The Concept of Time in Prophecy

In a short article it is difficult to present more than basic thoughts on so vast a problem as “prophetic time.” This subject has been our major study at the National Center of Scientific Research for several years.

One’s concept of “time” in turn determines his concept of the world, of existence, of destiny. Like revelation, it has a natural meaning (the Greek rational and humanist) or the supernatural, gained from divine inspiration.

The Hellenistic Concept

Greek humanism is historically responsible for the man-centered thinking that governs all civilization. Most authoritatively represented by Plato and Aristotle, it is devoid of revelation in the supernatural biblical sense, and is basically speculative. By metaphysical research the realities of “time” and of “eternity” are resolved as problems of being. Since in this speculative system God is the object and man the central subject, the knowledge of God, the relation of time to eternity, the nature of time, everything, in fact, becomes an ontological problem.

In Platonic thought time is simply a mirror of eternity. It reflects the eternal, though itself not eternal. It is only an abstraction that breaks into the operation of the non-eternal cosmos, to call to mind periodically the eternal of which the temporal is the moving image. The circle is another Greek picture of time. Unrelated to a non-temporal eternity, and inserted into the cycle of ceaseless cosmic repetitions, the soul is a slave not only to its body and to the cosmos, but to time.

Greek thought, therefore, associates the time cycle with spatial limitation, as well as with corruption and destruction. The soul’s longing for eternity is simply an unreflective intuition; since the soul is situated beyond time, any insertion into time is ontologically contradictory. The Greek notion thus invalidates all thought of divine appearance and incarnation in time. It spoils any Christian possibility of salvation and of eternal life.

Professor Oscar Cullmann has convincingly shown the essential conflict between the Greek and biblical time concepts (Christ et le temps, Delachaux et Niestle, 1947). Other writers such as Holscher, G. Schrenk, Jean Guitton, M. Doerne, G. Delling, likewise indicate that biblical time can be translated diagramatically only as a line (and not as a closed circle) which begins at creation and whose end is in God. The center of this line is Christ. The end points, whether historically determined or not, are moments chosen by God (kairoi), and fixed in the history of revelation (e.g., creation and parousia), as major landmarks in the time expanse called aeon in the New Testament. These prescribed points relate to infinity in two ways: from the point of view of the other world they are located in terms of creation; from that of this world, they are located in terms of the parousia. Without this no idea of time would be possible.

The straight and ascending characteristic of time (whose crucial point is Jesus Christ) is significant, Cullmann asserts, for both prophetic time and New Testament time specifically. But we must reject his assertion that Christianity and Judaism locate the imaginary center of the time-line in two radically different positions (p. 58). If we consider the situation not from the view of mere history but from the customary view of revelation (that is to say, prophetically), it is impossible to speak of different positions. We must speak rather of different perspectives.

For the prophet whose message is essentially “Christo-centric,” the imaginary center of the time line was future. For the Christian, the center is in the past. One is the perspective of anticipation, the other, the perspective of fulfillment. But Christ yet remains for both the center point of time.

The harmony of biblical revelation demands the same time center for both Old and New Testament economies. It must be located in the future (prophetic perspective) and in the past (Christian perspective).

Thereby we show that the great moments set forth by prophetic history are none other than the “times” that Jesus was to fulfill (Gal. 4:4). What are these times? They are the incidents, the acts, the circumstances sprung from a divine decree, generally associated with men chosen by God, whose purpose (either plainly or typologically expressed) is always the fulfillment of the plan of salvation of the world.

The prophetic time line—in the past, in the future, as in the present—is always the line of Christ. He who was predestined before the foundation of the world for his role of mediator, as the divine Logos ushered in at creation the line that he carried forward through the prophetic mystery of the old covenant, and through his incarnation and glorification. This line will terminate at the end of the present world with the establishment of the new heavens and the new earth, where God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

Unity of revelation is assured in Jesus Christ, “the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13). It is in this train of thought that Calvin wrote: “The covenant made with the ancient fathers in its substance and truth, is so like ours that one can say it is one with it. It differs only in the mode of administration.… So that nothing will hinder the promise made in the Old and in the New Testaments from remaining always the same, and Jesus Christ from being the unique foundation of one and of the other” (Institutes II, ch. 10, 2, and 11, 1). We can, indeed, speak of Christ as the crucial Center and the sovereign norm for the history of revelation.

