“And this is because it is for the sake of Christ—that is, for the whole mystery of Christ—that all the ages and the beings existing within those ages received their beginning and end in Christ.” -Maximus Confessor, QThal 60.4

I

About forty years ago Anglophone theology saw a certain trend emerge that conceived the limits of God-talk as the limits of the metanarrative which informs it, biblical or doctrinal or otherwise. Theology is, on its view, like grammar: its intelligible content—the range of its signification and the various logical/syntactical connections made possible by its own language—works always and only within a determinate context. “The meaning of a word is its use,” Wittgenstein remarked.¹ Seeing its use means seeing the word in action, and a speech-act only ever occurs in a definite, sequential pattern. Knowing how to “go on” in thinking or speaking or acting means knowing what’s appropriate here and now (not over there and earlier or later). And knowing that means recognizing ordered patterns: first this, then that; this goes here, that there; these connect in this way, these in that. That’s grammar: subject, verb, direct object; this verb takes an object, this one doesn’t; that’s past imperfect tense, that’s simple future. And so on.

Theologizing well from this vantage means using good grammar about God. Doing so requires a thorough knowledge of the determinate context within which this speaking occurs, since context determines right use. And this context—to come to the crucial point—always assumes narrative form. God discloses Godself to us in Christ’s human life, in scripture, in history, in the ongoing proclamation and tradition of the Church. These all bear a narrative logic; their parts link together serially. Each tells a story. Perhaps together they tell a coherent story too; that depends on one’s viewpoint.

It’s with some plausibility, then, that those working within this grammatical account of God-talk typically regard any attempt to trespass beyond the revealed narrative (in whichever of its forms) as an illicit act of speculation. Maybe even heterodox: “Gnostics,” we’re reminded, were rather notorious for claiming to espy far more in the scriptural narrative than is really there. Thus they cunningly “discovered” their own speculative idols buried like unmarked treasure in scripture’s rich earth. But this is the wrong approach: best to leave the depths to God and instead receive gratefully the glittering surface of things. We have the narrative of salvation history, we have the biblical stories, and we have authoritative vocabulary and grammar with which to speak of these blessed media. Let that sate the thirsty mind.

Respect the narrative; seek not what lies “beyond.” For many this isn’t just sober counsel in theological method. Our dependence on inspired (but finite) media disciplines the excesses of our heart’s desire. It renders us reliant upon and thankful to God who generously dispenses such graces. It inculcates obedience and chastens pride, for “knowledge puffs up” (1 Cor 8.1). It mirrors for us our own finitude. By nature and by consequence of sin, we are humbly delimited creatures. We die. Memento homo quia pulvis es. We’re borne along by the winds of time, suspended moment to moment, every event the merest syllable spoken by God’s creative and providential prosody. Fragmentary, piecemeal, fleeting, elusive, almost aleatoric at points—we mustn’t desire more than this in via, in devastated and metronomic “timespace,” as Paul Griffiths has pitilessly described it.² 

Conforming our speculative limits to narrative’s own, then, catechizes us into docile acceptance of our finitude, our spatiotemporal boundaries. Of course we must say something of God’s eternity; God transcends time. Thus we speak negatively of what God is not—finite—rather than precisely of what God’s eternity is. That, it seems, is all we can say with any confidence. Good grammar demands clear context, and that context will always appear to us as some sort of sequence or narrative. And so it’d be futile to seek a grammar beyond narrative—still more beyond time itself.

II

I think this speculative limitation is wrong, and that it’s exactly the Christian narrative which exposes this limitation’s own limit. Why? Because the Christian narrative isn’t just a narrative, but a narrative about the eternal God’s self-identification with (a) temporal existence. The Incarnation of the Son is an event whose very intelligibility requires us to think beyond the serial logic of time—its diastemic and countable and metronomic character. The truth of this event positively exceeds the supposed limits of “eventuality,” of what must be the case for an event to happen. Specifically, the Incarnation challenges the very basic assumption that the order of actual events dictates the order of the causal (or even just influential) relations that obtain among these same events. If event X happens before event Y, then X has to happen—to be—before X could (co-)cause or affect Y. The causal relation between X and Y qua temporal events is unilateral: X must first be if it’s to cause or affect Y at all. And when X occurs, Y isn’t yet an event that could cause or affect X at all.³

