SECTION IV

the fulness of the time

Time and space are no gods, for this, if for no other reason, that time intersects space, and space time. We can, however, hardly escape from the idolatry of these powerful forms of the world’s development. It seems most difficult for man to free himself from the notion that time is a god. Even the boldest philosophical systems, unassisted by the spirit of Christianity, in treating of the origin of the gods in time, are for the most part infected with the superstitious assumption that time is itself a god. In this case they do homage to Chronos, who devours his own children, who consumes personalities; to Moloch, to whom children are sacrificed; to the process-god, who destroys individualities in order to become entirely himself. The Grecian was delivered from Chronos by Zeus, who instituted an everlasting Olympus and a transposition of human heroes into the community of the immortal gods. The Hebrew was freed from Moloch by Jehovah, the eternal God, who in His covenant faithfulness is in all ages equal to Himself, and who also elevates His elect to His own eternity. The religious consciousness, however, of many philosophers has not yet attained either to the worship of Jupiter or the service of Jehovah, since they still expose their children by sacrificing the personal immortality of man to a god confounded with time-—a god in process of becoming such.¹

This idolatry of time is connected with the idolatry of nature. Nature is the slow development of the Spirit. The greatness of natural philosophy consists in its discovery of the gradations of development in the life of nature and of man; but it is its limited nature which is exhibited, when these gradations of development are regarded as periods of origin in the consciousness of God Himself. Nature is confounded with the act of creation, and even regarded as the Creator, when the subsequent is looked upon as the mere product of the antecedent, the higher as the mere birth of the lower. Thus the elements are made to arise from an effort and interworking of the original principles of nature, and the organic products from the elements, and always new and higher formations from those already existing, till at length man appears as the head of animal existence. It is indeed quite justifiable to estimate the origin of spiritual life by such gradual developments. But whenever a higher product is formed from one formerly existing, unless origination is distinguished from existence, its highest quality, i.e., its peculiar idea, its soul, and thus the very principle which is essential to it, must be surreptitiously introduced. The natural philosophy which would construct the higher out of the lower, is full of such surreptions. The elements may be made to weave as long as we please; but if a plant is to be originated, a new idea, and indeed a more concrete and powerful one than that of the elements, must be introduced among them, to assume their material according to its necessities, and to assimilate it into its own life. With each new gradation of life, a new idea actually appears as a new vital principle—an idea certainly announced and prepared for, but not created, by preceding formations. And it is in the very singularity, novelty, and power, by which it is raised above previous formations, that its peculiar nature is apparent.² We shall thus be obliged to allow that new forms in the ascending scale of life do not make their respective appearances merely as natural products, but as the thoughts and works of God. Nature, indeed, dreams of her future, and foretells it in obscure foreshadowings. But these very dreams of nature are only the result of the thoughts of God already working in her, and about to appear in new creations. Thus nature may be said to form a great number of concentric circles. New circles are ever appearing, each tending towards the centre. These do not, however, proceed from nature, but from a new creation and from eternity. Thus, e.g., within the circle of minerals is the circle of plants: within the circle of plants, that of the brute creation; within this, that of mankind; within the circle of mankind, the circle of the elect.

Here, moreover, the subsequent and the higher is not only as primordial as the former and lower; but with respect both to its own importance and the power which appoints it, it does, in the very nature of things, take precedence thereof in the mind of God. What John the Baptist said of Christ, ‘He that cometh after me is preferred before me, for He was before me,’ might equally be said by the plant of the stone, or by the lion of the plant. For the circles gradually tending towards the centre of life ever increase in depth. In each new circle appear the principles for whose sake the former were produced, and which, in their import, include and take up preceding formations.

In man appears the principle of all the days of creation. God first formed the earth, and made plants and animals. But man was nevertheless that principle in the mind of God, whose life called all nature into life.

Mankind forms another rich system of circles. Still deeper and still more powerful natures appear towards the centre,-the noble, the holy ones, the first in the truest sense, though frequently the last to appear. In the centre appears the God-man. Here is the veriest centre of the circle, here its fulness and depth; the consciousness in which God is one with man; hence the whole depth of Godhead and the whole depth of humanity, and therefore the essential principle, the First-born, the Eternal, in whom God made the world.

