Future

Robert Jenson writes, “In that an eternity is always some union of past and future, every possible eternity will be of one of two broad kinds:  a Persistence of the Beginning, or an Anticipation of the End.  Moreover, essential time is future time.  It is because we face a future that we experience ourselves as temporal beings; if there were only the past, which remains forever as it is, we would be timeless.  The eternity in which all persists as it was is therefore the cancellation of time; the eternity in which all is open to transformation is the success of time itself.”

The new heavens and new earth are the latter kind of future, an openness to transformation without end.