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

by James K.A. Smith

Reflection is hard, especially in a culture bent on distraction and superficiality. If this book offers some philosophers as guides for such an undertaking, that’s only because philosophy is a perennial invitation to reflect on how we live—to cultivate an “examined life,” as Socrates put it.

Slowing down is how we learn to notice what we usually speed past.

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. They have never considered the archaeological strata in their own souls. They live as if hatched rather than born, created ex nihilo rather than formed by a process.

This temporal delusion characterizes too much of Christianity and too many Christians (and not a few Americans).

A lot of contemporary Christianity suffers from spiritual dyschronometria—an inability to keep time, a lack of awareness of what time it is. Too many contemporary Christians look at history and see only a barren, textureless landscape. We might think of this as the temporal equivalent of color blindness—a failure to appreciate the nuances and dynamics of history. We can’t discern why when makes a difference. We don’t recognize how much we are the products of a past, leading to naivete about our present. But we also don’t know how to keep time with a promised future, leading to fixations on the “end times” rather than cultivating a posture of hope.

This temporal tone deafness is a feature of the view from nowhen that characterizes too much of contemporary Christianity. We think biblical ideas are timeless formulas to be instituted anywhere and everywhere in the same way. While we rightly entrust ourselves to a God who is the same today, yesterday, and forever, we mistakenly imagine this translates into a one-size-fits-all approach to what faithfulness looks like. We are blind to our own locatedness, geographically, historically, temporally. Even expressions of Christianity that seem to be fixated on time and history are, ironically, nowhen renditions of the faith that believe they are above time and history because they’ve been granted access to a God’s-eye view of it all.

But, in fact, the charts and predictions manifest a Christianity that believes it is above history. History is the regrettable grind of waiting, the churn of degeneration, the countdown of demise. Long chunks of history, including a long phase of Christianity between the death of the apostles and the momentous 1928 insights of John Nelson Darby, are devoid of the Spirit, eras of disillusion, superstition, and deception. Instead of discerning history, dispensationalism is a nowhen Christianity that mostly demonizes history.

But the question isn’t simply what’s true; the question is what needs to be said and done now, in this place and in this moment given this particular history. 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.

Being mortal means being temporal.

We, both individually and collectively, are products of a contingent history. Our identities are bound up with roads taken and not.

To face the spiritual significance of history is to contend with ghosts.

I won’t know who I am until I know when I am.

The miracle that puzzled Nicodemus, that should astound us, 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.

In the spirit of memento mori, consider this book an invitation to the discipline of what we might call memento tempori. Remember you are temporal. Keep your history daily before you. 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.

The paradigm of this intersection of time and eternity is the incarnation of God in Christ—the moment that is the fulcrum of human history. The intersection of time and eternity makes a difference for both. In history we see the contrails of the Spirit’s movement.

Bouwsma emphasizes “that Christianity is something that happened, and not a theory or an explanation or a set of doctrines.” Because Christianity is fundamentally a “happening,” we rightly understand it only in terms of story.

Being a Christian, then, is not so much a matter of believing something about God as much as living in light of this event’s cascading effects on history. Christian faith is ongoing participation in the Christ-event which continues to rumble through human history. Christianity is less a what and more a how, a question of how to live given what has happened in Christ.

Thus Heidegger offers a unique definition of “faith.”

Faith, he’s saying, is a how, a way of being, a “form of life” that is primarily a call to live “in” the historical event of the Crucified—the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate God.

Living “into” the history of revelation—living into the historical occurrence of the crucified God—is the call of the Christian life. But that requires a kind of historical consciousness that is eviscerated by too many forms of Christianity that amount to systematic forgetting.

What I’m calling the art of spiritual timekeeping—living out the faith with a disciplined temporal awareness—is informed by four fundamental convictions. First, spiritual timekeeping is the working out of our creaturely finitude as creatures embedded in time (what Augustine described as our being “conditioned by time”).

Second, spiritual timekeeping reflects a sense of time shaped by covenant—a promise made in history reverberates through subsequent time.

Third, spiritual timekeeping is nourished by Jesus’s promise that the Spirit will guide us into all truth across time (John 16:13).

Finally, spiritual timekeeping is animated by the future. Such a futural orientation we call “hope.”

The end-times countdown is a decline narrative: the clock is ticking to the rapture; everything in the meantime is just time endured before the escape pod descends. In contrast, spiritual timekeeping tries to discern where the Spirit’s restoration is already afoot in creation’s groaning.

In nowhen forms of Christianity, the watchword is “preservation”; faithfulness is understood as the prolongation and preservation of what has been (often oblivious to how recent their version of “the fundamentals” is). In other words, in nowhen Christianity, faithfulness is a matter of guarding against change.

In spiritual timekeeping, the watchword is “discernment”; faithfulness requires knowing when we are in order to discern what we are called to. In nowhen forms of Christianity, faithfulness is equated with sustaining a stasis; spiritual timekeeping, in contrast, is characterized by a dynamism of keeping time with the Spirit.

one of Husserl’s key insights: to be is to have been, and to have been is to have bumped up against others who rub off on us. They leave marks we might not always see. More than marks: they leave dents and deposits. Or they drill wells that become underground reservoirs from which we drink even if we don’t realize it.

I don’t always know what I remember and hope. I am not always aware of what I carry and what I anticipate. The measure of my “I” is always broader than this now of which I am conscious. Every human, as a temporal being, is something like an icon whose possibilities are illuminated by the halo of past and future.

My history makes me “me.” The nexus of habitualities that is “me” is utterly distinct, even if I’ve shared a world alongside a million others. Like my fingerprint or my gait or my retinal map, my temporal halo is a distinct signature of my existence.

Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweaters we hide behind; some of us still experience the world as if exposed. The question isn’t whether we have a style but which style we’ve (unconsciously) adopted given our histories. We wear time.

A feature of temporality that we either downplay or resist is the profound contingency of our existence.10 When we say something is “contingent,” we simply mean that it might not have been, doesn’t have to be, and could have been otherwise. And that is true of the entirety of the created cosmos, brought into existence by the free act of a bountiful, loving God. All of creation might not have been. That doesn’t make creation random or arbitrary, only contingent.

Our past is not what we’ve left behind; it’s what we carry. It’s like we’ve been handed a massive ring of jangling keys. Some of them unlock possible futures. Some of them have enchained our neighbors. We are thrown into the situation of trying to discern which is which. 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.