"HistoriaSalutis" Tagged Sermons
The historia salutis (the history of redemption) is distinguished from the ordo salutis (the order of an individual’s salvation), with Christ’s own story mattering more than ours. The gospel is fundamentally an event: God’s gift of his own righteousness, given to us in history.
Roman, Lutheran, and Reformed views are compared to press home the finality of Christ’s work against any reliance on ongoing personal experience. Even Calvin’s own view of the covenant remained incomplete, a gap later closed by Warfield and Vos for the Protestant legacy.
Justification by faith is first a corporate reality before it is a personal one; Christ’s own story takes priority over any individual believer’s story inside it. The phrase ‘the obedience of faith,’ framing Romans at both its opening and close, describes Christ’s obedience as much as ours. The church benefits from an obedience it did not itself perform.
‘Soteriology’ gets a real working definition here before the sermon turns to examples of corporate personalities throughout Scripture, figures who represent a whole people at once. Christ’s finished work is described concretely in terms of what it actually does for the believer, never left abstract. His humility operates both for us, accomplishing something outside us, and in us, reshaping how we live.