I want to identify three instances in Christian theology that seem to transgress time’s supposed logic. Each of the following illustrates not just that the narrative’s subject goes “beyond” itself, but also the positive form this excess takes. That form is mutual causation or constitution across the metronome. Events that occur later presuppose earlier events—that’s obvious enough. But past events also presuppose the actual occurrence of events that, from the earlier vantage, have not yet occurred. This creates a symmetrical relation between two events that stand at a narrative/eventual distance from each other. It creates, I mean, a kind of simultaneity and co-effectuation of events that necessarily transcends their temporal or even serial relation.

Other instances abound,⁴ but I select these: the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday, Mary’s Immaculate Conception, and the Second Coming of Christ.

III

1. Maundy Thursday. Scripture (1 Cor 11.23–9) and liturgy teach that on the eve of Christ’s betrayal, he performed and so instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. He did so at a definite “hour.” He gives thanks, distributes the wine cup and broken bread, bids his disciples to consume both, and to do so indefinitely “unto my memory” (Lk 22.14–20). These elements bear his memory (anamnesis) because they are his own flesh and blood. Which flesh and blood, exactly? That torn and spilled at his death, “the death of the Lord,” as Paul recalls for the Corinthians. And that very flesh and blood which, having expired, was raised from its dead state. And that very flesh and blood which ascended into the heavens and will come again (1 Cor 11.26).

Any version of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist should make Maundy Thursday odd to us. The fleshlier the version—Berengar’s profession of 1079, say—the odder it becomes. I presume, of course, that the event instituting the Eucharist was itself a Eucharist. It evidently was, as the tight linguistic repetitions of the Last Supper in the post-Resurrection event on the road to Emmaus imply (Lk 24.30–1). So then, on Maundy Thursday Jesus offers the body and blood which will not suffer until Friday and which will not resurrect until Sunday and will not ascend until fifty or so days thereafter. And yet each of these posterior events—crucifixion, resurrection, ascension—are the necessary conditions for Jesus’ eucharistic presence that Thursday. And that’s because the Eucharist is for us the “medicine of immortality”⁵  only as that life-giving body of God which has been plunged into our own death so that, even and precisely in death, we’re rooted in that body’s undying life (Jn 6.53–8).

Maundy Thursday was, then and somehow, an event consequent upon events that, from the vantage of time’s supposed narrative logic, had yet to eventuate. Friday, Sunday, and fifty days later were fundamentally constitutive of that Thursday. And yet because that Eucharist drove Judas from their midst and on to his betrayal of the Lord, that same Eucharist constituted the chain of events that led to Friday’s execution and Sunday’s resurrection—to the same dead and risen flesh they’d just consumed. True, X and Y appear manifestly in a definite order. But neither could have happened without the other’s actual happening. An only potentially dead and risen and ascended flesh could not be actually (eucharistically) present, after all. But look: right there and then it was, on Maundy Thursday, “before” potential “became” actual.

2. Mary’s Immaculate Conception. Catholics alone have dogmatized this event, but anyone willing to concede some version of Mary’s immaculacy—that she’s not stained (maculari) by original sin—might contemplate its implications for our subject, time’s logic. “In the sixth month,” the angel Gabriel visits Mary and finds her “full of grace,” beloved of God (Lk 1.28, 30). For Catholics, at least, Mary’s is no generic grace. It is entirely salvific, efficacious grace, rendering her impervious to sin’s ubiquitous effects even as a zygote in St. Anne’s womb. This grace, as all grace, flows forth from Christ the Head, sourced in capital grace. Such grace names not a nebulous energy or force field or divine injection to the system. It is the personal, divine-human presence of Jesus Christ—the very one who died and was raised and ascended—in us (Gal 2.20), personally effecting and affecting our own personal instantiation of human being. The grace which made Mary immaculate from her conception is the very grace won by the “merits of Jesus Christ” on the cross.⁶

