Dear Theophilus, 

We touched on a topic in the last letter that seemed to have some curiosity with you and that is the question of time and the creation of the universe and its meaning. You asked to maybe discuss this and I bend to your wishes and will consider this topic in this letter.

What is time? This is a question that has tantalized man for many centuries but it has always remained elusive. It is so close to us, and we experience it so intimately but at the same time we find that we cannot grasp it and understand it as much as we would like to.

The time that we are most familiar with is the linear time that we experience during the course of our sojourn on earth. Time moves like an arrow from the past through the present into the future. This time we will refer to by the term chronos. Many a lament and song has been written about the passage of this time and the fact that it will never return. Associated with this concept of time is the idea of history and both history and linear time are concepts of the West. In the East, another view of time is held. Here, the concept of time is cyclical and time is represented by a circle. Things go around and return to be repeated, whether exactly or not is not totally clear. One can see where the idea for this model would come from. Many things in life are cyclical such as seasons, day and night and many other aspects of life. This would naturally lead to a view of time as a cycle which repeats certain patterns.

In science, time plays an important role being involved in equations describing motion and other properties of the universe. It should be pointed out, at the same time, that there are areas in science where the concept of time, in a sense, vanishes. At the very small level of particles smaller than an atom, in an area of physics called quantum mechanics, time becomes meaningless and you start to deal with time independent functions. From all this we can see that there are varied views on time and it is not easy to see which one is correct.

In Christianity, time plays an important role from the very beginning. In the book of Genesis, there is a promise made to Adam and Eve that they will be like gods. This promise is a lie because it fails to take into account, time. They thought they were to become like gods instantly, at that very time whereas the truth was that they would have to wait a good number of centuries for this to eventually become a possibility being opened through the Incarnation. Time plays a role in the fate of another important character in the Biblical drama, Judas. Judas was impatient, committing suicide before the final act of the tragedy he had set in motion was played out. He despaired because he saw his actions resulting in a dead end. If he had waited, he would have had the chance to know that the actions he had set in motion did not end in the tomb but in the Resurrection. There is an important lesson for all of us in these two examples. One of the things we are asked to do is to wait, sometimes in a darkness that seems impenetrable, but to wait just the same and the dawn comes.

Time is very much a mystery tied to the mystery that is us. Just as it is difficult for us to perceive who we really are so it is difficult for us to perceive what time really is. Chronos is a two edged sword for it brings with it decay and death, but, at the same time, it is a harbinger of possibilities. Time in other words is a gift given to us and many of us squander it very often grieving its rapid passage as it passes through our fingers like water.

Time is closely related to the world that we live in, a world that I think we are called on to love. Our interaction with the world, our understanding of the world has become irreversibly affected by science. What does it mean to us to gaze upward and realize that our sun is only 1 among billions? What does it mean to gaze into an electron microscope to perceive a world unbelievably small? In this respect we are very different from the generations before us - we do know so much more of the physical make up of our world. Science has now taken over and moved into areas which were once the domain of philosophy and religion such as those of time and space and matter. What it tells us is to marvel at the world around us, at its amazing complexity and beauty. We may seem like unimportant pin points but it is through us and our intellect that the vast spaces and microscopic subatomic world are observed, catalogued and studied.

Cosmology is a study of how the universe came to be and what its ultimate fate will likely be. There are various theories here. One, called the steady state theory, holds that the universe has always been and will always be. It is eternal with no agent causing it to come into being. This, however, is not the predominantly-held theory. The most accepted theory is the so-called big bang theory. The world came into existence at a certain point when an explosion of unimaginable proportions occurred. Now, where did this whatever exploded come from is not commented on by science. The evidence for this big bang is the presence in the universe of certain wavelengths of energy which were detected within the last 30 years. With the explosion, matter starts to form and time comes into existence. Thus time has a beginning and whether it has an end is still an open question. Some hold a pulsating view of the universe: it explodes, the various pieces fly apart until gravity takes over and everything comes crashing together to restart the whole process. In order for this to happen though, there must be a certain minimal density of matter throughout the universe in order to enable gravity to be strong enough to overcome the forces of the explosion which are driving the parts of the universe apart. Whether there is sufficient matter in the universe to cause this to happen is still an open question.

I must caution you, Theophilus, that to build one's faith on scientific theories is akin to building a house on a foundation of sand. These theories change and will change in the future and are poor vehicles for things which belong to eternity. The steady-state theory was popular in the fifties; the big bang theory is popular today.

Whereas there are theories about the mechanism as to how the universe came into being, there are far fewer theories as to what time is and how it came into being. Here, our faith instructs us that there are various categories of time. There is chronos, which we had discussed above, the linear time that we are most used to. But there is also a time called kairos - the moment that contains more than what is present in a moment of chronos and does not flow like chronos but is more akin to the concept of eternity. Eternity itself is an idea that has unnecessary baggage attached to it. We think of eternity as chronos extending into infinity but it is hardly this which is meant in the New Testament writings. For the New Testament, eternity is not just an infinite projection of time but has a quality associated with it. If we were to maybe make an analogy we could talk about chronos as being a line. Eternity is like a plane which contains the line and other factors and all the moments of the linear time. It has a quality about it which chronos doesn't. I think you appreciate how difficult it is to talk about time from what was said above. Just to illustrate the complexity of time I'd like to refer to what is called the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics. This says that certain pairs of properties, such as location and energy, sort of work in pairs, one affecting the other. If you were to determine the energy of an electron very accurately, then its energy measurement would be very inaccurate. You simply cannot have both the position and energy of an electron determined very accurately at the same time. Time falls into some of these pairs (time-energy, for example) and from this we see that time is somehow intrinsic to the world and yet, mysterious, defying explanation. This Principle, by the way, seems very strange, and it took a person like Einstein a while to accept it, but it has been tested many times and has been found to hold true. It almost seems to say that nature has a certain degree of mystery which defies any attempts to understand our world more precisely. Or, alternatively, the models that we are using and the mathematical approach that has so far been so powerful are inadequate to the task of describing the universe at this level. I would have to go so far as to say that we have gone as far as we can with the tools in our hands presently. We have to come up with a totally different approach if we are to make any significant headway in the future.

What we are called on to do in the Bible is to wait. This is an important but painful role assigned to us. We express our faithfulness and hoping in this waiting. For the Bible, time is not linear. Having lost this perspective, we have lost something important. The Bible measures time not by a line with slots in it, but it sees time in a picture of ripening, of fulness. The Bible doesn't give a hoot for "watch time" because the Bible realizes that clock time does not, and cannot, measure that which is important. In support of this, we can say that it was Einstein who said that for the physicist the past, the present, and the future are artificial subdivisions introduced by man into nature.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

Return to Index