis or mental illness? Maybe just this: Optimism confirmed by optimal results has a habit of eliding into hubris with very different and unpleasant consequences. We use our tools, but our tools also use us by rewiring not just our abilities, but also our appetites and imaginations.
Here’s the point: Technology can deliver us from dozens of forms of inconvenience and suffering. But it can never deliver us from the nature of our creatureliness: our awareness of being somehow incomplete; our instinctive longing for something more than this world; the yearning that makes us human; our mortality and the questions it raises.
Real deliverance, the real redemption of our restless hearts, can never come from human hands. It’s the work of a loving God and his ongoing love through history – a fact that pervades and provides the framework for Gerald McDermott’s excellent 2024 book, A New History of Redemption.
McDermott writes as an Anglican theologian, but Catholics will find little to disagree with and much to draw value from in a text that’s both engaging and comprehensive in its review of God’s work from Creation to our own time and beyond. McDermott’s focus throughout is “on the meaning of Israel and Christ (Messiah) for the nations,” with a special emphasis on “the Jewish roots of Christianity.” The result is a marvelous read.
McDermott ties the inspiration for his book to Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Congregationalist theologian. That might sound odd. Edwards is often remembered, superficially, as the author of a famously grim “sinners in the hands of an angry God” sermon, alternately celebrated and reviled as the best and worst sermon in American history.
In practice though, as McDermott argues, “Edwards made beauty more central to his vision of God than any other thinker in the history of human thought,” including Augustine and Balthasar. Moreover, again per Edwards, since “God is a God of history – revealing himself not in one blinding flash but successively through history – history must be the best way to talk about God and the world.”
This explains the structure of A New History of Redemption, which borrows its title from “A History of Redemption,” an unfinished 1739 series of sermons by Edwards.
Despite the book’s use of history as a framework, McDermott notes that “readers who were formed by the Enlightenment and its historical-critical method” might be frustrated by the text’s lack of skeptical questions and dissection of facts behind the Biblical story. But this is deliberate, and a plus, not a minus.
“At its heart,” he writes, “this book is Biblical theology” with a profound confidence in the overall truth of Scripture as God’s Word. “It is a big picture [narrative] in which every part is connected to every other part, with the whole being more than the sum of its parts. . . .It is not a book privileging the methods of religious studies. I ask how, for example, Genesis makes sense of human origins, not whether anthropology can tell us about the relations of pre-hominids to Adam and Eve.”
The result is an absorbing pilgrimage of faith from Creation, through Abraham and Moses, the Incarnation and Resurrection, the Iconoclast Controversy, the rise of Islam, Medieval Christianity and the Monastic movement, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the modern era, and the eventual Eschaton.
McDermott makes a passing and favorable reference early in his book to Iain McGilchrist, the distinguished neurologist, philosopher, and author of The Master and His Emissary, a brilliant study of the human brain and how we perceive reality. Borrowing from McGilchrist, he notes that so much of modern life, including Biblical and theological studies, is dominated – and in effect, crippled – by an excessive reliance on the essential but narrow and sharply focused concerns of the left hemisphere of the brain; the hemisphere “which apprehends and manipulates without attending to the right [hemisphere of the] brain which comprehends the big picture.”
The joy in reading A New History of Redemption is the credibility of its scholarship, the scope and wholeness of its vision, and the consolation of its message: God loves, and God redeems.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
