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The Christian Understanding of Time

Emil Brunner

Scottish Journal of Theology / Volume 4 / Issue 01 / March 1951, pp 1 - 12

DOI: 10.1017/S0036930600002301, Published online: 02 February 2009

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Emil Brunner (1951). The Christian Understanding of Time. Scottish
Journal of Theology, 4, pp 1-12 doi:10.1017/S0036930600002301

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THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME
by THE REV. PROFESSOR EMIL BRUNNER

npHE Christian understanding of time is characterised by an

JL event which is the very centre of the Christian message,
and of which it is said that it happened once and for all. This
ephapax is evidently an essential part of the theology of St. Paul
and of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Christian conceives of
time like everything else from this centre, i.e. from Jesus Christ,
and therefore it is from this centre that our reflection upon the
essence of time has to start. This must be stated explicitly be-
cause another point of departure has been suggested by tradi-
tional theology. Certainly it was an act of great intuition on
the part of St. Augustine when in his Confessions he dared, for
the first time in history, to put forward the idea that the world
was neither timeless and eternal, nor created at a certain point
in the time-series, but that the world and time were created
together. Therefore if the world and time have the same be-
ginning in creation, it becomes meaningless to ask what God
did before the creation of the world. The whole schema of before
and after, the framework of time, cannot be regarded as existing
before creation, but as coming into being with creation, itself
a temporal fact. We can hardly overestimate the depth of this
audacious idea and cannot but wonder at the genius of the
thinker who fifteen hundred years ago anticipated the most
recent results of astro-physics which followed from Einstein's
theory of relativity on the one hand and Planck's quantum-
physics on the other hand. In Augustine's mind this idea that
time is co-extensive with the world was an intuition gained not
from scientific data but from his Christian faith. It followed
from the fact that he took in earnest the centre of the Christian
message—the unique event of the revelation and reconciliation
of God in Jesus Christ. That is why we have to start with this
and not with Augustine's idea of creation.
Others besides Christians talk about once-and-for-all or
unique events. Every good historian (that is to say, every his-
torian who knows what history is as distinguished from nature)
2 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
understands his proper object, the historical event, to be more
or less unique. The processes of nature as they appear to us
all have a cyclic character—day and night, summer and win-
ter, life and death—and are therefore characterised by recur-
rence and repetition. Historical facts, however, and particularly
eminent historical events, are not characterised by a cyclic but
by a forward-moving pattern. In mathematical terms, they
may be described by a straight line rather than by a curve re-
turning to its starting point. Historical events are unique even
if they have some resemblance to each other. Many parallels
may be drawn between the lives of Alexander the Great, Julius
Caesar and Napoleon, and yet each of them is unique not only
by his character but also by the circumstances of the epoch in
which he lived and by the factors which determined his actions.
What is true of these great figures and events, is true of all
historical life.
True as this may be, I want to make two remarks about
such a characterisation of historical events. First of all, this
conception of history is not self-evident. In our age when
natural science is predominant over historical thinking the ten-
dency of historians seems to be rather the opposite. Like scien-
tists they tend to state historical laws, parallels, and analogies,
and therefore to emphasise the element of regularity in his-
torical phenomena rather than that of uniqueness. We recall
also that this idea of uniqueness or onceness in history was not
present in antiquity which on the whole was dominated not by
the historical but by quite a different way of thinking, the cos-
mological and mythical. The guiding idea was not the straight
line but the circle of ever-recurring nature-processes. If we re-
member that one of the most powerful thinkers of modern
times, who was a historian by profession, Frederick Nietzsche,
believed that he had found the secret of the world in the idea
of eternal recurrence (which for him included history), we be-
come aware of the fact that the idea of uniqueness in history
is in itself historical. That suggests to us that this conception
of history as that which concerns unique events is itself of
Christian origin.
In the second place, I want to point to the fact that his-
torical events in general, taken by themselves, are unique only
in a very relative sense. That is why it is possible to apply to
 THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME 3
history the ideas of regularity, repetition, law and so on, al-
though with perhaps less success than in the field of nature.
At any rate it is true also that there are regularities, similarities,
parallels in history which we cannot ignore any more than
uniqueness. What we generally call history, is, to put it crudely,
a mixture of uniqueness and regularity. That is to say, history
is the field of relative uniqueness, but never of absolute once-
ness. It belongs to the structure of creaturely being that it is
always both generic and individual. If in the realm of history,
as distinguished from nature, the element of uniqueness pre-
vails, it is because here human personality enters the scene, and
with it something which nature does not know: decision. It is
to this element that the good historian will give particular at-
tention. History is the field of decisions—that is its distinction
from nature and that is the reason why uniqueness or onceness
plays such a significant part.
