Renewal: If Tomorrow Never Comes
Welcome to the new year, everyone.
We have seen 2021 come and go. I do not think it is too far fetched to say that we had hoped that year to be a different one from the start of coronatide in 2020. If anything, however, 2021 seemed to look like more of a repeat than a renewal. With news circulating about new strains of the virus, there are now worries that 2022 would dish out more of the same.
If there is anything that times like these reveal, it is that coronatide has pierced the Enlightenment veil and its faith in never ending progress from one improved state to the next. If anything, we are finding a state of regress, with the intensification of old rivalries and the creation of new ones where none existed. This is fueled further by the normalisation of social media, whose algorithms are designed to forment these rivalries by carpet bombing viewers with clickbait.
Rather than something that can cut through the din, religious faith now seems to have become just another plaything for these ongoing rivalries. Sad to say, the Christian faith does not seem to be immune to this.
This raises the question, does the Christian faith have anything new to say to a time of “wash, rinse, repeat”?
In thinking about what to write for this post, my thoughts about the social media dimension of these anxieties made my mind go back to a little essay I wrote a fair few year ago for the Journal of Moral Theology entitled “Faith in the Church of Facebook”. Revisiting that article suggested to me that, underlying our worries about 2022 being a repeat of the same, is a particular presumption we have taken for granted regarding how time works.
In that essay, I spoke about two conceptions of time. The more common conception of time that we take for granted can be called “clock time” or its greek counterpart chronos (from which we get the term “chronological”). As the name suggests, chronos denotes the chronological passing of one moment to another. What allowed this conception of time to exist is treating time as a series of measurable moments. However, the philosopher Robert Gibbs noted that in the course of making time measurable, we have also emptied time of any meaning. The reason why we can conceive of time ebbing away, is because we are seeing the relentless march of the same type of moment, one that is made measurable by being made empty.
In contrast to chronos, there is kairos, which is loosely translated to mean “the time”. The definitive article is important here, because the temptation here is to treat kairos as a kind of “eternal present”. As I argued in the article, just treating it as an eternal present may reinforce chronological time. Instead, I suggested it would be more helpful to focus on the definitive article “the” to understand time as a unique moment. It is unique, not because we can measure it, but because “the time” is a moment that is an appointed time. Going further still, it is an appointed time because it is a time chosen, not by us to capture, but by God to give to His creatures as a gift.
In being appointed by God, Kairotic time is a time that is enfolded into God, who is without beginning or end. Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas reminds us that God is absolutely simple, making him absolutely unique. Time being taken into the uniqueness of God then, makes the time absolutely unique and therefore, unrepeatable. This has major implication for our conception of time.
Metaphysically, the appointed time is then charged with meaning, charged with the works of God, which break the monotony of our chronological time in absolutely unique ways which, if we do not have the eyes to see it, will never come this way again.
However, we can find solace in the realisation that Kairotic time is not just one moment lost to the past that we can never recover. Because God is constantly at work within His creation, it means that the appointed time is is woven into the seemingly dull fabric of chronological time. And because each moment is unique every appointed time is, as I suggested a post this time last year, a new moment.
This conception of the appointed time should recalibrate our expectation regarding the future. At one level, tomorrow will come, and probably with its repetitions in tow. At another level, however, the extent to which we become trained to see the appointed time operating in this world, is the extent to which we become trained to see tomorrow as a unique time of divine renewal.
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