Paying Attention to Time Resource Pages

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Paying Attention to Time

Desired Results

Each Into the New Testament unit has been designed to foster enduring understandings as well as key knowledge and key skills. Here are the learning goals for Paying Attention to Time. For more on these categories, see my Understanding by Design page.

Enduring Understandings

  1. According to the New Testament, God's future (also known as "the kingdom") is at hand.
  2. NT texts have at least three different kind of time within them: calendar time, cosmic time, and narrative time.

Essential Questions

  1. What time is it?
  2. What does eschatology mean for daily life? (or, "What does it mean for Christians to live godly lives 'ahead of time?'")
  3. What does the future hold?

Key Knowledge

  1. The New Testament borrows from the Old and from other Jewish texts for its apocalyptic images, worldview and theology
  2. A text's verbs are always a clue to its sense of time and the relative timing of events.

Key Skills

  1. Identify the pace at which action unfolds in a New Testament text.
  2. Create timelines to chart events that are narrated in a story or letter.
  3. Distinguish between:
    1. calendar time (e.g. days, festivals),
    2. cosmic time (eschatological references), and
    3. narrative time (that is, at what pace the action occurs).

Resource Pages on this Skill

Paying Attention to Time | This is the introductory page you are reading right now.

What (Type of) Time Is It? | To pay attention to time in the New Testament means to notice when festivals, special days (like Sabbath) and seasons are mentioned. It also means paying attention to what a text says about the end time. Finally, it means to pay attention to the pace and timing of a story or other piece of biblical text. All three of these types of time are outlined on this resource page.

Two-Minute Tutorial on New Testament Eschatology | The New Testament has much to say about the End with a capital E. Get a thumbnail sketch of New Testament teaching on the end time here.

Before, During and After: Creating Timelines | Texts locate their readers within a time frame. There are things that have happened and things yet to happen. Learn to diagram the time frame implied by a text.

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