Informal Review- Time & Eternity

So I read this book, Time & Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science, and Theology by Antje Jackelen and I have to review it for class and I need to get it out in plain language before I dress it up with those multisyllabic words academics like so much.¹ And I figure if I’m going to break it down, I may as well break it down on my blog.

As you may have guessed from the title, Time and Eternity talks about time. But time is hard to talk about. Think about it for a second. What is time? If you were explaining time to a kid, what would you say? Is time seconds, minutes, hours, days, years? Is time history? Is time both? Is time neither, is it something that we measure with clocks and place history on? It’s a big task to talk about time on even the most basic level, so it’s doubly impressive that the author would want to toss Jesus and Relativity into the mix on top of time.

Since time is hard, Jackelen doesn’t start from definitions or a history of thought about time, though she’ll get to both over the course of the book. Instead, she starts with hymns. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur believes that time is best understood through narrative and the author takes that as a truth. And what better narrative form is there than hymns? Hymns are the words of the people, sung with theological implications but without theological rigor. What questions do they ask about time? Due to her background, I suspect, the author surveys German, Swedish, and English hymns for mentions of time concepts and while the first few pages of that chapter are dense, packed with graphs and charts of relative frequencies of seasonal, day-to-day, and eternal time words, the story comes to life in the qualitative analysis. There’s a lot that she pulls out of her analysis, but the kicker from the chapter is that modern hymns (those written after 1960 or so) are less likely to talk about eternity as this far away place, separate from now, that good Christians get to go to one day. We modern people are more concerned with bringing the future into existence now and eternity, whatever it means, isn’t so crucial to us.

The first time I read through the book, I couldn’t figure out why eternity was important. Couldn’t you just talk about it as infinite time or whatever it is? But that’s exactly the point. Like you and your ex on facebook, time and eternity have a complicated relationship, more of a dance than anything else. The author makes the point at the end of the first chapter that people who don’t have an idea of eternity have to depend on their lifespan to fit all their needs. FOMO is real, y’all. So, with the idea that eternity can be important to us in how we view the world, she moves on in the next chapter to biblical and theological ideas about time and eternity.

Now this is the chapter that I got stuck on. Analyzing and quoting hymns? Perfectly fine. An overview of scientific ideas about time? Can’t wait. Pages upon pages about what one old guy whose name I can’t pronounce thought about the nature of time and God? Um, I’m good, thanks. Just hit the highlights. But the author is a professor of systematic theology and if we’re going to be talking about time in the church, we’re going to have to dig into the bible eventually, so vegetables before dessert it is.

As far as the bible goes, there’s not one theology of time spread throughout, which makes sense for a book that’s actually made of a bunch of smaller books written over centuries. According to the author, the Hebrews have both cyclical (things that repeat, like yearly festivals) and linear (like history, events laid out one after another without regular repetition) ideas of time that interact throughout the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament is more influenced by Greek thought about time, but really, it’s focused on eschatological time, looking forward to the time when the kingdom of God will be a reality on the Earth. The New Testament has, as the author puts it, this idea of “already” and “not yet”. Jesus came and saved us, but we’re still waiting for the total fulfillment of that act of salvation.

So far so good, but how do we make sense of these different ways of understanding time? And where’s that time/eternity dichotomy, that idea about time as something we’re stuck in and eternity as something outside of that? Well, that comes into Christian theology from Plato via St. Augustine. God, as the perfect Creator, is outside of time and eternity is where God is, and where we’ll go when we go to be with God. ² But how does God as perfect and separate work with a God who comes to Earth for the saving of many, or a God that loves and sustains those that love God? Humans stuck in time and God in eternity isn’t going to cut it.

And that’s where we bring in the Trinity. Now, I have a lot of thoughts on the Trinity and I think it’s an idea that we Christians all kinda shift sideways on, but when you come down to it, if you want a perfect God that creates and a loving God that sustains, you’re going to have to have a God who can hold multiple natures in one God. God is the Creator, the Son, and the Spirit, just as time is something that’s passed, something that exists right now, and something that will be in the future. God is best viewed in relationship and the author makes the case that so is time, whether that relationship is past/present/future or eschatological old and new time.

But where is the science, you may be asking?³ Well, the point of the book is to consider a theology of time and so that’s the emphasis, which is why we spend a chapter on hymns, a chapter on the bible and theology, and at the end of the book, a chapter on a possible theology of time. But science has some insights on time and those can be passed along to theology. Or, if you like, we can use scientific ideas to help us narrow down what we want from an understanding of time. Science can inform theology.

