Creation and Redemption

Gabriel Hebert, British Anglo-Catholic monk and Old Testament scholar: 

Redemption is the renewal and restoration of that which God created in the beginning.

It is not that by the redemptive work of Jesus Christ man is rescued from entanglement with the created order and with the body--as if man were thereby raised from preoccupation with the ordinary concerns of life into some region of Higher Thought where he can be initiated into a theosophical secret lore. It is that the Son of God in his Incarnation became true man, growing up in a family, working in a carpenter's shop, and at last facing death as we all must and so winning the victory for man.

St. John in his Epistle sees the key-point of the Christian faith in 'Jesus Christ come in the flesh'; every person speaking with authority and claiming inspiration ('every spirit') who confesses this is of God, and he who denies this is utterly and fatally wrong (1 John 4:1-3).

The world which God has redeemed is the world which he created. 

--Gabriel Hebert, The Old Testament from Within (Oxford University Press, 1962), 16-17