These decisions, however, are very different in kind, and
have different degrees of uniqueness. The marriage of a young
couple is doubtless an important decision for both parties, but
for the historian it is just one of those everyday banalities which
happen thousands, even millions of times (apart of course from
specially important marriages such as that which united the
house of Hapsburg with the house of Aragon). They may be
mentioned by the family-chronicler, but not by the historian.
On the other hand we speak of a primary historical event which
has far-reaching circumstances, such as the conquest of Asia
by Alexander, or the break-down of the feudal system through
the French Revolution. Such events are unique and decisive
in a much higher degree than ordinary events. But even they
are only relatively unique. In a vast historical perspective, as
in Professor Toynbee's monumental work, even these colossal
events of the most decisive character lose much of their unique
character, for they are similar to events in other epochs or in
other civilisations. This relativity seems to belong to the very
essence of history, as of every creaturely human being.
It is quite understandable, therefore, that secular historical
thought is scandalised at the Christian message that in Jesus
Christ something has happened which is absolutely decisive for
all time and for all men. Such an Absolute within the relativity
of history would mean the breaking of historical continuity and
4 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
indeed the disruption of the framework of history. Historical
continuity excludes absolute onceness, because continuity pre-
supposes relativity. By speaking in such terms the secular his-
torian or philosopher becomes an unwilling witness to the Chris-
tian faith, for it is just this disruption of the historical continuum
which is the content of the Gospel. That this disruption of the
framework of history took place in the midst of the relativity
of history, without at the same time destroying empirical his-
torical continuity, is precisely what the Prologue of the Fourth
Gospel asserts in the words: "The Word became flesh." It be-
longs to the Incarnation of the Word that He entered into the
relativity and non-uniqueness of history. But that the divine
Word actually became flesh means that this event, which em-
pirically belongs to the relativity of history and which empiric-
ally is unique only in a relative sense, is yet absolutely decisive
and absolutely unique. The "flesh" can be seen by everybody;
the so-called Jesus of history is an object of secular historical
research, like Julius Caesar. He is part of the historical con-
tinuum. But the Logos, the Son of God, cannot be seen except
by those to whom it is given by faith. It is only for the believer,
for the Christian historian, that Jesus of Nazareth can be seen
as the Son of God, the Saviour, and that His cross is not merely
the death of a martyr for the truth, like the death of Socrates,
but God's redeeming work for all mankind, and therefore the
turning-point in all history.
If Jesus is the One to whom the New Testament bears wit-
ness, and if what He has accomplished by His life, suffering,
and death is what the Apostles say it is, then Jesus is Unique in
the absolute sense and His work is the once-and-for-all and
absolutely decisive event. Either redemption never happens,
or it happens but once and cannot be repeated. As the Apostles
say, it is i<f>' ana$. That Jesus and His work are what the New
Testament says, only faith knows to be the truth, but in this
very faith man is given to participate in the unique. In this
faith man's existence, inasmuch as it is existence in Christ and
with Him, becomes new. The character of his temporal exis-
tence undergoes a fundamental change—and "fundamental" in
this context is to be understood in the strictest sense. In every
man's life there are events which change its character to a con-
siderable degree. There are perhaps two or three such events
 THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME 5
of which he would say: This has changed my life completely
and given it a new meaning. But strictly speaking this is not
true, because all these changes lie within the plane of relativity.
Even such changes as marriage, loss of all fortune, complete
change in external circumstances, or even a new outlook on
life, all fail to alter the main fact: that man is a sinner and that
he must die. Through faith in Jesus Christ it is just these two
things which are changed: before God I am no longer a sinner
but a saint; I shall not die but live with Christ eternally. "If
any man be in Christ he is a new creature: old things are passed
away; behold, all things are become new." That word of St.
Paul is distinguished from all similar expressions by the fact
that it is to be understood not in a relative but in an absolute
sense.
We must now ask how from this point of view the problem
of time and temporality presents itself. That is a question for
endless discussion which no book, much less a lecture, could
ever exhaust. All I can do here is to give a few hints or a
few thoughts taken almost at random out of an inexhaustible
fulness.
