It's About Time

 

It’s About Time

September 29, 2022

 

Time is important to all of us. Some of us are obsessed with knowing what time it is. We set times for meetings and appointments. We remember past times in our lives, and we plan for future times. Some of us, including your humble author, get so interested in times past that we get PhDs in history. We have ways of measuring time. We use clocks and calendars to do it. They are both marked with symbols that represent time—seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. Our languages have past, present, and future tenses that we use depending on the relationship of the subject of a sentence to time. Most of us cannot even imagine a reality that does not include time.

I’ve been thinking about time a lot recently. I’ve wondered where the past is, where it has gone. Where is the four year old me, or the twenty-four year old me, of the me of five seconds ago? They all existed once, now they don’t. Where has the nineteenth century Russia that I once spent so much time studying gone? Where is the man on whose thought I wrote my PhD dissertation? He was here on earth once, now he isn’t. It’s harder for me to ask where the future is. It doesn’t exist now, but it will. Where does it come from, or does it come from anywhere at all? Authors of science fiction stories imagine ways that we could travel through both past and future times, but of course we really can’t. The past is gone, though I don’t know where it has gone. The future has not yet come, though I don’t know where it will come from. Albert Einstein famously said that the only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once. Indeed, we do not experience everything happening at once. We experience things as happening through time.

I have a PhD in studying the past, but I am also an ordained Christian minister, albeit now a retired one. I still spend some time nearly every day reading the Bible and contemplating (and often struggling with) what I find there. In recent times (there’s time again) I have been struggling with the way the Bible has the key events in its history of salvation occur over time. The Bible’s first creation story, Genesis 1:1-2:3, does not have God explicitly creating time. It does, however, have creation taking place through a progression of periods of time that it calls days. In the Bible’s second creation story, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, things take place chronologically.

Farther on, the Bible has other major events happen over time. At a specific point in time God told Abraham to leave his home and go to far off, foreign Canaan. The Bible has the Hebrew people being enslaved in Egypt at a particular time. Then, at a particular time during their enslavement, God decides to free them from that enslavement, something God had not previously done. As the people wander through the desert on their way to Canaan, at a particular time God gives Moses the Torah law that God had not given the people before that particular time (except for the law of male circumcision, which came to Abraham much earlier in the story). The Hebrew prophets foresee death and destruction in the future, but they also foresee a time of restoration and blessing that hadn’t happened yet in the time of the prophet.

The foundational Christian story also takes place through time. Most significantly, at a particular time God decides to come to earth as the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Over the course of a few years time Jesus teaches the people God’s ways, is arrested, is crucified, dies, and rises from the grave. We Christians say that those time-specific events brought us salvation. Then, after Jesus was no longer with them physically, the earliest Christians firmest conviction was that Jesus would come again at some point in the future. All of these stories have in common that they see God’s self-revelation and divine salvation as coming to the people at particular times. They all assume that there was a time before salvation. That means that they necessarily imply that there was a time when people were not saved. Then things happened that brought a previously missing salvation.

And these days I can’t stop asking myself why? Why would there be a time when God saved the people and an earlier time when God did not? There’s no reason to think that the Hebrew people before Moses didn’t need the Torah but Hebrew people after Moses did. More importantly for us Christians, did the people who lived and died before Jesus not need salvation but people like us who lived after Jesus did? I can see no reason whatsoever for that to be the case. Will the people of some future time have more need of Christ returning in power and glory than people in the past did? Or than we do? I can see no reason whatsoever for that to be the case either. All of these scenarios assume that at some point in time God said (or will say), “Oh! I see now that the people need something that they haven’t needed before. So I’ll step in and give those people the something they need that the people before them didn’t need.” I am wrestling here with the notion of time primarily because that assumption makes no sense whatsoever.

Some of the earliest Christians came up with at least a partial solution to the problem of chronological salvation. They were concerned that the great figures of their faith tradition from the past had not been saved because they died before Jesus. That meant to them that the souls of those saints had been damned because in their time salvation had not yet come. They sensed how wrong such damnation would be, so they dreamed up a solution. They invented the doctrine of “the harrowing of hell.” They said that in the brief time between Jesus’ death and his resurrection he descended to hell and brought back up with him the souls of people of earlier times who had been damned but didn’t deserve to be. That doctrine is completely unbiblical, and it still has good people having suffered in hell for the time between their deaths and Jesus coming to bring them out of their misery. The harrowing of hell doctrine may have addressed some of the problems with chronological salvation, but it certainly didn’t solve all of them.

