Now, Now and Not-Yet: On Time, Eternity, and Questions of Evil Today

Christian tradition has long wrestled with understanding the relation of time and eternity and its entanglement with questions of evil and suffering today. But where earlier spiritual thinkers such as Augustine and Boethius related questions of time and divine being to more logical conundrums of epistemology, it is with the late medieval anchoress, Julian of Norwich, where time, eternity, and evil are worked out in what this paper will argue is a comprehensive and realistic treatment of these enduring questions. It is in Julian’s differentiation between the “Now” of the divine perspective and the “now and not-yet” of human experience where questions of moral responsibility in both endurance of and resistance to evil can be helpfully engaged.