Fr. Georges Florovsky has described the Biblical *vision of history* as "a perspective of an *unfolding time*, running from a "beginning" to an "end", and guided by the will of God, leading His people to his own goal and purpose" (1). Although he may seem to identify *eschatological religion* with the "*essentially historical*" (2), he has also pointed out that the *eschatological* is the *ultimate*, not "of this world", which is here being realized 'in this world" of historical happenings (3). He emphasized that *history is not an evolution* (4) and "maintained that the efforts of a certain kind of romantic historicism to oppose [systems or types of historical interpretation] with an organic evolutionism were...a simpleminded confusion of metaphor" (5) Yet, this is exactly the kind of reduction which is built into the metaphysics of *time* underlying modern Evolution Science. Darwinian linear evolutionary time marks a radical falling away from the sacramental fulness of Time of the Divine Liturgy. With the advent of Darwinism the very possibility of sacramental, liturgical, or "condensed" time with its types and antitypes, and "presence", passed from the Western scientific consciousness. Orthodox Christian theology and iconology are in principle excluded by the (neo-)Darwinist base (6).

This revolution in our concept of time has been very nicely described in an excellent article by F.C. Haber who notes that the old teleological, typological mode of perceiving reality was "a union between the historical and perpetual incarnation, and this sacramental view of time and history remained an important mode of thought well into the seventeenth century, and for the pious it has never disappeared. There is nothing evolutionary about history in this cosmological frame of reference; it was instead an unfolding in the succession of time...Darwin's theory of evolution made it possible to think of historical time in non-teleological terms. In that sense...Darwin introduced a revolution in the concept of time. In addition, as teleology was removed from history it left the nature of historical facts on one plane of temporal significance. Henceforth, causation in history had to be sought in historical events, and transcendental purposes could not be invoked to explain why things happened when they did. A whole vocabulary of expressions remained as mere figures of speech: "the times called men forth", "the time was ripe", "in the fullness of time", etc. ...As historians adopted the Darwinian view of time and process, teleological time in history gave away to the simple linear mathematical view. Eschatons of one sort or another, such as the perfection of man have lingered on, but in critical history they were eschewed as speculative, philosophical or metaphysical, and were eliminated from the proper business of the historian" (7).

Along these lines , Roy A. Rappaport wrote, "We can ask, at the end, whether the recording of history may not be eternity's enemy...If time is numbered, we can no longer escape its undoing by entering ritual's eternity even for a little while, for when we return we can hardly avoid knowing that our sojourn in ritual lasted for, let us say, an hour and a half on a certain day of a certain month in a certain year...When moments of eternity are fully encompassed by a time that moves inexorably toward entropy, the intimations of immortality experienced in them are likely to seem no more than illusions, and eternity's only plausible resting place becomes an increasingly dubious hereafter. Number gives eternity, which once informed life and was infused by it, into the hands of death. We are left to the terrors of history (Eliade...) as the eternal is banished from life by the merely innumerable" (8).

There is a Biblical sense in which Jesus Christ Himself is the Beginning of Time, as indicated by St. Paul who clearly linked the rich meaning of Colossians 1:16-18 with Genesis 1:1. In his illuminating word study, Christ as the APXH of Creation, C.F. Burney has demonstrated how the New Testament pours all the fulness of Christ into the multiple meanings of the Hebrew *Bereshith*-- *In the Beginning* (9). The Beginning is Christ, not a moment in the mere Darwinian linear evolutionary scale of mathematical time which has become so firmly ensconced in the Western heart and mind since the nineteenth century. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End of Time. "Linear history" is transformed into "Presence" in the Lord the Spirit (10). One day with Him is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day (II Peter 3:8). The question of twenty-four hour days and a young earth (so important to "Creation Science" literalists) versus the endless geological ages (so necessary to Darwin) may well be a bit of a pseudo- problem when it comes to Christian relativistic eschatology. We note that Jewish belief conceived of the *olam ha-ba* (age to come) as "eternally existent; it is always in the heavens and we awake to it at death... Cognate with this aspect of the age to come is the concept of everlasting life...both as eschatological and as emphasized in St. John's gospel, a present possession" (11). "Within the framework of time, [the] general resurrection is future, but to the "dying" Christian it is a present event. This is the meaning of the Lord's words "The hour is coming--and *now is*..." (John 5:25). There is no difference between "is coming" and "now is"" (12).

