Time&Eternity

Biblical and Theological Conceptions of Time 107
past?), he sees the guarantee that created beings will not be completely absorbed
by the presence of God, but will rather continue to exist independently
even in their eschatological consummation. 350 It remains unclear
whether the work of the Spirit in believers is different from the work of the
Spirit in creation as a whole, and if so, to what extent.
One should consider the possibility that multi-temporality contributes
to the ambiguity of the role of the Spirit to the point of inconsistency.
Thus, Pannenberg can say, for example, that the work of the Son is fulfilled
only through the work of the Spirit in the hearts of the believers, that the
Spirit thus testifies to Christ, 351 and that, without the Spirit, the Son cannot
be the Son. 352 In Kuschel, on the contrary, the emphasis is on the Christ
who works through the Spirit in the present and who is not restricted to
space and time. 353 With regard to their respective temporal relationships,
Christ and the Spirit seem here to be interchangeable.
Generally, multi-temporality can be understood as the constant simultaneity
of the dynamic effectiveness of the divine Spirit. In this manner, it
can be conceived, from an inner-worldly perspective, as the expression of an
eternity that is “the undivided present of life in its totality,” 354 whereby present
here should be understood as “a present that comprehends all time.” 355
Pannenberg does not understand eternity to be anything like the essential
nature of time, the “epitome of time”; rather, “we are to think of time with
its sequence of events—future, present, past—as proceeding from eternity
and constantly comprehended by it.” 356 However, he does not think that
time can be derived from the concept of eternity, and he sympathizes with
Plotinus’s conception of the transition from eternity to time as a leap. 357
Time that manifests itself as a time sequence is a precondition for the independence
of the created beings. For this reason, one should not expect eschatological
consummation to mean the disappearance of differences that
have evolved during cosmic time, but rather the dissolution of the separation
of ages into past, present, and future. 358
Pannenberg also examines the theories of quantum physics and thermodynamics
when he speaks of the divine Spirit, understood here as the totality
of God, as a temporally structured force field of that which is possible in
the future. He ventures to identify this force field as the constantly restructuring
formative force that is counteracting entropic decay, and ultimately
as the source of all events. 359 At the beginning of the unfolding of the creative
dynamic nature of the Spirit stands “the emergence of contingent individual
events from the possibility field of the future”; its apex attains this
dynamic nature “in the integration of events and life’s moments into
unified form.” 360 The goal of the Spirit’s work is “to give the creaturely
forms duration by a share in eternity and to protect them against the ten-