Jordan Daniel Wood’s recent essay “The Fullness of Time” is a subtle and engaging meditation on how the incarnation of God the Son ought to inflect thinking about the nature of time and causality. In this short reply, I offer further reflections on two of his key claims, endorsing and strengthening the former, but objecting to and replacing the latter. Wood argues, first, that the Incarnation requires an account of time according to which temporally later events can be the causes and not only the effects of earlier ones; about this, he is exactly right, and (I will suggest) even understates the case for it. Wood goes on, however, to propose that the Incarnation, consummately at Christ’s return to judge and redeem all things, so transfigures the sin-damaged past that it ceases to be sin-damaged at all, and instead becomes what God willed for it from the beginning. I argue that this part of Wood’s argument rests on a logical impossibility, and conclude by sketching an alternative account of Christ’s healing of all times.

Wood rightly observes that “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.” On Maundy Thursday, he notes, Christ institutes the Eucharist by consecrating bread and wine to become his ascended and glorified body and blood, notwithstanding that their ascension and glorification will not take place for another fifty days. So too, at Mary’s conception, the same glorified Christ made himself present with her by his Spirit to sanctify her fully for the mission of eventually bearing him into the world.

In both cases, temporally later events (Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension) supply necessary conditions for the existence of a temporally prior one. This upsets the intuition – given classic expression by Aristotle – that there are no facts about what has not yet happened, that a sentence such as, “There will be a sea-battle tomorrow” has no truth-value.¹ The Incarnation implies otherwise, at least if Christ’s merits and presence reach back from the future to influence the past which gives rise to him.

So far, as he acknowledges (cf. n. 8), Wood’s account of time is intimate with what has been known since McTaggart’s seminal “The Unreality of Time” as a B-theory or “tenseless” account, according to which all times obtain a-temporally, there being no (non-indexical) facts about which time is “now.” And yet Wood suggests that he goes beyond McTaggart’s B-theory, since on that view, “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.” Perhaps this is true for the B-theory which McTaggart described (though without endorsing); after all, the causal relations he considers are all broadly “efficient,” the physical transfers of energy which are, as Wood himself acknowledges, pitilessly unidirectional, pointing always and only to the final stillness of the universe’s heat-death.

But then, not all causes are efficient. Already in the fifteenth century, John Wyclif argued, in his On Categorical Being, for an explicitly tenseless theory of time (the first such known to me, or at least perhaps the first since Parmenides) from two ordinary Aristotelianisms: first, that “cause and caused…are related, such that each requires the other to exist, and both perish together,” and second, that final causes are genuine causes.² “For,” he observes, “nature and every orderly agent acts outwardly for the sake of an end, which exercises final causality over such a work; as an alteration is for the sake of a substantial form which is to be generated.”³  Water molecules of a neutral pH, heated at sea level to 100 degrees Celsius, necessarily transition from a liquid to a gas. The process of heating seems to aim at the outcome of gaseousness, like an arrow at its target; we can specify necessary and sufficient conditions for boiling water only because they invariably issue in this outcome. But how can this be, Wyclif wonders, if there’s nothing yet for it to aim at?

And so, what Wood terms “the mutual…constitution of events across time” looks to me to be visible, not only from the speculative heights of Christology, but on the ground of ordinary causal realism. But those speculative heights still beckon, and Wood is right to emphasize that Christ’s relations to time and space are sui generis, as is evident from the fact that the ascended Christ can act as efficient, formal, and meritorious cause in regions of spacetime that precede his own birth. How, we might ask?

Wood’s own account of how this might be involves Christ’s transfiguration of all times in his Second Coming, which “effects the fullness or completion of every (necessarily) prior event of history. His parousia is the actual-happening of events—their truth.” In his final judgment of all history, Christ does not merely inaugurate a sin-free region of spacetime, leaving the pre-Parousia regions the devastated wasteland we now experience, but acts directly on that sin-damaged past – as we have already glimpsed in the instances of Mary and the Eucharistic elements of Maundy Thursday – to embrace it within his glorified body.

Wood characterizes this backwards-flowing redemption in radical terms, insisting that “the divine judgment…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.” He even ventures that “nothing has yet happened just because it has passed.” This is stirring stuff, but the meaning it most naturally suggests would, I fear, require Wood’s readers to adopt the White Queen’s discipline of believing six impossible things before breakfast. After all, we surely must recognize, with St. Bonaventure, that “what was, cannot be thought not to have been, if it is understood to have been.”⁴  Or, framed in terms of a tenseless theory of time: for God to bring it about that an event A, plotted in spacetime at w, x, y, z, not be so plotted, would simply be for him to fail to create A at all.

Not even the LORD can make it that what happens doesn’t happen, and this includes even things we and the LORD alike lament, notably the angelic and human falls, and the history of slaughter, rapine, hatred, and envy which they engender. For God to transfigure this series of events so that they are no longer sins – so that they, as locally-plotted in spacetime – conform to his best intentions for them, would simply be for him eternally to create other events in their place. This would not be the redemption of the actual, fallen world, but rather its replacement by an immaculate one. That God could have created the such an unfallen world is irrelevant to the question of what salvation for creatures in this one might consist in.

Nonetheless, there is an important truth in Wood’s account of the final judgment. We must, at the very least, pause to consider what “redemption” actually means on a tenseless theory of time. For if Christ’s work does not somehow act backwards to transform the devastation we inhabit, then the “redeemed” cosmos, at least as the LORD beholds it, perduring under the aspect of eternity, will still be a twilit region, mingling the shadow of sin with the light of Christ.

This is a dark and difficult problem, indeed, but I at least am inclined to seek its solution in memory’s daily transfiguration of the past: a girl’s chance meeting with a boy might initially disclose itself as the beginning of first love, then later, of first heartbreak, and even, in time, as the first time she saw her husband. Nothing that follows will make their initial meeting not have happened, but we should not presume that we know what it, or any event, meant until the final judgment makes all things manifest. Perhaps at the wedding supper of the Lamb, all of creation will look back on fallen and redeemed time as a winding journey to meet its Bridegroom at the altar of history.

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