time meta-blog 2

I've been working on blogging about time for... well a long time now here's what I've come up with. To start us off I want to look at this verse from Ecclesiastes 3:11 – He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

I think this shows us the time-less-ness of God, having already “made everything beautiful in it’s time” and also done everything “from the beginning to the end,” all past tense. It’s not what God has done and what God will do, but one statement, past tense, about what God has done. From an outside-of-time perspective, everything God does is done. Form an inside-time perspective this may look like some things are still happening, but from God’s perspective it is done.

If this is correct it means two things;

1) a shift in our thinking about things like predestination, free will, and prayer. I might get into those things more later. (I’ve been talking about them with my wife for years)

2) an incredible hope, following a God who already knows the way it all ends

So lets look at this a little more. This post was motivated by a conversation I had with some friends about life and death and I found it difficult to explain and support the point I was trying to make about time. I started out by looking through the New Testament for references to “eternal” or “eternity” that might give us more insight into the idea of time, I found the following: there are 69 references in the new testament, 63 of them don’t really say anything specific about time. Here are the other 6:

John 6.40:This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”

The last day (end of time) is the beginning of eternal life, which I think shows that time ends and then eternity begins.

Romans 6.22:But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.

This could be understood to mean that at the end of everything, including time, is eternal life.

2 Corinthians 4.17:For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure,

On the issue of time, this seems to me to say that now we are in time (momentary being a reference to an amount of time) and that now is preparation for eternity which is beyond all measure. Time is a measure, and the glory of eternity is beyond even the measure of time.

Titus 1.2:in the hope of eternal life that God, who never lies, promised before the ages began—

Here we have an example of how eternal life was promised before time began, showing that it is something outside of time.

2 Peter 3.18: But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity.

“day” is a measure of time, which here is linked with eternity. I think this shows that our understanding of time with at very least be different in eternity, because “day” is used to mean an ambiguous (or even infinite) amount of time, not a 24 hour period

Luke 18.30: who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.”

Here eternal life is referred to as an age, which seems to imply an amount of time with a beginning and an end. I suppose eternity could be an “age” with a beginning and simply no end, but it seems clearer to understand it as a starting point for an existence not governed by time whatsoever.

Other things like “eternal life”, “eternal glory”, “eternal dwelling”, “eternal fire”, --none of these terms imply a dynamic state of time in “eternity.” In fact, they all seem to point to eternity as a state of existence, without really specifying an amount (or lack) of time.

It comes down to this: is eternity infinite time, or an actual lack of time? I think there is scripture that hints at the latter, but nothing entirely decisive.

When scripture lets me down, of course I turn to Scot McKnight…

In Scot’s blogging about the Jesus and the kingdom, he shows how Jesus uses the term “kingdom” as both earthly and eternal, but there is a theme of “eternity” to the understanding of kingdom emphasized over and over again in the gospels.

Again in his discussion there doesn’t seem to be much that indicates whether there is in eternity an experience of time or whether eternity exists apart from time I read through it again and I didn't catch anything, but I could be wrong.

Right now I’m working on reading N.T. Wright’s book Surprised By Hope, which is what sparked this conversation in the first place and hopefully will help me as I continue to read it. If he says anything meaningful relating to time and eternity, I’ll post it!

What do you think? Time? No time? Waste of time? Don’t have time to think about it?

Two Ideas I'm thinking through

I've been doing some reading today that was probably a little out of my league. This morning while I was getting my car not fixed I started "Escape From Reason" by Francis Schaeffer. Then this evening I read a post by Stanley Fish which you can find here (good luck understanding it...) So these are two thoughts that are going through my head after reading those two things. I post it here mostly because this is how I process information, but also because I want to see what other people think. (i.e. am I that crazy?)

1) truth is a word; it describes other sets of words. It's a tool rooted in language, but in the absence of words what becomes of truth? Is truth something, as Derrida might put it, exist outside the text? And by that, I don't mean is there reality outside the text. I mean is there truth apart from language, or is truth simply a measure of words in the right order. Makes me want to stop blogging and start doing some form of visual art that has no words attached.

2) When I think does my mind actually create new realities of consciousness? These mental images and events floating like dreams, do they have real existence in some dimension, the way God exists even though we don't see God? When God thinks, creation happens; matter and energy are formed in our world. When we think, do new spiritual realities exist in the realm of God? Do we, in the image of God, have the ability to think things into spiritual exisitance?

OK so there you go. If you've known me for a while you may know I have a tendency to try to think about "theories" like these. My wife knows I've always imagined being some sort of theoretical physicist. I think it has to do with the fact that I read some really interesting books about theoretical physics when I was in college. The best by far was called "Einstein's Dreams"

So no, I'm not on drugs. Other then Mucinex for a bad chest cold I've been fighting. And Claritin. maybe that's a psychoactive combination, I don't know...

"A Community"

I finished reading Scot McKnight's book A Community Called Atonement yesterday, and so in classic Scot McKnight fashion, I will now blog about it. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the Jesus Creed blog. He blogs through a number of books... pretty good reading)

Before I picked this book up I knew relatively little about atonement theories. I knew there were a few, and that Penal Substitution was the dominant one in evangelicalism, but I couldn't really name any of the others. Actually I bought this book on amazon with the specific hope that I would learn more about the atonement theories. He does talk about them some, I feel like I have a better sense of what an atonement theory is, but not really what each one is about.

But that wasn't the point of the book. The main metaphor in the book is a bag of golf clubs. He says that just as no one goes out on the golf course with just one club, we shouldn't approach Christianity through only one atonement theory. The metaphor seems to work, though I was a little hazy on what game of golf itself represents in the metaphor. I think it must just be Christianity as a whole, or maybe Christian Theology.

But the ideas of the book do more then explain atonement theories. First, he shows the basic things all atonement theories have in common, then he explains what that should mean for Christians.

That's the part that I want to talk about. What does the atonement mean for our lives?

Scot describes atonement as "identification for incorporation" by which I think he means this: God in Jesus identifies with us so that we can be a part of what God is doing in the world. This, Scot says, is a commonality that all atonement theories have- it is the bag to hold the clubs.

Another idea that runs throughout the book is people as "cracked Eikons", Eikon being a word for image, in this case the image of God. Cracked as we are, the work of atonement is the restoration of Eikons, and ultimately the incorporation of those Eikons into the mission of God.

What I love about this language is the emphasis on justice and mission. As Christians, we're not just "evangelists" trying to "win souls" we're broken people participating in the mission of God to restore all the broken people. And it's not just about the afterlife; it's about life now, and it requires action.

Too often, it seems, we try to make Christianity into an intellectual pursuit while ignoring the injustice and oppression around us. "Know the right stuff, believe the right way, and behave yourself" thats what we're told it means to be a Christian. I believe Scot McKnight, and also the New Testament, give us a different mandate:

Accept the atonement.
Share the atonement.
Do the work of the atonement.
Live in a community called atonement.