By John Mark Reynolds 

When reading old books, it is easy to display a chronological snobbery, as C.S. Lewis called it. The chronological snob is to time what the ethnocentric person is to ethnicity. His chronocentrism assumes that everyone in the past should know everything he knows or agree with all his assumptions. When visiting the past in his imagination, he views it as Cameron viewed the people of 1912 on Titanic: moderns with funny clothes and less stuff.

Sadly, it is even more common in students to be chronologically ignorant. Such people forget the progression of ideas and they assume every concept and word available to them was available in the past. They forget that language and ideas also develop (the Platonist of today is not the Platonist of yesterday) and imagine that the ancients thought like moderns without the technology.

But Abraham was not an American with sheep and no Ipod.

The Lord God of Sacred Scriptures is not a revolutionary, thank God. Rapid change in human culture has rarely been for the best and God does not make the mistake of the French or Russian revolutionaries. Each revolution was led by men who believed that they could rapidly bring heaven to earth, but ended up making France and Russia look more like hell. God knows that even a great good must be brought on slowly to avoid doing greater harm.

He is outside of time and no chronological snob, nor does the Divine Being suffer from chronocentrism.

God also has to communicate with people in language and concepts available to them, if He is to allow them to mature. Even attempting to describe the inner workings of the atom to a tribal people would be useless, since they lack the mental vocabulary to make sense of the message. Of course, God could directly reveal all this to humanity, but this would not allow for a natural cultural development.

Why is such a development so important? If a culture does not learn for itself what is good, true, and beautiful then it will not be an adult culture. It will depend forever on priestcraft and develop a magical, instead of rational, understanding of reality. If God is trying to raise up sons and daughters, part of a divine educational program, then He must slowly help us grasp the ideas behind what He wishes and we need.

We would be lost without divine revelation, but He is intent on giving us the time to truly understand what He is saying. He does not just force it on our imaginations.

Ideas that seem easy to humanity now are the result of thousands of years of human thought in conjunction with the work of God’s Spirit. Great genius is often required to understand the big ideas on which later, more incremental progress, is based. The very words to describe these ideas and to refine them must be invented. A Moses or a Socrates, sensitive and ready to learn rapidly from God and experience, is a rarity. Most humans can only progress at a much slower pace.

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