8 - Time and Religion

Summary

Introduction

Religion does not take kindly to time. For many people the impulse to religion is generated by a desire to escape from the tyranny of time: we seek a refuge from the changes and chances of this fleeting world, and hope to evade the inevitable mortality of our temporal existence, by moving to a higher plane of reality, where the limitations of temporality are transcended by the eternal verities of absolute existence. And, independently of our motives for seeking God, it would seem to derogate from His perfection to subject the Almighty to the corrosion of time. So the Greeks, once they began to emancipate themselves from the all-too-human gods of Olympus, started to posit a timeless Absolute, an impassible, unmoved mover, the ground of our being, and perhaps the worthy recipient of our worship, but not an active intervener in our affairs or a person with whom we could communicate

The God of the philosophers was clearly very different not only from the Olympian deities but equally from the Yaweh of the Jews. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was thought to have intervened on many occasions in the course of the history of Israel, giving them a helping hand in their escape from Egypt, and a chastening one when they went after false gods. The word of the Lord came to the prophets, often unwelcomely as it did also to David and Ahab when they strayed from the straight and narrow path of righteousness.