That’s odd, isn’t it? Again, this grace comes to human beings only from Christ’s work on the cross—a temporal event. So conceived, grace’s effects presuppose Jesus’ own conception, birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Exactly to the extent that grace isn’t a quasi-force or underlying, non-hypostasized “energy” dispersed indiscriminately like cosmic neutrino showers, it is a direct effect of actual, temporal events—a concrete, spatiotemporal effect of God’s spatiotemporal life among us. But here again we find ourselves in a Maundy Thursday-like situation. Mary’s immaculate conception was an effect of a cause that wouldn’t occur for another forty-six to forty-nine years, namely the crucifixion of Christ. And yet it was this very effect, this entirely salvific grace, which created a necessary condition for Mary lovingly to consent to Christ’s own conception in her by the Holy Spirit. X, Mary’s immaculacy, presupposed the temporal actuality of Y, Jesus’ whole spatiotemporal activity (thence alone does grace flow), even as X occurred “first” and co-caused Y. Mary spoke her fiat mihi with an engraced volition which was itself the effect of a cause that her fiat co-effected.

3. The Second Coming. At first blush this might seem a particularly bad example. Seriality is already emblazoned in the reference—it’s Christ’s second coming! And anyway, what could illustrate narrative logic more clearly than a last or final event? But this is just why I choose this event: even here things prove far more complicated, more positively mysterious to time’s ordering.

Karl Rahner makes an obvious but underappreciated observation about Christ’s parousia:

His second coming is not an event which is enacted in a localized manner on the stage of an un-changed world which occupies a determined point in space in this world of our experience (how could everyone see it otherwise, for instance?); his second coming takes place at the moment of the perfecting of the world into the reality which he already possesses now, in such a way that he, the Godman, will be revealed to all reality and, to every one of its parts in its own way, as the innermost secret and center of all the world and of all history.⁷

The Second Coming cannot be just another event at the end of a long series of timespace events, and for the very good reason that it is the Event that perfects every event. It is the end, the finale, the last act, we might say, in a rather unexpected way. If it were the final act in the expected, narrative sense of “last,” it would perhaps grant us a sort of narrative resolution to what came before it; it would make a good ending, at least, to creation’s otherwise breathtakingly tragic plot. But then it would also leave those prior tragedies more or less untouched in themselves, lasting monuments—if only in faint memories or troubling traces of bygone sufferings—to past imperfections, failures, unfinished because these are divinely unwilled happenings.

Rahner’s emphasis falls on space, though the temporal implication’s not wholly absent. Creation’s perfection at and as Christ’s parousia will make everything what “he already possesses now,” so that Jesus will be what he is as the Creator-creature identity, the Godman, for all creation’s “parts.” Creation will be revealed bearing Christ as its positive mystery, the “center of all the world and of all history.” This must be so, and it must be the truth of both at once (space and time). Christ doesn’t come “back” without the New Heavens and Earth, without the voice declaring from the throne, “see, I make all things new” (Rev. 21.5). All things, all creation’s myriad parts—surely this includes every temporal event too. Being finite just is being timespace definite. These coordinates are but measures of motion across the creature’s four dimensions: you cannot be as a creature, as a part of creation, except as simultaneously extended in these ways. And so when Christ, in whom alone creation occurs (Eph 2.10) and is renewed or perfected (2 Cor 5.17; Gal 6.15), “returns” to his handiwork, his advent will mean nothing less than the perfection of every creature (1 Cor 15.28)—of the very timespace relations which constitute every creature. The Second Coming is, then, the actual eventuality of all events.⁸ 

So a “future” event, the Second Coming, effects the fullness or completion of every (necessarily) prior event of history. His parousia is the actual-happening of events—their truth. In Christ alone do all God’s promises find their “yes,” their fulfillment, their real and perfect occurrence (2 Cor 1.18–21).⁹ From this vantage the divine judgment to come names that utterly mysterious process by which God transfigures the wills of every participant in every event in order to make these events real events, to make them what God has beneficently and lovingly willed for them to be from eternity. Or doesn’t every event have an end? Isn’t a single moment just as much God’s creation as the whole of history (Jn 5.17)? And if every moment’s God’s creation, doesn’t it have a divinely-willed end, its own singular perfection and truth? Thus every tragedy, evil, failure, damage to every last moment in whatever way—all of it, so long as it’s left tragic, remains unfinished, a not-yet happening, a temporal miscarriage awaiting its true birth. Nothing has yet happened just because it has passed.

