Einstein, St Peter and Time
by Volunteer Adrian Bean
To Einstein everything, including Time, was relative: the rate at which it passes depends on your frame of reference. The Panacea members didn’t appear to study his theories, but they agreed with a similar declaration stated in II Peter III 8, and which they used to justify aspects of their beliefs: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Peter was making the simple point that in God’s eternal scheme Time was almost irrelevant; whereas humans might want Christ to return as soon as possible, hopefully during their lifetime, God could wait forever. His timescale was different from that of humans, to the extent that for him a thousand years was as fleeting a period as one day might be for a human. The day of Revelation would come suddenly and there was no certainty about the exact timing, but it would certainly come in due course. Peter was trying to give reassurance to doubters. As with much in the Bible, the words shouldn’t be taken literally but metaphorically.
Unfortunately the Panaceans tended to do the reverse, taking things prescriptively, with the result that this interpretation of God’s chronology was used as justification for doubtful arguments and mathematical calculations that they held as being irrefutable.
Extrapolating from Peter’s thought that God’s day was 1000 years, they worked out that:
God’s Working Week was 6000 years
God’s hour was 41 years and four months
God’s ten minutes was seven years approx
God’s minute was eight months and ten days.
These calculations are in themselves a harmless waste of time, but they took things too far and too seriously, fully enjoying the coincidences of Numerology. For example, in the Panacea magazine vol 4 no 42, the Editorial went to great lengths to show the significance of that edition, arguing (unconvincingly) that the Great War had ended after 42 months so edition 42 of the magazine might be the final one. But readers should not be worried, as the editors had every hope of carrying on for at least the next six months (by their calculations, the equivalent of some 183,500 years).
Clearly, such a narrow vision leads to unjustifiable conclusions, but they accepted this. Whether they sincerely accepted the Bible’s statement that Methuselah lived for an unlikely 969 years isn’t known. This is another “fact” that might have been worded in that way simply to indicate that he lived a very long time ago and for a long time rather than being meant literally. They probably found a way to believe it was true.
Einstein and Peter both had reasoning behind their statements, but as with their other beliefs, you tend to the conclusion that the Panaceans took an attractive argument and stuck to it, making things up as they went along to fit in with changing circumstances.
