At the heart of Christianity is not a teaching but an event. Revelation is something that unfolds in time, and redemption is accomplished by what happens. This is something that philosophers have impressed upon me more than theologians.
It was perhaps Kierkegaard who was the first catalyst in this regard. In Philosophical Fragments, written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard works out a thought project that is meant to unveil and analyze the difference between the “Socratic” notion of enlightenment (“recollection”) and the Christian emphasis on the necessity of revelation. But the difference between them, he emphasizes, isn’t just a difference of method or sources of knowledge; more fundamentally, the difference between the Socratic and the Christian is a completely different sense of the significance of time.
In the Socratic (“idealist”) model, the time of enlightenment—coming to know what I had already known but forgotten—was merely an “occasion” because at that time of recollection, nothing really changes. In contrast, Kierkegaard says, in the Christian understanding the instant of revelation—and the time of one’s coming to appropriate that revelation—is a decisive “moment” that changes everything. “If the situation is to be different,” he says, “then the moment in time must have such decisive significance that for no moment will I be able to forget it, neither in time nor in eternity, because the eternal, previously nonexistent, came into existence in that moment.” Time and history are not just pseudo-stages to roll out some timeless truth, like some mock unveiling of an open secret; rather, the truth is born at the very intersection of time and eternity, like a chemical reaction that requires both components. “A moment such as this is unique,” Kierkegaard continues. “To be sure, it is short and temporal, as the moment is; it is passing, as the moment is, past, as the moment is in the next moment, and yet it is decisive, and yet it is filled with the eternal. A moment such as this must have a special name. Let us call it: the fullness of time.”
In 1927, a young Martin Heidegger—by that point already a student of Kierkegaard for a decade—gave a lecture on “Phenomenology and Theology” at the university in Marburg (with Rudolf Bultmann in the room). Musing on the nature and calling of theology, Heidegger emphasized that theology’s “topic” was not God but Christlichkeit—“Christianness,” the how of Christian existence. Theology, he emphasized, should reflect the very nature of faith, which is “not some more or less modified type of knowing” but rather a faith-full way of being in response to the event of revelation in “Christ, the crucified God.” Faith—the existential transformation called “rebirth”—is a mode of participating in the Christ-event.