Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In Christian tradition there have been three broadly different ways in which eternity (however conceived)1 has been connected with time We find (I) a moral view: eternal life is the ‘due reward’, the ‘prize’ owed to certain states of consciousness and types of behaviour which have occurred in this life; (2) a voluntarist theory: eternal life is the unowed and thus gratuitous gift given subsequent to the occurrence of certain conscious states and behaviour patterns; and (3) the ‘ontological’ approach: eternal life is the final, culminating phase or development of those conscious states and patterns of action. All three of these views co-exist in Christian literature from the New Testament era on.
1 The philosophical case for and against the reality of eternal life and speculation about the possible empirical content of that life – its similarity or dissimilarity to temporal incarnate experience – have been, of course, very extensively discussed in modern literature since World War II. Cf. the recent select bibliography in Lewis, H. D., The Self and Immortality (New York: Seabury, 1973), pp. 221 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In the present essay, then, we need not raise the other and more basic issues. Assuming that some concept of eternity is reasonably defensible, we will examine various recent theories connecting it with time.
2 De Poenitentia
3 Breviloquium, 7, 1.
4 Summa contra Gentes, 4, 91.
5 Institutes, 3, 18, 7.
1 Commentary on Romans, 4, I.
2 Sermon, 158, 2.
3 Breviloquium, 5, 1.
4 Summa contra Gentes, 4, 91.
5 Opus Oxon, 1, 1S, d. 17, 3, n. 26.
6 Cf. Weimar Ausgabe, vol. 10, 1, 1, p. 422.
7 Cf. Institutes, 3, 15, 3.
8 Instructor, I, 6.
9 Mystical Theology, I.
10 Sermon, 24.
11 Instructor, 1, 6.
12 On the Sacraments, 1, 10, 9.
13 Compendium of Theology, 1, 2.
14 On Rom. 6: 10 in WA 56: 327.
15 Institutes, 3, 15, 5.
16 Ibid. 3, 9, 3.
17 The Christian Faith, para. 163, 2. Schleiermacher emphasizes the transintelligible nature of this ‘consummation’: ‘we always remain uncertain how’ this ‘state’ will be achieved in which individual consciousness is reconciled with ‘the immediate vision of God’ beyond the subject-object duality of temporal consciousness. Ibid.
1 Though this may does not deal with the older generation of theological writers who worked chiefly during the pre-World War II era, we might note that John Baillie in his splendid study And The Life Everlasting (New York: Scribner, 1933)Google Scholar anticipates and argues for what we have termed the ‘ontological’ linking of eternity to time. Cf. pp. 244 if. where he discusses ‘eternal life’ as ‘primarily a new dimension of life’ lived in time, ‘life of a certain quality’ which is to be distinguished from mere survival post-mortem in a durational sense. He gives an excellent summary of British discussion of this from the turn of the century to the early 1930x: Wicksteed's, PhilipThe Religion of Time and the Religion of Eternity (1899)Google Scholar, von Hugel's, FriedrichEternal Life (1912)Google Scholar, Pringle-Pattison's, Andrew SethIdea of God (1917)Google Scholar and Taylor's, A. E.Faith of a Moralist (1930).Google ScholarBrabant's, F. H. 1936 Bampton Lectures Time and Eternity in Christian Thought (London: Longman, Green, 1936)Google Scholar covers some of the same ground but with added attention to classic dogmatic data and to secular philosophizing since Descartes. Despite numerous differences on how to relate ‘eternity’ to notion of ‘perpetuity’, ‘simultaneity’, ‘duration’, utter ‘timelessness’ and the like, the writers all exhibit the same avoid-ance of concepts of eternal life as a ‘reward’ given for good moral behaviour or as a purely gratuitous gift superadded to temporal life. This tendency to de-emphasize the moral and voluntarist theories goes back a considerable way in modern theology. It might make an interesting historical study to see how far back it actually does go in the literature.
