Salvation is the one big idea in the Bible. Without it you’ve got just another large dusty book from antiquity. Salvation history traces the pattern of events in human history that reveal God’s saving plan. The “Reader’s Digest” version would be something like this: God’s covenant with Abraham; Israel’s deliverance from Egypt; the giving of the Law to Moses; Israel's entry into the Promised Land; the monarchy of King David; and the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Salvation history culminates in the New Creation awaiting us at the end of time.

What we mean by salvation is another matter. The Hebrew term for it denotes “to make wide or sufficient.” Unrestricted passage is the result: liberation from obstacle or impediment. Sin constricts human possibilities and God makes them wide and free again. When we say “our God is the God who saves,” we’re saying human liberation in a sinful world is only possible through divine intervention.

Early saving events in scripture are mostly military or political. Above all they’re physical: God saves folks from tangible dangers. That sets up the expectation that the God who delivered us yesterday will rescue us tomorrow, if need be. Salvation is not a dead fact but a living proposition. In time, biblical salvation takes on a spiritual aspect as well. We need saving not only from national enemies and seraph serpents but from the consequences of our own choices. Salvation comes to imply the rescue of the whole person, body and spirit. Ultimately, what we need is to be ransomed from death—so God extends the divine rescue all the way to the tomb.

Theologians say salvation is from something and for something. We’re saved from sin and death and for eternal life with God. The opposite of being rescued, of course, is drowning, perishing, being lost. In the wilderness of human choices leading in all directions, we can appreciate how we might wander so far that the only hope of rescue is a helicopter from above dangling its rope ladder over our heads. God’s saving power arrives in human history not unlike that helicopter. Once we understand that, it’s easy to see that all of human history is salvation history—even the parts that never made it into the Bible.

Scripture
• Psalm 51; Isaiah 65:17-25; Jeremiah 17:14; 31:31-34; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Luke 1:68-79; 9:24; John 3:16-21; Acts. 16:30-31; 1 Thessalonians 5:8-10

Online resources
• Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), November 21, 1964
• “The Nature of Our Salvation in Christ: Salvation as Participation and Divinisation” by Damien Casey

Books
• What Are They Saying About the Universal Salvific Will of God? by Josephine Lombardi (Paulist Press, 2008)
• Salvation Is from the Jews (John 4:22): Saving Grace in Judaism and Messianic Hope in Christianity by Aaron Milavec (Liturgical Press, 2007)

In this question we put two dogmas together: belief in the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Assumption and in the virgin birth of Jesus. We might add the Immaculate Conception of Mary, because a discussion of one of these touches them all. Theologian Elizabeth Johnson calls these dogmas “prophecy in the midst of the history of suffering.” Prophetic statements are matters of faith and not available for scientific validation.

Nor do these dogmas necessarily spring from the record of scripture. Chapter-and-verse proof texts for the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception in particular are unsatisfying because neither event is covered in the New Testament. The Assumption was formally declared (“promulgated”) as dogma in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, but that doesn’t mean the church has only recently taught it.

The early church fathers don’t address the matter of Mary’s departure from this world, but possibly as early as the 3rd century the tradition of Mary’s “transitus” recounted her bodily reception into heaven. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and even some Anglicans hold some version of the Assumption in their traditions. Roman Catholicism does not define whether Mary “fell asleep” or “died” before her body was taken up.

The theological argument for the Assumption is one of “fittingness.” Mary is the Ark of God’s new covenant in Christ. She was preserved from sin for this end (Immaculate Conception) and should not undergo the corruption of death (see Romans 6:23 on the wages of sin). Her body, given over to God’s purposes in the divine plan of salvation, became a vessel too sacred to be discarded or forgotten afterwards. Scholastic thinkers like Aquinas and Bonaventure used the Latin phrase “potuit, voluit, fecit” to sum up the idea: God “could do it, willed it, and did it.”

Perhaps a more humanly compelling argument arose in the wake of the 20th century’s two brutal World Wars. Pius XII surveyed the ghastly indignities suffered by the human body in recent memory and saw an opportunity to teach emphatically that God cares what happens to our mortal flesh. Mary’s exalted destiny may bring “clearly to the notice of all persons” the destiny of our bodies and souls. You and I are also vessels of divine life too precious to God to forget.

Scripture
• Genesis 3:15; Luke 1:41-45; 1 Corinthians 15:21-26, 53-57; Revelation 12:1-17

Online resource
• Apostolic Constitution of Pope Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, Defining the Dogma of the Assumption

Books
• Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion by Hilda Graef and Thomas A. Thompson (Christian Classics, 2009)
• Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspective by Jaroslav Pelikan, David Flusser, and Justin Lang (Fortress Press, 2005).
• Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University Press, 1996)
• Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary by Miri Rubin (Yale University Press, 2010)