2010-05-02 - "In the time of Jesus ..."

While the phrase "In the time of Jesus ..." refers to the historical period from the reign of Emperors Augustus to Tiberius, the Resurrection makes all generations "the time of Jesus."  As Jesus is the "Alpha and Omega," he is not a creature of chronology: "Before Abraham was, I am."  These are the decibels of eternity sounding from a human tongue, bringing a hint of heaven into the created world.

     Christ's voice is the same voice that began creation: "Let there be light." So a carpenter occupied with earthly pursuits also says, "I am the light of the world." This demands using our intellect, as far as it goes, and recognizing that this intellect does not know everything. As the Latin word for "deaf" is surdus, so life seems absurd when we block out the voice of God. "If today you would hear his voice, harden not your hearts ..."  Dogmatic atheists prefer the shortcut of listening only to themselves. When the leaders in Jerusalem deafened their ears to the divine voice speaking through Paul and Barnabas, the apostles moved out of the city and preached to Gentiles, who did not think that they "knew it all."

     The atheist's assumptions parallel the limited imagination of the U.S. Patent Office Commissioner, Henry Ellsworth, who reported to Congress in 1843, that "the advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." Another Patent Officer, Charles Duell, is said to have told President McKinley in 1899, that "Everything that can be invented has been invented." That may be only legend, for there is no written record of it, but in 1878 in Munich, the physicist Philipp von Jolly told a student not to go into physics because "in this field almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."  Max Planck ignored that advice and went on to become a founder of quantum physics.

     This month the former atheist philosopher Antony Flew died, having declared six years earlier that, while he would not affirm religion beyond Deism, the evidences of intelligent design on the macro level of the universe and the micro level of DNA made him accept the existence of God. A writer in the New York Times Magazine in 2004 suggested that Flew was senile. In declaring this, that writer may have been a little like Ellsworth and von Jolly.

     Flew died on what would have been my maternal grandmother's 125th birthday. It would take only 16 such birthdays to take us back to "the time of Jesus." But because that "time" is always present, the Eternal Voice speaks now as then, moving us from intuitions of a Cosmic Designer to a personal encounter with the Second Person of the Holy Trinity: "The Father and I are one."