In this excellent essay by Alistair Roberts on Theopolis Institute we are asked to think about time.
How we think about time and act in time shapes our lives, yet most of us do not take "time" to consider its implications. With references to theologian James Jordan and others, Roberts encourages us to perceive time in our lives and through our creator.
It’s About Time - Alistair Roberts
"There are countless scholars who have helped me in my reading of various passages of Scripture. I have gleaned insights and keys from them that have unlocked texts that once perplexed me. However, no scholar has done so much to teach me how to read the Scripture more generally than James Jordan. From Jordan I have learned skills that I bring to every text that I read and an integrative theological vision which helps to hold them together.
Jordan’s reading of Scripture, and his thought more generally, has significant breadth to it and develops out of an array of influences. One finds a constellation of insights in Jordan, all of which can assist one in reading the Scripture. However, he has always had an attraction to bigger ideas that might serve to integrate one’s wider field of intellectual enquiry. For Jordan, figures like Cornelius Van Til (presuppositionalism), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (the cross of reality), David Dorsey/John Breck (chiastic structure), René Girard (the scapegoat mechanism), among several others have all offered radical insights that inform his approach as a whole. While Jordan’s thinking doubtless also draws upon the work of more narrowly-focused writers and their specific insights, big ideas have always been particularly important for it.
The effectiveness of Jordan in forming his readers’ entire posture of interpretation probably arises in large measure from his peculiar gifts of recognizing patterns (e.g., the Exodus pattern), developing interpretative heuristics (e.g., the priest, king, prophetic framework), and his synthesis and integration of a variety of big insights from others into an approach that offers powerful purchase upon the scriptures. There are many elements that constitute Jordan’s approach. If you have not already done so, I recommend that you read his most seminal work, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World, to learn some of its fundamentals.
Within the array of his insights and emphases, I think it is possible to identify some deeper common themes. The one that might be most deserving of attention is the part that time plays within Jordan’s theological vision and biblical hermeneutics. Along with a few other theologians and biblical scholars, Jordan has given me an appreciation of time and of temporal categories within theology.
Beyond Jordan, temporal categories were downplayed in much of the thinking to which I was exposed in my theological formation. Much modern theology, even biblical theology, is implicitly spatialized, approached as if it involved the consideration of the logical relationships between doctrines in a timeless space. Even when time is present, we may be dulled to it. For example, concepts such as ‘old covenant’ and ‘new covenant’, while referring to two ages, the second succeeding the first, can often be treated as if they were disconnected stable states of affairs to be juxtaposed as contrasting administrations. Within such approaches, there is a weak sense of the maturation of the one into the other or of the unfolding phases within each.
With the privileging of sight and space in modernity, temporal realities in theology have often been transposed into spatial categories or downplayed. Jordan’s work was the initial and primary impetus for me to give temporal categories a greater prominence in my theology. After Jordan, other theologians helped me to develop my thinking in this area—Jeremy Begbie, Catherine Pickstock, N. T. Wright, Geoffrey Wainwright, David Bentley Hart, Douglas Knight, Peter Candler, Moshe Halbertal, David Fohrman, among many others—but it was Jordan’s work to which I most often returned and to which I have always been most indebted. In him time was everywhere and, as I became attuned to it, its importance became increasingly apparent.
As moderns, our sense of time is typically formed by the clock, which divides time into discrete successive moments of uniform duration, with specific times identifiable according to a common system of measurement. Things such as timelines and our common quantitative durations of time can subtly spatialize time; the timeline, for instance, represents a period of time as uniform and present on a single axis. As our daily liturgies of labour are ordered by the clock, it is profoundly formative of our perception of time more generally. The measurement of time made possible by the clock certainly has its benefits. Sharing a set time with others and being able to measure its duration enables us to organize and synchronize activity to a degree that would be impossible otherwise. Yet the dominance of clock-time in our daily routines can leave us with a very stunted sense of time more generally. Indeed, time as it functions in theology is in almost all respects quite different from clock-time..." from the article: It’s About Time - Alistair Roberts
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