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Spinoza, more concerned than Hobbes with the ancient conception of the role of philosophy in delineating the Good Life, made Substance, God, and Nature into synonyms. God is eternal, free, and all-powerful, but in no way personal, operating for no end, but from the necessity of its nature. Nothing is contingent. This entity, of whose infinite Attributes we know two, Thought and Extension, and whose Modes are the particular things (including us) of our experience, is all there is. Mind and Body are “the same thing, expressed in two ways.” A particular mind is composed of Ideas –beliefs, active entities, not the “dumb pictures on a tablet” of Descartes. Some ideas are adequate, others are inadequate, “confused and fragmentary.” The more we replace our inadequate ideas by adequate ones, the closer we attain to blessedness, and indeed share in the eternity of God.

This chapter attends to Rosenzweig's attempt to reestablish the relationship God–word–world, which was shattered in modernity. This provides the basis to rehabilitate a notion of miracle and the signs of liturgy for contemporary Jews. For Rosenzweig, liturgy is a form of reasoning about time that provides answers to the age‐old aporias that Augustine exposed in his Confessions. The first part of the chapter ends with an analysis of the psalms that are chanted in the Hallel service as keys to the liturgical relation to eternity. The second part of this chapter focuses on Rosenzweig's liturgical reasoning with each of the central festivals of the yearly Jewish calendar. These festivals are presented as expressions of three theological terms (creation, revelation, redemption) and the temporal tenses (past, present, future). The chapter concludes with an attempt to revise Rosenzweig's theology of Christianity through the Jewish‐Christian‐Islamic movement of “Scriptural Reasoning.”

This chapter examines one of the most significant 13th century atemporal terms, aeternitas. The English word typically used to translate this term is ‘eternity’, and is used by contemporary philosophers in both an everlasting (extensional) and timeless (non-extensional) sense. It is shown that medieval minds did not necessarily think of eternity in the durational way that contemporary philosophers do. They often preferred to construe eternity in terms of limitlessness and the different ways in which a particular could be limitless. As a result, there were at least ten different ways in which 13th century thinkers could use the word aeternitas (eternity). To distinguish between uses of aeternitas which were intended to convey notions of extensional or nonextensional existence, medieval thinkers distinguished between ‘less proper’ and ‘more proper’ uses of the word, reserving the more proper uses for non-extensional notions.

This chapter examines the question of how 13th century thinkers viewed God’s relationship to time. It is argued that mid-13th century accounts of God’s relationship to time are trying to affirm something that does not fall within the ambit of the concepts and thought patterns used by contemporary philosophers. Taking as their point of departure a universe populated and organized very differently from contemporary philosophical models, it should not be surprising that their thought refuses to be categorized and confined by the parameters of contemporary distinctions, such as that between timelessness and everlastingness.

This chapter surveys the Greek background in Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s Physics and De Caelo, and the dispute between late Greek thinkers, especially Proclus and Philoponus. Against this background, al-Kindī’s arguments that only God can be eternal and that creation must be finite in time as well as space are explored. It is suggested that al-Kindī’s interest in this topic can be explained in terms of the contemporary ’Abbāsid dogma that the Koran is not eternal, but created.

The self‐giving love of God deployed in the redemptive events creatively brings about a new and lasting mode of existence. The powerful and ‘performative’ language of Jesus transformed people. Then love exposed him to suffering and death, which brought the joyful union of risen life that will last forever. This chapter illuminates the nature of redemption by analysing love.

This chapter argues that the grammatical Thomism of Herbert McCabe and the story Barthianism of Hans Frei are as modalist or Sabellian as the full-blown story Thomism of Robert Jenson. On the one hand, if one applies the descriptive or narrative method to the Trinity and its works in salvation history, one ‘person’ will appear after another, as in modalism. On the other hand, this will not even achieve its stated aim of doing justice to the temporality of salvation history, since all three persons will be actualizations of a single, static, and immobile story. Although the narrative theological dissolution of the persons of the Trinity into a series of relationships may not be wholly grounded in texts of either Barth or Aquinas, the classical Augustinian method nonetheless undermines the historical force of the Biblical salvation history, with its descriptions of the persons of the Trinity, and therefore is not a stable basis from which to avoid modalism. This chapter proposes that the modern challenge can be met to show how the economic Trinity really exhibits the immanent, eternal Trinity by considering the historical missions of Son and Spirit, not just as the reflection or illustration of, but as the ‘expression’ of the divine Love. This approach to Trinitarian theology strengthens rather than diminishes the force of its reference to three persons, by keeping the Biblical descriptions in sight.

This chapter begins with a description of the life of Josiah Royce. It then discusses the following themes from Royce: proof of the existence of God, ethical theory, and the problem of evil in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy; the panpsychism of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy; the four conceptions of being in The World and the Individual; time and eternity and the worlds of description and acquaintance mainly in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy; and the notion of the beloved community in The Philosophy of Loyalty and The Problem of Christianity. Some comments on Royce as a religious thinker and man are presented.

This chapter complements chapter six by setting out the doctrine of God which was advanced by the Anglican Reformed. Tracing the most detailed Reformed presentation of the issues, the Cambridge lectures of Pearson, it shows how the Reformed were committed to a remarkably Thomist conception of the divine nature and the divine attributes. Advancing a strong conception of divine simplicity, they held, as many of their contemporaries did not, to the idea of eternity as timeless, and denied the existence of middle knowledge or a conditional will within the Godhead. The chapter underlines that the Anglican Reformed explicitly acknowledged their indebtedness to Roman Catholic Thomist thinking, and in fact preferred to cite those Roman Catholic authorities rather than contemporary continental Reformed sources.

After a quick survey of the positions prior to Avicenna concerning the age of the universe, the chapter focuses on Avicenna’s unique arguments for the eternity of the world. To this end, it presents his conception of possibility as well as considering how Avicenna envisions the most basic modes of possible existence, namely, substances and accidents, with a particular emphasis on forms and matter. There is then a general discussion of Avicenna’s notion of metaphysical causality. Upon completing the investigation of possible existence, one will be in a position to appreciate Avicenna’s new modal arguments for the world’s eternity and his response to earlier criticisms against that thesis. The chapter, then, concludes with a section on the Necessary Existent’s relation to possible existence as exemplified in Avicenna’s unique twist on the Neoplatonic theory of emanation.

This chapter examines the concept of the solitary Petrarch and suggests that Petrarch's theory of secular fame and the various stages of death, fame, time, and eternity are already present in nuce in the early Latin elegy on his mother's death. It highlights the influence of Dante's Inferno in Petrarch's development of an iterative mortality/vitality related to memory early in his career and on his Metrica on the death of his mother.

This chapter considers the implications for soteriology of Barth's doctrine of election. Following an introduction to the doctrine, this chapter reflects on criticism of Barth, and offers an analytical approach to the doctrine within the framework of the larger theme of universality in Christ. Primarily, it argues that the doctrine of election is the foundation of Barth's soteriology in terms of the eternal election of humanity in Christ. It is advocated that this doctrine tends very strongly in a universalist direction. However, the principal focus is to demonstrate that these universalist leanings do not in any way undermine particularity. This is demonstrated through a special focus on Barth's doctrine of eternity. This chapter provides part of the reflective theological material for the formative aspect of the book's interpretation of universal salvation in the Son in Chapter 4.