Concrete Time And Concrete Eternity

This publication investigates how Karl Barth’s doctrine of time and eternity can contribute to the continued understanding of the relationship of divine eternity to time or temporality. Examining from a theological, philosophical and physical perspective, with deep emphasis on the Trinity, as well as Barth’s Christology and pneumatology, the author helps us to understand his theory on time and eternity. Barth’s contribution to the subject is significant, with his doctrine of time and eternity being relational in ontology, Trinitarian in background and concrete in character.

This book seeks to unpack the evolution of Barth's understanding of God's suffering in Jesus Christ in the light of election. The interconnectedness of election, crucifixion, and (im)passibility is explored, in order to ask whether the suffering of Christ is also a statement about the Trinity.

This publication investigates how Karl Barth's doctrine of time and eternity can contribute to the continued understanding of the relationship of divine eternity to time or temporality. Examining from a theological, philosophical and physical perspective, with deep emphasis on the Trinity, as well as Barth's Christology and pneumatology, the author helps us to understand his theory on time and eternity. Barth's contribution to the subject is significant, with his doctrine of time and eternity being relational in ontology, Trinitarian in background and concrete in character.

Philosophers, theologians, physicists, and psychologists join their efforts to reflect on the crucial issues of limit and infinity, time and eternity, empty space and material space. The volume offers an invaluable contribution to some of the most important issues of our times: questions on God and consciousness are discussed in parallel with quantum theory, black holes, the inflationary universe, the Big Bang, and string theory, from different perspectives and angles, ranging from neuroscience to AI.

One of the vital issues in contemporary Christian theology is the problem of a renewed understanding of God's eternity and its relation to time. This is not merely a peripheral doctrinal issue, but lies at the heart of our understanding of God and humanity, and contributes to our entire worldview. This study focuses on a long-standing debate between two competing views on God's eternity: one focused on God's absolute timelessness in classical theism, and the other on God's temporal everlastingness in contemporary panentheism. In contrast to both of these well-worn options, this book presents an alternative Trinitarian analogical understanding of God's eternity and its relation to time, especially through a critical reflection on Karl Barth's and Hans Urs von Balthasar's engagement of the issue. This analogical approach, based on the dynamic and dramatic concepts of God's being-in-relation and of the Triune God's communicative action in eternity and time, has the potential to resolve the debate between absolute timeless eternity and temporal everlasting duration.

In the decades since the declaration of the "end of history," the West has been reminded time and again that history is not yet done with us. Time marches on, but the past keeps pace. The twin questions at the heart of the last two hundred years of philosophy and theology--What is history? What is tradition?--are more pressing now than when they were first posed. While most answers to these questions are methodological and descriptive, Nothing Gained Is Eternal presents an answer both theological and theoretical, an answer rooted in action, memory, and freedom. Drawing on the thought of some of the brightest lights of the twentieth century, such as Bernard Lonergan, Charles Péguy, Maurice Blondel, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Anne M. Carpenter argues for a new theory of tradition. It is a theory firmly moored to the ambiguities, contradictions, and varied fruits of the past. Carpenter shows ressourcement to be a way not only of retrieving the past but of making moral judgments about both a former age and our own. The resulting account of tradition pushes back against sentimental and triumphalist interpretations of Christian patrimony. Yet, this work also identifies the ways in which theology's turn to history is incomplete and confronts its own theory of tradition with decolonial criticism. Carpenter challenges readers to wrestle with whether tradition can persist when its colonialist practices are brought to light. And in asking this question, she offers hope for transforming the life of tradition in its wake.

(Peeters 1996)