Time&Eternity

Biblical and Theological Conceptions of Time 87
“the basic presuppositions of all New Testament theology.” 187 He emphasizes
two characteristics of these conceptions. First, “salvation is bound to a continuous
time process which embraces past, present, and future. Revelation
and salvation take place along the course of an ascending timeline.” 188 Second,
he asserts that “it is characteristic of this estimate of time as the scene
of redemptive history that all points of this redemptive line are related to
the one historical fact at the mid-point .l.l. : the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ.” 189 Thus, as Cullmann claims, the so-called Christian calendar,
which calculates backwards and forwards from the birth of Christ, corresponds
to the conceptions of time and history of early Christianity. 190 Cullmann
apparently fails to notice here, however, that he himself starts from
Jesus’ death and resurrection as the center, whereas, already by the sixth century,
the West had replaced the old Passion and Resurrection era with the
era of the Incarnation. 191
In contrast to the Greek qualitative distinction between time and eternity,
according to which eternity is timelessness, Cullmann says that, for the
early Christian view, it turns out “that eternity, which is possible only as an
attribute of God, is time, or, to put it better, what we call ‘time’ is nothing
but a part, defined and delimited by God, of this same unending duration
of God’s time.” 192 Early Christianity did not know a timeless God. Time
and eternity are both temporal, 193 so that “eternity can be conceived in
Primitive Christianity only as endlessly extended time.” 194 Temporality is
not an exclusive mark of creation. 195 Even if human beings cannot grasp the
extent of the timeline, there is no doubt about its measurability. 196 The God
who is not timeless reigns over time. God’s sovereignty expresses itself in
predestination and preexistence, and this, in turn, “signifies nothing else
but that he, the Eternal One, is in control over the entire time line in its
endless extension.l.l.l.” 197
Time can be divided into both three and two parts. The tripartite division
encompasses the eon prior to creation, the present eon, which lies between
creation and the end, and the coming eon, which will contain the
New Creation. This tripartite division, however, is overlapped by a two-part
division that separates time—as a red line at the zero point of a thermometer
scale of infinite expansion—into eons before and after the midpoint of
time, that is, an eon before and an eon after Christ’s death and resurrection.
198 In this scheme, the Holy Spirit is “nothing else than the anticipation
of the end in the present.” 199 The Church is included in the divine rule over
time as the place where the Spirit is active, and it “takes, so to speak, part in
it,” 200 Cullmann claims. He immediately appears to change his mind, however,
when he says: “the thing in question is not a sharing by the believer in
the Lordship of God over time.” 201