Eternal/Eternity

In Restoration scripture, eternal first describes the kind of life God lives and only then its length, a point God makes by taking "Eternal" and "Endless" as names. Mormon transhumanists therefore measure the pursuit of longer life by the quality of the life extended as well as by its duration.

Eternal ordinarily means without beginning or end, and eternity names either time without limit or, in much classical theology, a state outside time altogether. The Hebrew 'olam, usually translated "for ever" or "everlasting," refers to the remote past or future, time out of mind, and lexicons trace it to a root meaning "hidden," so that eternity is the time beyond the horizon of sight. The Greek aiōn means an age, and its adjective aiōnios, the usual New Testament word for "eternal," describes what belongs to an age. A line in Ecclesiastes uses the Hebrew word in a way that has long puzzled translators: God "hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The word rendered "world" is ha-'olam, which many modern versions translate "eternity," and its consonants also spell the root for what is hidden, a double sense that probably did not escape Hebrew readers of a verse about a horizon humans can sense but cannot see past. A common reading takes eternal to mean only endless, so that eternal life is existence that never stops. Restoration scripture adds a second sense, in which eternal names a quality of life that belongs to God.

Endless Is My Name

A revelation of 1829 teaches that eternal and endless are names of God, and so describe what comes from God before they describe how long it lasts.

It has long been recognized that this revelation, given to Martin Harris in the summer of 1829, softened the traditional doctrine of hell. God declares, "I am endless, and the punishment which is given from my hand is endless punishment, for Endless is my name. Wherefore⁠— Eternal punishment is God's punishment. Endless punishment is God's punishment" (D&C 19:10-12). On this reading the word tells whose punishment it is and leaves open how long any person bears it. Less often noticed is what the same logic does to the blessings of the gospel. If eternal punishment is God's punishment, then eternal life is God's life, and Jesus defines it in those terms: "this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John 17:3). Eternal life is a relation of knowing, and it lasts because God's life lasts.

God's Time and Man's Time

Restoration scripture places God within a real order of time, reckoned on a different scale, and it teaches that the core of each person had no beginning.

A tradition reaching back to late antiquity defined eternity as the whole of unending life possessed all at once, with no before or after. Restoration texts speak instead of reckonings. The Book of Abraham describes Kolob, a governing star, whose "one revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest" (Abraham 3:4). A revelation of 1843 asks whether "the reckoning of God's time, angel's time, prophet's time, and man's time" is "according to the planet on which they reside," and answers yes (D&C 130:4). An earlier prophet had said that "all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men" (Alma 40:8). Latter-day Saint philosophers have read these passages in different ways. Some describe a God who experiences sequence on a scale beyond human measure, while others keep much of the classical view. Either way, eternity in Restoration thought runs backward as well as forward, since "intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be" (D&C 93:29). Persons on this account are eternal in both directions, and their progression unfolds in time.

Time Without End

The transhumanist pursuit of indefinite life raises the question the 1829 revelation answers, whether endless duration is the same thing as eternal life.

Longevity research seeks to slow or reverse the biology of aging, and some advocates hope for a point at which therapies add more than a year of life expectancy for every year that passes. In 1979 a physicist calculated that in an open, expanding universe life might in principle continue without limit by thinking ever more slowly on ever less energy. Mormon transhumanists see in such work a possible means toward the immortality that scripture promises, and they read the promise as embodied and continuing. Yet duration alone carries its own risk. An eighteenth-century satire imagined immortals who never die but go on aging, and philosophers have argued that a life without end would turn tedious once a person's projects were exhausted. Both pictures describe endless life without growth, which by the measure of the 1829 revelation is duration of the wrong kind. The test for any technology that lengthens life is whether it also widens the knowledge and relationships in which that life can grow, adding life of God's kind, or only adds years to a life that stays the same.