In the first place, faith in Jesus Christ gives to history an
end or a goal—that applies to the history of the individual as
well as to the history of humanity. It is impossible to believe
in Jesus Christ without believing in that end, and an actual
end at that, not some merely ideal construction, a point in the
infinite distance like that in which parallels meet. It is in this
latter asymptotic sense that the idealist belief in progress speaks
of the infinite end of human becoming. The Christian end,
however, will be reached, or rather will reach us, individually
and universally, at some definite moment. That is the point at
which this earthly life ceases, and eternal life begins; when with
this earthly life all weakness, ambiguity, contradiction, and rela-
tivity which characterise our present existence will cease, and
a completely new life without sin and death will begin. We
can express this new life and its beginning only in temporal
terms, indeed only in negations of temporal characteristics. It
is an existence which is radically different from our temporal
existence here and now, for then we shall possess the absolute
and eternal which now we possess only by faith, not in its
broken or paradoxical form, but in immediate vision, in the
6 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
wholeness and perfection from which all that is relative is ruled
out. Time is then fulfilled, and that fulfilment is Eternal Life
in communion with God and with one another in Jesus Christ.
From the point of view of Christ, however, time has not
only an end but a beginning. Time belongs to the world, and
the world is created in and with time. That was the grand idea
of Augustine of which we have already spoken not as a specu-
lation but as an intuition of faith derived from its recognition
of the truth in the onceness of the "Christ-event". From the
point of view of the "Christ-event" we can see that the world
and time belong together, and, if I may speak as a child, that
they are equally old. Where there is world there is time. Before
creation there can be neither time nor world. Augustine here
employs a notion only recently introduced again by modern
physics. Time exists only where there are time-measurements,
or, as Einstein used to say, where there are watches. The
watches of the physicists are the stars. Where there are no
stars, no chronometers, there is no time. That was the thought
of St. Augustine more than fifteen hundred years before Ein-
stein, but he conceived of it because he believed in Jesus Christ.
From this angle we may answer the question, "What was there
before creation?", in two ways: (i) This is a meaningless ques-
tion, inasmuch as before creation there was no before and after,
there was no time; or (2) "In the beginning was the Word."
That is, before creation, there was the thought and will of God,
not some abstract thought and will, but the personal Logos, the
Son united with the Father. Before creation, there was God
alone, the Triune God.
Time then has a beginning and an end, but the beginning
is not the same as the end. Again it was Augustine who was
the first Christian thinker to express this idea, though the first
indication of it is found in Paul's antithesis between the First
and the Last Adam. The beginning of time is the creation of
the world, of this material, temporal, relative, creaturely world.
The end of time, however, is the end of this world and the
beginning of eternity, which is the fulfilment of the creature.
It is by this sharp distinction between beginning and end that
the mythological notion of endless recurrence is overcome.
Pagan mythology is based on the equation of the beginning
with the end. Urzeit gleicht Endzeit. It is just because the end
 THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME 7
is the same as the beginning that the whole process is an eternal
recurrence, an endless cyclic movement. Only when the end
is different from the beginning, does history become a straight
line and not a circle. Then history becomes real history. The
world moves from a beginning to an end and history has an
irreversible time-character. It can be spoken of as a one-way
road,or described in terms of a "time-arrow" as bythe physicists
who derive their notion of temporal irreversibility from the
second law of thermodynamics, the principle of entropy. Time
is truly historical and not pseudo-historical, mythical, or natural
because it is non-recurrent, linear and not circular. It is no
accident, therefore, that it was only in Christianity that time
and history were taken seriously and became objects for philo-
sophical thought, while Greek philosophy gave no attention to
them. It is only from the point of view of the absolutely unique
that it is possible to distinguish history from nature, by seeing
the essence of the historical event in the unique as opposed to
the typical or the general.
In the second place, it is not only the character of world-
time which is determined by belief in Jesus Christ, but also the
character of the life-time of individual man. In order to under-
stand this we may well start with two alternatives, opposed to
each other. There is one conception of life according to which
man "never has time", and another according to which he
"always has time". The first is that of modern, Western man.
His life is marked by constant unrest, by a sort of time-panic.
He has no time, or never has time, because he does not know of
Eternity. Because he knows only the temporal, he wants to
finish everything within his own life-time. He is pursued by
the fear of a closed door. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die." This is the man who is always looking at his watch,
who has to have the exact radio-time and must carry his watch
on his wrist, who is time-crazy, and therefore never has time.
This is Western, materialistic man. His opposite number is the
mystical or Eastern man. He always has time, because time
for him is no reality. Eternity alone is real, and the temporal
world is mere appearance. If for the Western man material
temporality is everything, for the mystical Eastern man it is
nothing. That is why time is worthless for him. It is unreal.
Why should he bother about time when it is maya, illusion?
