Time&Eternity

218 chapter 4
ing of what time is. This means that it would be a bottleneck that, from the
very outset, would necessarily lead to false results if one wanted to base theological
reflections about death and resurrection on a purely chronologicallinear
understanding of time. That the idea of a preserved identity cannot
simply and exclusively be tied to the continuity of time is, according to this
view, an important insight. Precisely this happens in the notion of the immortality
of the soul, however. Circumscribing death with the words “to
step out of time” [att gå ur tiden], which is customary in Swedish, proves to
be an appropriate reference to discontinuity. From the human perspective
of our dependence upon time, death must be described as non-relationality,
173 as well as complete deprivation, and thus also as deprivation of the
self. The person who has died is deprived of her self. What she will be, she
cannot make; she can only receive it. And, thus, as my third point, I return
to Mahlmann’s feeling of unease about the possibility of preserving identity
in the memory of an Other (in this case, in the memory of God). In contrast
to Mahlmann, I see the great advantage of this model precisely in this
relationship to an Other, since, here, one finally takes relationality and alterity
seriously. Mahlmann, on the other hand, makes the possibility of
eternal life dependent “upon a human existence—independent of another
person’s knowledge, but self-known—that continues beyond the person’s
death,” 174 an existence that is also continuously bound to a timeline. Due to
its fixation on self-known existence, this eschatological model remains anthropocentrically
restricted from the very outset and thus leaves little room
for cosmic dimensions.
In contrast, I would propose to understand eschatology as a hope that is
precisely not hope in oneself. The preserved identity does not lie in a static
conservation of one’s own sameness along an infinite timeline, but is rather
found in relation to the Other—or, to use Ricoeur’s terminology again,
when the immortality of the soul is made the precondition for eternal life, it
seems to me that preserved identity is understood in the sense of mêmeté, of
Idem-Identity, while the understanding that I am proposing goes more in
the direction of ipséité, selfhood or Ipse-Identity. 175 I do not see this selfhood
as being constituted primarily through self-conservation, but rather
through self-reception, that is, through receiving one’s self. Only in this way
is it completely possible to come to oneself and to find oneself; and, indeed,
eternal life then presumably has to do with finding more than one’s self.
Identity thus becomes a question of relation. If death and eternal life are described
as that through which one’s life or self finds itself eternally, 176 then
the basic assertion that God is love is violated, for love is inconceivable
without alterity, without a dynamic giving and receiving. Without surrender
and letting go of oneself, selfhood is impossible. Thus, the key to pre-