I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about good memories. Particularly, about how although revisiting them is enjoyable, there is frequently for me a sense of something nostalgic about such recollection. It’s not that “the good ole days” were truly better than these, for often times memory is lovelier than past reality, or at least the appeal of the past moment is highlighted more through remembering. This is not necessarily a consequence of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. When recalling the pleasure or poignancy of a past event, conversation, place, or feeling, we can remember the feelings that struck us during such a time and recognize that they are of the same caliber we presently entertain. We can know that today is creating the same such memories for tomorrow, and still there’s something intangible, ineffable, incongruous, about a fond memory. Nostalgia, yearning, longing, bittersweet wistfulness…all these words approach the feeling I’m trying to disentangle from memory, but they don’t quite reach all the way. There’s something strange about remembrance of delightful moments…no matter how great the past has been, it’s hard—if not impossible—to arrive at genuine contentment by dwelling upon the past alone.
The cause of this is, I think, wrapped up in the nature of Time, and how that process carries us (and yes, I think it more useful to think of Time as a process than a stream, or line, or what-have-you). In “A Severe Mercy,” the author reflects on how even satisfying moments carry with them a certain sadness. Even during the most fulfilling, enjoyable times, we know that such a time is passing: fleeting and flying, never to return. This is because, he finally realizes, we are made for eternity. We are not intended to enjoy ‘fleeting’ pleasures, with the looming specter of the ensuing loss—whereupon we may only revisit such joys through the veil of memory. This pleasure tends to be incomplete, whether experienced through transient moment or memory, for that is not where our pleasure should be anchored.
However, stating that good memories offer incomplete contentment may be true, and the fact that we are made for eternity may play a part in the reason, but I think there’s another piece to the puzzle. It is apparent that God does not want us to live stuck in the past (nor dwelling on the future), and perhaps He’s structured our experience of memory in such a way as to keep us from living in our past. Of course, even though it provides an ultimately unsatisfying outlet, many people dwell in the past anyway—people choose all sorts of unsatisfying practices, after all. Still, I think God does want us to enjoy the good things in our past, but they cannot fully satisfy on their own…instead, they are meant to point us forward.
The moments in our past we most wish to remember, as well as those moments in the present which we wish would linger, both point us forward…not merely to our earthly future, but to our eternal home. They are not meant to hook us into a moment of time, but to spur us onward. They are a sort of narrative encouragement, perhaps even a sort of temporal inertia. This squares with the way God works, of course. Not only does He want us to fix our minds on the eternal rather than transient things (2 Cor. 4:17-18), but He’s a God who works within Time to realize His work in us. Sometimes He acts instantly, true, but normally He sanctifies, rather than glorifies instantly; He uses process instead of automatic results; He grows before He harvests.
There’s nothing new in these observations. It’s no secret that God is a God of process. The New and Old Testaments, personal experience, and history itself all tell the story of a God who is powerful enough to effect instant change, but chooses to work through measured development and natural growth. He takes a single man and through steady (albeit incredible) steps, turns him into a nation; He takes a shepherd boy and turns him into a poet-king; He takes a handful of people and turns them into a worldwide church. He takes an infant in a feed trough and grows Him into the Redeemer of the World. Also, he causes a handful of seeds to become a garden, an acorn to become an oak, a light breeze to gather into a storm front. There is, in these latter examples, a cyclical element…but there is also a directional, processional quality to them that cannot be denied. God moves things, people, and causes forward through Time.
That seems a pretty underwhelming statement. Of course things move forward through time, and it’s not difficult to recognize that God’s typical mode of operation is through process and developing stories. History is processional, not cyclic (the recurrence of common themes should be no more taken as evidence of the ‘cyclical’ nature of history than such would be in a novel). Change is something inherent in Time, and is the mechanism by which story, development, process, progress, and growth exist in Time. Again, this seems obvious—to the Western-inculcated mind, of course. Some few cultures held to a cyclical view of time and history. But what I’d like to proffer is the suggestion that at first inquisitive glance, it seems more predictable that God would have chosen a cyclical sort of way to work in history or to structure Time.
