Carpe Diem Redeemed

Seizing the Day, Discerning the Times

Os Guinness

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780830845811
• eBook ISBN: 9780830849888
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

You only live once— if then. Life is short, and it can be as easily wasted as lived to the full. In our harried modern world, how do we make the most of the time we have?

In these fast and superficial times, Os Guinness calls us to consequential living. As a contrast to both Eastern and secularist views of time, he restructures our very notion of history as linear and purposeful, not as cyclical or meaningless. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, time and history are meaningful, and human beings have agency to live with freedom and consequence in partnership with God. Thus we can seek to serve God's intentions for our generation and discern our call for this moment.

Our time on earth has significance. Live rightly, discern the times, and redeem the day.

THERE IS AN OLD CHINESE PROVERB, “If you want to know what water is, the fish is the last thing to ask.” Rudyard Kipling wrote similarly in his poem “The English Flag,” “And what should they know of England who only England know?” Those two sayings turn on a common fact that also makes the challenge of time such a mystery to us as humans. Fish that can only live in water will never be able to understand the water that is their sole environment, and the English in Kipling’s generation who had never been abroad were incapable of understanding their empire and were blind to the worst of its consequences.

In the same way, we humans are so immersed in time that we will never be able to see and understand time objectively. Time is at the heart of existence. Time is the all-embracing medium of our lives, within us as well as around us, which means that we have no counter environment from which to look at time with detachment and perspective. Indeed, along with evil, time is one of the greatest mysteries in human life—evil being impenetrable through its darkness, and time being mysterious to us because of its closeness. What time is may seem obvious—obvious, that is, until we are asked to explain it. St. Augustine put it memorably: “What then is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”1

What was there before the beginning of time and the beginning of the world? What will it be like when “time shall be no more”? What might it be like to be outside of time? If we have to answer such questions by ourselves, there is simply no way to know or to say. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once remarked that such questions are like standing at the South Pole and asking which way is south. We are in time, and time is in us, so questions about what time is and what is beyond time are unanswerable from our vantage point alone.

If you are completely baffled by the mystery of time, you are not alone. An eminent twentieth-century physicist put forward a profound-sounding statement, “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.”2 But he then admitted in a footnote that the quotation did not come from Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, or any philosopher or scientist, but from graffiti in the men’s room at a café in Austin, Texas.

In an early entry in his journal, the eminent analytical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that the meaning of a system lies outside the system, and his point is true above all of life, the world, and time and history. Their full meaning, if indeed there is such a thing, does not lie within them but must come from outside them. The mystery of time will always be insoluble if considered from within time alone. What helps us make a beginning, however, is that humans have long attempted to understand all they could of time, from within time, and their different pictures illuminate time in contrasting ways. With time, as with almost all of the big questions of life, there are three major families of faiths offering answers—extended families of faiths in the sense that there are common family resemblances, although with differences, between philosophies or faiths that share a common notion of what is ultimately real. Viewed from this vantage point, the three major families of faiths are the Eastern, the Abrahamic, and the secularist, and out of them have grown three dominant and very different views of time and history—the cyclical, the covenantal, and the chronological.

Each extended family of faiths gives a dramatically different answer to the big questions of life, one of them claiming to have a view that comes from outside time, but they all start by facing up to the same existential challenge of time and history. In historian Mircea Eliade’s words, we humans are all confronted by the same “terror of history, with its randomness, its contingencies, its apparent meaninglessness.”3 Born into the world, we are each given a short life to live, but nature and the world around us do not by themselves inform us of the rhyme and reason to life. And as we look around, there is no obvious meaning to things as they are. We can see both beauty and brokenness, disasters and serendipities, random acts of cruelty as well as kindness, and always endings, endings, endings.

This too shall pass. Time flies. Nothing lasts forever. You cannot step into the same river twice because the river is different and so too are you. The grandest and most magnificent human endeavors are only sandcastles washed away by time and tide. And our own small enterprises and endeavors appear to be whistling into the winds of history. In the end, the sands of time will cover everything without a trace of who we are and what we have done. Or so it seems. And if that is so, what is the meaning of it all? Why does anything matter? And how are we to live if we are only here once, and the time we are here is so short?