2 Even conservative writers can show traces of this, however. While C. S. Lewis can speak of ‘heaven’ as a ‘reward’ and even as ‘pie in the sky’ – a concept which he sees as ‘woven into the whole fabric’ of Christianity ( The Problem of Pain, New York: Macmillan, 1948, pp. 132 f.Google Scholar), Lewis also says that ‘the point is not that God will refuse you permission to enter His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character. The point is that if people have not got at least the beginning of those qualities inside them, then no possible external condition could make a “heaven” for them - that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.’ Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 63.Google Scholar
3 A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Abingdon, 1917), pp. 232 ff.Google Scholar
4 Price, H. H., Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford, 1972), p. 95.Google Scholar
5 Ibid. p. 88.
6 Ibid. p. 89.
1 Hick, John, Evil and the God of Love (New York: Harpers, 1966), p. 376.Google Scholar
2 Ibid. p. 377.
3 Barth, Karl, The Faith of the Church, tr. by Vahanian, Gabriel (New York: Meridan, 1955), p. 172.Google Scholar
4 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Scribners, 1953), vol. 2, p. 297.Google Scholar
5 Bultmann, Rudolf, This World and Beyond: Marburg Sermons, tr. by Knight, Harold (New York: Scribners, 1960), p. 93.Google Scholar
1 Ibid. p. 94.
2 Bultmann, , Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols., tr. by Grobel, Kendrick (New York: Scribners: 1951, 1955), vol. 1, p. 334.Google Scholar
3 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology (University of Chicago: 1964), vol. 3, pp. 406 ff.Google Scholar
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5 Ibid. p. 415.
6 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, tr. by Bromiley, G. W. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1958), vol. 4/2, p. 836.Google Scholar
7 Op. cit. vol. 4/3 (1961), pp. 314 f.Google Scholar
8 Ibid. p. 315.
1 Rahner, Karl, S.J., Theological Investigations, tr. by Kruger, K. H. (Baltimore: Helicon, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 141 f.Google Scholar
2 Ibid. p. 147.
3 Ibid. pp. 155 f.
4 Rahner, , op. cit. vol. 1 (tr. by Ernst, Cornelius, 1961), p. 221.Google Scholar
5 Pierre Teilhard de, Chardin, S.J., The Divine Milieu, tr. by Bernard, Wall (New York: Harper's, 1960), p. 125.Google Scholar
6 Teilhard de, Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, tr. by Bernard, Wall (New York: Harper's, 1959), pp. 257 ff.Google Scholar Cf. The Divine Milieu, pp. 90 ff.
7 The Phenomenon of Man, p. 272.
8 Ibid. p. 271.
1 Thornton, Lionel, C.R., The Form of the Servant (London: Dacre, 1956), vol. 3, preface, p. v.Google Scholar
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3 Ibid. p. 136.
4 Ibid. pp. 141 f.
5 Bonhöffer, Dietrich, Letters From Prison, tr. by Fuller, R. H. (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 204 f.Google Scholar
6 Baillie also anticipated the sense of unease felt by some recent theologians with regard to eternal life. Cf. And the Live Everlasting, pp. 1–44 on ‘the modern revolt against otherworldliness’ and ‘the proper claims of earth’.
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2 Cf. Bloch, Ernst, Daz Prinzip Hoffnung, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959), vol. 2Google Scholar, especially pp. 1450 ff. on the Old Testament and pp. 1482 ff. on Jesus and New Testament Apocalyptic.
3 Moltmann, Jurgen, The Theology of Hope, tr. by Leitch, J. W. (New York: Harper's, 1965), p. 31.Google Scholar
4 Why Pannenberg specifies ‘the young Barth’ is not entirely clear. The later developments in Barth's eschatology do not seem to modify its essential timelessness to any appreciable degree.
5 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), p. 52.Google Scholar The theologians of hope clearly do not expect a personal corporeal return of the historical Jesus as pre-modern Christians did and do. ‘Parousia’, Moltmann writes (p. 227), ‘actually does not mean the return of someone who has departed, but “imminent arrival”…It is “the presence of what is coming towards us, so to speak, an arriving future”’. Moltmann takes the last sentence from Paul Schutz' Hoffnung and Prophetie. Pannenberg writes that ‘in the ministry of Jesus the futurity of the Reign of God became a power determining the present. For Jesus, the traditional Jewish expectation of the coming Reign of God on earth became the decisive and all-encompassing content of one's relation to God’ (p. 133)
6 A recent and potent critique of the notion of the divine eternity as ‘non-durational’ has been made on philosophical theological grounds by Pike, Nelson in his God and Timelessness (New York: Schocken, 1970).Google Scholar Pike concludes a lengthy examination – of both speculative and biblical data – with the ‘negative’ judgment that there is no good reason for the Christian tradition to assume that the divine ‘everlastingness’ is lacking in duration (pp. 189 f.). The ’Platonic’ tradition from the Fathers, especially Boethius, down to Schleiermacher, Pike finds generating contradictions with regard to divine knowing and power (pp. 53–120) especially. While Moltmann and Pannenberg reject the ‘Greek’ timelessness on biblical eschatological rather than speculative grounds, their conclusion converges with that of Pike.
