Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven by Kreeft Peter

Author:Kreeft, Peter [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898702972
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2009-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

Eternity: The Sixth Dimension

Unfortunately, it is a bit more complicated than that. Eternity is the sixth dimension, not the fifth. Chronos-time is the fourth dimension, kairos-time6 the fifth, and eternity the sixth. Thus there are three temporal dimensions, just as there are three spatial dimensions. Chronos is the first temporal dimension, like a line; kairos is the second, like a surface; and eternity is the third, like a solid: the concrete reality of which the others are only abstract aspects.

Chronos measures the quantity (but not the quality) of kairos; clocks measure how much life-time we live, as a surface boundary measures a surface by quantifying the area bounded by it. The lesser dimension is the boundary of the greater.

We need an image that will combine the truth symbolized by the point (viz., that in eternity all time is present at once, rather than dispersed into past and future) with the truth symbolized by the solid body (viz., that time is only the abstract boundary of a full eternity). We also need an image that will include all three temporal dimensions. Suppose we visualize kairos as a cone. All its radii come together at its point, eternity. The cone is bounded externally by chronos as an arc (p. 156).

At one end, the cone of our life-time touches the eternal center, the inner heart of time. At the other end, it is made finite and bounded by its amount of chronos, the outer skin of time. Our lived time has both an inside and an outside, a heart and a surface skin; our human time (kairos) touches both superhuman time (eternity) and subhuman time (chronos), both the divine and the material, just as our subjective spirit touches both objective spirit (God) and objective matter (the world).

There are three levels of reality: the human, the superhuman, and the subhuman: humanity, God, and the material world. Each has its own kind of duration that is natural to it: eternity for God, kairos for humanity, chronos for the world.

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