Why do I say this? Simply because of God’s immutable nature: He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, unchanging and eternal. Perhaps it could be said that because He’s outside of time, the fact that there is development and process within time is something of a moot point, i.e. because yesterday, today, and tomorrow lie ever in the Present to Him (Disclaimer: I’m not talking about God Incarnate here, but rather God Eternal. The Incarnation does muddy the theoretical waters a bit, as always—far too high an idea to even pretend to wrap one’s mind around), talking about temporal change in relation to an unchanging God should not come as a surprise. Or it could be said that because Creation is something tautologically other than Creator, “change” is merely something “not-God,” among many other such things like weakness, death, darkness, and doubt (again, Incarnation aside…). And I think there is truth waiting somewhere in the wings of that line of thinking. Yet it still strikes me as strange that God, in creating through the overflow of rejoicing in Himself (as Piper paints it), produced something so contrary to His own experience of changeless-ness. After all, the act of creating itself was a drastic change…and yet, because God is eternal and exists outside/beyond/above time, He arguably does not experience it as "change" per se, each moment being always the Present to Him (this poses an interesting seeming-paradox about the relationship between God, Time, and the Present which I won't introduce here). Can He subject Himself to change, as we understand it? Basically, I’m suggesting that the very possibility of change is to me an unexpected oddity when we consider God’s immutable nature. What appeals to an immutable, eternal, and utterly self-sufficient God about creating such an alien thing as change, as time? We think time and change are normal since they are all we ever knew—but how strange indeed for a change-less God to fashion them into His Creation?
Possibly the introduction/existence of change (by which I also mean in rather metonymical fashion process, development, growth, and story) is simply a result of the Fall, the introduction of sin into the system. Possibly, but I doubt it. The way God uses process, growth, and story seem too central to the way He works to be a product of accident. After all, when He chose to enter into the created order, to become a dependent rather than antecedent of Time, He came onto the stage in such a way as to require growth: from infant who “grew in wisdom and stature” to a Man who taught by story rather than tenet and formed His Bride through gradual and guided process. Although Christ’s arrival was unexpected, the way He chose to do so is quite in keeping with what we know of God. Christ’s 33-year story on earth became the focal point of the whole great Story of Creation. And that is why I say that God’s choice to work through means of process, growth, and intentional change is not incidental to His purpose in Creation: His use of story is essential to how He displays Himself and His will. This story, moreover, is what we normally mean by story, not a plot-less ordering of events…it points both forward and upward by means of narrative tension and momentum. Change is a part of His creative purpose.
And so we have an immutable and changeless God who chose to make change and processional Time a fundamental part of His creation. A God who subjected Himself to that change and process through entering personally into it; perhaps, even, this was one of His great purposes, that the Changeless experience Change firsthand. That’s impossible to know, and I don’t claim it so, but it just may be that for all we talk—and rightly—of God’s immutable nature, He wished to extend His already infinite Self by entering His story as a mutable character.
Yet if that is so—and really, regardless of God’s full reasons for entering into Time—there remains the truth that in spite of Christ experiencing and harnessing change, He remained rooted in eternity and perfection. He was complete, and yet He grew; this duality is a common theme for the God-Man, the One who was both sinless and sin. I think that, similarly, the process of sanctification/transformation in the Christian life is rooted in perfection and already-satisfied accomplishment…though we change, there is something of the eternal already at work (indeed, something that has already done its work) in us. 2 Cor 5:21 says “For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” That “made” denotes both a finished exchange and an ongoing process: in the words of the author of Hebrews, “by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” I may be getting far afield here, but again there seems to be an interesting dynamic between time and timelessness, or change and perfection. Again I find it curious how God chooses to work in this: we are redeemed by the work of the Cross, Christ fulfilled His substitutionary role, and we are reconciled unto God. In Jesus’ own words, It is Finished. That is the Eternal God speaking (or so it seems to me), the One who entered into Creation at that single instant upon which Time hinges…a moment which trumped the constraints of chronology as it forced a bridge from eternity to here. But, although the work is complete on the one hand, on the other it is not. The victory may be won but the process is not complete. God still works within and along time, in such a way that seems so natural and planned. Not only does Creation display the tension between Change and the eternal God; so does human salvation.
