Time&Eternity

Biblical and Theological Conceptions of Time 89
sites.” 210 Nevertheless, Cullmann ultimately embraces the equation: eternity
= time. Then, however, the God who is thought to have power over time
and to rule over time is, in the end, a temporal God who can at best be distinguished
from creation only in terms of a Feuerbachian projection. The
purely quantitative difference between time and eternity essentially renders
the concept of eternity superfluous. Because only God is granted eternity
and because this eternity is understood as God’s power over time, one can
actually do without the concept of eternity. What remains is time, of which
we know little except that it is the screen for salvation history, 211 that it is
“the means of which God makes use in order to reveal his gracious
works.” 212
In my analysis of the New Testament (pp. 72–80), I did not find any
self-contained time-eternity model that would come anywhere close to the
one that Cullmann develops. Therefore, one must ask: What if Cullmann’s
scheme is more an interpretation of the Newtonian model of absolute time
than an interpretation of a New Testament concept of time? 213 Chapter 3
will show how a quantitative time-eternity model of the Cullmann type
looks in light of twentieth-century physics.
The Ontological Difference Between Time and Eternity
According to Cullmann, the quantitative difference between time and
eternity derived from the need to find a comprehensive framework for his
concept of salvation history. This resulted in an alienation of time and eternity
from time consciousness because of the definition of time and eternity
as external categories of the redemptive event. Concurrently, the distinction
between time and eternity almost disappeared. The opposing movement, a
positioning of the distinction between time and eternity in the internal
world, is usually ascribed to Augustine’s concept of time: Writing 1,500
years before Cullmann, “he moved time into the soul, in order to bring it
back home, out of its externalization and diffusion in the world.” 214
If I deal at this point with Augustine, it is not because I am concerned
with an overall account of Augustine’s doctrine of time. This has been covered
in various ways by others and has resulted in vast amounts of literature.
215 An account of Augustine must also struggle with the fact that it is
easier to read something into his writings than to interpret them. To a
shockingly high degree, the major preconception of a particular reader of
Augustine seems to determine the outcome of the reading. Thus, Karl Hinrich
Manzke, for example, proceeds from a time-eternity relationship in
which eternity is understood as the truth of time, and he therefore finds a
relational time-eternity model in Augustine. 216 Arguing from the premises
of the overall conception of the Confessions and Greek ontology, Ulrich