Now and Forever: A Theological Aesthetics of Time

by John E. Thiel

Overview

Building on the insights of the ressourcement theology of grace, this sophisticated theological aesthetics offers a fresh vision of the doctrine of creation through a consideration of the beauty of time.

Conventional eschatological accounts of life after death tend to emphasize the discontinuity between earthly life and the hereafter: whereas this life is subject to the contingencies of time, life after death is characterized by a stolid eternity. In contrast to this standard view, John E. Thiel’s Now and Forever articulates a Catholic eschatology in which earthly life and heavenly life are seen as gracefully continuous.

This account offers a reconceptualization of time, which, Thiel argues, is best understood as the sacramental medium of God’s grace to creation. Thiel’s project thus attempts to rescue time from its Platonically negative resonance in the doctrine of creation. Rather than viewing time as the ambiance of sinful dissolution, Thiel argues for a Christian vision of time’s beauty, and so explicitly develops an aesthetics that views time as a creaturely reflection of God’s own Trinitarian life. This thesis proceeds from the assumption that all time is eschatological time and is thus guided by attention to the temporality implicit in the virtue of hope, with its orientation toward a fulfilled future that culminates in resurrected life. This interpretation of the beauty of eschatological time in its widest expanse presses further the insight of ressourcement theology that grace is everywhere, while appreciating how time’s graceful beauty manifests itself in the diversity of temporal moments, human communities, and most fully in the heavenly communion of the saints.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268205225
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	04/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	214
File size:	621 KB

About the Author

John E. Thiel is professor of religious studies at Fairfield University. He currently serves as president of the American Theological Society and is the author of six books, including the award-winning Icons of Hope: The “Last Things” in Catholic Imagination (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).

John E. Thiel is professor of religious studies at Fairfield University. He currently serves as president of the American Theological Society and is the author of six books, Senses of Tradition: Continuity and Development in Catholic Faith, God, Evil, and Innocent Suffering: A Theological Reflection and the award-winning Icons of Hope: The “Last Things” in Catholic Imagination (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).

Read an Excerpt

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Eschatology, Time, and the Continuity of Grace

2. The Virtues in Time: An Eschatological Anthropology

3. Toward a Theology of Events in Time

4. Tragic Time in an Eschatological Aesthetic

5. The Aesthetics of Tradition and the Styles of Theology

6. Forever and a Day: Resurrected Time in a Heavenly Imaginary

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Brilliant! This work continues Thiel’s development of a theology of eschatology, which he began in Icons of Hope, a major contribution to the field. In that book and this, he fully yet succinctly engages the tradition to shape a compelling and quite original view of ‘last things’ and how such a view can and should shape our views of time and being in time.” —Julia A. Lamm, author of Schleiermacher’s Plato

“This is a fresh theology of the ‘last things.’ Making a persuasive case for a ‘thick’ eschatology, Thiel writes gracefully as he weaves together strands from a number of complex theological topics into an essay that moves both smoothly and lightly. The book is quite accessible and a pleasure to read!” —David H. Kelsey, author of Eccentric Existence

"Those looking for a poetic approach to religion will find much by which to be edified. Thiel’s treatment of hope and waiting are valuable." —America Magazine

"As befits an exercise in theological aesthetics, Now and Forever is elegantly argued and those whose theology lives in symbiosis with a preaching and pastoral ministry will find many well-turned phrases with which to inform their practice."—The Heythrop Journal

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