A Kingdom View of Redemption

Russell Moore on Carl Henry's call for evangelical social engagement rooted in the Kingdom of Christ and God's purpose to redeem the entire cosmos:

Salvation must be articulated in terms of the broader category of the Kingdom, since personal regeneration is about Kingdom advance—since, in the reign of Christ, God "has already impinged upon history in a supreme and decisive way through the incarnation and Christ's conquest over Satan," thereby pointing the cosmos "to a future superlative climax applying the consequences to the whole human race." Evangelicals cannot fall into the crypto-gnostic trap of seeing the material world as intrinsically evil, a very real danger when fundamentalists combine an otherworldly soteriology with a rigidly legalistic personal morality. This means that evangelicals must understand redemption to include a restoration to the creational imperatives of the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:27-28, a mandate that does not allow for a flight from public responsibilities. It further means that Christianity is concerned that social structures conform to objective standards of justice, even as Christians seek the conversion of individuals.

—Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Crossway, 2004), 85.