R.C. Sproul

It is indeed the unfolding of the drama of God's work of redemption, so it is appropriate to call the Bible redemptive history.

But where the critics would say the Bible is not history, it's redemptive history,

People like Kuhlman and Ritterbosch would respond and say, yes, it's redemptive history, but it's redemptive history.

The fact that it is concerned with redemption is no excuse to rip it out of its construct and context of real history.

The Bible is filled with allusions to real history.

When we come to the New Testament documents, we come to the very birth of Christ, the famous Christmas story, and a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled, and that took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria.

In other words, the setting

for the birth of Christ is placed in real history.

And people like Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas and so on are real historical personages.

The Pharaoh of Egypt, Cyrus and Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, those are all real historical figures.

And what the Bible talks about is God's working in and through the normal plane of history.

Again, a distinction that Oskar Kuhlman made in his first book in the trilogy, Christ in Time.

was the distinction between two different words for time in the Greek.

One is the word chronos, and the word chronos is the ordinary Greek word that refers to the moment-by-moment passing of time.

I have on my wrist what we commonly call a wristwatch, and the more technical term for it is a chronometer.

A chronometer is something that meters or measures chronos, that measures time, the simple passing of day to day, and we call this time of history.

But the other word in the New Testament that can be translated time is the word kairos, and kairos has a special meaning.

It has to do not simply with history, but with what we would call the historic.

Everything that ever happens in time is historical.

But not everything that happens in time is historic.