Modern thinking usually lets itself be guided by the idea that eternity is imprisoned, so to speak, in its unchangeableness; God appears as the prisoner of his eternal plan conceived “before all ages”. “Being” and “becoming” do not mingle. Eternity is thus understood in a purely negative sense as timelessness, as the opposite to time, as something that cannot make its influence felt in time for the simple reason that it would therefore cease to be unchangeable and itself become temporal. Fundamentally these ideas remain the products of a pre-Christian mentality which takes no account of a concept of God that finds utterance in a belief in creation and incarnation

But eternity is not the very ancient, which existed before time began, but the quite other, which is related to every passing age as its today, and is really contemporary with it; it is not itself barred off into a…