Essays Hegelian and Ecumenical: What has been at stake

When we question the reality of time we do so in favour of something richer, measuring more
fully up to experience, not something poorer. Timelessness, therefore, signifies indeed an
absence of time, but in favour of something else which will be more and not less dynamic. We
could not, for example, accept a view which represented us vibrant human beings as like
immobile statues.
One reason for our confidence in saying this is that, contrary to popular assumption, the
doctrine of God was never one of immobility, even where it was one of immutability. In
Western and Christian thought God is necessarily a Trinity, a universe of relations, that is to
say. Here the Father speaks the Word, the Word proceeds, their mutual love pours forth
(spirates) perpetually. Such uttering, equated with begetting or generation, is what the Father
is. He was not, is not, anything prior to this generating.
Therefore any event that we experience, be it our own perception of something, or any event
at all, is so to say undercut and supported by, as having at its heart, this eternal utterance or
generation of the Word in which all things are contained. The very newness of things reflects
eternal novelty and freshness, and thus time is eternal reality's image and cipher, not its
negation merely.
If therefore anyone would replace this religious view with, as in absolute idealism, a universe
of immortal spirits, ourselves, in perpetual mutual relation, then should he or she not say, as
preserving the insight of theology, that we in some way generate one another perpetually? We
do not just find ourselves passively there. How could we? But nor is the individual alone
responsible for all else. Rather, we must be as necessary to the whole community as the
community is necessary to us. It could not exist without me, or you, and nor could I without
it. We are "begotten" from one another, yet each has his own energy which is yet one with
that of the whole.

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