But because Christ has this significance in the midst of the world’s history, time has its consummation in Him, and eternity appears with Him, and in Him, in the midst of time. Before time was, He was in God as the principle, the root, the motto of the world. Could the world have been conceived as a composition or fundamental idea without a motto? He will be, too, when time is no more, as the head of a new world, in which nature will be glorified in the spirit, the spirit incorporate in nature. Thus Christ is the Alpha and Omega in the development of the world. Hence His appearance in the midst of time has a depth and significance including both the beginning and the end. If we contemplate the æon of the natural world of mankind, His life may be designated as the end of the world. But on this very account His life is equally the beginning of the world, the foundation of a new and eternal world of mankind. As the light, the power, the saving life, the sanctifying Spirit, Christ forms the centre of the world, a centre whose influences penetrate all its depths, till they break forth in brightness on all points of its circumference, till the triumphant banners of the divine-human life float upon all the battlements of creature life. The coming of the Son of man will be like a flash of lightning, shattering the Old World from east to west, and discovering the New World in its spiritual glory.

In every normal birth, the head first makes its appearance from the parent’s womb. Therefore was the new, glorified, and spiritual humanity first born into the world in its Head. But the members follow the head. Therefore the external organism of Christ’s Church struggles out of the obscurity of natural life, that it may exhibit in its completeness the phenomenon of the eternal life.

Spirit is in its very nature eternal. But life is, in its natural appearance, transitory. Hence man remains for a long time in holy hesitation between eternity and transitoriness, because he is at once a structure of nature and a spiritual being—a union of the two powers. But the Eternal Spirit must elevate his perishing nature into His own element, into the glory of eternal life. Christ fulfilled this appointment. By His victory He has changed this hesitation between time and eternity into the triumph of eternity. And by communicating His Spirit to His people, nature is ennobled and spiritualized in them and by them, and raised by means of His victorious resurrection to the eternal. Hence the Church of Christ has ever had the feeling and expectation of being near to eternity, because, filled with the principle of eternity, she is ever ripening with silent but powerful growth for eternity.

It is in the very nature of things, that the whole history of the world, before Christ, should, both in great and small matters, point to Him in the realm of ideal life, as well as work towards Him in the realm of actual life. In all those great and little affairs of the world which have essential reference to the climax of the future, to Christ, tendencies and preludes may be perceived, whose fulfilment is given in Christ. And thus is time fulfilled in Him. We see here both the yearning of humanity after God, that is, its craving after eternity; and the satisfaction of this yearning, namely, the manifestation of God as it gradually dawned upon rough and sinful human nature in the ecstatic visions of patriarchs and prophets, until the time of its full appearance came. The life of Christ is the manifestation of eternity in time, because it is the manifestation of God Himself, because it forms the eternal centre of humanity, discloses and savingly restores the eternal destiny of mankind, and by its power transforms all nature into spirit. Christ came into the world from the Father, and therefore entered time from eternity. But then He left the world again to go to the Father. He will not, however, return alone, but with His people. He will raise them up to share His own exaltation, that is, out of time into eternity, into the spiritual life, whose light shows all times in every moment, all worlds in every place, all hearts in every heart, eternal, tranquil, solemn unity in all the changes of infinite variety.

