A Time to Keep

Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life

Ephraim Radner

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781481305457, 9781481309462
• eBook ISBN: 9781481305075
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The miracle of birth and the mystery of death mark human life. Mortality, like a dark specter, looms over all that lies in between. Human character, behavior, aims, and community are all inescapably shaped by this certainty of human ends. Mortality, like an unwanted guest, intrudes, becoming a burden and a constant struggle. Mortality, like a thief who steals, even threatens the ability to live life rightly. Life is short. Death is certain. Mortality, at all costs, should be resisted or transcended.
 
In A Time to Keep Ephraim Radner revalues mortality, reclaiming it as God's own. Mortality should not be resisted but received. Radner reveals mortality's true nature as a gift, God's gift, and thus reveals that the many limitations that mortality imposes should be celebrated. Radner demonstrates how faithfulness--and not resignation, escape, denial, redefinition, or excess--is the proper response to the gift of humanity's temporal limitation. To live rightly is to recognize and then willingly accept life's limitations.

In chapters on sex and sexuality, singleness and family, education and vocation, and a panoply of end of life issues, A Time to Keep plumbs the depths of the secular imagination, uncovering the constant struggle with human finitude in its myriad forms. Radner shows that by wrongly positioning creaturely mortality, these parts of human experience have received an inadequate reckoning.  A Time to Keep retrieves the most basic confession of the Christian faith, that life is God's, which Radner offers as grace, as the basis for a Christian understanding of human existence bound by its origin and telos. The possibility and purpose of what comes between birth and death is ordered by the pattern of Scripture, but is performed faithfully only in obedience to the limits that bind it.

I

Clocks, Skins, and Mortality

The Clock

In 1574 Strasbourg Cathedral unveiled a marvelous machine, unlike any that the people of the time had seen. The clock was enormous, with several ingenious features of measurement, built up on many levels, and including an array of artwork and moving statues. The clock’s maker, Conrad Dasypodius, wrote a book about his invention and became a celebrity. Visitors came from afar to see this wonder, and, as the years passed, the clock became the exemplar of numerous analogies regarding God and the created universe.1 The Strasbourg clock can also stand as a historical symbol of the kind of contextual argument about human life this book will be pursuing. Within its fabulous complexity of gathered mechanisms and temporal layers, the clock stands as a testimony to the single, if textured, way that all time, and with it human life, is given and held by God. The visual presentation of this fact in the Strasbourg clock’s construction aimed at drawing the human observer into a knowing submission to the truth of this divine creative reality.2

The clock itself is one of the few existing examples of the technological genre, others being found in Prague and Lund, for instance. And the current remarkable machine is actually the result of a complete refabrication by Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué in the mid-nineteenth century. Schwilgué was tasked with rebuilding a working mechanism but with keeping to the decorated framework of the sixteenth-century clock that had preceded it but that had ceased working in the late eighteenth century. Schwilgué’s work was designed to compute and display intricate aspects of timekeeping for up to ten thousand years, and to this degree it far surpassed earlier mechanisms. But the iconography of the clock, in which the mechanism was placed, remained fairly traditional and represents a steady Christian vision that had persisted over many centuries.

The clock is really a series of several measuring devices, each laid on top of the other in a stone and wooden framework, almost like a gigantic and many-tiered altar. Each level points to one aspect of time lived, and each is part of a larger decorative scheme that, although including some disparate elements, is due most prominently to the skill of the sixteenth-century Swiss painter Tobias Stimmer. The entire machine is eighteen feet high, eight feet wide, and five feet deep.

On the floor level of this great vertical contraption is a globe representing the heavenly sphere. Its rotation presents the movement of the stars, and it stands before the lowest clock face, which demonstrates the “apparent” time of each solar and lunar day. These two divisions are set within the measures of a twenty-four-hour period. In the center of the clock face is the projected map of the northern hemisphere, and around the outer circumference of the face are all the days of the year, each detailed by its link with the church’s calendar of dominical feast days and saints’ days. Here, Schwilgué’s genius can be seen in the way he worked into his mechanism the means of following the movable feasts and leap years. In the quadrants of this large face are Stimmer’s depictions of the “Four Great Empires”: Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, the last of which Europe still inhabited. Each empire, however, is depicted as but a passing set of rising and falling human efforts. This initial layer of the clock, then, represented human history, set in the shadow of the heavens, impregnated by the church’s life, yet all still located in a limited and dwindling round of days.

