One More Thought

 

One More Thought

Earlier today I posted a short essay on the chronology problem with Christmas. There I said it makes no sense that God would determine at some particular to save humanity when, supposedly, God had not done that before. Since I posted that essay something else has occurred to me. My objection to Christmas in that earlier essay is valid, but it is valid only if we assume that God operates within the category of time. That is, my objection is valid only if God experiences time the way we humans do. My earlier essay assumes that God does. It assumes that for God coming to us in Jesus was an event that in fact occurred after humans had existed on the earth for millennia.

But what if God does not experience time the way we humans do; or, what if in fact does not experience time at all? Time is a category of created being. It exists in creation so that, as Stephen Hawking said, everything doesn’t happen all at once. But God is not subject to the conditions of existence. God utterly transcends those conditions. It’s hard for us to understand, but it may well be that God does not experience time at all.

It is possible for us humans to be in a state in which we do not experience time. I had such an experience once. I’ve written about it before, but I’ll write about it again here. In the late 1980s I was an associate attorney at the Seattle office of one of the country’s largest law firms, Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher. I had a corner office on the 66^th floor of the Columbia Center, still the tallest building in Seattle. (It drove the partners in the firm’s mail offices in Los Angeles that I did and that our legal assistants also had view windows, but never mind.) My office had a spectacular view of the Cascade mountains and Mount Rainier, Mount Rainier at least on those days when, as Seattleites say, the mountain was out. One winter morning I arrived at my office early. The sunrise over the Cascades was simply stunning. The sky was filled with light in shades of red, orange, and yellow. I thought I’d just sit and enjoy the view for a moments before beginning work. In what seemed to me like essentially no time at all, I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes had passed. Throughout those forty-five minutes, I had had no perception of the passage of time at all. In those forty-five minutes, time didn’t exist for me. I was somehow present beyond time.

That, I think, is how God must be. God must be beyond time. Time, as I said, is a category of created being. But God does not subsist in created being. God can be present in created being, and, thank God, God always is. But God’s essence subsists beyond time. The category time simply does not apply to God. God is always in the condition I experienced for forty-five minutes on that cold winter morning in 1989. Time simply does not apply to God.

If that is true, and I am convinced that it is, our understanding that Jesus Christ came to us at one particular times makes sense for us, but it makes no sense for God. For God, Jesus didn’t come after anything or before anything. “After” and “before” are measures of time. They do not apply to God. For God, Jesus’ coming was timeless, for God is timeless. For God, Jesus didn’t come before or after anything. For God, Jesus’ coming and his bringing of salvation, whatever we understand that to mean, didn’t happen once upon a time. It happened beyond time. It is something that for us happened once but that for God happens always. Yes, I know. “Always” is a measure of time; but we humans can do no more than express ourselves using the concepts that apply to us. We are not God. That for God Jesus happens always is as close as I can come to expressing what I am convinced is a profound divine truth in human language. So I say it, knowing that it is in the end inadequate to express what I mean.

The problem I addressed in my earlier essay arises only because we think in purely human terms. Our human terms, however, do not apply to God. They can point us toward God, and, thank God, some of them do. Yet we cannot contend that they apply to God. After all, our human terms arise out of our experience as created beings. God is not a created being. God is not created being itself. God is being itself. God utterly transcends the human categories through which we live and which we use to express our thoughts. Therefore, for God, Jesus didn’t come in 4 BCE, which is when most scholars say he was born. He came never, and he comes always, for never and always have to meaning for God. Of course, God understands how those categories apply to us, but they do not apply to God.

Therefore, my concern with the chronology of salvation is meaningless. Salvation has no chronology. We can say it has always been here, but in truth it transcends the category always. Salvation is of God not of us created beings. Salvation, therefore, is not time bound. Yes, Jesus is important to us; but he is not important because he brought a salvation that wasn’t there before him. The closest we can come to understanding how salvation is beyond time is to say that it has always been here. It has always been real. Jesus demonstrates it, but he doesn’t create it.

So, is Jesus our Savior? Yes, in a sense; but he isn’t our savior because he brought a salvation that didn’t exist before him. He is our Savior because it is in him that we learn that we are in fact saved. We learn that we don’t have to worry about salvation. We’re saved. Period. Everyone is saved. Period. Everyone has always been saved. Period. Everyone always will be saved. Period. The tenses of verb to be—is, was, and will be—simply do not apply to God or to salvation. For that great truth, all God’s people really must shout: Amen and amen!