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Salvation History and our modern reconstructions of history
Here's an interesting quote which sort of critiques modern readings of Scripture (ie. specifically the fundamentalist or creationist perspectives):
"When read from Genesis onwards, the scriptures do indeed have a narrative. One can, as it were, uncurl the circle in figure 2, extending it backwards to the moment of creation. This is what is often done when speaking of “salvation history,” a term that has been used, as far as I am aware, only since the nineteenth century. But, it is important to note, this “salvation history” is not “history” as that term is used in modern times, as a neutral, objective account of things “as they really were.”
Rather, it is a way of seeing the scriptures and their description of the world and its history in the light of Christ— it is a confession. The world did not come into being 4,004 years before Christ (as the calculations of James Ussher would have it based on the Old Testament genealogies), and “the Fall” is not a later event that can be correlated temporally, say, to the Battle of Troy. Rather, a properly theological cosmology and “history” of salvation—the economy or the plan of salvation—begins with the Passion of Christ, and from this vantage point looks backwards and forwards to see everything in this light. As it is from this perspective that we interpret creation and its history, we can even say that creation together with salvation was effected when Christ offered himself for the life of the world, on 25 March AD 33.
This “salvation history” is not co-extensive with our modern reconstructions of history: it was not the way that the disciples and apostles were reading scripture prior to the moment that the risen Christ opened the scriptures. The most that they hoped for was that the kingdom would be restored to Israel; what they were shown by Christ was that the whole of the human race lay in sin and death waiting to be restored, through death, to life. From their time with Jesus prior to the Passion, they did not understand him to be the Lord and could not answer those who said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” But in the light of the Passion, they could now proclaim that, in accordance with the scriptures, he is indeed the Son of God born of the Virgin, a nativity which, as we have seen, is described in terms of the Passion. Going back to the very beginning, we can now see that the instrument by which Christ brought order to the universe, creating the ordered and harmonious cosmos, is the Cross: it stands eternally still as the axis of the world, around which the cosmos rotates.
Creation itself is indeed brought into being from nothing, ex nihilo, for nothing stands alongside the eternal God, independent of him; but the creation ex nihilo that Sts Irenaeus and Athanasius and others spoke of is precisely that created by our Lord and Savior, the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, the Coming One."
Fr John Behr
