How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

by James K.A. Smith

One might think, at first: the basic comportment to the Parousia is a waiting, and Christian hope (elpis) is a special case thereof. But that is entirely false! We never get to the relational sense of the Parousia by merely analyzing consciousness of a future event. The structure of Christian hope, which in truth is the relational sense of the Parousia, is radically different from all expectation.18

If you believe Christ is coming, the key question isn’t When? but How? The question is not How long have we got? but rather How should we live now, in light of that expectation? How will the future shape your present? How to live in light of this future?

Eschatology is primarily about how we occupy ourselves in the now, how we live in “the Time Being” in a way that bears witness to the reality of what we pray for when we long for the kingdom to come. That is why eschatology is more political than personal. An eschatology is a theology of public life, the life we share in common in the meantime.21

The revelation of God in Christ recalibrates humanity’s temporal compass,

and the calamitous present in which he believes God’s providence is at work.

This is not a puppet-master picture of providence but rather a sense of God’s Spirit as the breath of all creation, infusing, inspiring, sustaining, moving.

It can be easy to conflate “reading for providence” with an exercise in theodicy, as if trying to discern the Spirit’s movements in history were the same as justifying that history.

Rome, in his estimation, could only ever be unjust.

“An argument about whose blood is in the soil of this country is not an argument a white supremacist is going to win.”

Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.

Discernment is not a PR spin program for history. It is a prophetic endeavor that divines the future from the history we’ve been thrown into.

saeculum.

for Augustine the saeculum is an era, a chunk of history. The divine irruption in history that is the incarnation, cross, resurrection, and ascension—the Christ-event—becomes the Greenwich Mean of all history. In its shadow is the time in which we find ourselves: the era Augustine calls the saeculum, this age between cross and kingdom come.

we should expect pluralism.

these two “cities”

are distinguished by their loves, and the origin of the two cities is not creation but the Fall.

the earthly city did not begin with time; it began in time, and more specifically as a result of the Fall. The two cities are two fundamentally different ways of being a human community that are organized around two very different sorts of love. The earthly ci...

The city of God revolves around love of God and engenders sacrifi...

We will all find ourselves thrown into shared territories that are occupied by citizens of the earthly and heavenly cities who still need to figure out how to live together.

“Thy kingdom come,” it’s not here yet. That should undermine any temptation to identify a particular regime or government or party or policy or side or movement with the arrival of the kingdom—even if discernment also requires us to try to be attuned to movements that do bear the Spirit for a time and place.

the consequence of the Christ-event is a “‘desacralization’ of politics by the Gospel.”

Christians above all should not fall prey to the temptation to treat our meantime political identities as ultimate identities.

At the very end of the liturgical year we observe the feast of Christ our King, and the very next Sunday is the beginning of Advent.

In the feast of Christ the King we are reminded that the crucified God ascended to a throne while bearing his scars.

If Christ is King, then all earthly rulers have, in a sense, already been deposed—they are merely stewards in the meantime. They can make no ultimate claims on us. When King Jesus knows the number of hairs on your head, ...

Hope is a disposition toward the future that is at once expectant and dependent. It is entwined with faith because it trusts that the God of grace is a father who gives bread rather than stone (Matt. 7:9–11). And hope is bound to love because it is a form of desire.

The city of God is a gift that descends (Rev. 21:2), even if that city also takes up our faithful labors as anticipations of its coming

“How long, O Lord?” is the protest-question posed to God precisely because we’ve witnessed the inbreaking of the kingdom. So why, Lord, delay its distribution?

Maranatha! (“Come, Lord!”) is a cry that is half plea and half imperative.

Reinhold Niebuhr: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.38

Our frenetic busyness is so often a practical outworking of an unconscious despair, for it is a refusal of hope. It is a refusal of hope because it is, functionally, a refusal of trust and dependence. When I am frantically busy, I subtly (or not so subtly) am assuming that everything depends on me, as if I’m the one upholding the cosmos, as if the arrival of the kingdom depends on me.

I want to be a pastor who prays. I want to be reflective and responsive and relaxed in the presence of God so that I can be reflective and responsive and relaxed in your presence. I can’t do that on the run. It takes a lot of time. . . . It demands some detachment and perspective. I can’t do this just by trying harder. I want to be a pastor who has the time to be with you in leisurely, unhurried conversations so that I can understand and be a companion with you.39

One of the scandals of an eschatological orientation is that it makes room for rest despite everything that needs to be done. Sabbath is its own expression of hope.

a sense of trust and hope that God is always and ever acting in, around, beneath, and sometimes even in spite of our own labor. And so we can rest.

“Fear is not a Christian habit of mind.”41

O God of our ancestors, God of our people, before whose face the human generations pass away: We thank you that in you we are kept safe forever, and that the broken fragments of our history are gathered up in the redeeming act of your dear Son, remembered in this holy sacrament of bread and wine. Help us to walk daily in the Communion of Saints, declaring our faith in the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body. Now send us out in the power of your Holy Spirit to live and work for your praise and glory. Amen.

that the Lord of the star fields and Creator of the cosmos was attuned to the specificity and particularity of the histories we have endured in time, addressing the strange and perplexing ways we carry absence and loss in our heart and bones, the way a profound lack could exert so much power on our lives.

the eternal God understood what I had lost, what had been missing, what the locusts had eaten and left me bereft of. In Joel’s prophetic word I heard a promise of restoration attuned to my history—the promise of an abundant God not only making up for the lack but wantonly overflowing the cup.

It’s not that the locust didn’t rob me of something; but we eat in plenty now (Joel 2:26).

Redemption, here, does not sweep away a past; rather, Christ’s redemption gathers up the broken fragments and makes something of them. The God who saves is a mosaic artist who takes the broken fragments of our history and does a new thing: he creates a work of art in which that history is reframed, reconfigured, taken up, and reworked such that the mosaic could only be what it is with that history. The consummation of time is not the erasure of history. The end of all things is a “taking up,” not a destruction. “Time was not made for death but for eternity.”1

life, it seems like those histories go with us to heaven too. We will arrive in the kingdom of God carrying our stories. Indeed, if Christ’s resurrection is the firstfruits, we will arrive at the marriage supper of the Lamb with our scars. It’s hard not to imagine someone at that banquet of joy turning to ask, “Tell me about that scar,” and somehow, in ways that are unthinkable to me now, I will be able to revisit my history without pain or trauma, not because the memory card of my mind has been erased but because now I can see only the unique mosaic that is redeemed, rescued me, the tapestry that is us.

“I do not think him so intoxicated by that as to forget me, since you, Lord, whom he drinks, are mindful of us.”

good for a funeral

Nebridius will never not be someone who was Augustine’s friend.

There might be a sense in which primitivism is the default posture of American evangelicalism, which finds its legacy in revivalism. This stands in direct opposition to catholicity.

Humans are distinctly defined by their locatedness, as finite creatures who always live at the intersection of time and place. In that spirit, perhaps we could also describe Dasein as Dannsein, “being-then,” to indicate our locatedness in time.

This is perhaps odd and not uncontroversial, but let’s take a visceral example: the resurrected Jesus gets hungry and eats (Luke 24:43; John 21:12–15). Moreover, the hope of humanity is to be at the table for the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9). There is no digestion without change, and there is no change without time.