Time & Perspective Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne slips a mild rebuke into an apparently courteous concession. He starts by granting the obvious - that theology can’t pretend humans don’t matter - then pivots to the real point: scale. Theologians, he suggests, have been running their calculations on the wrong timeline. If your imaginative universe is bounded by “a few thousand years of human culture,” your conclusions may feel intimate and morally urgent, but they also risk being parochial in the literal sense: calibrated to one species’ thin slice of time rather than to reality’s full duration.

The intent isn’t to dunk on theology so much as to widen its jurisdiction. Coming from a physicist-priest who lived on both sides of the lab bench, this isn’t scientism; it’s a demand that religious thinking confront what modern cosmology has made non-negotiable. “Fifteen billion years” functions rhetorically as a cold splash of water: it collapses human self-importance without denying human meaning. The subtext is that doctrines formed in an anthropocentric age can survive, but only if they stop treating cosmic history as stage dressing for a human drama.

Context matters: Polkinghorne wrote in a late-20th-century landscape where Big Bang cosmology, deep time, and evolutionary biology had already reshaped educated common sense. His line aims at a theological upgrade - a faith intellectually honest enough to speak about creation, providence, and purpose in a universe that is not sized to our myths, and not timed to our calendars.