“Only Through Time Time is Conquered”: A Theological Reflection

    Through Christ and in Christ,the riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful.  Apart from His Gospel, they overwhelm us.

gaudium et spes¹

Time is a notoriously difficult subject.² It has come to be expected that every writer who seeks to consider theologically the thorny epistemological, metaphysical, and moral issues bound up with time will at some point crack open her copy of Confessions and turn the yellowed pages to the passage—coming not insignificantly on the heels of the death of Monica—where the young Augustine doggedly pursued the question of time as few others. She will perhaps find solace in reading the exasperation of such a great mind: “What is time?” he asks. “We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”³

Despite the considerable difficulty of discussing time, it is a maddeningly unavoidable topic. Time cannot be set aside and left for the experts the way neurobiology or ancient Semitic epigraphy can; it is not a discrete subject easily partitioned and examined, for it suffuses all aspects of human existence. What follows is a theological reflection on time. Though I am heavily indebted to the work of certain theologians, this article is not an exposition of any individual’s thought, but is instead an exploration that turns to the Christian theological tradition for guidance and inspiration. I consider two aspects of the problem of time, both of which find their answer in the doctrine of Christ. In the first part of this article, I seek to describe the problem presented by finite time, particularly in its relation to infinite time (which is nothing other than infinity itself). Beginning with a description of the problem, I then offer a survey of the inadequacy of some of the possible answers before turning to the answer offered in Christ’s temporality. In the second part of the article, I consider the particular theological problem of the possibility of redemption in light of suffering and evil within historical time, turning once again to Christ’s temporality for an answer.⁴

I. Finite Time and Infinite Time

a. The Problem: Dasein ist Sein zum Tod

Human beings are born into—or, rather, under—finitude. As young children, when we come to recognize our conscious selves for the first time, we understand our selves as placed, and therefore limited, within the world. That is, we start with a sense—however vague and inchoate—that the world is independent of us. As we slowly awaken to the unrelenting ubiquity of time, this first truth becomes a catalyst for two concomitant truths: that there was a time before we existed and that there will be a time after our death; the world was here before us and it will persist after us. This last truth—the inevitability of our own death—connected logically to the first two, takes most humans several years to recognize. Even then, it is not the brute force of the logic of finitude that awakens us to our own mortality, but almost always the felt experience of death, whether the death of a grandmother or the death of a dog or beetle. As children we do not sit contemplating abstractly that every thing that has a beginning must therefore have an ending, inferring that therefore we, who had a beginning, must also have an ending. No, instead, it is in our experience of death in the particular—of that beetle or that grandparent—reflexively applied to ourselves that we come to see and know that we too will die;⁵ most work hard to hide that knowledge under an avalanche of distraction. This is what we mean by finite time; our being-in-the-world is not unlike a snapshot of a...