[. . .] No honest Old Testament prophet ever promised eternal joy to his nation save on the other side of disaster. Much less can an honest New Testament prophet, using the cross of Christ for his understanding of human fate, predict for men and societies immortality without judgment. To show up as clearly as may be the potentiality of catastrophe in our lives is as much a function of reason using revelation in our day as in any ancient time.
Yet in the light of the revelatory occasion the Christian discerns another possibility; it is not his own possibility in the sense that it is implicit in him. But it is possible to the person who reveals himself in the historic occasion as the lord of life and death. It is the possibility of the resurrection of a new and other self, of a new community, a reborn remnant.
The above citation comes from “Reasons of the Heart,” the third and next to last chapter of Richard Niebuhr’s book, The Meaning of Revelation.[1] Richard Niebuhr was the younger brother of Reinhold Niebuhr. Both Richard and Reinhold were important Christian theologians. Reinhold, the elder brother, is most widely known for authoring what is called the “Serenity Prayer,” which is used widely, including often in Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve-Step communities.
The citation immediately below comes from the fourth and last chapter of the same book by Richard, the younger brother. That chapter is entitled “The Deity of God”:
[. . .] Revelation is not a development of our religious ideas but their continuous conversion. God’s self-disclosure is that permanent revolution in our religious life by which all religious truths are painfully transformed and all religious behavior transfigured by repentance and new faith. It is revolutionary since it makes a new beginning and puts an end to the old development; it is permanent revolution since it can never come to an end in time in such a way that an irrefrangible knowledge about God becomes the possession an individual or a group. Life in the presence of revelation in this respect as in all others is not lived before or after but in the midst of a great revolution.[2]
It was not until fall of last year that I first read The Meaning of Revelation, and when I first read the passage cited first above, at the start of today’s post, it struck me that the “resurrection” at issue not only in that passage but also in the Christian Bible and Christian tradition themselves, is not an event in what could be labelled clock-time, the time of datable historical occasions that occur once and then sink into the past. That is the sort of time in which, for example, in 732 at the battle of Tours Charles Martel defeated the Moors, to use an old line. Rather, it struck me, the resurrection at issue is something the happening of which is permanently recurring, occurring not “in” some already constituted time but rather in such a way as to “set out or forth” time as such, that is, as truly revealing just “what” time itself truly “is, was, and ever will be once and again forever,” as it were.
The same revelation about resurrection that so struck me when I read the first citation above, struck me anew yet again when I read the second citation above some fifty pages later. What dawned on me when I was reading the first passage dawned on me yet again when I read the second one — just as the sun dawns anew every morning.
* * *
What calls out to be kept in mind here is the difference between chronological time, from Greek khronos, and what we might call kairotic time, from Greek kairos. Those were the two words and senses of “time” in the culture and language of the ancient Greeks — from whom, be it noted, the entire occidental tradition of thought called “philosophy” also derives.[3]
The Greek noun khronos means time in the sense of a defined, measurable temporal extension, such as someone’s lifetime, a season of the year, a year itself or multiples thereof, decades, centuries, millenniums, and so forth. We might well put the point this way: khronos is clock time.
In contrast, the Greek term kairos means an opportune, decisive moment of critical change. We might well put it colloquially that kairos is the time when the hour has finally struck and the bell has been rung. It is the moment when conditions are there for the accomplishment of crucial action. As Wikipedia puts it: “In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.” In other words, kairos is always now!
Thus, according to its etymology, kairos is the “fit” time for happening as such. It is a moment of vision, when all becomes clear and arranges itself in its full entirety. When such a moment at last occurs, nothing has changed — that is, no one thing or combination of things has been altered — yet everything has changed.
One can often hear that very refrain in Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve-Step Groups concerning what has happened when someone “bottoms out” in their addiction, thereby reaching what in the book Alcoholics Anonymous and elsewhere in Twelve-Step literature is called “the turning point” and “the jumping off point” where, if and only if they do indeed take a turn and make the jump, they are “reborn,” to use the very word used in that same literature.
Such turning points, such jumping off points, are kairotic moments of vision.
Kairos, the ancient Greek god of the opportune moment
* * *
The sun is new every day.
— Heraclitus
This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.
— Maya Angelou
The words resurrection and rebirth at root say the same thing. The former derives from the past-participle stem of Latin resurgere "rise again, appear again." The latter derives ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *bher- “to carry,” which comes also and especially to mean “to bear children.”[4]
The sun itself is resurrected each day. It is reborn daily.
That Heraclitus, born in Asia Minor in the Greek colony of Ephesus in Ionia sometime during the 6th century BCE, and Maya Angelou, the African American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist who was born and died in the United States during the 20th century CE, could see to share that same observation is proof that both were once visited by Kairos, god of the opportune moment.
Neither Heraclitus nor Maya Angelou let that moment of vision pass. Instead, they simply spoke the truth that moment had given them eyes to see and ears to hear.
So, I pray, may Kairos — like the sun — come right now yet again ever anew to us all.
Let Kairos come!
[1] Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1941), pp. 130-131.
[2] Ibid., pp. 182-1983
[3] The word philosophy, heard to its etymological roots, means “the love (Greek philein, “to love,” in the sense of feeling “friendship or affection for/toward”) of wisdom (Greek sophia, “wisdom”). Just as in ancient Greek there are two different words for “time,” so are there two different words for “love”: philos and eros. I will explore that latter distinction and the relationship between those two senses of “love” in my next post on this blog, “Erotic Friendship,” which I will post two weeks from today, on March 10, 2025.
[4] That not all children so borne are infant animals will be one thing under consideration in my next post, “Erotic Friendship,” set to go up two weeks from today, on March 10, 2025.