The One Eternal God

Although modern philosophy has argued for the impossibility of any meaningful experience that is not pervaded through and through by time, popular discourse still uses the language of 'eternity' or 'the eternal', notably in contexts of bereavement and romantic love: remembrance or love are frequently said to be 'forever', 'undying', or 'eternal', and hymns and other devotional practices still emphasize divine eternity. Can such popular usage still bear significant philosophical and theological content--or is it just a question of old forms being used by rote without any real meaning being attached to them? By examining a series of classical, modern, and contemporary texts (religious, philosophical and literary), the research argues that there is a case for seeing the idea of 'the eternal' as contributing to and constituting a defining element of religious experience and, by extension, the concept of God.
Philosophy of religion today is a field offering widely divergent approaches, amongst which it is customary to distinguish between the analytical (also sometimes referred to as Anglo-American) and continental approaches. By adopting the method of phenomenology, this study places itself predominantly in the continental tradition, giving greater emphasis to the historical and textual nature of human beings' religious self-understanding. However, it also engages in a constructive dialogue with analytic philosophy of religion (see 'Objectives') and will encourage the cross-fertilization of these approaches without taking up prejudicial and exclusive attitudes. Such a both-and approach is essential to the future health of the field and is spontaneously reflected in the practice of many younger scholars.
Much of the focus of the study is provided by such thinkers as Kierkegaard and Heidegger, who have been central to the development of thinking about time in modern continental thought, although neither are accepted uncritically. Critical perspectives are, for example , provided by the Jewish thinker Franz Rosenweig's understanding of the eternal in time, as set out in his apologetic work The Star of Redemption and by the philosopher Michael Theunissen's magnum opus on the poetry of Pindar, a work that offers an important corrective to some standard assumptions about the idea of time in Western thought. Another major figure to be discussed is the poet Edwin Muir, whose work contains an extensive wrestling with questions of time and eternity, often with specific reference to the contrasting approaches of Nietzsche and Christianity. Muir's work in particular helps to show the interdependence of human experiences of time, love, and the eternal. Whilst emphasizing this connection might seem to be vulnerable to a debunking approach that would see the appeal to the eternal in, e.g., a bereavement situation, as merely compensatory and sentimental, the research argues that it may also be interpreted as drawing out a nexus of ideas that helps to give meaning to the 'essential loss' that is intrinsic to the human situation (i.e. our vulnerability to death and loss) and help establish a ground for commitment to love as a primary human value.

Although this book has arisen out of specialist teaching and research and its primary audience is an academic one, the issues it raises have wider, arguably universal, significance. As religious communities continue to wrestle with the relationship between their traditional teachings (in this case the eternity of God and the eternal value of human love) and modern thought and experience, they are constantly seeking ways of restating tradition in the light of new insights. Outside the academic community works such as that undertaken here are mediated to a wider public through reviews (previous work has been reviewed in The Guardian, TLS, THES, and Church Times as well as academic journals), and clergy and informed laity. In this process religious communities are enabled to avoid the kind of intellectual isolation that leads to the rejection of modern thought and experience and therefore encourages them to make the pastoral and social contributions to the generality of contemporary life that they are especially well-fitted to make. As indicated in Academic Beneficiaries, I have especially strong links with Copenhagen University and, through that, to the wider Danish Church (all Danish clergy are required to have the equivalent of a Master's Degree in Theology as part of their qualification for ordination, thus establishing a larger community of those with an active interest in theology than is the case in England). However, I also regularly receive speaking and preaching invitations that have a Church-related outreach in the UK and would use these to show the application of ideas developed in the book.