Friday, June 30, 2023

Secular Life, Millennial Life, Heavenly Life

I have found myself saying "this life", to refer to the life that each of us lives between physical birth and death. What follows "this life" is to wait for resurrection. Then, to be resurrected in the Resurrection which can also be called the Millennium. I like being able to say "millennial" about what goes on in the Millennium. But "this-lifely" is awkward.

Another term for "this life" could be "secular life", the time that is lived in this world. An atheist, Muslim, Christian, and even a Buddhist or Hindu would agree that there is a thing that we live in on some level, agree on that same thing, in which people are born (and registered as having been born if they live in a time and place where birth certificates are kept), and we can all interact politically and modern medicine staves off problems that we all recognize as problems. In this world, where perhaps we only expect to live 60 or 80 years, time flows linearly.

The Millennium, I assume, and this would be the natural assumption from natural theology, I think, flows linearly as well. Some people talk about non-linear time (kairos), versus linear time (chronos). Maybe kairos runs parallel to both secular and Millennial time, which are forms of chronos.

(My understanding of kairos in this post is that it is "gathered time" (every Christmas is linked to every Christmas you ever experienced). If the past currently exists, we can be close to all the Christmases at once at each Christmastime (kairos), even if otherwise things proceed according to chronos (where we are closest to the moment that just entered the past).)

Hell, ultimately, becomes non-existent and thus I guess timeless. Heaven, according to MSL, if I recall correctly, has a chronos component (repeated outworkings of life that proceed linearly), but perhaps also a kairos component. Certainly restful time lends itself to contact with kairos or the timeless, and heaven is a time of rest.

I don't know what to say about times before creation (the beginning of secular time).

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