Time in Heaven

Previously I wrote about Paul J. Griffiths' reckoning of the Augustinian perspective of time -- specifically, how the distinction between metronomic time and systolic time helps makes sense of the truth that time was both created to be good and is also currently in a fallen, corrupted state. The metronome describes present time -- the tick-tocking countdown to death; the systole describes healed time -- the life-giving, blood-gathering heartbeat of our lives being folded into God's light. By describing systolic time differently from metronomic time, Griffiths provides a way to think about life after death. In that future reality, which Christians call heaven, we remain temporal -- no creature can be eternal like God is, even in resurrected glory -- while being freed from the constraints of our present death-time. In short, the systole gathers up and heals the metronome.

Griffiths' work on last things is quite more extensive than this distinction between two kinds of temporality. His book Decreation, which attempts to describe the future state of all created things, is based on the premise that creatures -- that is, anything other than God -- can only have a future that is without novelty. To put it another way, after heaven (or hell), a creature cannot achieve anything else -- there is nothing newer than that to follow this state of "lastness." (Griffiths uses the Latin word novissimum, related to the English word for new, as an overall category for last things.)

According to Griffiths, there are only three possible last things for us creatures -- meaning, these are the only conditions without novelty: annihilation, simple stasis, or repetitive stasis. Annihilation is to come to nothing -- to cease to exist. The second last thing -- simple stasis -- has no movement or change at all. Simple stasis is not like the systolic heartbeat of worship; Griffiths doesn't spend much time explaining it, because this state is the precise definition of boredom and, eventually, death. Rather, his descriptions of the third state -- repetitive stasis -- make up the essential arguments of this book. Repetitive stasis is complex, cycling through a series of events, even if that cycle is repetitive and does not produce any novelty.

Some people understand Griffiths to mean that resurrected humans in heaven will not change. It seems that in one sense this is true, hence his use of the word stasis. However, I think that any movement, even if it is just back and forth between the same two places -- like the movement of a beating heart between the contraction and relaxation of its muscles -- implies change, and the "repetitive" part of Griffiths' formulation implies that heaven will indeed consist of changes. Griffiths' point is that these changes won't be novel -- after the resurrection humans will not experience new states of glory.

In my opinion, the option that Griffiths too-quickly rules out (something which others have noted) is that God might allow for resurrected human beings to develop and grow as part of their final state. Griffiths calls this condition "epektasy" and simply says that such a possibility is not compatible with Christian thought. After my first reading of the book, I'm still unconvinced. Indeed, it seems that there should be a way to both account for the healing of metronomic time and allow for post-resurrection growth "from glory to glory."

Stay tuned as I continue to work this out in future posts. It seems that music should be able to provide a way of understanding the cycles of time within an overall directionality.