© 1977 by American Academy of Religion
Abstracts of Articles |
Kinds of Eternity: Temporal Problematic and Historical Horizons
Peter B. Manchester (Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union) is Lecturer and Research Associate in the Religious Studies Program, University of California, Davis. This paper continues work begun in his 1972 disseration, "The Doctrine of the Trinity in Temporal Interpretation," and continued as a postdoctral fellow in 1975 at Dalhousie University, Halifax, working with A. H. Armstrong on "Time and Eternity in Late Classical Philosophy"
This hermeneutical exploration of the notion of eternity is committed to the premise that eternity is a temporal phenomenon. I show how notions of eternity express orientations within a field of phenomenological questions called temporal problematic.
Temporal problematic is a phenomenological way of raising questions about the unity of the future, the past and the present. Important misunderstandings of temporality spring from the commonsensical assumption that the unity of the future, past and present is time that these three are "parts of time," have time-like order and undergo flux.
I show to the contrary how decisions about the phenomenological problem of the unity of future, past and present show up ahead of, and in the direction of their origin, even apart from a given system's account of flowing time. For such decisions to have nothing to do with flowing time is no impediment to their being temporal. Flowing time in the old speculation is not even an original phenomenon of time, much less of the temporal at the level of consequence here explored. In classical thought temporal decisions are best reconstructed from the notions of eternity they produce. I sketch three different kinds of eternity in order to illuminate the range and consequences of such fundamental temporal decisions.
Along the way, I focus on a shift between kinds of eternity in the late Platonic speculations of Plotinus and Augustine. There we are given access to the specifically Christian experience of temporality. In that connection indicate how my construction of temporal problematic orginates in and means to return to the temporal problematic of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Its key features, especially the temporal interpretation of human historical firutude as it bears on hermeneutics, have been appropriated with great penetration in recent work by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yet Gadamer's exposition suffers from an important ambiguity concerning temporal "presence" which damages the discussion of historical horizons and would block my effort to thematize the projection of eternity in the horizon of the future in Augustine.
By supplementing Gadamer at this point, I make possible a hermeneutical appropriation of the kinds of eternity, centered in the Christian experience of a futural eternity which emerges in Augustine. Responding to Augustine, I conclude with some suggestions about temporal problematic and Christian trinitarian theology.