Prophecy And Time

Contrary to the Greek cycle theory, the linear concept of time would say in relation to prophetic thought:

Time is not an abstraction. It is not a question of a spatially conceived here-below and next world ontologically irreconcilable. It is rather the past, the present and the future at whose center revelation is accomplished without breaking continuity.

Time is not opposed to God. It has its source in God. God is the originator of time. He is the beginning of it (Gen. 1:1). He is master of it (cf. Ps. 75:3; 102:14; Hab. 2:3; Deut. 2:21; Exod. 13:10; 18:26, etc.). He is the end of it (Rev. 22:13).

Time is not opposed to eternity. Revelation summons the insertion of eternity into time. The message of salvation implies the mystery of the incarnation. Between eternity and time there is no absolutely qualitative difference.

The expression eternity (olam) traverses all prophetic literature; it reveals the relationship of unbroken time (God’s unlimited time) to portions of time brought about by this very unbroken, unlimited time. (Concerning this concept of olam, see H. Sasse, Theologischen Worterbuch, Zum N.T., T.I-).

Prophecy does not know a God outside of time. Because it inserts God into time, it calls man to participate in the eternity which is the prerogative of God’s time.

Whatever may be the aspects common to our time and to eternity, God alone can comprehend the full extent and know the measure of time. For he alone reigns over time. In his infinite and eternal being he does not permit man to reign over time. Ability to live only moment by moment with no power to embrace the totality of times that comprise the stages of sanctification, the stages toward completeness, toward perfect access to God, this is the trial and enigma of time.

Although God enters our time (for he is Spirit and he is God), man (for he is carnal) cannot yet enter into the time of God. While God has placed eternity (olam) into the heart of man (the original Hebrew says expressly: “God has placed eternity [olam] in their heart” [Eccl. 3:11]), the problem is that of its realization by faith. Notwithstanding certain joys of eternity already experienced, man is for the present withheld from fullest realization of promised blessings (salvation, justice, happiness).

Certainly this ordeal is of an entirely different nature from that which may haunt Platonic minds. For the Bible believer, the trial is of a purely spiritual and moral nature. It is a thirst to possess, a longing of the soul created in God’s image and regenerated, destined to live in his presence and to partake of his glory (cf. Deut. 14:2; 1 Pet. 2:9–10). The believer knows that after death he will attain to his glorious calling. He can already live it mysteriously by faith. But the impossibility of living it presently in its absolute meaning is distressing to him. The circumstances of time, the moments imposed by limitations of space and corporeality account for man’s longing after God.

“Oh, if you would rend the skies and descend!” (Isa. 64:1). This is the cry of the prophet who knows that God surmounts the limitations of our time, that he consents “to descend” from above into our hereness, and that the “rending” of the heavens will be actually consummated in Christ (cf. Isa. 53).

“My soul within me languishes in waiting” (Job 19:27). This is Job’s confession, who seemingly unjustly tested physically and materially knows, nevertheless, that his God is accessible to him, that he will see him with his eyes when liberated from the flesh, that this “redemptor” God (Goel) will be gracious to him (cf. Job 19:25–28).

Between the sighing of Job or of Isaiah, who interpret the believer’s longing for the destiny to which God invites him, and the Greek philosophers’ unanswered plea for liberation from an eternal time cycle empty of God, looms the gulf separating followers of the biblical God offered in Jesus Christ from the followers of human reason which expires in its impossible quest of a God in its image. Here below, under restrictions of the flesh and of temporality, the believer may suffer and weep. But he does not grieve as those without hope (1 Thess. 4:13). He knows that eternity will transcend the limitations of time.

Dr. Andre Lamorte served for 15 years as Dean of the Faculty and as Professor of Theology at Aix-en-Provence in France. He holds the Th.D. degree from Montpellier and in 1954 was named attache to the National Center of Scientific Research.

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