The Duration of "Eternity"

This topic stems primarily from a nonscientific moral issue that surfaces repeatedly in discussions and criticisms of the Judeo-Christian framework, the threat of eternal damnation and torment.

One of the most difficult things I had to deal with as a Christian in the early days of my experience was that concept of eternal damnation. If this has never bothered you, then I think either you don't take it seriously, or you don't take much of the New Testament seriously, such as, "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy."

Let me emphasize, we're not talking about simple justice, or punishment for bad deeds. We're talking about the idea of endless torture being heaped upon the heads of the damned. I could visualize plenty of reasons for pulling down evildoers, removing them from power, and administering justice. If there were absolutely no other possible course open, I could even visualize ending their existence completely to spare the next world their corruption. But I could never accept the concept of deliberately torturing any living soul after its fall for a never ending time period. That was, and is, non-saintly overkill to me.

So how do I still call myself a Christian? Of course, some might ask, how do people who unquestioningly accept the idea of applying such torture call themselves Christians? It's a real problem I think any serious Christian has to wrestle with at some point.

Let's ignore the possibility for the moment that "condemned" souls might freely choose a life separate from God, in a state that those who achieve Paradise might view as eternal torture, but which might be at least somewhat welcome to the condemned. I don't exclude this lightly, because I suspect it might have an element of truth to it, but there are other possibilities I wish to focus on here.

Let's also ignore for the moment those Christian sects that solve this issue by believing that essentially all souls eventually are saved. This too is worth discussing, but it is also not the main point that I wish to examine here. I wish to focus on some alterations to the concept of eternity made possible by modern geometry and physics.

Christian theology invokes "eternity" in several roles. We read of eternal paradise in the New Heaven and the New Earth. We read of this eternal torment for those who suffer the "second death". What do we mean by these statements? Do we really understand what we are referring to when we speak of these items? Perhaps not.

The honest answer is that we don't know if these terms imply some truly endless, euclidian, flat time, or whether at least some of them refer to non-euclidian paths, such as great circles on a sphere, which at least in some sense are finite in length. Non-euclidian geometry opens new possibilities for the concept of eternity itself.

More specifically, before the development of non-euclidian geometry, followed by general relativity, our notions of straight lines and distances were dictated by Euclid's geometry. A straight line could go on without end, and be infinite in length. We assumed there was one and only one line parallel to a given line passing through a point external to the line. And, time was considered to be an endless progression of instants along a simple euclidian straight line. Thus, eternity was an endless forever.

After general relativity, we learned of strangely finite times which appear infinite to others, particulary in the vicinity of black holes or "pits" in space which in some sense appear bottomless. And we learn that time may have an origin at the Big Bang, and could even end at a Big Crunch, although the Big Crunch now seems less likely, since recent observations have shown an accelerating expansion of our universe.

The first case arises for an object falling into a black hole (this example uses the Schwarzschild case). Outside observers will see this infall occur such that the object never quite reaches the event horizon, but instead gradually fades from view as its light becomes ever more red shifted as it appears to approach that horizon. That fade out appears to the outside observers to go on forever, but the infalling observers see no such barrier at the horizon. Instead they experience their infall in a simple finite time, and if the black hole is large enough, they will not even notice as they pass the event horizon. Of course, for the classical black holes such as a Schwarzschild hole, they will eventually approach a singularity, and be destroyed by tidal forces, but all that occurs in a finite time. If such holes turn out to be wormholes to other regions, the infalling observers -- like Dante and Virgil at the end of The Inferno -- may eventually even emerge elsewhere (but quite possibly in a shredded, primal state of matter and energy). The analogies with the "bottomless pit" of the Bible are interesting enough to consider, and the time scales actually experienced by those that transit such a pit are finite, while appearing endless outside.

Is such a device really a factor in those scenes from Revelations of "eternal torment?" Could that be a valid description, yet the experience still be finite for the "fallen?" I suggest it's worth considering. It's even worth considering if some spiritual rebirth is possible for those that take that path -- like the symbolic rebirth Dante and Virgil trace out as they ascend through the bitter bottom of Hell up to Purgatory.

We should remember that the Bible speaks of the end of time and the world, leaving us after all with a rather abbreviated "eternity" in this world, at least. We believe that the only endless (and perhaps timeless) world is the New Heavens and the New Earth. We should not assume a priori that any other "time" is really endless for its participants, not even in the bottomless pit, or perhaps especially not there.

Those who would quote the Bible to reject these possibilities should stop to consider a profound paradox found in Revelations. After we read chapter after chapter in which the "kings of the earth" are the servants of evil, and are overcome by the Lamb at the Second Coming, we reach the final verses of the Bible describing the new Paradise, and read in Revelations 21, verse 24,

"And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it."

The kings of the earth are evidently ultimately redeemed after all that drama of the earlier chapters. This is a beautiful mystery indeed!