Time&Eternity

102 chapter 2
ion of Father, Son, and Spirit—[is] the free origin of himself and his creation.”
307 One difficulty posed by the depiction of the temporal relation of
the eternal Father is immediately evident in these sentences. Statements
about the eternal God who does not exhibit Trinitarian differentiation are
often hardly distinguishable from statements about the eternal Father as a
person within the Trinity. In Pannenberg’s work, it becomes very clear how
the talk of Father and Creator becomes possible only in the reciprocal relation
especially between Father and Son, because the starting point for the
otherness and the independence of creation lies in the Father’s devotion to
the Son and the Son’s humble self-differentiation from the Father. 308
The creative act of God is to be conceived as an eternal act. It is inadequate
to think of creation as an act in time; it can be adequately conceived
only as the construction of the finite reality of created beings together with
time as their form of existence. In contrast, God’s preservational act as creatio
continua is structured temporally. In preserving and ruling, God becomes
involved with time as the existential form of creation. 309 There need
be no contradiction between the historicity and contingency of divine action
in preserving creation and the eternity of God in the act of creation.
Both can be asserted under the condition that God’s immutability be interpreted
as an expression of God’s faithfulness. This interpretation allows
room, on the one hand, for an evolution, a becoming, in Godself, as the dynamic
nature of the Trinitarian relationships; on the other hand, God’s eternity
is expressed over the course of time as the faithfulness of divine creative
love. Furthermore, this concept enables one to conceive of a process overarching
creation that allows eternity and time to coincide only in the eschatological
consummation of history. 310
Holding together conceptually the eternal act of creation and the temporally
structured, preserving, and ruling acts of God paves the way for “an
attempt to think of the eschaton as the creative beginning of the cosmic
process.” 311 This also solves the problem that God’s foreknowledge, from
the time of creation forward, would rob the world of its contingency and
necessarily lead to determinism. If, namely, “the eschatological future of
God in the coming of his kingdom is the standpoint from which to understand
the world as a whole,” 312 then the beginning of the world can no
longer be thought of as a self-contained, unchangeable foundation of the
entire world; it is then “merely the beginning of that which will achieve its
full form and true individuality, only at the end.” 313
If God’s eternity were appropriately and adequately described as timelessness
or infinite time, then a philosophical, undifferentiated concept of
God would suffice. If, however, incorruptibility and pre-temporality, as well
as omnipresence 314 and temporal powerfulness, belong to God’s eternity,