A Christian Vision of Time?

The Christian vision of linear time has shaped the West. It's counterfeits have wreaked havoc. When we lose Christian theology, but retain linear time, we open the door to utopianism.

A profound influence on Western political, economic, and cultural development and the idea of progress is the concept of linear time. The idea that time is linear — that it has a beginning and is going somewhere may seem obvious, but the idea of time as linear is a unique aspect of the Bible and an understanding of the world created by God. Time begins with creation. The concept of linear time comes from the Hebrew Bible andJudaism, and was spread through Christianity to Europe and the Western world.

Even Nietzsche, who was no friend of Christianity, admitted this.

Most cultures throughout history viewed time as cyclical. Cyclical time was as common among the Chinese as it was among the Mesopotamians, Hindu civilization, and the Greeks. The Greeks also thought that the world was eternal and had always existed.

In contrast, Judaism and Christianity teach that the world is not eternal or cyclical. Time has a beginning. It is also moving toward an end. Not just a finality, but a purpose: the coming of the Messiah and the new heavens and earth. As St. Paul writes in the Letter to the Ephesians:

“…this was the plan in accord with the will of the eternal God, to be carried out when the times were fulfilled—to gather up all things, both in heaven and on earth, in Christ".

This idea has profound implications for the Western understanding of progress and development. The idea of linear time - and the resultant idea of progress - falls between pagan cyclical fatalism and the secular utopian promise of heaven on earth.

As Ismar Schorsch explains in his essay "Judaism and Linear History":

Judaism replaces nature with history as its basic category of religious experience. … The consequences of this shift from nature to history reinforce the idea of ethical monotheism. Judaism develops a linear concept of time as opposed to a cyclical one and sanctifies events rather than places. … Time becomes for Judaism the realm in which humanity and God join to complete together the work of creation.

From Progress to Utopianism

When we lose Christian theology, but retain linear time, we create the conditions for utopianism.

Contemporary, secular concept of progress is a distorted derivative of the Jewish-Christian understanding of time. Linear time encourages innovation and hope, but when detached from its religious context, it can become a utopian view of progress, either technological or political. This can tend toward something like the optimistic English Whig theory of history where the world is on an inevitable trajectory toward liberty and material progress, or to darker authoritarian and materialist schemes as the 20th century demonstrated.

Twentieth-century utopianism was an example of what the late political philosopher Eric Voegelin called the "Immanentization of the Eschaton" - that is it makes immanent or brings inside of history the resolution to the problems of this world promised by the coming of the Messiah at the end of time. It builds upon the the Christian idea of the second coming of Christ, but secularizes the idea of paradise as something to be attained by politics or technology. It replaces the New Jerusalem coming from heaven that only God can bring about with the idea that man can create heaven on earth through technical means. Examples of this include:

• The Nazi thousand-year Reich

• Communist idea of perfect equality and the withering away of the state

• Contemporary transhumanism which envisions a technical solution to the problem of death by combing biology with technology. These ideas animate much of Silicon Valley and are popularized in the works of people like Yuval Harari.

• We also see it in more moderate scientistic ideologies that think there is a technical solution to all of our problems.

Can Science Redeem Us?

Benedict XVI explains in the encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope), the origins of this modern idea and the shift to a technical messianism are found in the work of the English philosopher, Francis Bacon, and the idea that nature can be conquered and dominated through the tools of science. He writes that with Bacon's idea of the "triumph of art over nature" a major shift took place. He writes:

…up to that time, the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay "redemption."

Now, this "redemption", the restoration of the lost "Paradise" is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world.

This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope.

Thus hope too, in Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called: faith in progress. For Bacon, it is clear that the recent spate of discoveries and inventions is just the beginning; through the interplay of science and praxis, totally new discoveries will follow, a totally new world will emerge, the kingdom of man[16]. He even put forward a vision of foreseeable inventions—including the aeroplane and the submarine. As the ideology of progress developed further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a continuing confirmation of faith in progress as such.

But this leads to a number of problems. What is progress for? Why is progress better than no progress? As Benedict XVI notes in Spe Salvi, while progress is good, it is not an end in itself. C.S. Lewis argued in Mere Christianity, progress is not going forward if you are going in the wrong direction. Unless it is connected to morality, progress can become a threat to man. Benedict XVI writes:

Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope. Given the developments of the modern age, the quotation from Saint Paul with which I began [Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, excluded from the community of Israel, and foreigners to the covenants of promise. You were in the world without hope and without God (Ephesians2:12)]— proves to be thoroughly realistic and plainly true.

There is no doubt, therefore, that a "Kingdom of God" accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore of man alone—inevitably ends up as the "perverse end" of all things as described by Kant: we have seen it, and we see it over and over again.

We can not put our faith in progress or technology or the state. Only God can bring about perfect justice, and any attempt to create the perfect society always results in disappointment or enslavement and death.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his essay "Jewish Time," echoes this point: the Jewish and Christian sense of time is not simply linear, it is "covenantal."

"Tragedy gives rise to pessimism. Cyclical time leads to acceptance. Linear time begets optimism. Covenantal time gives birth to hope. These are not just different emotions. They are radically different ways of relating to life and the universe."

This concept of a universe with a purpose and meaning found in the Bible shaped the Western idea of progress and impacted science, technology, innovation, and economic development.

Covenantal, linear time gives us the sense of agency that we are not simply ruled by fate, but that in partnership with God. We have agency and something to do. We are called to complete creation, to build, innovate, solve problems, overcome injustice, “redeem the time, and create a civilization of love. We cannot create heaven on earth, but neither are we bound to fate without agency. We cannot understand this message of hope—nor its distorted utopian derivatives that brings destruction—without understanding the idea of linear time and its foundation in the Jewish and Christian vision of the world.

This is a selection on the Jewish and Christian sources of justice from my forthcoming book, Excluded: How the Poverty Industry Excludes the Poor from Justice and Prosperity Forthcoming from Herder/Crossroad Press

Photo Credit: The Triumph of Eternity on Death, from The Triumph of Petrarch, Georg Pencz, Public Domain, MetMuseum.org