Time&Eternity

Biblical and Theological Conceptions of Time 75
mark of New Testament time is its eschatologically determined “openness
to the future.” 103 As in the Old Testament, time is considered less in the formal
sense than with regard to its content.
Time Terminology in the New Testament
Of the New Testament terms for time—aiōn, kairos, chronos, and hōra
—aiōn and its derived adjective aiōnios occur most frequently. 104 The term
occurs primarily in prepositional phrases, but also as an independent noun
both in the singular and the plural. 105 Only from the particular context can
one decide whether aiōn means “eternity” or only “distant, long, uninterrupted
time.” Basically, eon means a long time, limited or unlimited, which
actually leads to the contradictory expression chronoi aiōnioi (Rom. 16:25,
etc.). However, its meaning can also be extended in the direction of “world
time,” so that the same word is used for two profoundly contrasting meanings,
namely, for the eternity of God and for the time of the world. Under
the influence of apocalypticism, aiōn can even designate the world in the
spatial sense. 106 Aiōn does not describe a uniformly endless sequence of
events, but instead marks courses of time in a structured history that can be
restructured again and again. Along with the preposition eis, aiōn can mean
both the inner-temporal and the post-temporal future. The most graphic
depiction of eons is found in Matthew, who distinguishes between two successive
periods of world time, the present one and the future one.
A doctrine of eons, however, such as one can find in Gnosticism, 107 is not
developed in the New Testament. In Paul, “this eon” is the sin-determined
course of the world without Christ. In the Synoptics, eternal life, zoē
aiōnios, as the life belonging to God, is also the life that is expected within
the framework of a future resurrection of the dead. In John, by contrast,
belonging to Christ in faith is the eternal life, which is therefore already
possessed by those who have entered into communion with Christ.
In general, the future is mentioned only with a certain reservation; it is
the present that is of primary concern. Eternity is described mainly in temporal
categories. It is neither understood as pure timelessness nor in terms
of a dualism between time and eternity. Answering the question of whether
eternity is to be understood as everlasting time or as timelessness is not the
subject of the New Testament. This assessment is important because it prevents
us from reading the New Testament through the glasses of the Greek
philosophy of time. It also provides the explanation of why Cullmann is
wrong, even though his theory in Christ and Time, namely, that the New
Testament does not contain any notion of a timeless eternity, is correct in
principle. 108 The New Testament does not know of any timeless eternity because
it is not concerned with the nature of eternity. When the New Testa-