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The Fullness of Time: Jesus Christ, Science, and Modernity
While human existence in time is determined by the time of Jesus Christ, by the logic of the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension, the predominant accounts of time in the modern West have proceeded from a very different basis. The implications of these approaches are not just a matter of epistemology, or of abstract doctrinal and philosophical claims. Instead, they have had, and continue to have, concrete ramifications for human life together. They have overwhelmingly been death-dealing rather than life-giving, marked by a series of temporal moral errors that this book hopes to address. As a counterexample, this book reads Søren Kierkegaard alongside Karl Barth to highlight the ways that both figures rejected a Hegelian approach to time that was, and is, not coincidentally intertwined with a racialized account of history and the co-opting of Christianity by the modern Western state.
150 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 17, 2022
Kara Slade deftly affirms the value of scientific knowledge even as she reveals its limitations, especially when we seek to reason from a standpoint beyond time in order to control it. The danger in going past the limits of knowledge obtained through the scientific method can be seen when researchers move beyond what can be known objectively to supporting their subjective views. Then they pass off the results as if they were determined within the bounds of science. Eugenics is one example of the results of just such a move. Then there is Big History, which offers a meta-narrative of the greater good in increasing globalization, while glossing over the evils inherent in colonialism.
Slade is a scholar-priest who is not in the least anti-science. She holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. She worked at NASA before responding to a call to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. Returning to Duke to pursue a Doctor in Religion, she explored how differing views of time are at the heart of these issues within modernity.
As a slim volume that engages meaningfully with our understanding of time, she begins with a key assertion. Slade undertakes this work after making a foundational assertion that, “The Triune God has acted, acts, and will act freely in loving relationship to the created world…” This is not a book concerned with “religion” and science, but a work that assumes and works within Christian Theology.
She uses the Danish theologian and existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the Swiss systematic theologian Karl Barth as able guides. Slade cautions wisely against Christians contorting their faith into a Christianity without Christ or other forms of civil religion in order to “make faith relevant to civic discourse and societal improvement.”
A key concern is when the objective scientist seeks to take a view beyond time and in so doing pretends to a perspective divine rather than human. In the process, individual people or even larger groups of people become expendable to progress as when whole peoples are dismissed as "primitive."
The problems with the scientist as objective observer guided solely by reason is this places a time-bound human, who thinks he (usually) or she sees all human history rightly, in the seat of the judge. The move from explanation and description to ethics and prescription is then a short step. For the Biologist EO Wilson, that step is toward a broad scale, population-reduction project controlled by the state.
Slade’s look at the issue points us as those living an “ordinary Christian life in ordinary time, empowered by the Holy Spirit acting in word and sacrament” to “a constant work of re-vision and repentance, of comparing the world that is from the world that God has desired for his creatures.”
In that world, no one is expendable for “from eternity, God has elected not to see human beings from [EO] Wilson’s god-like view. God has chosen to be for each one of us and our neighbors, in Jesus Christ.”
This is the most important book I have read on confronting racism that is not a book about racism and the best book on the folly of the CEO as the ideal of the church leader without being a book about church leadership. I highly recommend Dr. Slade’s The Fullness of Time.
Slade is a scholar-priest who is not in the least anti-science. She holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. She worked at NASA before responding to a call to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. Returning to Duke to pursue a Doctor in Religion, she explored how differing views of time are at the heart of these issues within modernity.
As a slim volume that engages meaningfully with our understanding of time, she begins with a key assertion. Slade undertakes this work after making a foundational assertion that, “The Triune God has acted, acts, and will act freely in loving relationship to the created world…” This is not a book concerned with “religion” and science, but a work that assumes and works within Christian Theology.
She uses the Danish theologian and existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the Swiss systematic theologian Karl Barth as able guides. Slade cautions wisely against Christians contorting their faith into a Christianity without Christ or other forms of civil religion in order to “make faith relevant to civic discourse and societal improvement.”
A key concern is when the objective scientist seeks to take a view beyond time and in so doing pretends to a perspective divine rather than human. In the process, individual people or even larger groups of people become expendable to progress as when whole peoples are dismissed as "primitive."
The problems with the scientist as objective observer guided solely by reason is this places a time-bound human, who thinks he (usually) or she sees all human history rightly, in the seat of the judge. The move from explanation and description to ethics and prescription is then a short step. For the Biologist EO Wilson, that step is toward a broad scale, population-reduction project controlled by the state.
Slade’s look at the issue points us as those living an “ordinary Christian life in ordinary time, empowered by the Holy Spirit acting in word and sacrament” to “a constant work of re-vision and repentance, of comparing the world that is from the world that God has desired for his creatures.”
In that world, no one is expendable for “from eternity, God has elected not to see human beings from [EO] Wilson’s god-like view. God has chosen to be for each one of us and our neighbors, in Jesus Christ.”
