The beauty of eschatological time lies in its capacity to offer an infinite horizon for resurrected persons to act in order to negotiate morally the sin they have committed and the sin they have suffered, and to do so in the vast proportions of the communion of the saints before and after the Last Judgment. Were we to imagine capaciously the personal, communal, national, international, and transhistorical dimensions of sin whose effects have shaped the character of resurrected selves, then heavenly time opens a graceful duration of endless proportions within which to imagine the workings of heavenly virtue capable of reconciling the eschatological heritage of sin. Were we to dare to hope with Hans Urs Von Balthasar that finally the salvation of Christ extends to all so that those whom the traditional imaginary consigns to eternal perdition yet stand too before the Beatific Vision, the moral work of reconciliation in heavenly time increases all the more. And if this reconciliation is a profound dimension of the redemption of Christ itself, then heavenly time is a graceful gift, a transfigured duration as unending as God’s love and within which the joy of true reconciliation ever increases with the healing of sinful rifts in the communion of the saints.
We parse time in the categories of past, present, and future, aware that in existential time these moments are implicated in and with each other as they shape the meaningfulness of our lives as they have been, as they are, and as we hope they will be. To be a created person means that the very reality of self ever transpires in the dynamics of this temporal tension in which one’s words and deeds configure the person one becomes. When the traditional imaginary of heavenly life does not conflate creatureliness and the divine eternity, it might make room imaginatively for the personal past and present of resurrected selves in heaven. But the traditional imaginary does not posit a heavenly future before which one stands in hope, since hope and the future have evaporated in a redemption timelessly completed. And since a real future has disappeared in the traditional imaginary of heaven, what might remain even of a personal past and present are transformed into a skewed temporality that bears little resemblance to the conditions of creatureliness affirmed in the doctrine of bodily resurrection. The notion of heavenly time only sketched here in this first chapter offers the prospect of a future in the eschatological forever, a future before which one does not hope for a graced time already given but for a future in which grace abounds all the more, as do the moral bonds of relation in the communion of the saints.
Theological speculation about a heavenly time is only of value if its results enhance our appreciation of temporality in the eschatological now as much as they edify our hope for the life to come. God gives us time, and our theological endeavors to reflect on that gift have implications for theological anthropology, ecclesiology, ethics, and even a theology of God. Theological efforts to think through the redemptive resonance of moral endeavor in resurrected life clarify the graceful dimensions of the eschatological now in enlightening ways. Our encounter with graceful redemption now in experiences like love, forgiveness, friendship, understanding, compassion, conversion, commitment, hope, and openness to the stranger might be enriched by considering how the workings of grace continue into the eschatological forever, and how those insights, formed by the deepest Christian hopes, in turn inform our reflections on graceful redemption in the eschatological now.
The continuity of grace in time is an aesthetical judgment that has garnered a consensus in modern theology. We have argued here that the beauty of graced time is more beautiful still if its continuity is imagined to stretch into heavenly life and its ongoing redemption. Such an interpretive course asks Christians to think along with the traditional symbols rather than to translate them into existential states or circumstances to which they are assumed more meaningfully to refer. Yet, even when a traditional imaginary is interpretively re-imagined, as it is in our proposal here, the classical symbols of the faith remain rich resources of meaning with an endless capacity to stir our appreciation for the hope of the life to come.
