In Matthew 16:1-4, the Pharisees and Sadducees approach Jesus demanding a sign from heaven. Jesus refuses, responding with what sounds like barely controlled exasperation: "When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?" The accusation is one of practical attentiveness without moral perception: they can read weather but cannot read history.
The phrase "signs of the times" has two layers in Matthew. On the surface it is an accusation of selective blindness: people who are perfectly capable of attending to what matters to them (weather forecasting, practical affairs) but who ignore what should matter more (the presence of the Messiah, the decisive moment in the history of God's relationship with Israel). On a deeper level, it refers to the specific cluster of events that, for those with eyes to see, announced that something unprecedented was happening in the world.
The phrase entered English with both layers, though the surface layer proved more durable in secular use. "A sign of the times" means an event, trend, or phenomenon that is characteristic of or symptomatic of the current era, something that would not have occurred or been possible in an earlier period, and that reveals something essential about the present moment. The phrase combines observation with interpretation: not merely what is happening but what it means about where we are in history.
Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century British essayist, gave the phrase particular prominence with his 1829 essay "Signs of the Times," a critique of the mechanization of Victorian society and its effects on human spiritual life. Carlyle used the phrase to identify the distinctive character of his era, its unprecedented industrialization, its trust in mechanism over spirit, its displacement of human meaning by technological efficiency. The essay established a mode of cultural criticism in which identifying the signs of the times meant penetrating beneath surface events to the underlying historical and spiritual tendencies they revealed.
The phrase has been used by every subsequent era of cultural criticism with the same structure: here is what is happening that most people consider routine, and here is what it actually reveals about the spirit of our age. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan all practiced variations of this method, identifying specific cultural phenomena as signs that revealed the deep structure of their historical moment.
Prince's 1987 song "Sign o' the Times" and the album of the same name applied the phrase to the specific anxieties of that decade: AIDS, gang violence, natural disasters, drug addiction. The song is a catalog of contemporary horrors presented without explanation or resolution, with the refrain functioning as a kind of helpless recognition that these are the distinctive signs of the present moment. The combination of biblical phrase and contemporary social observation gave the song an elegiac gravity that pure social commentary would not have achieved.
In everyday use, "sign of the times" is now so familiar that its origin in Matthew's accusation of spiritual blindness has become entirely invisible. The phrase is used in journalism, conversation, and commentary to point at anything characteristic of the present era, from changing social norms to technological developments to economic shifts. The biblical irony, that Jesus used the phrase to accuse people of attention to the wrong signs, adds a layer of meaning available to those who notice it.
The phrase also carries an implicit methodology of cultural interpretation that has proven durable: the idea that specific cultural phenomena are legible, that they can be read for the underlying patterns they express, and that attentive observers can distinguish the meaningful signs from the mere noise of events. This methodology underlies not only religious prophecy and cultural criticism but also epidemiology (identifying the early signs of an emerging outbreak), economic forecasting (reading leading indicators), and intelligence analysis (interpreting behavioral signals).
The Matthean context adds a layer of self-critical awareness that the secular use typically loses: the accusation that we are good at reading the signs that serve our practical interests and poor at reading the signs that challenge our assumptions or require moral response. This is a permanent feature of human cognition, well documented by cognitive psychology under various names (confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, selective attention), and the biblical phrase names it with economy and sharpness that secular formulations rarely match.
The phrase's grammar is also worth noting: "signs of the times" is plural, suggesting that the signs are multiple and require synthesis into a pattern. The reader of the times must look at many individual signs, weight them against each other, and discern what pattern they collectively express. This interpretive challenge, distinguishing signal from noise, identifying the meaningful signs from the merely conspicuous, is as difficult in the twenty-first century as it was in the first. The accusation that contemporary observers can read weather but not the times remains as applicable as ever.