This is the most important book I have read on confronting racism that is not a book about racism and the best book on the folly of the CEO as the ideal of the church leader without being a book about church leadership. I highly recommend Dr. Slade’s The Fullness of Time.
January 14, 2022
Just read this for a professional development clergy group and it was a fantastic book that called me back to my vocation and challenged my brain!
January 19, 2022
y'all.
Ok, first, this is an academic text. There are massive chunks of quote blocks from Barth, Kierkegaard, and other historical and contemporary writers. Slade explores colonialist thought and how progress slides into eugenics and other incredibly heavy topics.
And every single time she wraps up the end of the chapter, having guided us through a tangle of layers of ideas, with a clear and concise pointing to the hope of time as creature, centered in Jesus Christ, who makes time.
A helpful framing that she puts into words: that science is both a practice, and the work of practitioners... and one cannot be substituted for another. She is not anti-science, don't get me wrong... she's got a PhD in Rocket Science, too, but she offers us ways of navigating conversations and actions as we try our best as sinful individuals.
Probably should be required reading for science ethics classes. Or a seminary curriculum.
Ok, first, this is an academic text. There are massive chunks of quote blocks from Barth, Kierkegaard, and other historical and contemporary writers. Slade explores colonialist thought and how progress slides into eugenics and other incredibly heavy topics.
And every single time she wraps up the end of the chapter, having guided us through a tangle of layers of ideas, with a clear and concise pointing to the hope of time as creature, centered in Jesus Christ, who makes time.
A helpful framing that she puts into words: that science is both a practice, and the work of practitioners... and one cannot be substituted for another. She is not anti-science, don't get me wrong... she's got a PhD in Rocket Science, too, but she offers us ways of navigating conversations and actions as we try our best as sinful individuals.
Probably should be required reading for science ethics classes. Or a seminary curriculum.
April 28, 2023
An excellent exploration of the way in which modernity operates in temporal modes that are in conflict with human flourishing and Christian faith. This is a book I will be thinking about for a long while.
February 14, 2022
I think Kara Slade offers a promising, timely, and interesting argument in this book. She addresses the manner in which science is used as a means of discerning existential or ethical truths beyond its scope as a tool of inquiry in describing material reality. She does a great job of cataloging the manner in which the "scientific man" is prone to hubris and to a false sense of detachment from time. Furthermore, the chapter "Beyond" strikes me as helpful and original reflection on the limits of science and the promise of theology.
However, I do have a couple concerns. I feel the book could have been better served by being longer and allowing Slade to further develop her argument as well as provide more detailed descriptions of the ideas she critiques. The book being 129 pages long could have been expanded without the risk of becoming an inaccessible tome. One of the major issues that I think hampers the argument is the reliance upon secondary sources to sum up the various "systems" she critiques. For example, Hegel and Hegelianism come in for a fair bit of criticism throughout the book, but Hegel is never cited within the logic of her arguments. She relies extensively on da Silva's critiques of Hegelianism and Darwinism early in the book, but never details Hegel's or Hegelians' ideas. This only makes it more difficult later in the book when certain intellectuals are described as departing from, critiquing, or joining Hegel's larger project.
However, I do have a couple concerns. I feel the book could have been better served by being longer and allowing Slade to further develop her argument as well as provide more detailed descriptions of the ideas she critiques. The book being 129 pages long could have been expanded without the risk of becoming an inaccessible tome. One of the major issues that I think hampers the argument is the reliance upon secondary sources to sum up the various "systems" she critiques. For example, Hegel and Hegelianism come in for a fair bit of criticism throughout the book, but Hegel is never cited within the logic of her arguments. She relies extensively on da Silva's critiques of Hegelianism and Darwinism early in the book, but never details Hegel's or Hegelians' ideas. This only makes it more difficult later in the book when certain intellectuals are described as departing from, critiquing, or joining Hegel's larger project.
July 4, 2022
This is academic writing at its worst: the writing is painfully dense and overstuffed with block quotes, each chapter follows the same unvarying outline (cherrypicking authors to establish an idea underlying modern science, philosophy, or theology, then throwing a bunch of Kierkegaard and Barth against that idea even though it's rarely obvious why their ideas are uniquely or particularly applicable to the problem), there's no real justification for why these ideas (some of them admittedly intriguing) belong in a volume together and organized this way (like say, a coherent thesis or through-argument), and even when you make yourself finish it there's no payoff in terms of practical applications (for one's own life, for Christian communities, for teaching or preaching).
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May 16, 2025A clear and concise critique of scientistic perspectives on time. Its reliance on Kierkegaard and Barth makes it hard for me to fully take its conclusions for my own, though; it's far too skeptical of natural theology for my liking.
August 17, 2025
Very dense, hard to follow. But maybe I don’t have the background in science or theology to be able to understand it. It’s a PhD thesis by a priest in my local Episcopal church.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews