Salvation History

"The history of salvation is not a small event, on a poor planet, in the immensity of the universe. It is not a minimal thing which happens by chance on a lost planet. It is the motive for everything, the motive for creation. Everything is created so that this story can exist – the encounter between God and his creature. In this sense, salvation history, the covenant, precedes creation. During the Hellenistic period, Judaism developed the idea that the Torah would have preceded the creation of the material world. This material world seems to have been created solely to make room for the Torah, for this Word of God that creates the answer and becomes the history of love. The mystery of Christ already is mysteriously revealed here.... One can say that, while material creation is the condition for the history of salvation, the history of the covenant is the true cause of the cosmos."

Thanks to Ben Myer's blog, Faith and Theology, I came across this bit of prose. Surprisingly, it is not from Karl Barth or the schools of theology that are shaped by his Dogmatics. Rather it is from Pope Benedict XVI. For all his critics, Benedict is not a casual thinker. He is a theologian and from time to time can still write and think like this.