7 Pannenberg, , op. cit. p. 62.Google Scholar
1 Moltmann, , op. cit. p. 337.Google Scholar
2 Pannenberg, , op. cit. p. 62.Google Scholar
3 Ibid. p. 87.
4 Ibid. p. 88.
5 Moltmann, , op. cit. p. 227.Google Scholar
6 Ibid. p. 213.
1 Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity (Yale, 1948), pp. 157 f.Google Scholar
2 Cobb, John, A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965), pp. 244 f.Google Scholar
3 Price, , op. cit. p. 69.Google Scholar
1 Hick, , op. cit. p. 376.Google Scholar
2 Lewis, H. D., op. cit. p. 194.Google Scholar
3 Ibid. p. 195.
4 Ibid. p. 205. For one reason or another –: religious or cultural or both – this openness to psychical research is not the rule among existentialist theologians. Rahner is an unusual exception. ‘At death’, he writes, ‘the human soul’, released from the by, ‘will not become a-cosmic, but, if such a term may be used, all-cosmic’. The soul will be ‘involved with’ and ‘open to the world’. And, ‘on the basis of this hypothesis, certain parapsychological phenomena, now puzzling, might be more readily and naturally explained’. Quaestiones Disputatae: The Theology of Death (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961), p. 30.Google Scholar
5 Price, , op. cit. pp. 99 ff. and pp. 21 ff.Google Scholar
6 Ibid. p. 94. Professor Price appears to share the positivists' view that a non-durational eternity is the equivalent of ‘complete extinction’ (p. 95) rather than a transformation into some unknown mode of existence. This is not how the existentialists or a mystic like Eckhart would understand the ‘Now’ moment and its ‘verticality’ to temporal consciousness. Positivists – one thinks of Professor Anthony Flew – evidently assume that the limits of positive intelligibility in terms of present experience are identical with the limits of the real. What the justifying grounds for such an assumption might be is never made clear.
7 Lewis, H. D., op. cit. p. 195.Google Scholar
8 Ibid. p. 196.
9 Hick, , op. cit. p. 386.Google Scholar
10 Ibid. p. 388.
1 Ibid. p. 381.
2 Lewis, , op. cit. p. 208.Google Scholar
1 Hick, John, Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976).Google Scholar He finds Tillich's concept of the eternal ‘essentialization’ of the self especially full of ‘unresolved contradictions’ and ‘not altogether dissimilar’ to the Process view (p. 217). On balance their differences seem to outweigh their similarities, however. Interestingly, Professor Hick, speculating on his own, suggests that the reality of the Western ‘eternal life’ may possibly ’converge’ with the ‘nirvana’ of the East (pp. 459 f)
2 Rahner, , op. cit. vol. 3, p. 143.Google Scholar
1 Ibid. p. 144.
2 Price, , op. cit. p. 88.Google Scholar
3 Kant has God's ‘law inexorably commanding’ men to ‘holiness’. He does so ‘in order to be true to His Justice’ in the share He assigns to each in ‘the highest good’. Man's earthly life is too short for him to ‘be fully adequate to God's will’. Hence, God will grant him an ‘infinity of duration’ in which to experience ‘a further uninterrupted continuance of this progress even beyond this life’. Critique of Practical Reason, 2, 2, 4. This is not really a ‘reward’ theory at all. It is an onto-moral theory. Eternal life is given for moral behaviour in this world, not as a meta-moral prize, as in traditional Christian thought, but simply so that moral progress might continue on to perfection. The same metamorphosis is seen in many Liberal Protestant theologians who conceive of eternity as ‘further service’ in some activistic manner which continues the ethical modes of conduct begun in time. Cf. Rauschenbusch, , op. cit. pp. 232 ff.Google Scholar
