Most scholars agree that the Enlightenment or “Age of Reason,” which began in the early seventeenth century, set up a great dichotomy that persists in modern time.(1) The great “dichotomy” of the Enlightenment entailed the separation of the public and private realms. The public realm was the world of ascertained by reason alone. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains, “The thinkers of the Enlightenment spoke of their age as the age of reason…by which human beings could attain (at least in principle) to a complete understanding of, and thus a full mastery of, nature—of reality in all its forms. Reason, so understood, is sovereign in this enterprise.”(2) In the realm of reason, therefore, revelation from a divine realm was not needed. Human reason could search out and know all the facts about reality, and “no alleged divine revelation, no tradition however ancient, and no dogma however hallowed has the right to veto its exercise.”(3)

The realm of religious belief was now relegated to the realm of private value and private purpose. It wasn’t that the Enlightenment dichotomy cut out God. Rather, it created a distinction between “natural” religion—God’s existence and the moral laws known by all and demonstrable by reason—and “revealed” religion—doctrines as taught by the Bible and the church. The latter realm, dominant in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, came under increasing attack and was eventually relegated to private expression and personal feelings.

Fueled by scientific and philosophical discoveries, the view of the world as the venue of God’s providence and rule, shifted to the view that sovereign reason could discover all that was necessary to advance humanity toward its highest destiny. All of Christianity’s supernatural claims and all of its revelatory content were unnecessary in a world where the Creator had endowed human beings with enough reason to discern what was important simply through the study of the natural world. As such, the autonomous, rational human became the center of truth and knowledge.

What emerged from this dichotomy was the belief that the real world was a world of cause and effect, of material bodies guided solely by mathematically stable laws. Discovering the cause of something was to have explained it in its totality. There was no need to invoke any supernatural “purpose” or “design” as an explanation any longer.

And yet, purpose remains an inescapable element in human life. Newbigin argues: “Human beings do entertain purposes and set out to achieve them. The immense achievements of modern science themselves are, very obviously, the outcome of the purposeful efforts of hundreds of thousands of men and women dedicated to the achievement of something that is valuable—a true understanding of how things are.”(4) Hence, persisting in the belief that science, for example, is value and purpose-free belies an intentional rejection of reality. The pursuit of science to find causes for effects devoid of any larger purpose seems self-defeating. Why study at all if there is no purpose for study?

Proclaiming that purpose infuses human endeavor, and as such, that purposeful human endeavor can point to purposeful design, and design gives rise to a Designer behind it all will not necessarily convince those who see a world only of mechanical cause and effect. Yet, scratch the below the surface of the most strident materialists, and one uncovers a yearning for something more than what can be understood by reason alone. As atheist Sam Harris wrote: “This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute….The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ‘spiritual.’”(5)

The Gospel of John suggests that reason and revelation need not be dichotomized. In this explanation of the significance of Jesus Christ, the objective and the subjective aspects of truth are revealed in a person: “The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.” The rational principle that undergirds all things, as the Greeks understood the Logos, is embodied in the human person, Jesus, according to John’s Gospel. And in the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus we have a new starting point for reason. The resurrection is indeed the very basis “for the perpetual praise of God who not only creates order out of chaos, but also breaks through fixed orders to create ever-new situations of surprise and joy.”(6) Ever-new situations of surprise and joy might involve breaking a false dichotomy between public and private faith and the objective and subjective aspects of reality, even between reason and revelation. This one who brings new life and new ways of knowing invites us to wholeness, and not dichotomy.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Stanley Grenz and Roger Olsen, 20th Century Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 16-17.
(2) Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 25.
(3) Ibid., 25.
(4) Ibid., 35.
(5) Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 227.
(6) Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 150.

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The dominating time-piece is nothing if not thought-provoking. British inventor John Taylor’s “Chronophage” (literally ‘time eater’ from the Greek chronos and phageo) keeps watch outside Cambridge’s Taylor Library of Corpus Christi College.(1) A foreboding metal grasshopper with an ominous chomping mouth appears to devour each minute with eerie pleasure and constancy. The toll of the hour is marked by the clanging of a chain into a tiny wooden coffin, which then slams shut—”the sound of mortality,” says Taylor.(2) The pendulum also speeds up sporadically, then slows to a near halt, only to race ahead again as if somehow calculating the notion that time sometimes flies, sometimes stands still. The invention, according to Taylor, is meant to challenge our tendency to view time itself as we might view a clock. “Clocks are boring. They just tell the time, and people treat them as boring objects,” he added. “This clock actually interacts with you”—indeed, striking viewers with the idea that time is nothing to take for granted.(3)