So what are to do with the Bible’s chronological presentation of the history of salvation? Just throw it out? Ignore it completely? Try to be Christians (or Jews) without it? Well, no. The Bible is so foundational, some of it for Judaism and all of it for Christianity, that those faiths couldn’t possibly exist without it. Yet since we Protestants don’t accept the doctrine of the harrowing of hell because it isn’t biblical, we seem to be left with no solution for the shortcomings of chronological salvation whatsoever. But are we? I’ll ask us again: Is there is a way to solve those shortcomings while still using the biblical stories of chronological salvation as foundational for our faith? Having given the matter considerable thought, I believe that there is such a way.

That way is to remove the time element from our understanding of the meanings of those stories. In other words, the solution to the problems we’re wrestling with here is to understand our foundational stories not as history but as the myths that they really are. Not myths as something people think is true that isn’t true. Myths in the far more sophisticated sense of stories that connect us with God and God with us. To understand them as stories of things that may or may not ever have happened but which are always true either way. To understand them as stories set in temporal reality that convey truths that transcend time. Truths that the stories don’t create but rather truths that always were, are, and will be true. Let me use the foundational story of my Christian faith as an example.

In that story God creates or at least demonstrates in the strongest possible way God’s salvation of the people. The story takes place over time. Jesus Christ as Emmanuel, God With Us, is born, lives a relatively short human life, dies, and rises again. That story covers the course of about thirty years. In that story we Christians find salvation, but when we leave time in the story we have only temporal salvation. Jesus happened at a specific time. There were lots and lots of people who lived before him. If the Christ story created salvation, those people weren’t saved. Because the foundational Christian story takes place over time it seems to leave us with only temporal salvation.

But what if we take time out of the story? We can’t change the story, of course, nor do we want to. We can however take time out of the meaning of the story. We can understand the story as being set in time but revealing a timeless truth. We can see the story as one that, to some extent at least, relates things that happened at a particular time but the meaning of which applies to all time. The events in the story are actually not what creates salvation. Rather, the story points us toward the truth that God is a God of salvation and not only one who always will be but one who has always been. People who lived before Jesus weren’t damned simply because they lived before Jesus (or for any other reason, but that’s a topic for another day). They were as saved as we are because God not only is but always has been a God who saves God’s people.

It may be apparent that some types of Christian theology work better with this notion of timeless salvation than others do. I’ll use soteriology, the theology of salvation, as an example. The soteriology known as theology of the cross fits timelessness well. It doesn’t say that Jesus’ suffering and death were necessary for salvation. Instead, it says that Jesus’ suffering and death demonstrate God’s unshakable presence and solidarity with us humans no matter what. It is easy to see the presence and solidarity of God with people as timeless. It has always been true, it is true, and it will always be true. Time plays no necessary role in that truth.

The far more common Christian soteriology known as the classical theory of atonement or the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement doesn’t work with timeless truth at all. That soteriology says that God Incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth had to suffer and die, indeed God sent Jesus to suffer and die, because a price had to be paid before God could or would forgive human sin. This theory says that because Jesus’ suffering and death are the sine quo non of salvation, there was no salvation before they took place. Yet they took place only at a specific time. A necessary conclusion of classical atonement theory is that God did not forgive the sin of people who lived before Christ’s Passion because that Passion was a condition precedent to forgiveness. (Please excuse my use of a legal concept here. I also used to be a lawyer.) When a condition precedent for some act or event is not present, that act or event of which the absent thing is a condition precedent does not happen. No Passion of the Christ, no divine forgiveness of sin. That’s classical atonement soteriology in a nutshell. It is firmly bound to an event that is said to have taken place at a specific time, and it cannot work apart from that event. The classical theory of atonement doesn’t work with timeless truth at all.

So we can indeed overcome the failings of time-bound salvation without abandoning the foundational stories of our faith. We do it by removing the time element from the story. We see the story as speaking a timeless truth rather than as merely relating historical events. Leave the time element in the story of the exodus and you have only an account of things that are said to have happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. Remove it, and you have a powerful, timeless myth that points to God’s desire that all people be free. That is the power of timeless theology. Timeless theology frees us to see God’s truths as timeless, as indeed they must be because God transcends the created category of time absolutely. Timeless theology does nothing less than make Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) faith possible in today’s world. It is or at least can be a great blessing for us. May it be so.