James Alison -- We Always Start from Where We Are

On Being Liked, Chapter Four, “Creation in Christ”

James Alison realizes that many of us are seriously baffled and troubled by the story of Christian salvation that we’ve heard.

“We begin with creation and the fall, we move on to salvation, and from there to heaven.(47)” This order of events gives the impression that God created a perfect world that humans spoiled, forcing Jesus Christ to come fix everything, after which the duty to keep the world from getting spoiled again, if fulfilled, will permit humans a permanent place in heaven. This interpretation is a distortion that paralyzes us.

I consider that what is first in the order of our knowledge is an intuition of salvation, first worked out and elaborated over many centuries of ups and downs by the Jewish people, which issues forth into a very special refinement of this Jewish discovery in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is starting from this intuition of salvation that a critical understanding of creation was worked out, and not the other way round.

If we stay with chronological intuition (that starts with creation, etc.), we get stuck. But the world wasn’t created to be saved. Salvation created the world. Or rather, salvation CREATES the world.

This notion is wonderful enough on its own, but one of its really terrific consequences is that it puts the biblical story of creation into its proper light. In other words, it shows how pointless today’s Creation vs. Evolution debate is.

That’s my reaction, at least -- Alison might or might not like it. I hope I’m not twisting his words.

We always start from where we are. When Catholics say that God created the universe, we are not making a claim about a ‘religious’ way of describing how things came into existence… We are saying something about our contemporary wonder at the fact that they came into existence at all… We are expressing amazement at the gratuity of it all.
       This expression of amazement at the gratuity of it all is not an alternative scientific explanation of anything. It is, on the contrary, a condition of possibility for us not to be frightened of advancing as far as we possibly can in our understanding of how things came to be.
     …So we make a real mistake if we consider creation to be something which very specially has to do with the remote past… The only access we have to the past is the access for which our present understanding equips us.
     …Both the contemporary holding on to a sense of wonder or mystery that there is anything at all, and the contemporary refusal to accept specifically ‘religious’ accounts of how things came to be are central to what we are talking about when we talk about creation. And of course, the ability to do those things, to hold on to that mystery, and to refuse religious shortcuts, let alone the ability to do both of those together, are abilities which have been acquired over a long time, and have a history. (49-50)