On a narrow layer immediately above this lowest floor of the clock is a sculptured mechanism presenting each day of the week with the rotating figures of the Roman days associated with it, ending with Saturn devouring his children. To each side Stimmer provided a pair of paintings: The Creation of Eve, The Triumph and Judgment of Christ, The Resurrection of the Dead, and the contrasting Deaths of the Pious and Impious. scriptural verses accompany each image. Between these are squeezed the reclining allegorical figures of the fall and redemption, the former shown as a woman enveloped by the delights of the world, the latter by the Scriptures and the Eucharist. Each figure reprises the scene of the last quadrant’s representation of the good and bad death. These two uphold what we might call the clock face showing “normal” time, the hours of the day as we still perceive them, divided into twenty-four. On this layer, then, the dailiness of life is set before us in its scriptural frame: the minutes are given in the one reality of divine creation and redemption.

Right over the clock face of normal time, there are the mechanized statues of two small and cheerful angels. The first sounds the initial strike of the quarter hour, and the second, at the end of each hour during the day, turns its hourglass upside down to begin another hourly round. These two happy creatures are coordinated, however, with automated sculpted figures on the sixth level: the four ages of man who follow suit with the infant chimer for each quarter hour, as child, youth, adult, and old man. At each hour, as the cherub below turns the hourglass, Death appears above, ringing its bell, something it continues to do through the night, even as the small angels below take their rest.

So we move to the fourth level of the clock. Here we find another clock face that traces the changes of the planets as the year progresses. In each of the quadrant corners in which the face is set, Stimmer painted allegorical male figures representing, respectively, the four seasons, the four ages of man, the elements, and the hours and temperaments, bound up as these were with the movements of the heavenly realm. A “year” in this context is a period of time that both repeats itself in toil and in character and winds itself down into old age and weakness.

On the fifth level is a globe that follows the phases of the moon. And just above it, on each side, are depictions of the Church as Virgin Queen, standing upon the moon, and of Antichrist, facing her. This lunar realm evokes the scene of Revelation 12—struggle, exile, and trembling survival all at once.

The sixth level, as mentioned, has mechanized figures of the four ages of man appearing each quarter hour and submitting finally to the hourly tolling of the bell by Death. Yet just above this, on the seventh level, is the summation of all these elements, set in motion every noon hour. Here stands a figure of Jesus, holding his banner of the cross. After the angels and ages have had their say, and Death too, at twelve o’clock figures of each of the twelve apostles make a turn before their Lord, who greets each one of them with his hand. As they file out before him, a large automated rooster, to one side, crows three times. Betrayal, passion, and the new day are all wrapped together in this intense moment. Lastly, Jesus gives a final blessing to the cathedral crowd watching below. To this day, noon hour is the moment when tourist and worshipper gather together before the clock.

A final pinnacle to the tower contains fixed figures of Isaiah (holding a scroll with Isaiah 9:8 written upon it—the word of judgment and light to Israel), the four evangelists, and several musicians. There are other elements: a stone staircase to one side, with a small angel reminiscing on death; a wistful onlooker, sculpted into an adjoining wall; a pillar of angels gazing out; images of the Fates, of the builders and artists of the clock, emblems of the city. But the marvelous clock itself is held in these layers, wrapped in the net of heaven and earth, death and salvation, seasons and their possibilities and exhausted exclusions, and most especially the relentless insistence of limits whose measurability is but the mark of their utter dependence upon God for their very manifestation.