According to Eric Voegelin, "...Philosophizing about time and existence today occupies the place that was held by meditation before thinking in Christian categories dissolved. The analysis of the time-consciousness of world-immanent man is the laicist residue of the Christian ascertainment of existence in meditation with its spiritual climax of the *intentio animi* toward God" (13). Harold P. Nebelsick has noted an important challenge to the commonly-held assumption that Biblical time is linear while Greek time was cyclical, suggesting that a sense of degeneration rather than cyclicity was more the keynote of the Greeks (14). Here, Stoic cyclicity (and the notion of "apokatastasis") and a Biblical multidimensional sacramentality (rather than simple linearity) are perhaps insufficiently emphasized in order to make the point. For a Christian critique of various theories of time, and for a Christian theory of unfolding Cosmic Time, both multi-dimensional and sacramental, with the temporal cyclicity of contemplative mystical descent and return and the the *intentio animi* (faith-functioning) restored, _A New Critique of Theoretical Thought_, the magnum opus of the Dutch, Reformational scholar, Herman Dooyeweerd, is well worth detailed consideration (15). Some very helpful literature on Chinese vis-a-vis Western time consciousness is also readily available (16).

References

(1) Georges Florovsky, _Christianity and Culture_, Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing Company, 1974, p.55.

(2) _Christianity and Culture_, p.58.

(3) Georges Florovsky, _Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View_, Nordland, 1972, p.68.

(4) _Christianity and Culture_, p.48.

(5) P.15 of Jaroslav Pelican, _PUTI RUSSKOGO BOGOSLOVA: When Orthodoxy Comes West_, in David Neiman and Margaret Schatkin (editors), The Heritage of the Early Church Essays in Honor of the Very Reverend Georges Florovsky, Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1973.

(6) Constantine D. Kalokyris, _The Essence of Orthodox Iconography_, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross School of Theology, Hellenic College, 1971, pp.85-90: Iconography and "Liturgical" (Condensed) Time.

(7) Pp.386,385,401 of Francis C. Haber, _The Darwinian Revolution in the Concept of Time_, pp.383-401 of J.T. Fraser, F.C. Haber, G.H. Muller (editors), _The Study of Time Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time_, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York: Springer-Verlag, 1972.

(8) Pp.28-29 of Roy A. Rappaport, _Ritual, Time, and Eternity_, Zygon 27(1):5-30 (March 1992). Time and eternity here take on the interesting "shape" of mathematical "time-series analysis" ("spectral analysis"). So also Dooyeweerd: Refractions in Cosmic Time.

(9) C.F. Burney, _Christ as the APXH of Creation (Prov. viii 22, Col.i 15-18, Rev. iii 14)_, The Journal of Theological Studies 27: 160-177(1926).

(10) See page 83 of John D. Zizioulas, _Apostolic Continuity and Orthodox Theology: Towards a Synthesis of Two Perspectives_, St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 19(2):75-108(1975).

(11) Matthew Mahoney, _Paraenesis, the Oikonomia and the Expectation of the Parousia in the Early Church_, Milltown Studies, No.11, Spring, 1983, pp.57-73.

(12) Arthur C. Custance, _Time and Eternity and Other Biblical Studies_, Zondervan, 1977, Part I _Time and Eternity: Creation and the Theory of Relativity_, p.42.

(13) Eric Voegelin, _Anamnesis_, Notre Dame, 1978 [trans. Gerhart Niemeyer], p.14.

(14) Harold P. Nebelsick, _The Renaissance, The Reformation and the Rise of Science_, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992, pp.169-177.

(15) Herman Dooyeweerd, _A New Critique of Theoretical Thought_, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij H.J. Paris / Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Vol.I 1953, Vol.II 1955, Vol.III 1957, Vol.IV (Index) 1958.

(16) J.T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, F.C. Haber (editors), Time, _Science, and Society in China and the West *The Study of Time V*_, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

On Chinese embodied rationality and consciousness see Chung-Ying Cheng, _Chinese Philosophy and Contemporary Human Communication Theory_, Chapter 2 of D. Lawrence Kincaid (editor), _Communication Theory Eastern and Western Perspectives_, Academic Press, Inc., 1987.

April, 1995

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Index