Temporality And Eternity

Is time a creation of God? How can God be considered eternal, if he is responsible for the existence of time? Is God temporal or is he timeless? The relationship between God and time has been an object of inquiry in philosophical and theological traditions around the world for centuries. This volume takes up these and other questions, presenting a range of answers not only as brought forth in European philosophical traditions and in early Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but also positions taken by mediaeval Indian theologians and in the influential traditions of early Buddhism. Traditionally, discussions have focused on questions such as whether time is a necessary concomitant of God’s existence, or whether time should be identified with God. But there is a further question: did these traditions develop their own unrelated and independent view of God and time? Or are there similarities in their reflections? This volume, with contributions of scholars from various relevant fields, offers a novel approach to these inquiries. When taken as a whole, it provides new momentum to contemplation on an age-old enigma.

Is time a creation of God? How can God be considered eternal, if he is responsible for the existence of time? Is God temporal or is he timeless? The relationship between God and time has been an object of inquiry in philosophical and theological traditions around the world for centuries. This volume takes up these and other questions, presenting a range of answers not only as brought forth in European philosophical traditions and in early Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but also positions taken by mediaeval Indian theologians and in the influential traditions of early Buddhism. Traditionally, discussions have focused on questions such as whether time is a necessary concomitant of God’s existence, or whether time should be identified with God. But there is a further question: did these traditions develop their own unrelated and independent view of God and time? Or are there similarities in their reflections? This volume, with contributions of scholars from various relevant fields, offers a novel approach to these inquiries. When taken as a whole, it provides new momentum to contemplation on an age-old enigma.

Editor Gregory Ganssle calls on four Christian philosophers to present and defend their views on the place of God in a time-bound universe. The positions taken up here include divine timeless eternity, eternity as relative timelessness, timelessness and omnitemporality, and unqualified divine temporality.

Temporality, Eternity, and Wisdom invites readers into the text of Augustine's most widely read book to consider if rhetoric conflicts with Christianity and if Christians should condemn and abandon its use. In the Confessions, Augustine seems to answer such questions with an emphatic yes. Through a comprehensive review of the classic text, Calvin L. Troup argues that Augustine does indeed reject the dominant rhetorical tradition of the late Roman Empire, known today as the Second Sophistic. Troup notes, however, that Augustine's rejection of that rhetoric dates from long before his conversion. Troup argues that when Augustine converts, the semiotic integration of time and eternity in the incarnate Christ motivates him to espouse a substantial, practical alternative to the Second Sophistic that is nonetheless a form of rhetoric--a Christian rhetoric.

Temporality and Trinity argues that there is deep homology between the roles of temporal problematic in Augustine’s On Trinity and Heidegger’s Being and Time. Although Heidegger was aware of On Trinity, the claim is not that he writes under its influence. Rather, Manchester moves from the temporal problematic of Being and Time to the psychological explication of the human image of God in On Trinity, schematized as memory, understanding, and will. Formal and phenomenological parallels allow interpretation of that psychological triad as a temporal problematic in the manner of Being and Time. In a sense, this is to read Augustine as influenced by Heidegger. But the aim is more constructive than that. Establishing a link between trinitarian theology and Being and Time opens a more direct way of benefiting from it in theology than Heidegger’s own assumptions. It puts philosophy in a position to confront New Testament theology directly, in its own historicality, without digression into anything like philosophy of religion.

In this highly original and ground-breaking work, the author brings together discussions in the philosophy of time and space, philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of science, Special and General Relativity, classical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and so forth, with the concerns of philosophy of religion and theology, in order to craft a philosophically informed and scientifically tenable doctrine of divine eternity and God's relationship to time.

This book examines the nature of Augustinian time as the unfathomable yet permanent focus of the present. What are the implications for Augustine’s confessional discourse? How to reconcile the brevity of time’s focus with eternity’s longueur and the rhetoric of digression?

This remarkable work offers an analytical exploration of the nature of divine eternity and God's relationship to time.