Christians have long been encouraged to gaze upon clocks like this, at least figuratively speaking. Strasbourg’s “astronomical” version is only an early modern form of the book of Ecclesiastes in this respect. Some historians have argued that the invention of mechanized clocks changed Western perceptions of the self. But the Strasbourg clock shows that the advent of modernity and temporal measurement did little to alter the basic premise of human unfolding that was articulated already in scriptural reflections on human life. As in Ecclesiastes, the Strasbourg clock explicates that life in terms of birth and death, embedded in a world woven with change but also incapable of recreating itself. Human life is bound to a world of growing and weakening, of aging among other agers, of years laid out one after another in the course of fragile and ultimately passing human constructions. At the same time, however, the Strasbourg clock points to deeper meanings in this temporal passage. The details of human growth and death, the clock says, are themselves the very points of contact with the God whose creative hand has allowed being to be at all, birth to be the coming-to-be, and death to be the going-forward and out of view. The advent of mechanical clocks did nothing but permit the publicizing of these facts and thus the standard-bearing of such truths that creatureliness must constitute. That Schwilgué, with his admittedly new technological methods, was made to hew to the older sixteenth-century framework of the clock, with Stimmer’s historical and allegorical panels nailed to the evangelical announcement of daily life, was but a sign that such creaturely time would be dismissed only with difficulty.

Since Schwilgué’s nineteenth-century era, however, a sense of creaturely time has indeed been diminishing. The Strasbourg clock tells us that we die, not simply because of our mechanical limitations. Human machines, after all, wear out and break, as every commentator on clocks since Donne has pointed out.3 Rather, the time of our life, the clock tells us, is settled with the moon and with the sun and stars of heaven in all their passing magnitudes. Our lives, therefore, are best seen not simply as time spent but as time offered, because they have been offered to us by God and they come to us as our very being. Perhaps that is why, to this day, crowds of tourists in Strasbourg buy tickets to wait in line to see, each noon, the rooster crow Peter’s face-to-face encounter with the God of mercy: they are drawn to a deep truth about the character of their lives. But it is a kind of fleeting memory that draws them—a whispering spectacle of something long forgotten. In the place of such a spectacle today is a world without clocks for time—but rather with clocks aimed only at ordering the now, coordinating present moments in their multiplied and discrete details. Clocks today tell us what to do in the instant only, even while the creaturely context for our moments has been culturally obscured.

In a similar way, our problems with reading the Scriptures for clarity and guidance with respect to the pressing practical problems of our day are related to the way creaturehood no longer provides us with a context for our reading. In order to regain this context, our own thinking must slowly change, as must our habits of reading Scripture and thereby our sense of who we are. We will regain our true context as creatures if we can recover a way of thinking that is bound more to Strasbourg’s peculiar clock time than to the coordinating of moments by which today we tend to measure our lives. The Strasbourg clock time is one of filiated tremors and textures; it is the time of the One Man, Jesus Christ, whose one life is the life by which we have the privilege of being made. This life moves from first Adam to second Adam, as Stimmer showed in his quadrants painted around the moving dials. This human life indicated by the Strasbourg clock engages a wholeness that is set by God and no one else, and that lies within the tiny realm of time, outside of whose bounds there is only the disturbing uncertainty of nothingness. “Could ye not watch with me one hour?” Jesus asks his tired disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt 26:40). We, in our turn, are asked to dwell upon this extended reality of our time set against God’s making of it.

Being a Creature

This book will reflect on what it means to live as a mortal human being—as someone who must die. Human life, in its most basic significance, is bound up with the fact that we are temporal beings. We emerge from an inexplicable nothingness; and at their end, lives disappear into what is perhaps that same nothingness. Mortality may be obvious, but in our era it is no longer a central concern of discussion, even of theological discussion. In popular discourse about life’s significance, even many Christians will point to something that lies outside of time. We often hear people describe the “meaning of life” in terms that stand beyond the limits of birth and death. A common religious presupposition is that life is “more than” the stuff that happens in being born and in dying, and certainly more than simply the things that happen in between birth and death. This presupposition is itself not wrong insofar as it assumes the meaning of life in that which gives life—that is, in God. Still, while we can rightly say that human life is both oriented to and grounded in God, we must begin a reflection on our lives elsewhere than in the simple fact of God if we are to be faithful to what is human about our lives. It is, after all, God who has fashioned this particular humanness that is given in birth, living, and dying.

