WHAT DOES ETERNAL MEAN?
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Even for the greatest Christian thinkers in history, eternity has always been a tricky subject. Most scholars would agree that eternity has to do with God’s relationship with time, and that it might also describe the relationship with time that people have after death. Some would go farther, and say that eternity is an expanse of time without an end and perhaps also without a beginning, or even that eternity is a way of existing outside of time altogether. There has been lively debate about all this for centuries among philosophers and theologians, and even today there is no clear consensus, because whenever we talk about time or eternity we are also deciding how we want to understand ourselves and what, if any, freedom we have to make meaningful choices. For example, if God is outside time, that could mean that for God our futures have already happened, and we are not free to choose our own actions.
Part of the problem is that the words in the Bible that we render into English as “eternal” and “eternity” come from two different languages—ancient Hebrew and first-century Greek—each of which comes with its own set of assumptions about God’s time. Furthermore, those assumptions themselves changed through the centuries as different interpretations of the Bible gained and lost support. Finally, over the past hundred years or so, our ideas about what time is like have changed radically, and those changes have thrown new light on old arguments about God’s time. In this article, we will summarize what this all means for eternity.
The word in the Hebrew Bible that we sometimes translate into English as “eternity” is olam. Hebrew Bible authors often use this word to describe God (Jeremiah 10:10) or things belonging to God, such as God’s love (Ezra 3:11) or God’s righteousness (Psalm 119:142). They also use this word to emphasize how some things, such as God’s covenant with the Hebrew people (1 Chronicles 16:17), will last forever. However, this is not the only way the word olam is used in the Hebrew Bible. In some contexts, olam just means “a very long time.” For example, it can describe the age of mountains (Genesis 49:26), or the length of time that has passed since great historical figures were alive (Joshua 24:2). It can be used to wish a king long life (Nehemiah 2:3), or even to say that one person will work for another for the rest of his days (1 Samuel 27:12). So, during much of the time over which the Hebrew Bible was written, describing God or God’s promises with the word olam makes less of a philosophical statement about what God is like and more of a practical one. To say that God is eternal in this sense means mostly that God is neither flighty and fickle the way human beings tend to be, nor perishable the way created things are, but rather that we can always rely upon God, without regard for the passing of time or the changing of circumstances.
In some of the later books of the Hebrew Bible to be written, we begin to see a new way of using olam. The later parts of the book of Isaiah sometimes speak of God’s eternal salvation, that will endure when even the earth itself has come to an end (Isaiah 51:6). The book of Daniel develops this idea further, describing a time when God will bring the powers that have oppressed the Jewish people to an end and set up a new, eternal kingdom (Daniel 2:44), one in which the dead will be raised to either “eternal life” or “eternal contempt” (Daniel 12:2). In later Jewish writings, this division becomes clearer as olam begins to carry the meanings “an age, a major division of time,” or “the world.” Jewish scholars start to describe the age of God’s rulership mentioned in Daniel as ha-olam ha-ba, “the age (or world) to come,” in contrast to ha-olam ha-zeh, “this age (or world).” These terms continue to be important in Jewish thought up to the present day. For all that the eternal age to come is unlike this age, however, there is no indication in the earliest Jewish texts that time in the olam ha-ba is different from time as we experience it now: a series of passing moments in which past, present, and future are clear and distinct from one another.
By the time Jesus’ ministry began in the first century CE, the distinction between olam ha-ba and olam ha-zeh had become well established in Jewish thought, though Jewish scholars were not always using the Hebrew language to discuss it. Over the three centuries prior to Jesus’ birth, Greek had become the main language of politics, trade, and scholarship throughout the lands surrounding the eastern Mediterranean Sea, so many Jews spoke and wrote in Greek, (1) and even used a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. When Greek-speaking Jews referred to the Hebrew concept of olam, where olam was used as a noun, as in, for example, the phrase “olam ha-ba,” they typically used the Greek noun aion. When these writings are translated into English, this noun is often given as “age.” Where olam was part of a descriptive phrase, as in places where it was applied to God’s attributes or to something God was doing, Jewish scholars used the Greek adjective aionios. English translations of Greek Jewish texts usually render aionios as “eternal.” The New Testament uses aion and aionios in just this way: many of its authors were Greek-speaking Jews, and they had a lot to say about eternity and the age to come. As we read the Bible in English, it is easy for us to think of these as two quite different concepts because the English words for them are so different, so we must keep in mind that, in Greek and especially in Hebrew, they are arguably not different at all.
Jesus’ teaching and preaching emphasize the distinction between the present age and the age to come over and over again. According to Jesus, the cares and concerns of this age create obstacles that prevent people from hearing and obeying the word of God (see Mark 4:18). Jesus sets up an opposition between the “children of this age,” whose behavior he criticizes, and the “children of light” (Luke 16:8) who are “worthy” (Luke 20:35). Jesus even predicts that the eventual end of the present age will involve a great deal of destruction and suffering (Matthew 13:40–42, Matthew 24:3). Jesus’ descriptions of the age to come, on the other hand, elaborate on the ones we saw in the book of Daniel: those who fail to care for the poor and oppressed will suffer “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:41), while those who serve God and their fellow people will receive “eternal life” with God through Jesus (Mark 10:30, Luke 10:25, John 3:16). The few details Jesus gives suggest that this eternal life with God will be different from life as we know it now. It will not include the trouble, suffering, and death that Jesus associates with the present age; indeed, the people who have eternal life in the age to come “cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God” (Luke 20:36). Nor will this eternal life include any more marriages or births (Luke 20:35). Jesus compares the life of the age to come to a joyful wedding feast (Matthew 22:1–14), and says that in the age to come he will drink wine with the disciples (Matthew 26:29). Jesus gives even less detail about the “eternal punishment”—which, once again, means “the punishment of the age to come”—that evildoers will suffer. Some theologians, including Saint Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century (2) and David Bentley Hart today, (3) argue that, just because the life of the age to come is endless, we need not conclude that the punishment of the age to come is also endless. It may be that, after a period of suffering, evildoers in the age to come will be reconciled to God and enter eternal life.
