Action, Time, Eternity

Action, Time, Eternity November 11, 2015

Robert Jenson begins his classic The Triune Identity with a succinct analysis of the religious import of human action.

“Every human action moves from what was to what is to be: It is carried and filled by tradition but intends new creation” (1). Every action proposes and is something new; every action has an eschatological ambition.

Because of this, Jenson argues, “our acts hang between past and future, to be in fact temporal, to be the self-transcendence, the inherent and inevitable adventure, that is the theme of all Western religion and philosophy. But just so always our acts threaten to fall between past and future, to become boring or fantastic or both, and all life threatens to become an unplotted sequence of merely causally joined events that happen to befall an actually impersonal entity, ‘me’” (1). We need some assurance, insurance, that the past that gives form to our action and the future to which we aim cohere. Only then can life become “meaningful.”

That, Jenson says, is what is meant by “eternity,” and it is not some higher layer beyond human life but inherent in our every action. Everything we do is a bet on eternity: “Life in time is possibly only, that is, if there is ‘eternity,’ if no-more, still, and not-yet do not exhaust the structure of reality. Thus, in all we do we seek eternity.” When our seeking becomes explicit, then we are practicing “religion” (1-2).

For Jenson, everything depends on how eternity is understood and lived. He argues that there are fundamentally two options: One that sees eternity as immunity to or escape from time, and one that sees eternity as hope for the future: “religion is either refuge from time or confidence in it. God may be God because in him all that will be is already realized, so that the novelties of the future are only apparent and its threats therefore not overwhelming. Or God may be God because in him all that has been is opened to transformation, so that the guilts of the past and immobilities of the present are rightly to be interpreted as opportunities of creation. God may be our defense against time’s uncertainties, or he may be himself the ‘Insecurity of the future.’ Brahman-Atman, by any of his names, may be God, in which case all time is illusion, circling around a blissful utter Sameness. Or Yahweh may be God, in which case all sameness will be overcome by the God who makes all things new, whose very righteousness is his love of sinners, of those who are lost if the past determines” (4). These are the “two great religious worlds” that arise from the structure of human action.


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