Time&Eternity

Biblical and Theological Conceptions of Time 85
new can happen at all in the temporal world. The Platonic model thus invites
a conservative position, which hardly leaves room for an eschatological
breakthrough into the temporal world.
The second model differentiates the conception of God rather than the
conception of the world. Here, by distinguishing between a timeless-eternal
God and a temporal God, God—rather than the world—is considered
dipolar. The “timeless-eternal” describes the “possible” as the primordial nature
of God. The “temporal” describes the “real” as the consequent nature
of God. It remains questionable, though, how eternal primordial nature
and temporal consequent nature relate to each other. Because God cannot
be conceived in this model without a relationship to the world, the thought
of a creatio ex nihilo becomes problematic. If it was difficult to imagine a
true innovation in Platonically oriented thought, then in this model of
process theology it is difficult to think of anything other than change. Both
examples strive to overcome the gulf between time and eternity by introducing
a third party. They are distinguished from each other in that, in the
first case, the third instance is introduced as eternal world on the side of
eternity; and, in the second case, it is introduced as temporal God on the
side of time.
In an apparently elegant manner, a third model avoids the difficulties of
the first two by consistently contrasting God and eternity, on the one hand,
and world and time, on the other. But then the question immediately arises
of how one should conceive of God’s acts within this conception. Timeless
action appears contradictory, because “action” is always related to time.
Consequently, either God could not act at all as Creator, or God could act
in God’s own time without any temporal relationship to world time, or
God appears as the timeless enabling ground for events in time, which,
however, undermines the talk of a living God, as appears to me to be the
case in Leftow. 178 All three alternatives have one element in common: They
basically render God irrelevant for the conception and structuring of time.
The difficulties of Christian Platonism, process theology, and modern
theism show that it is insufficient to simply claim that there is “some kind”
of relatedness between God and world. Instead, the how of the relatedness
of God to the world must be discussed in theological terms. For this reason,
Dalferth believes that his task is “to emphasize theologically the nature of
this relatedness as the nearness of God that makes all things new and gives
everything a new quality.” 179 He believes that this cannot be achieved by
dualistic thought about the world or God. “In order to correct the selfinflicted
loss of relevance of the God-concept, we need a new elaboration of
the concept of eternity.” 180
Before I discuss Dalferth’s suggested solution (see pp. 98–101), the char-