Today I have been reading some essays on history. Among them was a set of "Theses on the Philosophy of History" by Walter Benjamin, a German Jew (1892-1940) who offered some 'deep' stuff which I'm not entirely sure I understand, but made me think...  The two I cite below I chose because of their theological threads... 

A

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history.  But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical.  It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.  A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.  Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.  Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

B

The soothsayers who found from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homgenous or empty.  Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance - namely in the same way.  We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future.  The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.  This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succomb who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment.  This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time.  For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

(from Tamsin Spargo (ed) Reading the Past, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000 p 126)

Benjamin took his life in 1940, so we can never know how he might have revised his ideas in later life.

I am struck by a kind of now-and-not-yet running through these two theses.  The 'chips of Messianic time' running through the whole of history (now) and the future possibility of Messiah entering (not yet).  The commentator suggests a view of history which eschews theological comfort, and maybe there is a deep irony in these two extracts that has gone way over my head.  But I wonder if I can read them more positively as affirming the divine both within and outwith time/history?