Scott Hahn's "Salvation History"

Scott Hahn's "salvation history" is certainly one of the worst deviations from Sacred Tradition to be blamed on Vatican II. And yet, I have not yet seen it so blamed. On the contrary, this term, "salvation history", seems to have become the main way we are supposed to approach the bible. As Scott and Kimberly Hahn say on page 96 of Genesis to Jesus, “If we want to understand the bible, we need to understand its “plot.” That plot is salvation history, - the story of how God’s plan for human salvation unfolds in the course of human events!! Now it is time that Pope Pius XII in the Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, did encourage the use of “literary forms” in the study of scripture…but to reduce the bible as a whole to one literary form – that with a plot – even in quotes – seems to me a totally unwarranted assumption.

Next, completely skipping over creation, as if it had never happened, the Hahn’s briefly relate the incident of “The Emmaus Road”, in Luke 24. The third heading tells us that “The Mass: The Key to the Bible” is so because Our Lord’s words concerning Moses and the Prophets, reveal His Coming and His Mission. Now this leaves a terrible gap in the Hahn’s “story”, because it really assumes that there never really was an original State of Innocence lost by a really awful original sin on the part of two exceptionally gifted human beings, in fact, our First Parents.

      

The Mass is primarily a re-enacting of Our Divine Lord's Sacrificial Propitiation for that Original Sin, whose consequences continue in us.  However, true to the very new "Letter & Spirit" of Vatican II, we are repeatedly reminded of the Resurrection - to the extent that we forget what went before it and so come very close - if not identical with the Protestant position that we have no need for acts of sacrifice, because Jesus did it all for us on the Cross!  Well....for many in the Novus Ordo, it's just back to Luther! 

 

But I must get back to Scott Hahn and his reduction of scripture to "Salvation History", following the document Dei Verbum of the Second Vatican Council.  There is, in fact, a whole new set of rules for exegesis - rules that have completely replaced the Traditional four senses of Holy Scripture - summing up the Sacred Tradition of thirteen plus centuries and clearly laid out by St. Thomas in the last article of the first question of the Summa:  The article asks "Whether in Holy Scripture a word may have several senses?"  To sum up, there is first of all the historical or literal sense - which is the sense that the author intends.  This literal sense is the only sense from which any argument can be drawn - and nothing necessary to Faith can be in the spiritual sense, which is not found in the literal sense."  (ST, I, Q.1, a10.) 

 

Traditionalists should consider how severely Dei Verbum, and its interpretation have betrayed Sacred Tradition, perhaps even more than the documents concerning ecumenism and religious liberty.  In fact, the entire "letter and spirit" of the Second Vatican Council were and continue to be formed and motivated by a philosophy of becoming, a letter and spirit of constant change - a moving forward to some unknown and unspecified future goal perhaps summed up in the phrase - " a better world."  Meanwhile, eternity looms for each of us and for the world.  From St. Thomas (ST,I, q.1, a10):  In addition to the "historical or literal sense" - (note the identity of the historical and literal) - there are three spiritual senses:  One being the allegorical - wherein the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law.  Second being the moral sense of what we ought to do - and the third being the anagogical sense relates to eternal glory.  The allegorical sense developed into the elaborate system of typology, and it is in this sense that all of the Old Testament figures -- in some way -- are types of the New and the New Testament fulfills the Old.  Scott Hahn's "salvation history" - by ignoring the literal sense - deprives the Church of one of its most compelling motives of credibility, and leaves the faithful soul an easy prey to the wolves of Modernism, especially the radical evolutionism that dominates today, despite its ever-increasing self-exposure of error, heresy, and the irrational or absurd.  

 

May God have mercy on the souls of those who have so cut up the Sacred Scriptures into pieces of their own liking, as if the Scriptures were some kind of cafeteria offering.  May God also have mercy on those traditionalists who wittingly or unwittingly, culpably or invincibly, are ignorant of the real nature of Modernism - which is a philosophy of becoming, - irrational in nature, - the "operation of error" of 2 Thessalonians:10 and who may be complicit in its continuous spread - especially in the schools, from kindergarten to post-graduate and beyond.  Primarily, I suggest, by the means of the oxymoronic term pre-history - a term that directly attacks the Words of God Himself - Who has deigned to reveal to us, not only that He created all things  - but also how and exactly when He did so.  

 

Those - who in their ignorant arrogance think they know better than all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church - who wrote the Hexaemera....well, words fail!  

 

Kyrie, eleison.