Semper sola nunc
The negative image of God's Omnipresence
I was watching an interview1 between David Perell and the Twitter- author known as the Cultural Tutor. Their conversation ranged from writing to culture. One of the twists and turns of their labyrinthian conversation yielded a profound observation that got me thinking. (The whole conversation is enlightening and highly recommended.) Perell noted that the world we inhabit has gone from a space bias to a time bias. Once if you had gone to a book store you would have found a large array of local or maybe regional books going back through time, but now as soon as we log onto Twitter, we have access to the thoughts and opinions of those all over the world, but they’re all now. There’s no longevity to our thoughts today. They are capable of reaching anyone in the world but only for a second before they drown in the digital abyss. It’s the “never-ending now”2. That is to say, it is always only now. Our memories fade and foresight dims all we can see is what is before us. News from a month ago is now old news. We can’t look beyond the current election. The world before our eyes is moving so fast that we barely register it before it changes. Our transcendence to the present moment is curbed by the very brevity of the moment itself.
This is the negative image of God’s omnipresence. God is present to each moment, simultaneously. I remember my professor in grad school speaking of God’s omnipresence as if every note in a piano concerto sounded simultaneously, so every moment of creation is simultaneous to God. The past is no more distant to God than this present moment. The same with the future. God isn’t bound by time, but rather binds it and masterfully orchestrates it so that “at the appropriate time, God sent out his Son.”3 He knows the end from the beginning and yet we can’t be bothered to remember the beginning or anticipate the end, as it is always only now in our distracted state.4
Our current captivity to novelty robs us of our full humanity. It’s another manifestation of the sin of sensuality. Reinhold Niebuhr in his Nature and Destiny of Man, argues that the essence of the Imago Dei is self-transcendence5, that is we are the only creature who knows it is a creature. As such this knowledge makes us anxious. This anxiety becomes the occasion for sin to enter the picture. Rather than living by faith and trusting God who created us with such knowledge, we seek to alleviate the anxiety either by denying our finitude and creatureliness (pride) or by trying to dull our transcendence through some means of physical sensation (sensuality) usually drunkenness, gluttony, or some other type of hedonistic indulgence.6
Thank God, this is not the final word for this always only now that is presently a curse will turn into a blissful blessing in the presence of our Lord on the other side.
Begin about 50 minutes.
David Perell’s phrase from this conversation.
Galatians 4:4 NET
Isaiah 46:10
A good portion of my M.Th. dissertation was devoted to laying out Niebuhr’s understanding of the Imago Dei, and how that undergirds his understanding of the scope and function of the state.
Nature and Destiny of Man vol 1 chs 6-8.