Thoughts on God, Time, and Eternity
In Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order he shares that to modern man, similar to the Greeks, we think of time as linear, “extending in a kind of line from some point in remote antiquity to the present.” The difference between this and how the Hebrews viewed time is that the Hebrews viewed it as psychic, “that is related to the soul, to spiritual experience.” Because of God’s existence outside of time, the revelation of Himself to the Hebrews was also a revelation of eternity. Kirk shares this passage from Thoreif Boman that better conveys the concept of time in a psychic sense:
“For us space is like a great container that stores, arranges, and holds everything together; space is also the place where we live, breathe, and can expand freely. Time played a similar role for the Hebrews. Their consciousness is like a container in which their whole life from childhood on and the realities which they experienced or of which they had heard are stored. Because every person is and remains identical with himself, a consolidating unity adheres to each person’s psychical content which could be expressed thus: all this is my world, my existence. A man who lives from the psychical impressions that the external world makes upon him has a world in his consciousness; he lives in time, but even while he actually lives in time, moments and intervals of time play a very subordinate role. It is the same I that once played as a child, went to school as a youth, and entered competitive life; body and appearance have changed, life’s experiences have come, but the man himself, i.e. his consciousness, has remained the same self. Seen from the inside his personal experiences form a unity, a world; in that world he moves freely and with ease. Thus even while the Hebrew lives in time, time-distinctions play a very trifling role for him. Even in the divine consciousness all time-measurement disappears, because Yahweh remains identical with himself.”
Yahweh is one of the sacred names for the God of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible. As Thoreif Boman’s passage shows us, in order for a human to have an anchor that can ground their experiences across time, their singular consciousness relies on the bodied self that experiences each and every linear event. It doesn’t follow that that self (the body especially) that experiences each event is eternal, but there’s one consciousness that is present for each event.
According to the Hebrew concept of eternity from Boman, one doesn’t have to look at Yahweh as a God who grants eternal life to the bodied selves who believe in Him in order to understand Him as an eternal God. He’s eternal because He works as a psychic anchor across time, which is true, because since He’s been revealed to Moses and the Jews, He’s been permanent.
Of course, since we’ll all live and die, we won’t be present in linear time long enough (at least in the form of bodied persons) to know if Yahweh’s seeming permanence will remain, though He’s definitely on pace to do so. We do know that Nietzsche’s claim of the death of God, though he didn’t mean the phrase literally, seems like it wouldn’t ever be literally possible, because despite the decline of religiosity in the west, the idea of there being a God never goes away.
Also considering the fact that the world and history’s three greatest religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) are anchored on the God of Abraham, it seems even less likely that He will be anything other than eternal. This is, of course, a recognition of His being eternal in a psychic sense, because an eternal literal existence is a different conversation.
These observations are more profound for anyone who knows the history of the Jewish people, their religion, and the unlikelihood that they, a people who for most of history didn’t have their own state, would be the group that has survived instead of all the other great civilizations of history. Of course, as long as the Jewish people survive, so does their God (though He now has two other chances at survival thanks to Christianity and Islam).
When one looks at this psychic interpretation of the eternity of Yahweh, Christ’s message that “whoever believes in Him will have eternal life” makes more sense. It becomes an exercise of language, where you don’t have to think of any concept of heaven and hell, to realize that belief in Christ anchors one to Yahweh (the eternal God), which grants the believer an access to eternal life, since the life is anchored to something that is eternal. A certain belief of Christ’s words still depend on if you accept Him as the physical incarnation of the God of Abraham, but even without Christ, the God of Abraham, like I mentioned, is on pace to be eternal.
I will acknowledge that these thoughts I’m sharing aren’t sufficiently considering concepts of heaven, hell, or whether or not Christ’s resurrection literally happened. There are likely theological gaps to fill in that would extend this blog post and any conversation anyone has with me if they read it. But I do share these thoughts because they give a different concept to the idea of eternity.
Whether we have souls and what happens to them after we die is also a topic left for another day. Science still hasn’t explained the mystery of consciousness, so the idea that we’re forms of consciousness trapped in bodied selves still doesn’t seem too far off. But what this exercise in language about what we mean when we say ‘eternal’ does show us is that whether or not we’re talking about a literal eternity, having eternal life through God can be true if we understand the idea of God’s eternity the way the Hebrews understand it, as a psychic phenomena.
