The relationship between time and eternity is of utmost importance, and yet nary a Christian seems to contemplate it; at least not that transparently (like when was the last time you heard a sermon series on the relationship between time and eternity?). As an Evangelical Calvinist, or more pointedly, as a Barthianish Reformedish typed, my way into this locus will always be oriented by a Christ concentration. With the recent death of my dad (which I still reel from) this particular locus has taken on new gravitas for me. Clearly, this side of the eschaton our vision will always be delimited by faith rather than sight, but it is a delimitation that allows room for spiritual growth; precisely because we must rely on the One we cannot see, but who raises the dead. In this vein, Karl Barth opines some wonderful insight in regard to “God’s time” pro nobis. He notices what most Christians don’t; that is, he observes that without God’s supra-temporality or super-time the Gospel itself has no concrete shape or character—at least no shape that has extra or alien ‘substance’ for us. Barth notices that outwith God’s grounding of temporality for us we are only left with a vacuum wherein the abstract human heart will seek to fill it with its own vain, and even demonic imaginations (we see this in the world over, currently). Barth writes:

It is only if they are true and legitimate that the whole content of the Christian message—creation as the basis of man’s existence, established by God, reconciliation as the renewal of his existence accomplished by God, redemption as the revelation of his existence to be consummated by God (and therefore as the revelation of the meaning of His creation)—can be understood as God’s Word of truth as  not as the myth of a pious or impious self-consciousness, the comfortless content of some human monologue which lays no real claim upon us, the substance of a well-meant pastoral fiction, mere wishful thinking or a terrifying dream. The Christian message cannot be distinguished from a myth or dream of this kind unless God’s eternity has temporality in the sense described, and God is really pre-temporal, supra-temporal, and post-temporal. If God’s eternity is not understood this way the Christian message cannot be proclaimed in any credible way or received by faith. For the content of this message depends on the fact that God was and is and is to be, that our existence stands under the sign of a divine past, present, and future, that in its differentiation this sign does not point away into space, to a God who, in fact, is neither past, present nor future. Without God’s complete temporality the content of the Christian message has no shape. Its proclamation is only an inarticulate mumbling. Therefore everything depends on whether God’s temporality is the simple truth which cannot be attacked from any quarter because it has its basis in God Himself, which is not then a mere appearance, a bubble constructed by human feeling or thought. And it is as well to consider this whole matter from the other side too. In the temporality of all its statements the Christian message is the truth which binds and comforts men. In the One who, according to this message, was and is and is to come we have to do with the true God Himself, The message calls us to faith in virtue of its own weight. It attests itself as God’s Word and therefore destroys, so to speak, from within the suspicion that we have to do only the imaginative drama of a myth. But because this is the case, it is quite impossible to deny to God’s eternity the possession of preparedness for time and therefore temporality. It is for this reason that this is true, and the concepts of pre-temporality, supra-temporality and post-temporality are legitimate because they simply spell out and analyse what the Christian message guarantees to be the Word of God and therefore the truth. This message can neither be proclaimed nor believed as the truth without the proclaiming and believing of these statements about God. They are not simply inferences from the Gospel. As certainly as the Gospel tells us the truth about God, they are elements in the Gospel itself and as such. The Gospel itself and as such cannot be spoken and take shape without these statements being made and this understanding of the divine eternity forcing itself upon us—not indirectly, as a scholastic parergon, but directly, because the Gospel must either remain unproclaimed or be spoken in the form of these statements. We shall go through them quickly to remind ourselves of the two aspects—that the truth of God’s Word depends on their truth, and that they themselves are base on and preserved by the truth of God’s Word.[1]

There is an asymmetrical continuity between God’s time and our time, but this continuity is all important. Time requires God’s eternity, but God’s eternity does not require our time; no, He freely chose it and created it for us in the primacy of Christ’s humanity for the world. Personally, this brings me peace because I know that the life I live as a Christian isn’t one that is lived apart from my dad’s life (or any other Christian’s); it is only life lived in the humanity of Christ, and the triune life He mediates us into in the triune life—just as sure as He is the eternal Logos, the Son of God. We need God to be God, but if He simply remained God without time He would be God without us; and this is precisely what He is not, indeed He is Immanuel, God with us!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 190.