Can anyone find and show scripture that explicitly states it is important for man (me/you) to apply an absolute concern for TIME in relation to our studies and reading the Word of God? The wife and I were discussing TIME this morning as it relates to "One day is as a thousand years to the Lord", "Absent the body, present with the Lord" and then when Jesus called Lazarus from the grave he said to "Come out..." Not down from heaven. While those relate to understanding where you are when in the physical sense, what I mean is that while these ideas of time are important to understanding the relationship between God and man, is there any scripture that clearly points toward us needing to fully understand TIME as it relates to our duty to Christ? I told her that as far as I was concerned, when you die it doesn't matter if your spirit immediately slips out of your body and appears next to Christ, or if you lie in the last state of natural being (the grave, ashes, at the bottom of an ocean or on the highest mountain as your former body turns to dust) for 10,000 years fully unaware of time and then you awake next to Christ. In either sense time does not impact your salvation. It does not affect your being in the spirited sense. It does not lessen nor extend eternity. Love is not lost nor gained. What was there in the beginning will still be there today, tomorrow, and forever. Yet, I have seen churches torn apart because of such matters. Issues I consider trivial in the scope of understanding that we are to put on the breastplate, take up the shield and sword, and go forth making believers of men. To be fishers of men. To do what we are instructed while we are alive and not to worry about the grave. So, do you know of any scripture that makes TIME an integral part of our worship and where we have a duty to understand it fully?
Since you asked in Traditional Theology ... there are different kinds of time, represented by two different words in Scripture.
But as it relates to Orthodox theology we understand that there is a chronos (χρόνος) time that is the time that passes, time in which we live our lives. There is another time - kairos (καιρός) - which is a sort of moment in time, as touching eternity, in which God acts. It is within kairos that the Liturgy connects to the worship in heaven. At every meeting in our particular church we sing "Today is the beginning of our salvation" in a hymn about the annunciation (because our local church is named for the annunciation). But events in "God's time" when He works our salvation are always present, in a sense, because God is outside of time. It is how we can participate.
How we spend our chronos time is how we live our lives, and makes us whatever we become, so it is important to orient that time towards God in some degree.
I know that's not what you're asking really. But that is the only Traditional teaching about time I am aware of.
You seem to be asking about soul sleep, which is a modern theology and was not a teaching of the early Church.
If you want to get hypothetical, no, in a selfish sense it would not matter to each individual's salvation whether they themselves simply slept. But that's not how it is. After all, we are surrounded by a great crowd of witnesses, and who knows but maybe my great-grandma, who pretty much prayed all us grandchildren to faith anyway, isn't right now with Christ still asking His blessings on us. Love doesn't end.
As for splitting up churches, schism was regarded as a very great sin in the early Church and often there were great efforts to prevent it. After all, disunity is a great sin. But people who find themselves in many denominations today inherit a history of ongoing reform, which I'm sure usually has good motives but has produced a shattering of Christianity as a result.
You might prefer this to be moved to General Theology if it wasn't the traditional understanding you wished to discuss?
