Eternity’s Christ and Triunely Conditioned Reality

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Eternity isn’t some abstract future happenstance. Eternity is in fact God’s triune Life. He alone is eternal. He, by grace and adoption, brings us into participation with Him through Christ. This is the eternity we stand before, and within. It is not some type of cosmic expanse, or some energy/force that just supposedly is the primal one; a pantheistic or monistic concept (think Eastern mysticism, or Western New Agism). Time and space in fact have an empirical beginning, that is by inferential deduction. But even more so, time and space have a personal beginning, that is ‘in the beginning God … and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ There is a relational and personal and loving concrete ground that stands behind, and that currently upholds all things, from moment-by-moment, by the Word of God’s triune power. But this is the inner reality of the created order, including all of its cosmic ramifications; whether terrestrial, or stellar; seen or unseen; that is, God’s triune life of interpenetrating and eternal love. This is the eternity we stand before, and within; as He graciously, and firstly elected to be for us, in us, and with us for all time, now, and forevermore.

4 thoughts on “Eternity’s Christ and Triunely Conditioned Reality”

  1. Yes and Amen! The beautiful truth Bobby!
    Many times even some of my own favorite pieces, I have placed God in eternity, although in control of eternity. I try to conceive of God transcending eternity, and resign to the fact that being human or not intelligent enough, I can not.
    That He Is Eternity sheds an entirely different light. Time is his creation; Eternity Is He!
    Amen!
    Duane D.

  2. Amen… and emet. As Isaiah described it, ‘eternity’ is the proper ‘residence’ of the One who is both high (supernal) and is also “lifting up” … and He whose Name is Holy “inhabits” it (cf. Isaiah 57:17). Humanity, too… yet in Christ alone, is ‘lifted up’… into the presence of the Lord of Glory and the eternal abode of the household of faith… to forever abide in the communion of God’s “triune life of interpenetrating and eternal love”. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift! Hallelujah!

  3. Amen, Duane. I’m glad this has been helpful for you, it has been for me too. We are included in “God’s triune time,” which happens to be eternal. To me the only way to try and conceive of this is through the analogy of the incarnation; where the tangent of *eternity* assumes the tangent of *time*, indeed, as it has always already been the ground of temporal/historic reality. All of this thinking for me, really comes from Barth’s reformulated doctrine of election; that is it provides a frame to think of how all of created reality is circumscribed by God’s time, by his eternal life. Just an apprehension, really; not a comprehension, of course.

  4. Amen, Richard. Indeed, this way of thinking is really just biblical/canonical thinking. This is what Robert Jenson has attempted to press into with his narratival trinitarian theology (and of course he’s riffing on Barth’s focus).

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