My Spin cycle classes run for 45 minutes. But, as I sweat and struggle my way through a one minute sprint, I always find it helpful when the instructor informs us that there are just 15 seconds to go. A break is coming…keep going through to the end. But I never thought about time in my exercise classes in terms of promise and fulfilment. Not until I read Christopher Watkins on Promise and Time – here’s a third quote from his book ‘Biblical Critical Theory’.
“The figure of promise and fulfilment rhythms the biblical experience of time. We all know what it is like to have our experience shaped in this way. Sitting in a cafe waiting for a friend who has promised to come in five minutes’ time just feels different to sitting in a cafe with no appointment due that day. Doing reps at the gym with the prospect of resting in 5-4-3-2-1 will help you push harder than if you had no idea when you are going to finish. Furthermore, fulfilment means so much more if it is the final realisation of a long-awaited event.”
Watkins goes on to note that we like to think of time as a single line with the present point moving from past to the future. But we are reducing things in doing so.
Watkins quotes Genesis 17:5 “No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.” He comments: “when God pledges something, it is as good as done – no, we need to be stronger than that – it is done in terms of the certainty of its coming to pass, though from where we stand in time we are still waiting to see God’s power accomplish what he has promised. This requires a subtler understanding of time than a simple line.”
He links this with the mathematical idea of topology and then concludes: “promise and fulfilment stretch and squeeze time, folding distant points so that they sit adjacent to each other, like a baker kneading a batch of dough such that ‘a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day’ (2 Peter 3:8). This is why Christ can say, ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56), and how Peter can claim in Acts 2 that David spoke of the resurrection of Christ. Moments distant in time are being brought close to each other by the great divine kneader.” (Watkins, ‘Biblical Critical Theory’, pp 228-29)
I find myself scratching my head when it comes to thinking about ‘time’. And reading Watkins stimulates my thinking though I still find myself scratching my head. I haven’t thought about John 8:56 like that – to me it was just a way of saying that ‘Abraham saw it in his mind’s eye’ – by faith. But perhaps this is another way of putting it or seeing it. His closing paragraph in ‘Promise and Time’ seems to point to the place of faith in reading the Scriptures (the faith of the faithful):
“Acts of faithful remembrance reach across the centuries without collapsing them. For example, the last supper is folded on top of the Passover feast, establishing a proximity across the centuries and retroactively reinterpreting the Passover meal itself as the foreshadowing of Christ’s death. Similarly, Psalm 22 is folded into Jesus’s experience and interpretation of the cross as if it had been written for that very moment – which, in fact, it had. In the pages of the Bible and in the Christian experience of time, promise and fulfilment kiss.” He links this with the mathematical idea of topology and then concludes: “promise and fulfilment stretch and squeeze time, folding distant points so that they sit adjacent to each other, like a baker kneading a batch of dough such that ‘a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day’ (2 Peter 3:8). This is why Christ can say, ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56), and how Peter can claim in Acts 2 that David spoke of the resurrection of Christ. Moments distant in time are being brought close to each other by the great divine kneader.” (Watkins, ‘Biblical Critical Theory’, pp 229-30.)