That, I think, is why Maximus Confessor claims that God’s providence and judgment “are one in power,” and that in the Son’s Incarnation they are one in actual fact.¹⁰ Jesus Christ is the end of divine providence and judgment, because he is all creation perfected—which is to say, creation truly created, “the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1.15). His presence, his happening, completes every timespace relation and coordinate and act. The effects of his historical life extend, therefore, to history’s very edges. It is he, Mary’s boy, Jesus of Nazareth, who by his conception, birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension “becomes all in all.”¹¹ I tell you a great mystery: all events, X+, precede the final Event, Y, and yet Y is the very ground and eventuation of every X.

IV

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, philosopher J.M. McTaggart famously identified and described two conceptions of time.¹² He labeled them the A-series and the B-series. Roughly, A-series expressions and ideas include concepts such as “past,” “present,” “future,” “today,” “now,” “yesterday,” and so forth. They conceive time as a flowing series: one and the same event cannot be both now and yesterday, past and present. They also refer to the subject perceiving or uttering temporal events, and so carry a certain specificity. If I say, “the universe will be destroyed in a great heat death,” it’s of some urgency whether I mean today or in a hundred years or in 2.8 billion years (currently our best guess). Not so with B-series conceptions. These only mark temporal events according to the relative ordering what obtains among them: “before,” “earlier,” “after,” “simultaneous with,” etc. On this view, discrete timespace events imply only definite and ordered relations, not an absolute vantage from which one might assign one event to the (absolute) “past” and another to the (absolute) “future.”

This clarifies the phenomenon I’ve tried here to identify. This phenomenon—what I described as mutual or symmetrical constitution (or co-effectuation) across time—exceeds the logic of both of McTaggart’s series. That’s fairly evident for the A-series, the flowing conception of temporal events. In each of the examples treated, X event has receded into the past before Y passes from future to present event, and yet in each case X also depends on Y’s actual happening to occur as X at all. In fact, they depend on one another.

But this transgresses the (less rigid) B-series as well. Even from this perspective, X still occurs “before” Y, so that it seems unclear how Y could have any constitutive relation to X qua X, even if they somehow existed simultaneously or if their “presentness” were a matter relative gaze (say, God’s own). My phenomenon, by contrast, does not indicate merely an absence of existential priority among temporal events. That’s a negative claim, and it’s as far as the grammatical account permits. Rather, my phenomenon manifests a positive truth about temporal events themselves, whether conceived in absolute motion or in relative (narrative) ordering alone: events separate by time, however short or long the intervening interval, can be mutually constituting, such that one’s true eventuation depends on the other’s. Mary cannot be the Mary who assents to her Son apart from her Son’s own assent to the cross; her Son would not become human, mortal, apart from his Mother’s assent.

The mutual—one is tempted to say dialectical—constitution of events across time makes history a single, unified event. This unity surpasses the very narrative-temporal logic many have thought inviolable on theological grounds. But it does not simply negate that logic. When the Lord broke his own body in the bread of Maundy Thursday, it wasn’t as if the body made eucharistically present lost its irrepressible plot indicators: that body was the very body that would be broken on the cross, but was there before the cross, and therefore is at every moment and time and event—in brief, to every creature. When Jesus returns to judge the quick and the dead, and thereby make some things die which were “alive” and others alive which were “dead,” we will see the very same face (1 Cor 13.12) that so captivated Mary’s in some Bethlehem cave.

Time’s truth is that it is a single act whose parts mutually imply and constitute one another. There’s one reason for this: because, “in the fullness of time,” God sent his very Son (Gal 4.4)—very God—and thus identified his very self with a finite timespace existence. Yet he transcends time. The Incarnation, then, achieves—no, is—the concrete identity of divine (eternal) and creaturely (spatiotemporal) idioms; for neither time nor eternity exhausts the Subject who bears both. Their interpenetration occurs only in the person of the Son. Time’s existential fullness is found in eternity and eternity’s in time because both are in—no, are—Christ’s one body. He recapitulates everything in himself. He ever-sources and ever-heads and ever-grounds and ever-is all things in heaven and on earth and under the earth (Eph 1.10). He preserves time’s narrative logic only because he fulfills and exceeds it.

My lights are admittedly dim, but I can see no other way to make sense of the gospel story.

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