“What is the relationship among sin, salvation history, and the church? (Be sure to explain the significance of man having been made in the image and likeness of God, the role of Divine revelation, and the importance of God’s covenants with his people. ) The relationship among sin, salvation history, and the church can be answered by first referring to the Protoevangelium, or the first gospel. This is when God said, "I will make you enemies of each other; you and the woman, your offspring and her offspring.
It will crush your head and you will strike its heel" (Gen 3:15). To back track before the first gospel, on must know that in the creation of man God mercifully created all people with a spiritual sense. The spiritual sense entitles us to two powers of the soul, free will and intellect. This means when God the Father forbid man to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil humans freely choose to eat it and automatically knew the consequences of listening to the serpent. Luckily, after banishment from the Garden of Eden, God had promised us a redeemer.
The redeemer being His son Jesus Christ means that this is the start of salvation history. Salvation history is God’s saving plan of salvation through his son, and our savior, Jesus Christ. As we continue on in history we learn that Jesus were to come through the line of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third born son. Before Christ though we have to recognize a couple people, the first being Abram who God made his first covenant with. Abram was a righteous man that God found favor in, so God decided to make a covenant with him.
A covenant is a promise between God and man, God and a nation, or God and the world. Abram’s covenant was that God was going to make Abram’s name great and nation, make him a numerous amount of decedents, and that he would be a source of blessing for all people. God did fulfill the promise of making Abram many decedents that later became the 12 tribes of Israel. These 12 tribes later on were to be enslaved by the Egyptians yet set free by the power of God and a man named Moses.
After fleeing Egypt, Moses and his people the Israelites spent years in the desert traveling to a land promised by God. Before reaching this promise land God himself revealed his name to Moses as, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). This revealing that God is the “eternal I AM” telling us that He always was and always will be, in other words he has neither beginning nor end. This is the exact moment where, he not only revealed his name, but the Ten Commandments as well.
The Ten Commandments are a set of laws given to us by God to fulfill His word. A couple hundred years later on God fulfilled the “great nation/ name” promise through another righteous man named David. David became a king chosen by the prophet Samuel and by God himself. Because David came from the line of Abram this made his name great. Jumping far ahead to the end of salvation history with the birth of Jesus Christ we see that God fulfills the promise of a source of blessing.
To simplify it because Jesus came from the line of David, who came through the line Abram, we see that Abram is the source of this blessing to the world. Jesus is a source of blessing because he came down as fully human fully divine to save us from eternal damnation by dying on the cross and then resurrecting three days after. With Christ’ ascension into heaven the Catholic Church was born. It is remarkable to think that after the fall of man the only purpose the world had from there on was coming of Jesus.
So to plainly answer the question of what is the relationship between sin, salvation history, and the Church is to confidently say that the world was created for the Church. Because of sin and the fall of man God had to send humanity a savior. The soul purpose of the world after that was to wait for the savior (a. k. a. Jesus). As the savior had left and was reunited into heaven at his rightful place, he founded the Church. So it is fair to say that the relationship is that sin and salvation history lead up to the makings of the Church.