Why does process feel so natural in ourselves, and growth appear so proper in and around us, and progress get pointed out even when it remains tacitly indistinct from mere change? Why do we expect story and development through time? Well, obviously there is the fact that we observe such things around us…but to return to my main point, why did God structure things this way? Is there something in God’s nature that is directional and/or processional, or does the manifestation of limited creatures’ experience of relationship with their perfect and limitless Creator necessarily give the impression of direction and procession? This could be the case regardless of sin—were Adam not to fall, we would still need to grow to move towards God; even when He is ultimately intimate (even indwelling, a fathomless thought), He remains in a sense unreachable to non-infinite creatures.
We are created in God’s own image. Although it may be worth noting that in Genesis when God created man and woman in His own image He created (apparently) an adult man and woman. Maybe He created them infants (although in Eve’s case at least that seems quite unlikely), and I find it suggestive that when God created beings in His own image He created them mature—at least physically, and one can assume emotionally and mentally as well, with only spiritual maturity on hold for ensuing reasons. However, I’m not quite sure what that suggests…perhaps that something truly made in God’s image doesn’t need growth? If so, it’s a suggestion that lacks substantial persuasive weight. In any case, we can infer from the Genesis account and elsewhere that mankind is an image of God, however sullied. After all, the man Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” and “the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being.” We are created in God’s image, yet we expect and experience change, growth, process. Is that a part of our nature that is in God’s own image, or a result of the Fall, or otherwise a part of the Story God is telling? I really don’t know…I hesitate for obvious reasons to consider that there is something inherent in God’s nature that is analogous to human growth or directional change. Nevertheless, there is a piece I’m missing here, one which I don’t think I’ve quite articulated in this whole writing.
There’s one more thing I’d like to bring into the mix before I wrap it all up. These next thoughts are largely sparked by re-listening to a sermon from my old campus minister, Matt Dean, although the ideas come from a couple other sources too. The Greeks had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos was often personified as “Cronus,” known to the Greeks as the consuming god of time and father of the Olympians. He was, in Greek mythology, a usurper of the sky god Uranus. Both he and his Roman counterpart, Saturn, wielded a sickle, for he was the harvester. In the Middle Ages, Saturn/Cronus was associated with melancholy, and in astrology he represents coldness, separation, skepticism, and misfortune. The sort of time he represented was the devouring, destructive, dreadful sort of time…the type that wastes away, that rots, that lies like an inevitable burden on the shoulders of mortality. In a less harsh light, it was the timeline sort of time, calendar time: it was our normal conception of time as an ever-marching procession of instants. Alternatively, kairos refers to “an appointed time, season.” This is not the sort of time that can be measured by seconds or days or years, but only by significance. In a way, chronos is the sort of time which flows unceasingly onward, and kairos is the sort which freezes chronos so that a moment of import can make its appearance.
I’m no Greek scholar, so I will not try to differentiate between the two concepts any further. Nor will I really draw any specific conclusions from the philological distinction between the two times. But perhaps “chronological” time really is a kind of usurper, introduced (or more likely, corrupted) by the Fall, and the “appointed” sense of time, the “right-place-at-the-right-time” sort of thing, is truer to the way the spiritual/celestial realm works. Perhaps one thing the Fall did was divorce these two manifestations of time. Of course, this is very speculative. Still, something tells me that a proper understanding of kairos might go a long way towards illuminating why an immutable, eternally-perfect God formed Time, why He uses it like He does, the necessity of the temporal element of process, transformation, and growth…and maybe even why there seems to be a tension between salvation being already accomplished and something we need to work out—in other words, the relationship between justification and sanctification. In the meantime, I will continue to suspect there’s a mystery to Time that I can’t unravel.
