Tozer acknowledges that the words for “forever” and “eternal” in Scripture don’t literally mean “time without end.” However, he says that claiming the writers didn’t mean “forever” as we mean it has no basis in serious scholarship, pointing out the theological bias in trying to debunk orthodoxy. I am afraid that I might bounce the same criticism back to Tozer, in defense of orthodoxy. I have not done a serious study of the terms to see specifically how they are used, but I don’t think that a general statement about scholarship on this issue has merit, and that it really needs to be studied objectively.
“’From everlasting to everlasting thou art God,’ said Moses in the Spirit. ‘From the vanishing point to the vanishing point’ would be another way to say it quite in keeping with the words as Moses used them.” –Tozer
The question is, what did the writers of Scripture have in mind as the “vanishing points”? The beginning of time, as we might? Or the beginning of the earth? Or the beginning of human creation/history? We really don’t know.
One thing I do affirm, however, is that the writers did not consider “eternity” to be “outside time” as we might think of it. That is a more recent philosophical/scientific concept, and has no place in ancient thought. Time is thought of in the ancient world as a series of ages, and the “end of time” is truly the end of an age, or era. For the Jews, 70AD is the “end of time” because their history as a people changes remarkably at that point.
I wonder how much hebrew ideas about eternity/forever are linked with the idea of being remembered, and not forgotten by God. To be never forgotten, to be always on God's mind, must be a close match in the absence of ideas of time which we moderns have.
ReplyDeleteGood thought. To be remembered by God is, in a sense, eternal life. I know that in the most ancient parts of the Bible, eternal life is seen through progeny and perpetual reputation. From at least Daniel 12 on, eternal life is connected to resurrection of the body.
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