The Christian worldview is one that recognizes at the deepest level that something about humanity is not temporal. Easter, in fact, is the celebration that this is not just a suspicion, but a reality. Christians believe in eternal dwellings, a day when tears will be no more, and in one who is preparing a house of rooms and welcome.(4) And yet, we also very much live with the distinct experience of these promises within time. Christ is not merely the one who will be with us in all eternity, the one who will dry our eyes at time’s end. Christians believe he is also alive and among us today, welcoming a kingdom that is both present and approaching. “Remember, I am with you always,” ends one of account of the life of Jesus, “even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). For the Christian, all of time is filled with the hope of resurrection, even as it is filled with Christ himself.

Why then, I wonder, are there moments when time seems so oppressive, the hope of eternity a distant glimmer, the presence of a resurrected Christ beside the daily pendulum an inapplicable promise? If the Christian life is about moving closer and closer to the glory of the resurrected Christ, why is there not more light and less darkness, a more vibrant Church and less grumbling, greater outreach and less greed, followers who look more like Jesus and less like the world around them? The expectation in the life of a Christian is that there will be a dramatic difference, or at least steady progression, of lives transformed by Christ. But instead we often find little difference—or we find the opposite of progression, so that both inside and outside of the church people are left wondering: Where is transformation as all this time marches onward?

John Taylor’s menacing grasshopper is an apt image for such a confession. Time marches on oppressively, unapologetically, while the promise of “being transformed into [Christ’s likeness] from one degree of glory to another” seems to remain a distant mirage.(5) Christians begin to doubt. Skeptics point out the obvious fantasy of faith. ^*But perhaps something in Taylor’s clock also challenges this fearful view of time and transformation. Time is indeed a linear progression, marching onward in precise increments, but our experience of time is far less like this. We are at times startled by its passing, other times painfully aware of its tedious movement. We interact with time knowing that some minutes are fuller than others, but that time is always more than a linear, monotonous experience.

Similarly, when I think of transformation, I often think of dramatic change: an acorn turned into an oak tree, the apostle Paul changed from zealous tormentor to zealous Christian, Lazarus moved from death to life. And I believe there is indeed something quite like this that takes place in the life of one willing to follow resurrected Christ—a creature who actually stops being one thing in order to become something else. It should not be surprising that around the world we find Christians in the most unlikely places, administering aid, speaking hope, exhibiting this change of which the gospel speaks. For clothed in Christ’s perfect nature, the nature of a person is truly changed. Though we stand before God imperfect and discouraged, it is the Son the Father now sees. And this part of Christian transformation is as dramatic as it is complete, allowing us—and the world—to stand assured of God’s work within.

But this is not to say that God is finished working. To the one who has been united with Christ, the daily indwelling of God is a gift! Within the Christian’s experience of time, the message of the gospel is all the more transformational, the vicariously human Christ is our moral influence daily, and through the Holy Spirit we are being further transformed into his image. This kind of transformation is neither the dramatic change often expected, nor the steady linear progression for which we might hope. Like Paul himself, we can find ourselves doing the things we don’t want to do, falling back into mindsets that need to be renewed, imitating a broken world more than we imitate Christ. Transformation at these times seems far less like Lazarus rising from the grave and more like a would-be butterfly refusing to come out of its cocoon.

But even here, Christ is surely near, the eternal urging the world of souls to see the potential even in this very moment: “The intermediate hope—” writes N.T. Wright, “the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day—are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present… is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day.”(6)

That is to say, Easter is being implemented. Whether we make our bed in the depths, whether we fall repeatedly or seem to be moving backward, God is both near and at work, the reality of the resurrection working its way into every ticking minute. In the experience of time before us is the radical promise of both the intermediate hope and transformation and the gift of looking glory full in the face. By the power of the Spirit, God takes the most wretched of creatures and changes it into the likeness of Christ, the most beautiful creature. Whether time is flying or standing still, for the worst of us, even menacing grasshopper types, this is indeed very good news.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Maev Kennedy, “Beware the time-eater: Cambridge University’s Monstrous New Clock,” The Gaurdian, September 18, 2008.
(2) Robert Barr, “Fantastical New Clock Even Tells Time,” MSNBC, September 19, 2008.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Luke 16:9, Revelation 21:4, John 14:2.
(5) 2 Corinthians 3:18.
(6) N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: Harper, 2008), 29-30.

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