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

by James K.A. Smith

You could say there are no latecomers in the communion of the saints, which is just to say that all of us are latecomers to the arrival of a hidden God. This eternalizing of the historical and historicizing of the eternal at once sacralizes time and flattens chronos because it is “the moment”—kairos—that makes all the difference. Thus Kierkegaard sees the God who grants the condition as the reconciler of all generations.14 God is no respecter of ages. To repeat Annie Dillard’s phrase, “the absolute is available to everyone in every age” insofar as both the contemporary follower in AD 33 and the follower-at-second-hand in 1843 are in immediate relationship with the Absolute. God is as near to the twenty-first-century disciple as to the medieval saint. And the medieval peasant is as near to God as the first-century apostle.