Salvation History 3.12.2021

    It is now a year. We have spent the last year becoming ever more familiar with our living spaces  probed ever deeper relationships with our spouses. Deeper than we had ever imagined would be necessary. Mrs. Beckman and I have really invested in drinking tea. Hot tea. We particularly like Earl Grey, decaffeinated. Drunk in the front room whilst one or both of us has a cat on our lap. What began as a bit of distraction is quickly becoming lifestyle. 

I have been keeping a spreadsheet during the pandemic. The first entry was one year yesterday, March 10, 2020. This is what it looked like.

Who would have thought, who could have possibly thought, that today’s entry would look like this?

 A year of doing anything should give us a sense of perspective. A year of reorganizing our lives. A year of reaffirming our love. A year of hoping and praying that we remain healthy. Along with normal stuff like hoping the Cubs do well and for Mrs. Beckman, that there will be snow.

Unlike the other creature around us, only humans, made in the Image of God have an awareness of the passing of time. There is a certain place in the process of learning (I was going to say education but of course, one can be educated and not learn) where we have collected enough diverse information—data, facts, trivia, concepts, precepts—to begin to draw conclusions and formulate broad hypotheses about what we experience. At this point in the Pandemic we can make the following generalized, unscientific observations.

◆ It was worse than we anticipated. 

◆ It could have been still worse.

◆ Narcissism can be expressed in many ways. 

◆    We are surrounded by heroes and heartless grifters.

◆ You can make a difference.

◆ The story has to unfold before you can determine the plot. 

Broadly speaking this year which has both crawled and catapulted past us—at the same time—teaches us that the the arc of history is more than just the passing of time, the swinging of sun and moon across the sky, and the flipping of calendar pages. 

If you are a believer you have had a year-long primer in what theologians call “Salvation History.” Now, when theologians discuss Salvation History they are examining it within the pages of the Bible. What is essential about it is that it teaches us to view history  panoramically, dynamically, globally, locally, personally, socially, culturally—theologically. Salvation History means stepping back enough so that you can gain, as much as is humanly possible, a wholistic perspective on historical process. That is, Salvation History helps us to see history as linear and goal-oriented. This goal, of course, is something which can be perceived by us, even affected; but it is not ours and beyond the horizon is a loving person who knows and sees all in a way to which we can only pretend. 

That person is God. God sees the scope of human destiny from Creation to Consummation as an entirety. He has acted in that History through His Son to rescue us from our own worst instincts.  We, especially since we now have clocks, and calendars which mechanize and chop up the passage of time into malleable packages which we can further manipulate and dominate in our rush to conquer time and space. We see in part, and through parts. God sees the whole and provides meaning where we see disorder, discontent and malignant destiny. 

The pandemic ripped(s)(is ripping) away that sense of control that we have developed which allows us to posses and dominate time, coopting it into our petty schemes to dominate and shape creation. God started with eternity, did great work in seven days, and is working His way back to eternity. We, the high point of His creation, shaken by crisis reject the notion of eternity, and work backward from there to a sense of  emptiness when we find, against all odds that we really can’t create our own meaning. 

What have you learned in this little experiment in Salvation History? Have you grown closer to the Creator? Is the scope and scale of historical process clearer to you now? Have you stopped feeling alienated and abandoned by all those hapless political structures which became so stressed during the pandemic that vast portions of society were left to their own devices? Have you stepped out of the hall of mirrors and escaped the damning narcissism which has crippled our society and created a scorning culture of contempt? Have you made that fateful discovery that the only solution for our shared fallenness is the eternal perspective of one who stepped out of eternity to sanctify history by His own passion; delivering us from the distance we fearfully put between us and God when first we fled obedience.