The Fullness of Time

Jesus Christ, Science, and Modernity

Kara N. Slade

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781532689390
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

While human existence in time is determined by the time of Jesus Christ, by the logic of the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension, the predominant accounts of time in the modern West have proceeded from a very different basis. The implications of these approaches are not just a matter of epistemology, or of abstract doctrinal and philosophical claims. Instead, they have had, and continue to have, concrete ramifications for human life together. They have overwhelmingly been death-dealing rather than life-giving, marked by a series of temporal moral errors that this book hopes to address. As a counterexample, this book reads Soren Kierkegaard alongside Karl Barth to highlight the ways that both figures rejected a Hegelian approach to time that was, and is, not coincidentally intertwined with a racialized account of history and the co-opting of Christianity by the modern Western state.

1

Introduction

Let me know you, O you who know me; then shall I know even as I am known. You are the strength of my soul; make your way in and shape it to yourself, that it may be yours to have and to hold, free from stain or wrinkle. I speak because this is my hope, and whenever my joy springs from that hope it is joy well founded. As for the rest of this life’s experiences, the more tears are shed over them the less are they worth weeping over, and the more truly worth lamenting the less do we bewail them while mired in them. You love the truth because anyone who does truth comes to the light. Truth it is that I want to do, in my heart by confession in your presence, and with my pen before many witnesses.

—St. Augustine of Hippo1

A pamphlet writer such as I am has no seriousness, as you presumably will hear about me—why, then, should I now in conclusion pretend seriousness in order to please people by making a rather big promise? In other words, to write a pamphlet is frivolity—but to promise the system, that is seriousness and has made many a man a supremely serious man both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others.

—Søren Kierkegaard2

On September 19, 2008, between the feasts of the Holy Cross and St. Matthew the Evangelist by the liturgical calendar, Stephen Hawking unveiled the Chronophage, a new public clock built by inventor John Taylor for Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Its mechanism features a large mechanical grasshopper and an irregular movement, designed to impress upon passersby the unpredictability and terror of human existence in time. Taylor describes his creation in colorful terms:

The Chronophage Clock’s pendulum slows down, speeds up and even stops, with the time shown by lights racing around the face. The time is exactly correct every fifth minute to one hundredth of a second. Time is not on your side, it’s rather scary, so with the Corpus Chronophage I changed the cuddly image of a Walt Disney grasshopper into a rather frightening time eater. I thought it would be fun if in a minute he slowly opened his jaws wider and wider, and on the 59th second of every minute he went crunch, got that minute, chewed it up and swallowed it so you could never get it back.3

The clock’s effect, which, according to Taylor, is “meant” to be “terrifying,” is further intensified by the sound of a chain dropped into a small wooden coffin to chime the hour, as well as the biblical quotation from the Vulgate that appears below it.4 The excerpt is from 1 John 2:17, translated in English as “the world and its desire are passing away.” Tellingly, though, the second half of the verse is omitted. In its entirety, 1 John 2:17 reads, “And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.”5

While preparing the final manuscript of this book for publication, I stumbled upon a blog post from the BioLogos Institute—ironically also entitled “The Fullness of Time”—that discussed the Chronophage as a site of theological reflection. The BioLogos editors contend that the clock offers Christians a “gift towards humility” and a “reminder that time is a gift.”6 On the contrary, I believe that the Chronophage marks time according to the secular liturgies of twenty-first-century scientific modernity. Inaugurated by a luminary of unquestioned scientific authority, it teaches people and forms them in the belief that time is a threat and that death is final.7 Even the carefully edited Scripture passage that appears beneath it has been shorn of any hope. Ironically, its location and its name bear a hint of the older, Christian liturgical time it tries to supplant: Corpus Christi, the medieval feast that commemorates the institution of the Eucharist and the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of Communion. There, on a street corner in Cambridge, two narratives of time collide. That collision is the focus of this book.

Preliminary Expectorations

Everything that follows depends upon a theological assertion in which God is the acting subject. The Triune God has acted, acts, and will act freely in loving relationship to the created world in and through the covenant of grace. In Jesus Christ, the eternal God took on human temporality. The creator irrupted into created time. In doing so, God embraced, redeemed, and liberated human existence in time.

As part of dogmatic reflection on the God-world relationship, a Christian account of time belongs within the doctrine of creation. Unfortunately, Christian theological writing on time has, for the most part, proceeded by way of abstract speculation, or worked towards a seamless harmonization of modern science and theology that often creates more problems than it solves. At its core, this book is an attempt to take the summons to creaturely theology seriously, and to do theology as a creature relating to the Creator as revealed in Jesus Christ. It does not intend to deliver an encyclopedic theology of time and history. It does not, in the words of Søren Kierkegaard quoted in the epigraph, “promise the system.”8 Instead, it presents a series of examples that illustrate how scientific modernity shapes our assumptions about time, with pressing dogmatic and moral implications for the proclamation and witness of the church in the late-capitalist West. Rather than present a comprehensive survey of Christian theologies of time, it attends closely to the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, two thinkers who saw clearly the presenting issues of their age and offered a theological alternative that was neither a flight into nostalgia nor an uncritical embrace of modern thought.

What might a Christian account of created time and creaturely life in that time look like? Augustine’s reflection on time in the Confessions grew out of an exegesis of “In the beginning, God created . . . ,” and to be sure that has been a consistent pattern in the Christian tradition. Where else can we begin but the beginning, even as that beginning constantly tempts us to secure our own position by thinking behind it—by attempting to think ourselves into eternity? As Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted in his own exegesis of Genesis 1, human thought “pounds itself to pieces” on a beginning that it both “wants and cannot want power to attain.”9 Bonhoeffer explains that the Christian life in time is not a matter of securing the beginning but of living from the middle, having received both the beginning and end from Christ—and only from Christ. What Bonhoeffer covered in a few pages in 1933, Karl Barth would explore more than a decade later in all its implications. Strikingly, and characteristically, Barth’s argument in Church Dogmatics III/2 from Jesus as the Lord of Time to creaturely life in time hinges on a different passage entirely. He reasons not from the beginning, but from the constancy and contemporaneity of Jesus Christ in Hebrews 13:8: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

The result is not just christological as a form of window dressing, proceeding with an argument from creation that notes in passing the participation of the Word in that creation. Instead, Barth’s logic is christological all the way down, and as such it shows what it means to confess in the creed that “through him all things were made” as the external basis of the covenant of grace. This is an account of time that contradicts the human belief that our time—past, present, and future—is either ultimately about us, or it is about nothing. It leaves no room ...