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January 26 - February 13, 2024
Don’t worry if philosophy doesn’t come easily to you. The difficulty is the point (“a feature, not a bug,” as they say).
Those who imagine they inhabit nowhen imagine themselves wholly governed by timeless principles, unchanging convictions, expressing an idealism that assumes they are wholly governed by eternal ideas untainted by history. They are oblivious to the deposits of history in their own unconscious.
A lot of contemporary Christianity suffers from spiritual dyschronometria—an inability to keep time, a lack of awareness of what time it is.
To assert that “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter” is not wrong in principle but temporally. It fails to recognize that “Black Lives Matter” is something that has to be said here and now because of a specific (contingent) history that got us here. The assertion of the ideal, timeless truth that “All Lives Matter” is performatively false in such a situation. It lacks prudence and does not constitute faithful witness here, in this now. Our (shared) history makes all the difference for discerning what faithfulness looks like.3
because it attunes us to receive God’s grace in different ways in different eras of a life.
We are mortal, not just because we die but because we are the sorts of creatures whose very being is lived in time.
“What do we do now?” is one of the fundamental questions of discipleship.
But what you hold in your hands is not a book about praying the hours or, God forbid, spiritualizing time management. This book is intended as a wake-up call to the significance of your temporality,
We don’t need coaches who will help us manage our time; we need prophets who make us face our histories (and futures).
White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us. . . . And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. . . . In great pain and terror because . . . one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating.5
the new birth is not a blank slate.
And not because God erases history; that would mean erasing me, this “I” that is a historical creation.
is that the God of grace can redeem even me—this historical creation—can begin again with this history that lives in me, that is me. It’s the body with scars that is resurrected; it’s the me with a history that is redeemed, forgiven, graced, liberated.
you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.
Remember there is a future after the sand runs out, and that future is already bleeding into your present. Dum spiro spero: while I breathe, I hope.
We need to remember that at the heart of Christianity is not a teaching or a message or even a doctrine but an event. God’s self-revelation unfolds in time, and redemption is accomplished by what happens.
Kierkegaard says, in the Christian understanding of time, the instant of revelation—and the instant in which I am confronted by such revelation—is a decisive “moment” that changes everything. Things change in time,
the truth is born at the very intersection of time and eternity,
Because Christianity is fundamentally a “happening,” we rightly understand it only in terms of story.
“love story” in which the Christian “becomes a character in the as-yet-unwritten continuation of the story” insofar as they come to see the story as a story about themselves, a story that transforms them not least by transforming their self-understanding.
“not some more or less modified type of knowing” but rather a faith-full way of being in response to the event of revelation in “Christ, the crucified God.”
Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event.
communion with the crucified God.
spiritual timekeeping reflects a sense of time shaped by covenant—a promise made in history reverberates through subsequent time.
Jesus’s incarnational promise to never leave us or forsake us, even “to the very end of the age” (Matt. 28:20 NIV). That is a promise of presence through history—not above it or in spite of it.
spiritual timekeeping is nourished by Jesus’s promise that the Spirit will guide us into all truth across time
The church is a people of the future, a kingdom-come community that is always learning anew how to wait.
apocalyptic literature in the Bible is interested not in chronos (“clock time,” as Heidegger calls it) but in kairos, a fullness of time, a time charged in a way that can’t be simply measured.
an inbreaking future that makes an impact on our present.
In other words, in nowhen Christianity, faithfulness is a matter of guarding against change.
The Teacher’s counsel is provocative, even table-turning: lean into your creaturehood; live into your temporality; dig into your toil. There are gifts you might never have imagined: pleasure, happiness, joy. The
To be a creature is to be passing away, amid things passing away.
language is like an audible clock: communication is possible only if words emerge then fade, making way for the next word in the sentence.2
Racism, for example, is not just an attitude but a bodily schema of habitualities that I absorb over time.
What does it mean to be steadfast when, as a creature, I am ever unfolding?
A feature of temporality that we either downplay or resist is the profound contingency of our existence.
Such contingency is lamented by romantics who entertain fantasies of going back. The movement from “what might have been” to “what has been”11 is not a fall to be lamented but the arc of creaturehood. The conversion of possibility into actuality is not a loss but a focusing. For every path taken, of course, another was not, and our mercurial souls will sometimes wander back to the fork in the road and wonder. But only stasis could have kept the options open, and for temporal beings, stasis is death.
“thrownness”: the way in which even the life I’ve made for myself, the accumulation of a thousand choices and decisions, still feels like a life I’ve been thrown into because, in some fundamental sense, the possibilities were also decided for me before I ever emerged on the scene.
William Faulkner’s insight: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
We are called to live forward, given our history, bearing both its possibilities and its entanglements. Faithfulness is not loyalty to a past but answering a call to shalom given (and despite) our past.
Every person who carries a Bible in their hands, a collection of books between two covers, is an heir to the discernment of Christian councils in the fourth century. Our battered Bibles are living relics of their work. So, too, the vast majority of Christians worldwide worship with a repertoire of practices bequeathed to us from centuries past, and our spiritual disciplines carry something of the heat and light of earlier saints in the desert. This temporal inheritance, carried in the artifacts and rituals of the church, is the tangible expression of what we call “catholicity.”
Avett Brothers’ song “We Americans.”
a tangible reminder that the creature comforts of many were consumed at the expense of fellow image bearers of God.
God, will you keep us wherever we go? Can you forgive us for where we’ve been? We Americans.
There is a sort of fascination with the past that is an act of deliberate forgetting: it’s called “nostalgia.” Religious communities are particularly prone to this. Faith is “handed down,” a matter of traditio, and hence faithfulness can be confused with preserving the past rather than having gratitude for a legacy meant to propel us forward.
The “past” that is pined for is always selected, edited, preserved in amber, and thus decontextualized, even if this past is invoked as marching orders for restoration and recovery.
Many forms of collective nostalgia demonize the present while luxuriating in a fabled past.
Such romanticism about the future is like nostalgia in negative. It is not hope but hubris.
why doomsdayism about the future often pairs well with nostalgia about the past).
When God can raise the dead, not even death is the end. Resurrection and forgiveness mean the future is always an open source of surprise.
