Time&Eternity

230 chapter 4
The eschatologically qualified relationality of time also has consequences
for understanding the future. In this perspective, future becomes
comprehensible as a relational structure consisting of future and advent. Resulting
from this is the fact that futurist striving for world improvement and
the adventist composure in the expectation of a consummation lying beyond
the immanently possible complement each other. Eschatology is not
speculation about the grand finale, but rather, above all, the ferment of
hope. In this capacity, it certainly does not eliminate the finale, but it is not
fixated on it. Eschatology is primarily the expression for the relationality of
old and new, of future and advent, of identity and alterity.
For dealing with time, this means that we certainly need our chronometers,
which help us to divide up and organize time. However, just as urgently,
we need the experiences of forgetting time; we need time periods in
which measurable time plays no role. These are often precisely the experiences
that offer what affects human life on the deepest level. At least two
types of languages are prerequisite for an optimal understanding of time:
the formal language of mathematics, in which we can present calculations
with positive, negative, squared, and imaginary time, and the language of
narrative, which unites phenomenological and cosmological time 238 and is a
superior means of expression for relationality. Even the physics of complex
systems can no longer survive without narrative—if Prigogine is right: “In
connection with irreversibility, we reach a description of physics that brings
a narrative element into play on all levels.” 239 At least in this regard, narrated
time and time in both theology and science are closer to each other than
often presumed. A possible story of time that recurred repeatedly over the
course of the study is the narration of time as a dance. 240 Its strength lies in
its ability to thematize the relationships of process and rhythm, space and
time, the unique and the recurrent, detail and generality, individuality and
sociality, idea and action, and the like. This flexibility and openness is simultaneously
also its weakness. It need not necessarily be a liturgical dance
of joy in God, as hymns and theological literature so gladly assume. It can
just as well be the Nietzschean dance of the self-glorification of the
strong. 241
After everything that has emerged from the reflections in the four chapters
of this study, we still have the ongoing task, first, of narrating good and
appropriate stories of time. In hindsight, it is clear that, in this respect,
hymns are guardians of rich treasures. Their narrations on time and eternity
offer a diversity that highlights contrasts, so that the Church which sings
“any and everything” has experiences that are manifold to the point of being
conflicting. Expressing the whole range of the diversity of these experiences,
in turn, corresponds very well with the realities of life. In this sense,