Further complicating matters, the Bible was not the only important influence on early Christian thought. By the time the New Testament was written, the most influential Greek philosophers (including Plato and Aristotle) had agreed for centuries that the God who created the universe could never experience change, because a changing God would be an imperfect God. Because early Christian theologians tended to have had Greek educations, they often presumed that God must be unchanging. Writing at the turn of the fifth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo argued that time is only a part of the universe that God created, so that the eternity in which God lives is entirely outside of time. (4) Just as north, south, east and west are defined in terms of the Earth’s surface, so that it makes no sense to ask whether the planet Neptune is east or west of the Mississippi River, so for Augustine concepts like past, present, and future, or before, after, and now, only make sense when we are talking about the created universe. They simply do not apply to God or to eternity. Some theologians, like John Calvin (5) and Martin Luther, (6) conclude from this that God knows and wills from eternity everything that we do, so that every detail of our lives essentially follows a “script” that God wrote beforehand. However, writing in the sixth century, the Christian philosopher and theologian Boethius reasoned that, assuming God’s eternity is outside of created time, then strictly speaking God does not know the future before it happens. Rather, God has the same relationship to all moments in time, and sees things as they are happening, whenever they happen. (7) Many later theologians have disagreed that God’s perfection requires changelessness, and that God’ s eternity is outside of time. Moreover, even those who agree with Augustine’s view of eternity have debated about whether the eternal life that people will experience in the age to come is changeless in the same way that God’s eternal life is.
Strangely enough, it appears that the changes to our notions of time that modern physics has brought about may be relevant to these theological questions about whether eternity is timeless. In most earthly situations, we can rely on a pretty straightforward sense of how time works, and of how past, present, and future relate to one another. For example, if I were in New York talking on the phone to my friend in Los Angeles, we would have no trouble agreeing on a moment that both of us could call “now,” or “the present,” even if my friend thought of now as noon and I thought of now as 3 p.m. Before Einstein put forward his theories of relativity, people assumed that time worked this way for everyone in every part of the universe. So, the assumption went, I could also have a phone conversation with someone on Pluto, or even with someone on a planet in another galaxy, and be able to agree on a moment to call “now” just as easily. In this view, space and time are independent of one another, and your movements in one don’t affect your movements in the other. Isaac Newton even wrote that this single expanse of space and time, uniform and without boundaries, was the way in which God perceives the world. (8) This way of looking at time presents no barriers to thinking that God experiences time the way that human beings do, as biblical authors seem to assume. Even if Augustine is right, and God is not in time along with us, God could at least agree with all human observers about exactly when things happen in the universe.
However, Einstein put an end to that simple picture of time. He discovered that space and time are closely linked to one another, so that when you see events happen and how long you see events take depends on how you are moving with respect to those events. If you were looking out your window during a thunderstorm, you might see two flashes of lightning at the same time. However, if your friend were looking down at the Earth from her spaceship, she might see one of those two flashes of lightning happening before the other, as long as she was traveling fast enough. Neither of you would be either more or less right than the other about when those lightning strikes happened. So, if we cannot agree on what things happen at the same time, then we cannot agree on what “now” means, either. Nor can we necessarily agree on which things have happened and which haven’t happened yet as of a certain time, so past and future turn out to be relative, too. Many philosophers conclude from this that past, present, and future are just illusions that our minds create, and aren’t useful terms for describing the world. If that’s true, then time in the everyday sense of a series of passing moments doesn’t even really apply to created things, let alone to God. Relativity would thus give us reason to think that Augustine was right in saying that eternity is timeless, and that our futures are most likely just as fixed and unchangeable as our pasts. On the other hand, others argue that, just because past, present, and future depend upon place and are different for different observers, that doesn’t mean they can’t be real. That could mean that God’s view of time is stranger and more complex than either Newton or Augustine thought: not looking down on time from a single point of view like a spectator at a theater, but instead seeing it through the eyes of all the actors in the play.
Around this time, many Jews also used Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew. Some parts of the books of Daniel and Ezra are written in Aramaic, and Jesus and his disciples almost certainly spoke to each other in Aramaic. The Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew word olam is alam; this is very probably the word that the writers of the Gospels rendered in Greek as aion.
Great Catechism ch. 8.
David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Confessions XI. Augustine is drawing the writings of Plotinus, a third-century philosopher of Plato’s school of thought who, while not a Christian himself, had a powerful influence on Christian theology, argued that aion ought properly to mean the kind of changeless life that God possesses. See Plotinus’s Enneads III.7.6.8.
Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, ch. 16.
On the Bondage of the Will, §§9–12.
Consolation of Philosophy V.VI.
Optics, Query 31.