CYCLICAL TIME

The first major family of faiths responds by concluding that though life is short, we are not here only once. It then sets out an entirely different picture of existence based on that assumption. Its view is that time and history are cyclical, that we all experience successive reincarnations, that everything comes back to the place from which it started, and that our only hope for freedom is to escape from the perplexity of history and the illusion of reality altogether—into the realm of the changeless beyond this world of flux and change.

This cyclical view starts with observations from nature, and its underlying picture is of time as a wheel. The immediate appeal of this view lies in its reflections on what we all see in the natural world around us. The planets revolve in the heavens, and the seasons of the year come and go. Spring leads to summer, summer to autumn, autumn to winter, and winter to spring once again. In the same way, the clouds come down as rain, the rain washes down to the river, and the river to the sea, and the sea evaporates in its turn to form clouds, which once more come down as rain, and so the cycle continues endlessly. Aristotle summed up the cyclical view as the classical Greeks understood it, “Coming to be and passing away, as we have said, will always be continuous and will never fail.”4

On one level, we humans seem to fit this cyclical picture in that we too are subject to the processes of nature. Like all animals, we go through a succession of seasons or passages in our lives. We wake and we sleep. We are born, we grow, we decline, and we die. The classical authors described these age stages differently. Generally, there were three (youth, maturity, and old age), but Pythagoras and Horace divided them into four, Hippocrates into seven, and Solon into ten. The most famous description in English is William Shakespeare’s immortal seven ages of man: “At first the infant, mewling and pewking in his mother’s arms” moving through five more seasons of life to the “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”5

Shakespeare, of course, wrote from within the second family of faiths, not the first. He did not believe that the entire universe moved in cyclical time. Today the two main proponents of the grand cyclical view of time are the Hindus and the Buddhists, but in the ancient world there were many who held this view. Buddhism is in essence a reform movement of Hinduism, so there are important differences between the two views and their ways of life, just as there are many differing traditions within each religion. But they share the overall view of the radically cyclical view of time. Indeed, they go beyond the evidence of the cycle that lies before our five senses and project the notion of the cycle onto the very cosmos itself in the form of reincarnation. Everything goes around and around, and then returns to where it began, as a matter of what the Eastern religions call “reincarnation” and Friedrich Nietzsche called “eternal recurrence.”

Seen this way, time is an ever-moving wheel. Human life in time is life bound to this wheel, as desire leads to craving, which leads to attachment, which leads to death, which leads to reincarnation, and so it goes. Ethics, then, is a matter of karma and a question of what each of us has done in some previous incarnation. History, like a wheel spinning in place, goes nowhere, and freedom (moksha, “release” or salvation) can be achieved only as an escape from the wheel and so from history and the world that we take to be real but is in fact only an illusion (maya). Importantly, there is no way to stop the cycle from within the cycle, so the only way to be free is to escape the cycle itself—by adopting one of the recommended paths to salvation, such as yoga for the Hindus and “right mindfulness” for the Buddhists.

Unquestionably, the cyclical view of time does justice to an enormous part of our experience of life and to many of the operations of nature that we can observe. Recognizing that part is vital to realism and wisdom, but at what price do we make it the whole story of life? Does the cyclical view do justice to the whole reality of human existence and provide an adequate answer to the significance of humans and the challenge of time? And what are the consequences of holding this view? If everything goes around and around and around, and always returns to where it began, is there any escape from the oppressive weightiness of remorseless karma, fate, and destiny? And if everything goes around and around and comes back to where it started, what does that say of our actions in history, especially if history and the world that we know are only an illusion? (“What history relates,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “is in fact only the long, heavy and confused dream of mankind.”)6

Why is there a striking absence of any call to “change,” to “reform,” or to work for something that is truly new? Why is there so little of the “novel” and the “revolutionary” within the cyclical view? If all that is once was and will be all over again, how do we escape such a natural reinforcement of passivity and the status quo? If everything is ultimately unchanging, is it also unchangeable? Do our actions have significance here and now, or—as a Zen saying expresses it—are humans only as “a stone thrown in the pond, who causes no ripples”?