8 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
The Christian has another attitude to the world and to
time. God has put man into this world, and into the time-
process. He has given him both, world and time, but both in
their limitation. Further, within time and within the world
God has given man the Christ and thereby makes man's time
the time of decision and trial. Therefore time within a Chris-
tian rife is characterised by passionate tension, which stands in
marked contrast to the disinterestedness of the Eastern mystic.
At the same time the Christian is free from the time-panic of
Western materialism, because though he lives in time the Chris-
tian has his base in Eternity. He lives in time as one who be-
longs to Eternity, and so he stands both in time and above time.
His slogan is paradox: wait and hasten, hasten and wait. As
one who lives in Christ he stands already at the end or the goal.
On the other hand, as long as he lives in the flesh he has not
yet reached the end, but moves toward it. "Not as though I
had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow
after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am appre-
hended of Christ Jesus." The Christian's relation to time, then,
is neither that of panic nor that of indifference, but a para-
doxical unity of freedom and intense concern in the time-
process.
In the third place, we must look more closely at what is
meant by the end of time. That time has an end, does not mean
that all which is and was will in time be annihilated. Eternity
is not meant to be a mere negation of temporality but its ful-
filment. Since God Himself has come into time, He has united
time with His own Eternity. God has, so to speak, pledged
Himself to time inasmuch as He has pledged Himself to tem-
poral man. The Incarnation of the eternal Son of God means
also His Intemporation. "When the fulness of time came, God
sent forth His Son." In Jesus Christ God has tied together the
time-process and His eternal Kingdom. With a slight change
in the words we might make use of the well-known saying of
Irenaeus: "God has become temporal that temporal man might
become eternal." When we say that Eternity is the end or the
goal, that is not a negation of time, but merely the negation of
its negations. Eternal life is not Platonic timelessness, but ful-
filled time. Eternal life is not the monotony of the once-and-
for-all, but communion with the All-mighty God, who in Him-
 THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME 9
self is not lonely, but is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Just as
the Biblical idea of God is not the idea of the abstract Absolute,
but the Triune Personal God, so the Biblical idea of Eternity
is not abstract timelessness, but the fulfilment of time. What
does that mean?
Eternal life is not extinction, but the perfection of the di-
vinely created humanity, both individually and universally.
Eternal life as the idealists or pantheists see it, is, whatever it
may be, not individual eternal life, but a kind of dissolution
of individuality in something universal. This idea is foreign to
Biblical eschatology. It is in conflict with the personalism of
the Biblical idea of God and of His relation to man. God does
not aim at unity, but at communion. The Biblical figure of
eternal life is the festal meal of communion, where men sit down
together with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the Father's table.
God does not want the individual face to disappear, but to
transform it through Jesus Christ into the perfect image of God.
Likewise, God does not want to annihilate the results of temporal
history and life. He merely wants to annihilate their negations,
sin, death, imperfection, suffering, etc. "If any man build upon
this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay stubble;
every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall
declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall
try every man's work of what sort it is. And if any man's work
abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.
If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he
himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire." The Church of Christ,
the Body ofJesus, shall not be destroyed, but shall be perfected
beyond history.
Finally, we must inquire into the relation between the form
of time and Eternity. We start from the fact that according to
the New Testament there is something which the Christian ex-
periences in time and which remains in Eternity, when every-
thing else, even faith and hope, shall be done away: that is,
love. Love, in the sense of agape, is not merely the object of
Christian hope, but also a present experience in the life of the
Christian and of the Church "because the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us".
Love therefore is known as a reality within the Christian com-
munity and is active in the life of the true believer. Love is
io SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
of the character of eternal life, nay, it is the very essence of
God. "God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in
God, and God in him." Certainly love is spoken of too lightly,
and we make too little of it, but that does not alter the fact
that there is a love, lived in the temporal life, which is precisely
that of which the New Testament speaks. Now what is the
relation between this love and time?
