The idea that time is just what it appears to be -- that everything just comes and then goes, like a sparrow flying through a mead-hall -- that the past is lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine -- is unacceptable. In such a world, everything dies. "Immortality" does not solve this problem, any more than the continued existence of the modern city of Rome can change the fact that ancient Rome is gone forever.
But the alternative -- that time is an illusion, that nothing changes -- that God and the universe as God sees it are simply an eternally static four-dimensional object -- is also unacceptable. In such a world, nothing really lives, for life is an inherently temporal thing. Stasis is not and never can be compatible with life.
What is temporal is temporary, and what is atemporal is lifeless. But Jesus promised eternal life -- really eternal, and really life -- and taking his message seriously means trying to understand what that means.
This is the problem that has been occupying most of my time recently.
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6 comments:
I think the problem is (as here) in trying to detach time, as an abstraction - for conceptual examination; when time is bound inextricably to the nature of a being. All beings are in-time, the concept of being includes the concept of time. Trying to pull time away from actual beings makes Time mysterious, incoherent, incomprehensible.
Time cannot be separated from consciousness, nor have I tried to do so.
I suppose you would need to understand the way in which ancient Rome has Not 'gone forever' - that some aspects (at least) are eternal; through the reality of eternal Beings who participated in ancient Rome.
By the standard of linear continuity through time, Rome still exists. However, it has changed so much since the days of Cato and Cicero that it makes sense to say that ancient Rome, Rome-as-it-was, is gone.
The Beings once known as Cato and Cicero still exist, too, but they, too, have presumably changed beyond recognition -- or if they haven't yet, they will, as the innumerable kalpas of their future existence unfold. Such Beings may live forever, but they cannot properly be called "eternal."
You may find mere-continuity fully satisfying; I don't. I feel the sting in the words "They grow up so fast" and "You can never go home," and I trust that that sting of death is, in some way I have not yet managed to grasp, swallowed up in Christ.
Owen Harrison writes:
God's memory is perfect, so nothing that has ever happened can ever truly be lost. Since His thoughts are more real than the physical world, he can remember our past more vividly than we experienced it the first time. It wouldn't be hard for
him to share that with us once in we enter Heaven.
Another possibility is that the Past is real, preserved, "frozen in amber." We leave metaphysical trails of events, loves, thoughts, and emotions behind us, like the wake of a ship that always remains, never dissipates. In Heaven, these trails might be as easy to explore (and re-experience) as a walk in the woods.
Maybe these two possibilities are separate ways of describing the same thing.
Hopefully, God will harvest every good thing that has ever happened in the human experience and resurrect it in the world to come. To do otherwise would be wasteful. Not only good souls are brought into heaven, but also good past events, good art, good songs, good conversations, lost loves etc. etc.
Nostalgia might be the soul-joy that signifies those parts of the past that will be resurrected into the world to come. Conversely, the soul-joy of Imagination signifies those things in our future which will come to be.
Owen, I discuss those and other possibilities in my post "The reality of the past (and the passing)."
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