COVENANTAL TIME

Today, the cyclical view of time is mainly associated with Eastern religions. Many people think it must be a minority view because it differs from the mainstream modern view that has shaped the West, but from the vantage point of history that conclusion is seriously skewed. The cyclical view was nearly universal in many periods of history, and it is likely to emerge strongly again if the views that succeeded and eclipsed it falter in their turn—witness, for example, Nietzsche’s rejection of God and his turn towards “eternal recurrence.” In other words, many people in the West take their view of time and history for granted and do not realize how radically unique it was when first it burst upon the world through the Bible and the Jewish people.

The Abrahamic family of faiths sees time and history quite differently from the very beginning, at creation, and it has important differences from the purely cyclical view all the way down the line. Crucially, it is the one family of faiths that does not claim to be an understanding of the system from within the system—and therefore qualifies at once to be assessed in light of Wittgenstein’s claim that the true meaning of the system must come from outside the system. In contrast to the Eastern views (and as we saw with Bertrand Russell and Roman Krznaric, all later secularist views too), the Abrahamic view claims to be the result of revelation rather than reflection, a matter of divine disclosure from the outside rather than discovery through the quest of some religious genius such as Siddhartha Gautama or Shankaracharya. And the differences proliferate from there.

According to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and in strong contrast to the surrounding cultures of Babylon and Egypt as well as the Eastern religions, time and history are viewed not only as cyclical but as linear and covenantal. The truth behind this truth is the sovereign freedom of God and the fact that human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, are also free. They are free with a freedom that is unfathomable but precious and unique among the life forms on the earth. Many implications flow from this foundational idea of created freedom, but at their core is a titanic truth and a momentous message that completely transforms the meaning of life: Time and history have meaning. Under the twin truths of God’s sovereignty and human significance, time and history are going somewhere, and each of us is not only unique and significant in ourselves, but we have a unique and significant part to play in our own lives, in our own generation, and therefore in the overall sweep of history.

One might stop right there and ponder the marvel of that truth. Once again, contrast is the mother of clarity. Time and history are not an illusion or maya, as Hinduism and Buddhism see it. They are not meaningless or, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth put it, “a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”7 We are not dust blowing in the wind. We are not a freak accident lost in a universe that came to be without meaning and one day will cease to be without meaning. Paul Johnson captured the stunning contribution of this Hebrew view in the opening pages of his A History of the Jews: “No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. . . . The Jewish vision became the prototype for many similar grand designs for humanity, both divine and man-made. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.”8

The result is an immense and magnificent transformation. What Mircea Eliade called the “terror of history,” history viewed as random and meaningless, is transformed into the “task of history,” filled with significance and meaning. What the Eastern religions advocate as a freedom that is an “escape from history” becomes, within the biblical view, a freedom and responsibility that is an “engagement with history,” and a commitment to work for freedom, justice, and shalom in this life and in this world.

In the Bible’s view, this radically different view of time, history, and human freedom goes back to the radically different understanding of God and the radical difference it makes. God, as we encounter him in the Bible, is completely different from all other conceptions of the gods. God is not a superman or a demigod projected onto the skies by humanity. He is not the personification of any of the forces of nature, such as the sun, the sea, or the storm. He is not another name for the spirit or sum total of the very cosmos itself, as in pantheism, monism, or notions of Being. According to the Bible and the Abrahamic family of faiths, all such notions of God are a false projection and inflation of what is merely a part of the universe and not God at all, and therefore an idol or a nothing.

As God reveals himself in the Bible, he is absolutely unique in two foundational ways. On the one hand, God is transcendent and utterly Other—the One who is “only, outside, and over all” (radical monotheism) and therefore sovereignly free. At the same time, God is personally and passionately engaged with his creation and on behalf of his creation, and especially committed to and concerned for the human creatures he has made in his image and likeness. God loves us and believes in us as humans even more tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: You Only Live Once—If Then
• 1 Singular, Significant, and Special
• 2 Survival of the Fastest
• 3 The Hidden Tyranny of Time
• 4 The Way to Seize the Day
• 5 Prophetic Untimeliness
• 6 The End Is Not the End
• CONCLUSION: Choose Life
• Notes
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Also by the Author
• Praise for Carpe Diem Redeemed
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright