II have written about how heaven likely still includes challenge in an earlier post. I want to build on that, utilizing the rightly famous verse, “faith, hope, and love, these three endure forever.” We will focus down on “hope” and what this word implies. These three are central to what makes heaven heavenly. It is one thing to think about hope in this world; it is quite another to think what “hope” means in a world without sin. Before we discuss this further, however, we must ask if these three—faith, hope, love—endure forever only in humans or if these three endure forever into the eternal past. Does the immanent Trinity—which is to say, God in the eternal past—provide the basis for these three? Do the Members of the Trinity experience these three? We may say preliminarily that the way “faith, hope, and love” is experienced by God need not be identical (univocal) to how humans experience it. To start this investigation, we will briefly look at the Greek of this verse, but first let’s address the elephant in the room, which is the weakness of humans in the face of eternity.
When I stated, “. . . or if these three endure forever into the eternal past,” I am applying a temporal word—’past’—into an atemporal situation. Grammatically in Greek, the word for “forever” or “eternal” is aiōnîon, or for my Greek nerds, since it is an adjective, it could be aiōnîos, aiōnîa, aiōnîon depending on the word it is modifying. This is sometimes strengthened in the biblical texts to this phrase using the nominal (or noun) form of aiōn: eis aiōnas tōn aiōnōn. This is often translated as “forever and ever”; this is not literal though, and the translation is more literally “unto the ages of the ages.” The early Church’s Origen, regarded as the ultimate scholar who even the great Athanasius revered, long outlined that the Son of God being “begotten” was a timeless occurrence. Origen understood the weakness of human language. Dietriech Bonhoeffer would later articulate this as humanity’s frustration with the impenetrable beginning, that no creature can access. It is not only that we cannot access it in thought, we have no words that can univocally describe such a situation. Our imagination allows us to attend and modestly approach, but with every revealing we are met with a concealing, to quote Karl Barth. Origen’s phrase that the Son was “eternally begotten” only gets us so far since all occasions of a child being begotten in the world of humans denotes that child’s beginning in time. This is why Origen goes to great lengths to articulate that the Son being begotten is a timeless generation.
There were some in the early Church and today that look at the phrase, “unto the ages of the ages,” and conclude that hell is not eternal or endless. Appending an alpha, α, to an adjective in Greek makes it a negative adjective, a negation. Thus, the adjective aiōnîon (αιωνιον) has often been argued to connote the negation of time not its endless extension. This is complicated by the underlying noun, aiōn (αιων), whose referent is seemingly straightforward: i.e., age, which is not a timeless period but firmly a time-frame. We are oversimplifying this, however, since aiōn in the more ancient Greek philosophical tradition could even have the meaning of “life” or “enlivening principle.” The span of these meanings—i.e., life, age, timeless, endless time, perpetuity—are drawn together by the realization that the entire human-program is situated and defined by “time-orientedness,” which only matters to sentient-sapient life-forms (humans). To speak of “an age” only matters whatsoever if there are sentient and sapient (humans) life-forms. The point is that “life” requires “an age” or a “time” in which to express and observe itself. In this world, time is a critical piece of life. Hence, it is not strange that aiōn (age) once had the meaning of “life.”
In the face of eternity, humans are helpless. Because we have no experience of eternality, we can have no language that univocally articulates it. This does not mean that we cannot piecemeal our way towards understanding eternality. We understand things beyond our minds partially, and we ever stride towards greater understanding. To those who want to avoid the idea that hell is eternal because the word aiōn sometimes means “age” fail to understand that no word univocally conveys eternality. It is only through our imagination that we stride towards understanding eternality: we take our experience of time, make it abstract, then imagine that such experience would go on and on. To prevent confusion, we should point out that “eternal” as applied to God has a different meaning than when applied to creatures. What we can imagine is endless time into the future; this is “eternal” as applied to creatures. The idea of no beginning and no end is the “eternal” applied to God, which idea dwells in unapproachable light, and no one can grasp it. To wit, we have no option but to use words that are built from time-situated humans, but the limitations of creaturely words does not mean that these words don’t set the groundwork for what comes next. This highlights the importance of analogical interpretation, which is to say that analogies are important to know and love God. We understand in part and it takes eternity to grow ever towards knowing God.
Now we are ready to discuss hope with this understanding of eternal in the backdrop. Here is the Greek of 1 Cor. 13:13.
Νυνὶ δὲ μένει ⸉πίστις,* ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη, τὰ τρία ταῦτα⸊· μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη.
And now these three remain, faith, hope, love: but the greatest of these is love (trans. mine).
Recall the preceding context (v. 12) here is Paul detailing how we currently see in part—through a glass dimly lit—but in the heavenly future we will have direct and full access so that we “know [God] as we are known.” I’ve explained in other posts that verse 12 is about access not perfect knowledge of God as though limited creatures like humans could divest God of His infinite mysterium. How then does hope remain in the heavenly future? To hope implies something to look forward to. Hebrews 11:1 gives us this intel: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This verse reinforces the fact that hope involves conviction of things not currently seen. What are we looking forward to in heaven? If hope remains in our perfect future, what is the object of our hope since we are already dwelling in the presence of God, the Satisfier of all living things, as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 145:16). The answer is obvious presuming that God really is an infinite Well that has no bottom. Jesus gives us this imagery: “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life (Jn 4:13 – 14).” No matter how deep you swim, we never come to the end. No matter how long we live in heavenly future with God, there is water anew to satiate each new day in eternal life. To avoid the big issue of the problem of evil in heaven, we must remove the possibility of boredom. Jesus’ “well of water springing up” somehow “in us” provides an image of ever new water in eternal life, and what does water from a well do? It provides new life and energy, and do not miss the implication that water is a symbol for the Spirit of God. Water is critical for life and endless welling up water provides a basis for hope. Hope implies new accomplishment, new mountain tops to climb. As I’ve said elsewhere, hope lays out the possibility of challenge being part of the culture of heaven—without obviously the envy that corrupts challenge into something evil. The simple observation is that if God is infinite, then discovery is endless; and this is Gospel good-news because it eradicates the problem of evil in the form of heavenly boredom.
Dr. Scalise