Time, as we experience it, is three-dimensional, past, pres-
ent, and future. This expression "three-dimensional", however,
is borrowed from space and is therefore inadequate. Past, pres-
ent, and future are different from each other. They are not
interchangeable, like the three dimensions of space. The present
is not merely a point without extension but a dividing line be-
tween the future and the past. No sooner has something, which
was expected in the future, become present than it has already
become something of the past. Once again, it was Augustine
who put his finger on this, and, if I am not mistaken, seems to
have been aware of the important fact that experienced time
is different from thought time. Experienced time is, to use
Bergson's phrase, duree reelle. That we can experience the pres-
ent is due to the fact that it is ours already as something future
and that it is still ours as something past. Human existence
could not be human, i.e. it could not have the essentially human
characteristics, if this were not the case. All thought is a syn-
thesis, a unity of different elements, and as such transcends the
temporality of the present moment. Let us call the present
which is merely thought, and which therefore has no extension,
"crumbling-time" {die zerbrockelnde Ze^)- I*1 this "crumbling-
time" the present is merely an atom of time, or not even that,
a point without extension. This "crumbling-time" is trans-
cended or, as it were, eliminated in every thought, since thought
is the unity of a plurality of elements. That is the basis of the
Platonic idea that truth is beyond time and that cognition of
truth participates in a timeless Eternity. Certainly we know
that when we speak of God and call Him eternal, His thought
is not like ours, embedded in "crumbling-time". "With Him
a thousand years are as one day." God's Eternity is not a
present that is broken up into parts. It is an undivided present.
When He reveals Himself to us, God enters into our time, into
our temporal existence, but He does not become temporal Him-
 THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME u
self. He remains Eternal so that past, present, and future are
one in Him. We human beings who are created after the image
of God somehow share in this supra-temporality, for whenever
we perform meaningful acts, acts of synthesis, we somehow
transcend the crumbling of time. On the other hand, we are
creatures and all our thinking and understanding is embedded
in "crumbling-time" and is impeded by it.
It is the result of sin, which destroys the image of God in
us, that our life is oppressed by temporality, by "crumbling-
time", in a way and to an extent which do not belong to our
human destiny, but rather to our rebellion against it. When
we think of our future we are burdened with agony and anxiety;
when we think of our past, we are burdened with the terrible
weight of the guilt of our sin. As we are created after the image
of God and not like mere animals we cannot shake off the bur-
den of our past, nor can we escape the fear of the future. This
double burden is our lot as sinful human beings.
What is the significance of sin for our experience of the
present? It means that we seek endlessly to shake off our dark
past, although we never succeed in doing so. It means too that
we cannot cease to try to dominate our future of which we are
afraid, although we always fail to do so. And so our life is, as it
were, ground between these two mill-stones: unsuccessful flight
from the past and unsuccessful domination over the future. In
this two-fold effort we love the present. Sinful man does not
have a real present, because he is always so fruitlessly con-
cerned about his past and about his future.
This lack of a real present, which is the existence of sinful
man, manifests itself particularly with regard to his fellow-man.
Sinful man is not present for his fellow-man. He is too pre-
occupied with his own past and his own future to realise pro-
perly the thou of the other. He seeks himself because he has no
real present, and by seeking himself he is not there for his
fellow-man. You may turn it the other way round, and say
that the other is not there for him. He is not there as a subject,
as he ought to be, because he becomes the object of his fears
and desires—that is, he becomes a part of that past which he
flees or a part of the future which he wants to dominate. He is
not there as his thou, as a real presence.
It is otherwise with the Christian. It is his experience in
12 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
Christ that he is given to have a real present. The burden of
the past, the guilt of sin, is taken away from him by forgiveness,
and the agony and fear of the future are taken away from him
by the certainty of eternal communion with Christ. In the
Gospel it is not only sin and forgiveness that are spoken about,
but fear and confidence too. Through Jesus Christ and His
Holy Spirit man is given to participate in the true present
which God possesses; and this new kind of present in the con-
crete form in which it is expressed is nothing else than the
love of God which is "shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy
Ghost".
The evidence for the truth of this conception of the real
present is to be found, if I may say so, in the actual fact of
experience that faith in Christ brings with it a new relation
to other men. Real faith manifests itself in making man aware
of the thou, his neighbour, whom God gives to him. Liberated
from anxiety and fear of the future, redeemed from the guilt
of the past, he is given an open heart and mind. He has time;
he has heart and thought for his fellow-man. He is compelled
no longer to make an object of him. Now he can see him as a
subject, without repelling him or taking him a prisoner. Now
he has communion with him. It is in this communion, in
which they are present to each other, that he himself gains the
experience of the true present. That is why it is love that
abides, when all earthly things pass away, for it is of the same
nature as Eternity. Love is both the true present and Eternal
Life.
I have come to an end. It remains for me now only to
remind you that I have only attempted to give a slight sketch
of the Christian understanding of time. Even the theologian,
like the rest of sinful mankind, is embedded in "crumbling-
time". Perhaps I have been too daring in putting before
you something unfinished, although perhaps I would have
been too cautious had I waited until these thoughts had
attained some perfection. At any rate, I place myself with all
my unfinished thoughts, which I have given to you in this
article, under the judgment and grace of God, by which we
all live.