Salvation Has A History

"At the heart of the modern reluctance to see the church as itself a type of politics is the inability to see it as more than a gathering of individuals, who are assumed to be the real subject of salvation. In the biblical witness, however, salvation is inherently social. The Jewish and Christian conviction about salvation is remarkable precisely in that salvation has a history. Salvation is a fully public event that unfolds in historical time before the watching eyes of the nations. Salvation is not a matter of pulling a few individual survivors from the wreckage of creation after the Fall, but is about the re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth (2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:1). The history of salvation is not told separately from the history of politics. In the scriptures the story of salvation takes flesh on a public stage and interacts with pharaohs, kings, and Caesars. Salvation itself is imaged as a coming kingdom and a new city."

--William T. Cavanaugh "Church," in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2007) p.394