So the third chapter gets into it. It starts by talking about Newton, who settled on absolute time, thinking of time as something that passes at a second per second everywhere in the universe. That’s why our clocks agree- they’re measuring something fundamental about the universe. From there, we get to relativity, which takes the speed of light as a fundamental constant, which makes time relative. It doesn’t pass the same for different observers travelling at different speeds or in different gravitational fields. That’s something that we can measure, something we know to be true. So if time isn’t absolute, what is it? Well, don’t look to quantum mechanics for the answer- that’s only got the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle⁴, We can at least say that time flows forward, from the Second Law of Thermodynamics⁵, but chaos theory tells us that even if we know the initial conditions of a system, we can’t predict the future. That’s what modern science tells us- we don’t know exactly how best to describe time, but we know it isn’t absolute.

Okay, so we’ve done a lot of work, all in the spirit of understanding what time is, but we haven’t come around to anything definite. That’s the frustrating thing about ideas about time- it’s really hard to come to a definite answer on any of this. But, at the very least, with the backing of science, we can say that time isn’t absolute, and with the backing of biblical studies, that eternity isn’t absolutely outside of time either. At the very least, we can get rid of that Frozen Chosen idea of eternity as unchanging perfection. Time is best understood as a relation, or as a dance. If you like, you can try to measure it up with the Trinity- Creator/past/faith, Son/future/hope, Spirit/present/love.⁶ But the relation is what’s crucial for us in our lives. Rather than separating and breaking things down, we should be looking at how they interact. Science can tell us that time is that which is measured by clocks, but we can look at the way the past has brought us to the present which is moving toward the future, or how eschatology, or how we hope for the future, bleeds back into how we live our present.

Now, academically, I’m supposed to have some criticism of the book at this point. That’s problematic for me, because I’m still working to make sure I’ve grasped the point of the book and represented it accurately. I found the book dense, something that you have to work through to understand, which is the nature of working with time. I had hoped for something more accessible- a book that starts off talking about hymns, pokes through biblical ideas about time, then brings in some science? I’m about that. But this book is aimed at an academic audience and so the concepts aren’t spoon-fed to you, they’re wrapped up in nuance and arguments and long words that carry definitions sentences long.

And, for a book that is considering the question of time in science and theology, science surely has a small part. The author’s already come around the idea of time as relational and complex and uses science to support that. Science as a confirmation of a theology is fine, but in the book, it feels extra, like the chapter on science could have been a footnote in the larger argument. The hymns, too, feel added on, once you’ve gotten into the book. They could have been a sidebar in an overview of the history of theological thought about time- we would have come to the questions they posed either way.

But the author didn’t set out to write a book for popular consumption (though I think that would be a worthy project out of this, especially with the author’s emphasis on the importance of eternity and relation in our daily lives) and so I can’t fault her for her language. And by starting from questions pulled from the available Christian narrative and incorporating scientific ideas, she does present a more holistic view of time than a purely theological treatment would. She takes a tack within the science and religion story of bringing the two sides to the table to discuss one topic, one that both are going to have more questions than answers about, and comes out the other side with the importance of relationships and the metaphor of the dance, and I do very much like that.

All in all, what we’ve got here is a book whose topic sparks the imagination and whose contents you can sink your teeth into, whether you’ve specialized in religion, science, or neither. It’s not a simple read (nor should a book on time be) but a rewarding one, putting forward an argument for relationality and complexity in our views of time and God.

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¹ Actually, I think that I have to boil it down for purposes of my own understanding. Having the freedom to use an uncommon word to express a complex idea is one of the benefits of academic- they’re space-savers. But they’re also barrier-makers and I need to fix that for myself
² Augustine actually has this idea of time as being something inside the human soul, where we remember the past, exist in the present, and anticipate the future, but that’s not the point.
³ You would be asking this if you were me and you were begging for a reason to continue trudging through this book.
⁴ The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that thing that says that you can’t know both particle’s position and its speed, and since time is part of the equation for speed, it fuzzies up time a little as well. 
⁵ The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in a closed system, entropy increases over time. Entropy is a measure of disorder, so over time, things become more disordered.
⁶ That's Michael Theunissen's way of delineating the Trinity in Negative /theologie der Zeit (p. 360, according to the endnote)