Breaking the Cycle of Time

Throughout early history, the world's religions shared a common theme: time moves in endless cycles. The goal of human existence was to understand and conform to those cycles. With the rise of Judaism 3,000 years ago, all that changed.

The Jews introduced the idea of linear time. The Jews did not abandon the idea of cyclical time, but they introduced the idea of the world moving from creation to completion of some sort. Most cultures had creation stories, but they were usually fantastic stories intended as metaphors for seeing patterns in life. The creation story in Genesis 1 opens, saying there was a beginning and created all that is. Without denying the theological primacy of the story, it is important to recognize how non-metaphorical the presentation of creation is. The world had a beginning, and God created it. (For more on the concept of cyclical time, see my post History Doesn't Repeat itself, But it Rhymes.)

If Judaism introduced linear time, Christianity introduced the idea of progression on the time continuum. The Jewish view has been that a messiah is coming who will restore Israel, but there is no sense of history "improving" until the Messiah comes. Christianity has always had within it the idea of the "Kingdom of God" spreading throughout the world until the day when Christ ushers in his Kingdom. The "wheat and the tares" will grow until the coming "harvest."

Scripture mentions the idea of a millennium when Christ will reign. Some believed that the Kingdom would spread, Christ would return, and a 1,000-year reign would begin. Others believed that the Kingdom would spread, eventually filling the earth and ushering in a millennium of peace and prosperity, at the end of which Christ would physically return. Still, others have seen the millennium as a metaphorical construct to convey theological truths.

During the first centuries of the church, there was great persecution. Christians had a pre-millennial view of Christ's return, believing the world would deteriorate until Christ returned (in the near future) and established the millennium. With the conversion of Constantine and the Christianization of Rome, many began to believe that the Kingdom of God would expand throughout the world, redeeming creation and humanity until Christ returned.

Throughout most of the Christian era, there has been a belief in linear time combined with progress until Christ's return. There have been eras where pessimistic pre-millennialism has dominated for a time. These were usually in eras of rapid change and great uncertainty. The era just before 1,000 C.E. was one era. The last decades of the Twentieth Century have been another. Nevertheless, the ideas of linear time and progress are unique to Christianity.

What has this to do with ideas, justice, theology, work, or any of a host of other issues that confront our daily lives? I will get to that shortly, but first, I want to summarize the dominant eschatological perspectives in my next post.

Comments

[will spotts]

Excellent post -- particularly about the ancient cyclical view versus the Jewish and Christian views.

I would point out one item in the progress motiff: Bothe the wheat and the tares grow. Yes, Christianity makes progress, but so do those forces that work against that progress. The question this raises is this: since both good and evil progress and are interwined with progress, how much of progress can be regarded as good?

[Michael Kruse]

Thanks Will.

"since both good and evil progress and are interwined with progress, how much of progress can be regarded as good?"

I read somewhere that "tares" look identical to wheat as they grow. Even the trained eye has difficulty distinguishing the two. You can't tell them apart until the come to full "fruit" and the heads unfold. So "What is progress?" is indeed the question. As I will say in couple of more posts, I think the concept of "shalom" gives us some insight but how easily we see what we want to see from our culture and point in history.