Excerpted from several posts made to the mailing list LDS-Phil by James Faulconer.
From an essay on the difference between our ways of understanding the world and that of the Hebrews (for more on some of these issues, see Thorlief Bowman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek):
For Greeks (a word I use in the essay to refer to the Western tradition in general), space is fundamental to time; in an Indo-European model, time is traditionally modeled on space, namely as a series of points that follow one another in a line. For Hebrews, however, time is fundamental, not space. In Indo-European languages, time is a straight line and we stand on it gazing forward at the future, with the past behind us. These points and that gaze define the tenses of our verbs, as does our attitude toward time. We can sum up our attitude toward in Aristotle's phrase, "time destroys" (Physics 221a30). In contrast, we might sum the Hebrew attitude up in the phrase "time gives birth."
As part of their thinking about time, Indo-European ("Greek") languages have three tenses, describing the three relations possible to points on the time line, to what we, standing in the present, can see: this moment, before this moment, and after this moment. But Hebrew has essentially two tenses, corresponding to the completion or incompleteness of the events which make up time, not to what we can see. Hebrew tenses refer instead to events: that which has been concluded, and that which has not been concluded, roughly the perfect and the imperfect tenses (145-6). Interestingly, when Hebrew does correlate seeing to time, it speaks of the past as before and the future behind. [Footnote: This seems to explain the odd wording of Alma 13.1: " I would cite your minds forward to the time when the Lord God gave these commandments unto his children."]
The two tenses in Hebrew are a result of the fact that, for Hebrew, it isn't the line that is paramount, not even if we conceive that line as a circle, as we sometimes attempt to portray non-Indo-European conceptions of time. [Note: Mircea Eliade, for example, uses the analogy of the circle (The Sacred and the Profane, 70) to discuss other conceptions of time, as does Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces). Instead, rhythm, an event rather than a series of points, is the model for thinking about time, the rhythms of the seasons, for example, or the rhythms of life and death, or the rhythms of dance.]
We can illustrate this difference between the Indo-European and the Hebrew ways of thinking about time in thinking about the New Year. For us it is the death of the old; for Hebrews, it is the return of the beginning in a promise of what is coming. If we conceive time as rhythm rather than a line, any moment contains both all previous ones and any coming ones in the way that rhythm contains what has come before and what comes after to be rhythm. We can conceive of spatial and, therefore, Indo-European temporal moments as discreet and independent. The existence of one particular moment of time can be considered apart from any other moment, just as any one point on a line can be separated from every other point on it. However, the moments of rhythm cannot be discreet in that way and remain moments of rhythm. They require ("contain" already) their before and after to be at all.
One beat of a drum is not part of any rhythm; the beats are what they are as rhythm only in their relation to other beats. Moments in a rhythm are meaningful only in relation to what has come before and what will come after. Consequently, though for us space is the container that includes us, our lives, and everything about us, for Hebrews the "container" is time. For us, things and their qualities are metaphysically paramount; for Hebrews, events and their meanings are paramount. [Note: Some contemporary philosophers, for example, Martin Heidegger, have argued that to make space and objects paramount is the essence of metaphysics, which seems to mean that Hebrew though is non-metaphysical. Other contemporary philosophers, for example, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, have argued that metaphysics is inescapable. For now, we will ignore that problem.]
When thinking of history, this difference between Greek and Hebrew ways of thinking is telling. We think of the past as gone forever and, as we see in Augustine's Confessions, the passing of time becomes a difficult problem for Western thinkers. The problem is especially acute for Christians, for if the past is gone once and for all, redemption and atonement are incomprehensible: I have sinned. Nothing can change that and any recompense to be made, whether by me or by God himself, is a poor substitute for what should have happened in the first place. For the West, history is a series of nows that disappear forever and, once gone, they cannot be changed or effected. The form of events is fixed forever by the passing of time.
In contrast, if we conceive time rhythmically, then the past can change. Not that the previous moment of the rhythm didn't occur, but that the past is what it is, even as past, only in relation to the continuation of the rhythm, only in relation to the present and future happening of the rhythm. As I said earlier, the relation of one drum beat to the previous beats and to the beats that are coming determine the rhythmic meaning of any beat of a drum. Thus, a present beat determines the rhythmic meaning of a past beat as much as the beats that came before determine the rhythmic meaning of a present beat. In rhythm, causation runs backwards as well as forwards. Similarly, a rhythmic conception of time means that something that happens now can affect the being of something that has occurred previously.
The Biblical conception of time is the rhythmic conception, a conception shared by the writers of the Book of Mormon. In fact, the Book of Mormon writers even more clearly conceive of time as rhythmic. The Book of Mormon speaks of types and shadows, the rhythms of time, repeating themselves in new ways that remain also the same. (Our understanding of dispensations may be another example of this rhythm.)
These differences between our conception of time and that of Biblical and Book of Mormon writers seem to be more than different descriptions or recourse to different sets of metaphors; they seem to rely on different implicit ontologies.
We can use the metaphor of rhythm to think about time and its moments. However, as moments, i.e., as movements, moments are different from instants. The instant is a break in the continuity of moments. It need not be a break by reflection, but human existence is such a break. In fact, reflection is possible only because human existence is already a break or rupture of the movement of time. (See Heidegger, "Anaximander.") Human existence is an ekstasis.
The ecstasy of human existence is labor, which breaks with the momentum of time by doubling back on itself. Using Alexandre Kojeve's terms, work (which is different from labor) is mere exertion. It is not such a break. In contrast, labor is distinguished from exertion by the fact that it is such a break. Kojeve says that labor is for an idea. If we can use the word idea very broadly, I'm willing to agree; we cannot use it as a synonym for "mental representation." In labor, I work for an eidos, a form, an idea that is beyond myself, whether or not I represent that form mentally.
The notion of repentance makes sense on a view that allows for backwards causation, but not on the usual view of time. If the past is indeed absolutely past and not to be changed, then repentance is a sham. It is no more than feeling sorry for what happened and it is probably an exercise in bad-faith to take it as more than that. God's promise to remember our sins no more is only a rhetorical flourish and I have difficulty understanding why an atonement is needed or what it could possibly do.
Assume, however, that repentance is meaningfully described as Christianity describes it, as a change of one's personal history. One might make sense of such a view by thinking that repentance has to do with events rather than points of time. To repent is to change the meaning of a past event. But if the existence of the past is a function of its meaning in the present (something I believe but cannot argue for here), then the existence of the past is altered when I change its present meaning by repenting.
It is perhaps possible to think about future events in the same way. They exist in the present as meanings, perhaps sets of possible meanings. Perhaps one could know the present totality of possible meanings of the future one could be omniscient. But since the coming into actuality of some of these possibilities rather than others would mean a change in their meaning and therefore, a change of what the omniscient being knew in the past, it would be in principle impossible to have a cause and effect relation between present omniscience and future events. Though the future would be known fully as future (i.e., as indeterminate) in the present, that knowledge would change in time, though the omniscient being would always remain omniscient. On such a view, we would have to change the way we ask about the connection of the present and the future.