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Amazing how it all makes sense to a mortal who is aware of being alive in timelessness -- and how foolish it must seem to one who perceives of nothing more than three spatial dimensions evolving over time.

Indeed! The recognition that one is alive in timelessness is ultimately a spiritual insight. Plus time is not usually a topic that one examines or analyzes; it "just is" in the eyes of many, simply taken for granted....

But Wolfhart Pannenberg has taken the trouble to examine these concepts, and has some fascinating things to say about time and eternity in his Towards a Theology of Nature. He suggests that "the divine act of creation does not occur in time -- rather, it constitutes an eternal act, contemporaneous with all time, that is, with the entire world process. Yet this world process itself has a temporal beginning, because it takes place in time."

[As an aside, this insight seems to agree with my supposition that Genesis 1 does not refer to God's acts in time. I imagine that we don't see that until Genesis 2. That is, I imagine Genesis 1 refers to eternity, and Genesis 2 to time.... Just a thought that has struck me....]

In view of the relativity of the modes of time to the aspect of the human being experiencing time, this [results] in the assumption that all time, if it could be, so to speak, surveyed from a "place" outside the course of time, would have to appear as contemporaneous. This assumption is confirmed by a unique phenomenon of the human experience of time through the experience of an "expanded" present in which not only the punctiliar now but everything on which a position may be taken [e.g., past events, future anticipations] still or already is considered as present. The concept of eternity as the sounding together of all time, achieved in this way, is distinguished from the Greek idea of eternity of changeless existence, as founded on Parmenides and Plato. There the idea of eternity is constituted by the contrast to the world of the senses, to time and change. Understood in the sense of the suggestions above, the concept of eternity comprehends all time and everything temporal in itself -- a conception of the relationship of time and eternity that goes back to Augustine and is connected to the Israelite understanding of eternity as unlimited duration throughout time.
The worldview of the theory of relativity also can be understood in the sense of a last contemporaneousness of all events that for us are partitioned into a temporal sequence. The four-dimensional continuum of space and time can be represented symbolically -- projected on a three-dimensional image -- as a cylinder or (under consideration of the progressive expansion of the world) as a cone or sphere. In these images, the entire world process is conceived as a single present. However, it could appear in this manner only from a point of view that would not coincide with any position in the world process.
Eternity so described must not be viewed as the mere sum of that which is scattered in time. Eternity can also be thought of as the production of the content of time which at the same time remains contained in it -- in eternity. On this basis the creation of the world would be identical with the creation of the total process of time, and this act can be described as the moment of the independent confronting of the finite moments of the space-time continuum. Thus creation can be conceived, on the ground of the theory of relativity, as an eternal act that comprises the total process of finite reality, while that which is created, whose existence happens in time, originates and passes away temporally.

Pannenberg also notes that human knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, participates in a certain sense (despite its position in time) in the perspective of eternity. "It does so by grasping sequences of events, which occur in time successively, beforehand in their structure of sequence and in their instances. Such participation in eternity, the brokenness of which would have to be discussed more exactly, seems to be confirmed also in the function of knowledge which causes unity. It results through the anticipation of the entirety of the processes occurring in time."

Here is a most striking additional insight from Pannenberg:

...[T]he question arises: What is the relationship of the function of eternity, which comprises all that which is temporal, to the world process itself which takes place in time? Insofar as this is characterized by an increasing unification, eternity enters from the future into time. Of the modes of time, the one closest to the eternal act of creation would not be the past but the future. From the future is the world, even with its already past periods of world process, created.

Just some food for thought here! I highly recommend Pannenberg's stimulating, provocative, and challenging book!

Thanks so much for your excellent essay/post my dearest sister in Christ!

BTW, thanx so much for the ping.

I truly enjoyed reading Pannenburg's book! Thank you so very much for sharing his insights here along with your own.

I intend to pull his book of the shelf and do some rethinking of his views from the aspect of God and the Observer Problem - "time" being among the most curious challenges to overcome as an observer.

>> What is the relationship of the function of eternity, which comprises all that which is temporal, to the world process itself which takes place in time?

Time is when we're together and my, my, how it flies. Forever is when you're away from me.

Does that clear everything up?