Time&Eternity

196 chapter 4
our impression is confirmed that their concepts of God often stay very close
to Newton’s level of theological sophistication. They tend to fall short of
taking into account the current state of theological knowledge and discourse.
Time, Eternity, and the Trinity
Dance presupposes time, but Johnson does not particularly deal with
this. Robert W. Jenson, on the other hand, considers the doctrine of the
Trinity also on the basis of time. His starting point is that the biblical story
that deals with God and ourselves is true with respect to God and for
God. 53 Like Vanhoozer, he wants to understand God’s nature as narrative, 54
which means that, in God, there must also be room for surprise and genuinely
new things. From this, Jenson then concludes that God’s eternity
cannot be merely the absence of time, but, rather, that eternity must be for
God something like what time is for us. 55 In this conclusion, the description
of what is meant by eternity remains open and general: “it only denotes
whatever it is on which a particular spiritual community relies to join the
poles of time, to knit future and past into a coherent fabric.” 56 According to
this, eternity is what holds past, present, and future together—i.e., it is
what constitutes coherence. Eternity thus becomes the principle of meaning:
the supposition of an Archimedean point whose appearance can vary
considerably, however. There are therefore a multitude of eternities. The
Christian interpretation of eternity is based on the Trinitarian God whose
hallmark is life: “‘God’ simply as such denotes what happens between Jesus
and the one he calls ‘Father’ and the Father’s Spirit in whom Jesus turns to
him.l.l.l. ‘God,’ simply as such, denotes a life, as the Eastern tradition has
put it, a complex of ‘energeia.’ ” 57
This life of God surrounds time, thus it must appear correct when Jenson
concludes that “Time .l.l. is the accommodation God makes in his living
and moving eternity, for others than himself.” 58
Jenson also specifies a direction of time in God. While the Father appears
as the “from where” of divine events, the Spirit represents the “to
where” of divine life. For the Son, God’s “specious present” 59 remains. Jenson
pays particular attention to the Spirit as the power of the future. He sees
a close correlation between the Holy Spirit, the narrative structure of God’s
nature, and the freedom in God that makes what is still to come into more
than a mere consequence of what has already happened: “The Spirit is God
as his and our future rushing upon us, he is the eschatological reality of
God, the Power as which God is the active Goal of all things.l.l.l.” 60
Jenson does not draw parallels to science at this point. However, his description
of eternity as diverse and his depicting God’s eternity as alive and