Time&Eternity

notes to chapter 2 261
time or from a different type of understanding of reality, but rather from the experience of
salvation, from the “Begegnung mit dem Gott, der die Zeit der Aufrichtung seiner
Herrschaft dienstbar macht” (encounter with the God who uses time for the purpose of establishing
divine rule), 125. In this way, he moves the question of the Old Testament concept
of time beyond the cyclical-linear categorization and makes it dependent upon the
category of salvation history.
60. See also Herrmann, Zeit und Geschichte, 101.
61. “.l.l. Umwandlung kosmischer religiöser Strukturen in Ereignisse der Heilsgeschichte,”
Eliade, Geschichte der religiösen Ideen, vol. 1, 170; trans., 179.
62. “.l.l. daß die Hebräer als erste die Bedeutung der Geschichte als Epiphanie Gottes
entdeckten.” Ibid., 326. With respect to the interpretation of history in the Deuteronomistic
corpus, Ringgren remarks that this interpretation is certainly not without parallels
outside of Israel, but that it nevertheless forms the earliest consistently developed philosophy
of history in antiquity. Israelitische Religion, 101.
63. According to Eliade, in pre-Christian times, an understanding of time as salvation
history also matured in other places. Thus he gives the example of a cosmogony from the
Iranian region that already presupposes an eschatology and a soteriology (Zurvanism).
Geschichte der religiösen Ideen, vol. 2, 265–70; trans., 309–13.
64. Eliade, Geschichte der religiösen Ideen, vol. 1, 326.
65. Eliade shows the occurrence of both perspectives within one tradition using the example
of the exodus tradition. Ibid., 382f.
66. Cf. Herrmann, Zeit und Geschichte, 110.
67. Cf. this also to Eliade’s theory of the “eternal return,” which speaks of a continuity
between Christian eschatology and the archaic pattern of the periodic regeneration of history,
between the drama of the Church year and the superseding of concrete, historical
time by the repetition of archetypal (cosmogonic) acts. The fact that in Judaism and Christianity
the regular regeneration of creation is replaced by a single future new creation in
illo tempore, which puts a definite end to history, exhibits what is still basically an anti-historical
perspective. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, esp. 111–30.
68. “Alle Jahre wieder,” EG 556,1, text by Wilhelm Hey (1837) (not included in
EG1996).
69. These reflections basically agree with Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments,
256–63, 286–94.
70. Gowan, Eschatology in the Old Testament, 2f.
71. Ibid., 127f.
72. Ibid., 126.
73. It appears that the Greeks, starting from the philosophical question of eternal being,
may have been the first to address the issue of time philosophically. The priorities thus
established are expressed in the fact that Greek culture made no basic contributions with
respect to the measurement of time and the creation of calendars (above all, in comparison
to Egypt and Babylonia). Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur, 53–68.
74. In distinction to Heraclitus’s conviction that constant becoming and change make
up the essence of the world.
75. Delling, Zeit und Endzeit, 13.
76. Plato, Timaios 37D.
77. “.l.l. die Zeit gewissermaßen einfangen durch kreislaufartige Wiederholungen von
Prozessen, die unvermeidliche zeitliche Bewegung erlauben, aber ein‚ Ausufern’ durch Ausbrechen
in eine lineare Unendlichkeit .l.l. verhindern.” Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur, 56. Cf.
to the following also the discussion of time in classical antiquity in Whitrow, Time in History,
37–70.