Time&Eternity

No Concept of Time without Narrated Time 55
Summary and Preview
The examination in this first chapter began with a hypothesis based on
Paul Ricoeur, namely, that time is tangible only as narrated time. Its aim has
been to trace the central motifs of the narration of time in church hymns in
order to glean formulations of questions for the rest of this study.
The narration of time becomes tangible primarily in the time indications
that occur in the hymns. These include everyday and seasonal terminologies,
as well as eternity terminology and explicit time terminology. 367 As
the centuries have progressed, talk of eternity has receded into the background,
while narration about everyday affairs and time has gained in importance.
According to the classical hymn tradition, talk of eternity frequently
occurs in set phrases within the context of doxology. Only rarely is
eternity itself the subject, and even rarer are the phrases in which time occurs
as the main actor. Nevertheless, both are present in various ways as a frame
of reference.
The future is primarily a theme of the twentieth century. Here, in the
face of a threatening and threatened future, human beings stand between
calm surrendering and hope-seeking grasping. It remains unclear whether
they desire to take hold of an earthly or a heavenly future, for complete salvation
is no longer conceivable without including the entirety of suffering
creation. In their vision of hope, human beings appear to blend not only
goals, but also the past and the future.
Christmas carols and Easter hymns in particular tend to portray the past
as the present. Thus, they relativize the distance to the historical event and
signal the importance of the past event for the present. Within the framework
of contemporization, an interlocking of times may occur that will finally
be revoked in a new simultaneity. In recent times, the Passion of Christ
has been contemporized as an event in the present. Consequently, the Resurrection
is not only mentioned as a unique occurrence, but rather, by overcoming
suffering and gaining victory over human death, it is unfolding as a
continuous process.
Especially more recent baptismal and Communion hymns are less interested
in contemporizing the past than the future. The strong motif of remembrance
is almost superseded by the idea that in the sacrament, time is
imbued with something qualitatively different.
Eternity means endless time as well as timelessness, that is, something
that has a quality different from time. Traditionally, time derives definition
from the primacy of eternity. Eternity and time can be related to each other
in three ways, namely, as a succession, as an interaction in one direction or
the other, or as an encompassing of time by eternity. In more recent hymns,