Time&Eternity

No Concept of Time without Narrated Time 43
Father, Lord of all creation,
ground of Being, Life and Love;
.l.l. yours is every hour’s existence,
sovereign Lord of time and space. 211
One finds the doxological function of space and time in both christological
and Trinitarian contexts. 212 Of the Son, it says:
Creation sings a new song to the Lord,
the universal energies rejoice,
through all the magnitudes of space and time
creatures proclaim the grandeur of Christ. 213
If the mention of “space and time” here serves to replace traditional eternity
terminology, then we encounter the expression “place and time” in Brian
Wren in the opposite context. In the hymn “Christ Is Alive,” the risen
Christ, who comes here from the distant past in Palestine and triumphs
over every place and time, claims the here and now. He is not enthroned in
the distant heavens, but is rather present in the midst of daily life, in order,
in his Spirit, to realize his joy, justice, and love throughout this and all future
ages 214 —a kind of immanent Christology from the past.
Jerusalem is the city that stands high above space and time, with joys beyond
measure and transcendent peace, as is recounted in the Swedish rendition
of Pierre Abélard’s hymn, “O quanta, qualia sunt illa sabbata.” 215 A
look at the Latin text 216 shows that the sublimity over space and time does
not have a direct correlation here. Instead, we are dealing with an interpretation
set against the horizon of a modern worldview, just as is found in
Olov Hartman’s revised version of Dies irae, the Day of Wrath, where there
is neither time nor space. 217 In Hartman’s version, the universe and the sea
tremble, the walls of space fall, the clocks of time stop, and time becomes a
single now. 218 The thirteenth-century Latin text, which can probably be
traced back to Thomas von Celano, knows nothing of this. 219
Hartman is not entirely consistent, however, with regard to the end of
time. In a text from 1979, he makes God the one who, in death, recreates
life for ages and worlds to come. 220 How these new ages and worlds will react
on the day of the big collapse of space and time is a question that must
remain open here. It may be that Hartman, who died in 1982, did not have
enough time to think through, and poetically express, the theme of “(outer)
space and time,” a topic that he frequently mentioned, though it was so
new. His basic intent, however, was clearly expressed in his creed from 1970:
Vi tror att Gud är mer än världen och rymd och tid,
den förste och den siste av allt som finns.
När världen störtar samman är han vårt liv. 221