Questions regarding “eternal life” must therefore be raised only after we have faced carefully the realities of temporal existence. For the ways by which God becomes known to us are the same ways by which we come to be, persist, and pass away as temporal beings, pressed up against the edges of an existence we cannot explain. We know God only insofar as, yet also precisely because, we come to be and live in a temporally limited fashion. This is what makes us God’s creatures. But it is also the case that only as creatures do we know God. Every other aspect of our knowing, and every other aspect of our peculiar religious knowing, derives from and is shaped by this one fact—that we are creatures. Creaturely knowing means that God stands to us as the one who gives the very possibility of knowing anything, even while we are beings that cannot know how to come into existence or leave it. Whether, as some writers of the Christian tradition have speculated, this being that we are contains a “soul” or “spirit” to be distinguished from the bodies and flesh of our lives is fundamentally irrelevant to our creaturely condition. Whether we are more flesh than spirit or more spirit than flesh or both fused together, we stand before the one who made us as fragile and transitory things, laid across the plane of reality that is God’s alone.

To say we are creatures is, therefore, a quintessentially religious claim even if it is a claim we can make only because we are mortal beings. We cannot claim to be creatures apart from some fundamentally religious understanding of reality. That is why, although I will be suggesting a far more physically focused understanding of the human being than the spiritually oriented emphases of some strands of the Christian tradition, there is no way in which this focus can be viewed as reducing human life to physicality. It is true that the Latin from which our English word “create” derives can easily refer to biological begetting. But the English term “create” has, from its original fourteenth-century usage, always been attached to God. Only God “creates” in any substantive way; and the work that comes from God’s hands is always, by definition, some kind of “creature.” Obviously, the Christian faith further specifies this creation as somehow being “in Christ,” but the basic relationship of creature to Creator is undisturbed by this christological specification. Human beings are somehow “made” by someone beyond their scope of action and being. Human beings are not self-given; they do not “emerge” from something else in a basic way, even if we adopt evolutionary biological frameworks for explaining the origin of human life. Whether we are talking about atoms or the forces that order them or hold them together, it is not possible to avoid the question of what it means that any of this exists at all. The question of this original existence of all things and of their order is one that goes beyond physics. The Christian affirms that all things, including our very selves, “come to be” because of the specific act of the Creator. This relationship to a divine act outside of us and outside of our own times makes our creaturehood something singular, in comparison with other relationships we have with people and things, past and present.

If this is a book about human life and its meaning, then it is one that will focus on the contours that are intrinsic to a life given solely and fundamentally by its Creator. In addition, then, such a focus on creature and Creator must also turn toward the Scriptures as a fundamental point of departure. A central claim of the Christian gospel is that we are “creatures of the one Word” who is the cause and source of our life in every way. “For in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Col 1:16 RSV; cf. John 1:3; Heb 1:2). If we are creatures of Christ, then we are creatures of those words of Christ that are his own “spirit and life” (John 6:63). To be, in the traditional Latin phrase creaturae Verbi, creatures of the Word is thus to have our life given in the scriptural description of that great movement from Adam to the New Adam, Christ Jesus.

We must, then, assert a fundamental link between human life and the life of God: the times of our life, insofar as they are scriptural times, are God’s time. And these times must include not only a limited set of special times—the Sabbath, say, or only acts of devotion or holiness—but all times, of every kind. Most importantly for our self-understanding as creatures, God’s time includes the times that mark our coming to be, our survival, and our passing away: times of birth, growth, eating, learning, sexual engagement, relating, work, birthing, forming, weakening, and dying. These personal existential times are scriptural times, in that the Scriptures are God’s word speaking about the times we are living. Traditional Christian reading of the Bible could always find this or that aspect of a given human life in the scriptural text for just this reason: all of our human times are created by the Creator; each of them lies somehow “in Christ,” who is the original, the truest, the one human life.

The great mystery and wonder of being a creature is that the very realities that mark our human lives are all gifts of the Word: the limits, the changes, the boundaries of nothingness that hold us in; the densely, if often loosely, populated realm of our habitations; the symbolic clock of Strasbourg. The Word itself creates our time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: Recovering the Context of Life
• Chapter I. Clocks, Skins, and Mortality
• Chapter II. How Life Is Measured
• Chapter III. Death and Filiation
• Chapter IV. The Arc of Life
• Chapter V. The Vocation of Singleness
• Chapter VI. Working and Eating
• Conclusion: The Church’s Vocation to Number Our Days
• Notes
• Scripture Index
• General Index