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Notes

1. When it is settled that time and space are no gods, it is at the same time decided that God is not limited by time and space, and is therefore not a developing (werdender) God. But not only God, but man also, as a being of divine extraction, is raised in his own nature above time and space. Even in his relation to time, man is as ‘the happy one for whom no hour strikes,’ not to mention his being, as a partaker of salvation, a timeless being, whose memory and hope are ever pointing out the flight by means of which he soars, eagle-like, above the temporal. He is in the essence of his nature above time. This characteristic of his inner nature is the natural basis of prophecy. The prophet passes above and beyond the present and the temporal, by means of the divine Spirit. In His light he beholds the future. But man can as little retreat from, as advance beyond the external present, without the co-operation of the Spirit. He cannot even appropriate history without His intervention. The very forms of language express this elevation of man above time. By the words: I was—he places himself in the past; by the words: I shall be—in the future. The Greek Aorist especially expresses this hovering above time. With respect to his relation to space, man is comprised in an eternal tissue stretching into infinity; hence the poetic attraction of the mind towards the blue distance. But in his renewal through the Spirit of God, he is a king, constantly obtaining a new purple from the treasury of the kingdom when the old has grown obsolete, and whose resurrection is pledged, by the power of his spiritual life over the visible world. Misconceptions of eternity, whose theological result is the destruction of the noblest dogmas, whose philosophical result is the destruction of the noblest ideas, are connected with misconceptions of personality. Thus time becomes an ever-produced line, never finding or exhibiting repose in the sacred circle of eternity;³ and finite being rushes breathlessly, in wild pursuit and ever unsatisfied longings, through time and space to reach the infinite, but in vain! But Christ has manifested the fulfilment of time, even eternity, by the power of His eternal nature. His peace is the peace of eternity, of personality merged in God and finding itself in God. In the power of that infinite superiority to time and space, which is part of His eternal nature, He threatens the storm and wind of that pantheistic excitement of the sea of life, whose wild and foaming obscurity threatens to overwhelm its disciples. And thus there is a great calm. The presence of the personal God gives to His people the assurance that they are eternal personalities, for whom the roaring flood of temporal life is to be transformed into the calm, transparent sea of His eternal administration.

2. Even Feuerbach is constrained to remark (in his essay Das Wesen des Christenthums), though he distorts even this truth into error, that in Christ the end of the natural world of men appeared in principle; that He, as the beginner of a new world, represented the close of the old. ‘Christ, i.e., the historic religious Christ, is not the centre but the end of history. This follows as much from the conception of Christ as from history. Christians expected the end of the world, of history.—P. 204. It is just because Christ is the principle of the heavenly, and the centre of the actual, that He is the end of the natural world of men.⁴

1) [Hegel, Schelling, Baur, and their followers, are forced by the principles of their philosophy to repudiate the idea of a fulness of time in the Christian sense. As has been shown in a previous chapter, they can admit no such incarnation as this requires, no single, historical incarnation, which happens once for all. To become man is, as it were, God s eternal attribute and destiny, which, as God, He is always fulfilling, and men accordingly are reduced to mere phenomenal manifestations of God. In this sense God becomes incarnate in every man, and through all time; and if there is a fulness of time, it is only because one man, say Jesus, has more strikingly than others revealed the eternal and infinite. ED.]

2) Compare Streffen’s Alt und Neu Beurtheilung dreier naturphilosophischer Schriften Schellings, p. 20; Rosenkranz, Schelling, p. 87; Hegel Logik, 2d Part, die Lehre vom Begrif, p. 209. ‘The more the teleological principle has been connected with the notion of a supernatural understanding, and so far favoured by piety, the further has it appeared to depart from true natural philosophy, which sees in the properties of nature, not alien, but inherent certainties.’—P, 210, ‘The aim is the conception objectively realized.’—P. 219,

3) Natural history takes the exactly opposite course (to the ordinary view of nature). Nature is, in her view, originally only active. All nature is ever changing and ever changeable, and change itself, the only constancy. ‘This original activity is the first and last, the primitive thesis, the ever-present and the eternal, the unchanged in the midst of change ; and, for those natural philosophers who would construct nature from it, the inherent creation of the world.’—Sieffen’s Alt und Neu: Beurtheilung dreier naturphilosophischer Schriften Schellings, p. 9.

4) [The old and recently revived question, ‘utrum Christus venisset, si Adam non peccasset,’ is one which philosophical theology is required to face. If we speculate at all on the connection of God with the world, on His freedom and purpose in creating, we meet the question : whether or not the world, with all its vastness and order, is worthy of the infinite Creator; whether it adequately expresses His perfections; whether there was anything in His purpose, and therefore in the essential history of the world, which can be viewed as a worthy motive of His action, Many, feeling the difficulty of asserting that a finite production is worthy of the design of an infinite God, have adopted the solution that (as Malebranche says), ‘though manhad never sinned, a divine Person would not have failed to unite Himself to the universe to give it an infinite dignity, so that God should receive a glory perfectly correspondent to His action.’ See the question fully treated in Dorner on the Person of Christ Div. II. i. 361, &c., and very lucidly by Saisset, Modern Pantheism, i, 76, &c.—ED.]