When God created the world, He created time.  This may seem like an unnecessary statement, but I bring it forward to highlight the significance of time for the Christian life.

The Nature of Timelessness and Time

God is timeless and so are the angels.  They do not grow, and they do not change, because they are not physical, but they are spirits.  To give an analogy, think about the truths of mathematics: they do not grow, and they do not change based on time.  1 + 1 = 2, and it will never become anything else.  A triangle is a polygon that has three sides and three edges that all add up to 180°; this will never change.  These truths have not changed based on time, and they never will change because the nature of mathematics is timeless.  It is eternal.  Further, the truths of mathematics are not physical.

However, whatever exists under time grows and changes.  We are such creatures.

What does that mean for us in our spiritual lives?

Throughout the Scriptures, God shows us that time is the field in which He works.  The effects of growth and change are not terrifying for Christianity, but they are the field in which we are to live our Christian life in its fullest expression.

Concepts such as repentance, moderation, and patience all assume a world in which time exists.  In eternity, there is no repentance because there is no time; the direction toward which we were oriented in this world whether toward God or away from Him, is the direction toward which we will live in eternity.

The Ancient Understanding of History: Cycles

Christianity also has a unique relationship to time because it sees the development of time as linear, pointed in one direction.  To make this understandable, it is best to compare Christianity to the world it arose in. In the ancient world, for the most part, all cultures saw time as a set of cycles.  The past was more or less the same as the present, and the future was going to be more or less the same as the present.  The only difference was going to be the people and cultures that dominated in the future.  There was not going to be a difference in terms of the overall quality of everyday life, institutions, and social structures.

Humans back then could not conceive of a higher quality of life with every coming generation, whether in terms of comfort such as air conditioning and heating, fast carriages (cars), or travel through space.  They also could not conceive of a world where our understanding of nature would differ based on the type of technology we used to observe the world.  Even further than this, they could not fathom a world where humanity would be different in terms of its quality (such as not having slaves, or people choosing which vocations to pursue regardless of family background).  All these things were beyond their ability to imagine due to their understanding of how history worked; it was all a never-ending set of cycles.

The way humans understand how history works is called philosophy of history.

The Christian Understanding of History: The New Covenant

Christianity, however, had a different philosophy of history, which is also the one that describes what we actually observe in reality, and this philosophy of history developed from all the way back in the Old Testament because believers saw and understood that God worked in every generation, and He had revealed more and more of Himself and His plan to the Prophets.  This plan showed that He had intended to bring about a New Covenant. Now the word “New” in “New Covenant” (Jeremiah 31:31 LXX; Hebrews 8:13) in Greek is kaine, and it does not simply mean new like something that just happened such as when we hear that a band has released a new album, or Nike has released new shoes.  There is nothing new here except a model; the idea is essentially the same.

This word kaine means new in terms of its quality; this is unlike what we have seen before.  It would be analogous to someone first presenting an orchestra to an audience when all people knew were flutes or harps played by themselves.  He has presented a new music.  Or it would be analogous to someone presenting the shoe for the first time when all people knew were sandals.  He has presented a new footwear.  The same is true for the New Covenant.  What God had promised was going to be something of a different quality.

For this reason, Christianity has always understood that history does not simply move in cycles, but there is a development and progress throughout history, both of God’s revelation and in the realm of human learning, especially in the theoretical understanding of the world.  Both are the results of contemplative prayer.

God created us in His Image, and that Image is the rational soul, the soul that has the intellect, that allows us to understand the world around us, to make connections, to reflect on it, to contemplate the occurrences of life, and to reason.

God intended His Image to develop in us, which would in turn, lead to us reflecting the Likeness of God.  This is indeed the goal of Christianity, which in Orthodox Christianity is understood by the term theosis.  The more we reflect on the Image of God within us, and the more we follow God’s plan for our lives through our constant prayer and life with Him, we begin to partake of the divine nature, and we reflect the Likeness of God.  The role that writing plays in this process cannot be overstated.

A Case in Point: The Invention of Writing and the Inspiration of the Scriptures

We know that humans did not always know how to read and write, but that was a development over the course of time beginning in art then moving to scripts, and even in scripts there was a development in stages.  This is an example of something new in the life of humanity.  To give an example of the development, the most ancient forms of writing were all ideographic; symbols expressed ideas, not sounds. Then, this developed to symbols expressing both ideas and sounds, then further development led to symbols expressing just sounds such as we know today in the West with alphabetic writing.  How did God work through this?  Since God is free, and God is reflective and contemplative, knowing Himself, He wanted us to experience something similar since He created us to reflect His Image.  So, He saw us develop writing which is a direct result of His giving us the gift of speech which reflects most the rational soul that lives within us, which is His Image.  And through writing over the ages we have come to know what we are, and we have deepened our understanding of ourselves.  Indeed, Hermann Hesse said it best when he said, “Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”

Because of writing, we have literature, and there is something about the deep literature that moves us because it shows us what we are, and what we can become whether good or bad. Thus, through the reading of a wide variety of literature we come to understand both the goodness and beauty of human nature (the Image of God within us), and the evil to which we can descend when we stand away from God.  An example of such a book (a modern book) that may be familiar with audiences is The Giver.  The people in that book live in a world that is declared to be perfect, and everyone takes an injection every morning in their homes which actually alters their way of thinking to make them more submissive, less inquisitive, and non-imaginative.  When the main character of the book, Jonas, stops taking the injection, he realizes the depth of human life and its value, and he comes to the realization that what the overseers of this community are doing is dumbing down the depth of human life in order to control the population, and this includes killing those it deems weak such as newborns and older people.  He finds out that one of the newborns he has bonded with will be terminated, so he takes action and escapes with the newborn in order to save his life.  This is an example of how literature shows us the tendencies that we can develop when we are unguided by values, and in a sense, these books are prophetic of what an evil world will become.

When humans had a good understanding of literature, then God moved to inspire His Prophets to produce in writing their own history, their experience of seeking God, and His message to them. With these three aspects, we have the three divisions of the Old Testament: The Books of History (including the Torah), the Poetic Books, and the Prophets.

And all these really have one theme running throughout them which is the encounter with God and His salvation of humanity.  They are a sort of diary (a collection of memories) of God’s people and their meetings with God.  The idea of a history progressing toward one direction, toward one end, runs throughout all of them.  David Miliband points out saying, “I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for ‘history.’ The closest word for it is memory.”  This is what we see in the Scriptures; it is not history in the sense that sadly too many people think is history: which is facts and dates.  Facts and dates are not actual history.  History is the reconstruction of the past and the understanding of significant events and the influences that moved that history.  It also helps us understand our lives today in the light of those events and influences.  Carl Jung understood this when he asked that “Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?”  This applies to us as Christians.

At the heart of the Christian faith is a collection of books, so literacy becomes a spiritual activity, a sort of prayer.  When we read widely in literature, we can understand a wide variety of books, ideas, and the world around us in all of its dimensions: physical, temporal, psychological, aesthetic, and the relational.  For example, when we read poetry, then we know what poems are like. When we bring that background to reading the Psalms and Proverbs and the rest of the poetic books, we can now take them in because of the background that has helped us understand them.

God has done all things in the fullness of time, and that fullness included a world where writing was widespread, understood, and easy to learn.  In addition, it included a world rich in literature that showed humans what humanity was.  This would be all the more important when God’s son became human and lived among us. Humanity would be in a position to comprehend what it meant for God to become man.  And that topic will be explored in next part of this reflection on the Lord of History.

Click here to read the Lord of History (Part II): The Son

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