27 September 2023
Another major cultural issue we face as Covenant people in an anti-covenant West is how we view time.
You can go back and find court cases where some prisoners were adjudicates unfit for release into society because they lacked a future orientation. Judges have openly and very specifically condemned a present time orientation as harmful to society. If you aren't planning for tomorrow in a materialistic sense, you aren't American. There is a strong legal precedent for that. Lacking a materialistic future orientation is grounds for any number of legal sanctions, not just loss of freedom, but loss of property and child custody. Notice how this government document casts the whole question in terms of sustainability and moral responsibility.
We've noted in the past how the insistence on knowing the future is a childish outlook. It's based on the natural anxiety of dependence, but oddly produces a very short-term temporal outlook. Oddly, military service actually reinforces this by denying relevant information and making troops "responsive" on short notice. It makes it easier for leadership to shave off moral inhibitions when it's politically necessary to do horrible things. It produces a compartmentalization in the psyche; there are things relegated to the ordinary future orientation, and a lot that is bound under officially approved present time orientation.
There is a lot more behind all that. It's not as simple as having either a future orientation or a present time orientation. Unfortunately, the courts (as well as big business) don't recognize the other ways of looking at it. But academia does make room for variations in how you face the future, and whether you do at all, even if popular culture seems ignorant of it.
The Bible in particular does not promote either a future or present time orientation. As noted, both of those are confined within a materialistic worldview. This is another place where American jurisprudence has been pretty bad. Not so uniformly as with one's time orientation, but most judges take a dim view of people who aren't motivated by material concerns. The Bible flatly condemns materialism and calls for something altogether different: a timeless view.
The starting point for us coming from a western orientation is, quite naturally, learning to dismiss materialism. That's a very tall order. It's one thing to recognize the utility of material things; it's another to be bound to them by the anxiety over the consequences of possible loss. The flesh hates having no control over hedonistic comforts. It regresses into childhood very quickly when it senses the loss of control. That's where we get the anxiety about future events; it's all about the control.
This brings us to another major conflict with the West: The Bible insists that the flesh is not the real you, and that this world is essentially a lie. If you burrow down into legal precedent and political policy, the biblical outlook is flatly illegal. The government refuses to recognize the spiritual realm. The wider social culture treats it as a joke, as something that is at best spooky and unknowable. The Bible says it's our home.
We are oriented on Eternity; we have no temporal orientation except in our fleshly nature. Because of this, categories like future and present simply don't matter. We are both at the same time, and yet neither. When it comes to obeying the Covenant, we tend to see all of time as one single event. The mandate to walk in the Covenant does not recognize time limitations. We need to lay a broad, bright stripe across the whole of time.
When it comes to waiting on God to deliver His promises, we aren't demanding children, but trusting children. We take what comes, knowing that we cannot schedule the ripeness of fruit that God has created. Indeed, scholars recognize that a biblical sense of time is not measuring and scheduling, but waiting for things to ripen. It's simply no good, wholly undesirable, to jump the gun. It will taste nasty and upset our stomachs.
All things in God's time.
Comments
DarkMirror
I like to (or try to, at least) view time as a temporary way of measuring mortal existence, since we are alive now and eventually will die and stay dead. That's a weird practical way of phrasing it. I guess I could say time is something we suffer through until we are in eternity. I imagine we'd experience time somewhat while in eternity but it will be a lot different.
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