Faith & Spirit Quote by Walter Lang

Time gets demoted from cosmic backdrop to authored artifact. In one clean sentence, Walter Lang frames time as a designed medium with a start point, not an infinite river we merely float along. Coming from a director, the line reads less like armchair theology and more like craft instinct: every story needs an opening frame. By insisting time was "created...at the beginning", Lang imagines reality itself as having a call sheet and a first take, with God as the ultimate showrunner who decides when the clock starts rolling.

The intent is to shut the door on the seductive modern fantasy that time is neutral, endless, and therefore exempt from judgment. If time is made, it can also be limited, shaped, and ultimately accountable. That carries a moral subtext: your life isn't happening in an infinite sandbox; it's happening inside a bounded production with stakes. The phrase "not eternal" also needles a certain kind of scientific grandeur, the worldview that treats time as a self-existing absolute. Lang's God is not squeezed into the universe; the universe's most basic condition is contingent on God.

Context matters: a 20th-century Hollywood director living through world wars, the rise of physics as public mythology, and cinema's own obsession with time (editing, pacing, montage). Film doesn't just record time; it manufactures it. Lang's line quietly aligns theology with the cutting room: beginnings are chosen, durations are constructed, endings arrive because someone had the authority to set them.