Long before the fourth century Christians had known that with the coming of Christ the world entered a new age. The Promised One expected by the Jews had come; the definitive end of world history had been anticipated in events that took place in a Roman province in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. The prophets and the biblical writers had singled out one strand of history. Interpreting it in the perspective of God's saving acts done among His people, they turned it into ‘sacred history’. In submitting itself to a fixed canon of scripture comprising the books of the Old and the New Testaments, the Christian Church accepted a strictly limited understanding of ‘sacred history’. The scriptural authors not only told a particular strand of the history of the ancient Near East, that of the Jews and of Jesus; they were ‘inspired’ by God in telling it, that is to say, they were giving, along with their narrative, an interpretation; and to their interpretation the Church was prepared to assign divine authority.

The sacred writers, prophets and evangelists were presenting God's action in their narratives within the framework of the history of salvation. Their interpretative scheme was inspired and authorised, so Christians held, by the Spirit Himself. Of course, God had been active outside this particular and narrow stream of historical narrative; of course, He would continue to act in all history and nothing would be remote from His providence.