10.07.2007

Time

We're taking a break from the study of John's gospel (which we have been working through for more than a year) and spending the next 6 weeks in the book of Titus. John's message on Titus 1:1-4 today was particularly excellent. He was emphasizing the distinction between chronos (as the seasonal, ebb-and-flow perception of time) and kairos (as a critical moment, an in-breaking of God or a moment of realization that something significant has just or is about to occur).

John was describing our experience of chronos as being primarily a function of our observation of sequential movement. A 24-hour day represents one rotation of the earth on its axis; a 365 1/4
-day year the full rotation of the earth in its orbit around the sun. Days, Seasons, Years, Eras, Epochs, all find their markings in our perception of motion.

So this fuels the resurgence of a question I've been kicking around for about 20 years now: Is time (in the chronos sense) a thing? Is time anything? If time is our perception, our making sense, our attempt to accommodate and understand the sequence of movements macroscopic and microscopic, then are we perceiving something tangible which really is? Or are we merely putting the tangible motions into a sequential framework so we can describe it and conceive of it?

If time is not itself a thing, if it is merely our perception of actual things, then in what sense can we ever say that we are 'in time' or that God the Creator is 'outside of time'? Even if time is something, from where do we get the idea that it is something which is localized or spatial, something which one can be either inside or outside?

Is the statement commonly repeated in pop-theology that because God is infinite and eternal, that because he is the Creator of space and matter and all that is, that he is therefore outside of time a true statement? or even a helpful one? If time is perception and not a thing in itself, then the best we could say is that God's perception is infinite whereas ours is limited: our perception has a beginning but no end, while his perception has neither beginning nor end.

I apologize for getting so cosmological here. I'm pretty sure that no one else cares about this. But do any of you have thoughts on this?