Eternal Life in This Life

Abstract

If it is contradictory for the timelessly eternal God to be a living God, it is also contradictory for a temporal human being to have eternal life. The root of the contradiction is in the conjunction of life and eternity. Life is lived and as such by its nature has a temporal progression, while eternity is by its nature timeless and so atemporal. The very idea of ‘eternal life’ presents a contradiction, it seems. If ‘eternal’ is rendered as ‘everlasting,’ then the contradiction is escaped. Yet in one way of religious understanding, the eternal life held open to human persons is not an everlasting eschatological life but an eternal life, a timelessly eternal life, in this life. It is now time to address the question of how this can be.