eternity – godblog

Eternity again and again

I’ve posted before on eternity, but there is much to say on this endless subject. The first thing to figure out is what eternity is. There are two main contenders:

Eternity is time without beginning or an end, sometimes called sempiternity.
Eternity stands outside of time. It is a perspective on time, but not time itself. Eternity is nunc stans, from the Latin meaning remaining now, unchanging. Ordinary time is nunc fluens, time that flows or passes.

The second way of thinking about eternity is often attributed to Plato (Timaeus 37c-e), but it became theologically significant in the work of Augustine (Confessions, book 11). God, and only God, is eternal. Earthly time, temporal time, is so insubstantial and illusory as to border on non-being (Erie, p 62). Just as humans can only find fulfillment in God, so they can only find fulfillment in eternity. God and eternity are virtually the same thing.

Now is a ceaselessly moving point between past and future. It is ephemeral, and totally lacking in substance. For this reason, time has no value. I was going to write, “ordinary time just is,” but the thing about time is that its substance, moments, have no substance. They are gone the instant they have begun.

Eternity is the opposite. It is always present and everywhere. In eternity all time is now. How to make sense of this? I like the simple explanation of C. S. Lewis. He is answering the question how could God hear every prayer uttered by all who are praying at the same time.

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Dawkins, Christianity, and the Meaning of Life

Dawkins, Christianity, and the Meaning of Life.* Many readers will be familiar with Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, among other works promoting atheism. Darwinism, argues Dawkins, offers a better explanation of what we observe in the world than does the assumption of a creator God.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. (1995, p 133)

The world is exactly as it appears to be if there were no God and no higher purpose to human life.

The trouble is, the world is also exactly as it appears if there were a creator God and a higher purpose. One doesn’t look at the world as a blind set of facts, and conclude there is no God. Instead, one begins with a general outlook on life, and then chooses the facts that support this view. Unlike so much in life, our religious views are not primarily expressions of early childhood experiences. People seem to choose, and change, their worldviews later in life, often in the late teens or twenties.

Consider the basic questions of life: why are we here, what’s the meaning of our lives, where are we going, what may I hope, what should I do? One does not find these answers in the facts; the facts are interpreted in terms of these questions.

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What’s so great about eternity?

For all its importance in Christian thought, the concept of eternity in the Bible is remarkably unclear. The two most important Christian thinkers, Augustine and Aquinas, place God outside of time, in what is called the nunc stans. Nunc stans is the opposite of the way we ordinarily think of eternity as time going on forever. In the nunc stans, you experience all of time in a single moment. Or you would if you were God.

As Augustine put it, we pass through God’s today. The experience would be something like seeing time as though it were space, a plane spread out before you. You might focus on one part of the plane or another, but all time is there to be experienced in a moment. The term is Latin (no surprise). Nunc means now, and stans refers to stand. In the nunc stans, all of time stands before you.

Not in the Bible

Trouble is, that this way of thinking about time is nowhere in the Bible (I’ll confine myself to the New Testament, but the problem is found in the Old Testament as well.). The Greek term aeonios, for which so many translations mistakenly use the word “eternal” is derived from the noun “aeon.” “Aeon” means “age” or “ages.” Thus, the word translated as eternal really refers to an aeon or age, not forever. When Jesus says “I am with you always, to the end of the age (αἰῶνος), he does not mean forever, but until the end of the present age—that is, until the eschaton. Aidios (αιδιος) is the ancient Greek term for eternal, and it is used only once in the Bible in reference to God (Romans 1:20). *

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God is the one who remembers

God is the one who remembers. Everything. Everyone, every being, is remembered by God. A God who understands human weakness, but also a God who judges each of us. Everything you or I do matters, because it will be remembered by God. Those who made the Holocaust possible will be remembered by God. My Grandson, who contributes a large portion of his small salary to charity will be remembered. Remembered and judged by God. For all eternity. But that’s it. God does not punish the bad or reward the good. In the end we return to the stardust from which we came. But God knows. Forever. Kind acts and cruel acts are not the same. God knows the difference and remembers, even when humans have forgotten. Everything you do is of eternal significance.

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