"It's About Time"

Those who know me know the impact C. S. Lewis has had on my thinking and theology. But perhaps the most influential idea I got from him was his simple statement that just because we live in time and space doesn’t mean God does (see Mere Christianity, “Time and Beyond Time”). We humans live life incrementally – one moment at a time. For us, life is arranged as a unidirectional series of moments: past, present, future. “One moment disappears,” he says, “before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each.” What he means is that we actually live in a tiny little piece of time-space (to use Einstein’s term) called “now,” and in the very act of saying “now,” “now” slips past and becomes “then.” Indeed, “past” and “future” refer to moments to which we have no access. Our access is limited to that tiny little moment called “now.” And notice: Because this is the way we experience time, we naturally assume that this is the way God experiences time too. But Lewis says that this is surely wrong:

Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty – and every other moment from the beginning of the world – is always the Present for Him.

Imagine, he says, that time were represented as a line with the points A, B, C, and D representing moments of time out of our lives. You couldn’t move on to “Point B” until you had finished with “Point A” or “Point D” until you had finished with “Point C.” But not so with God. He experiences the whole line at once and has equal access to every point on the line. There is no point on the line God must “pass” before moving on to the next. His life is not dribbled out in increments, one moment at a time, as ours is. He is present to every moment and has infinite time to spend (read “eternity”) on each.

A simple idea, but the implications are worth considering. Take “Incarnation” for example, the belief that “once upon a time” God became a man. “Well, who was running things up in the cosmos while God was human?” we ask. But notice: My question smuggles in the assumption that Jesus’ life as God was a piece taken out of God’s life as a whole – “Point C” lifted out of the whole line. That is, there was a time before God was Jesus, a time when God was Jesus, and a time after God was Jesus. That is, the Incarnation is a period or “point” in the history of God’s life. But if God doesn’t “live in time” like we do, then this kind of thinking is surely mistaken. God has no history because to have a history means that there are “points” on your timeline to which you have no access. As Lewis says: “You cannot fit Christ’s early life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time.” The mystery of the Incarnation is a timeless truth about God that all that we humans are – our weakness, our vulnerability, our ignorance, our pain, our suffering, our death – are somehow included in God’s life. Or as Paul says: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.”

And therein lies the real mystery of the Incarnation – He became what we are so that we might become what He is. Maybe, if we have the faith for it, our lives too won’t always be measured out one moment at a time. And when that day comes, we’ll say, “It’s about time!”