The Philosophy of Time

Several leading theologians of the 20th century emphasized the “futurity” of God in their formulation of the relation between Eternity and time. Although the impetus for such proposals was connected to the rediscovery of the centrality of eschatology among biblical scholars, many of these theologians also appropriated (and participated in) a late modern shift in the philosophy of time. This “turn to futurity” created challenges for theological formulations that presuppose the deterministic and linear views of causality dominant in early modernity. However, this shift also provided a new conceptual space within which theologians could retrieve and refigure traditional resources for articulating the intuition that creaturely being (in all its temporal modes) is constituted by the coming of the eternal God.