# Eternal/Eternity

Eternity spans hidden depths beyond mere duration—explore how restoration scripture recasts eternal as a divine name and destiny.

Eternity is duration that lies beyond every horizon of human sight, without beginning or end, and the adjective *eternal* has come to name both that endless span and the life proper to God. The Hebrew *’olam*, which the King James translators rendered “for ever” and “everlasting,” denotes the remote past or the distant future, time out of mind, and lexicographers trace it to a verb meaning “to hide.” The Greek *aiōn* signifies an age, and its adjective *aiōnios*, the customary New Testament word behind “eternal,” describes what belongs to an age. When the Book of Abraham carries the Hebrew word into English, it spells *’olam* as *gnolaum*, glosses it “eternal,” and applies it to the spirits of human beings themselves.

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes gave the word its most enigmatic setting. God, he wrote, “hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he 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 term rendered “world” is *ha-’olam*, which many modern versions translate “eternity,” and its consonants also spell the Hebrew root for what is concealed, a double sense that could hardly have been lost on readers of a verse about the limits of human sight. In contemporary speech, eternity has been reduced to sheer length, an unending succession of years. Restoration scripture recovers the word’s second sense, and it begins by placing *Eternal* and *Endless* among the names of God.

## Endless Is My Name

In the summer of 1829, a revelation to Martin Harris recast the vocabulary of punishment. The Lord declared, “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). Latter-day Saint teachers have generally read the passage as a clarification of the doctrine of hell, since the adjective identifies whose punishment is meant and leaves open how long any soul must bear it. In the Book of Moses, God likewise declares, “Endless is my name; for I am without beginning of days or end of years.” Within the framework of the Restoration, *eternal* functions first as a divine signature, and its sense of duration follows from the One who bears it.

Readers seldom carry this logic beyond the question of hell, though Restoration scripture itself does so. If eternal punishment is God’s punishment, then eternal life is God’s life, and a later revelation defines it in precisely those terms: “This is eternal lives—to know the only wise and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent” (D&C 132:24). The words consciously echo the Savior’s intercessory prayer in John, and the plural *lives*, distinctive to Restoration scripture, enlarges a relation of knowing into a life of increase. From this premise it follows that duration, however vast, describes eternal life only as a consequence of the relationship that defines it, a life shared with God, who is Himself without beginning of days.

## God’s Time and Man’s Time

Boethius, writing from prison in the sixth century, defined eternity for classical theology as the complete and simultaneous possession of unending life, a timeless present with no before or after. Restoration texts speak instead of reckonings. The Book of Abraham describes Kolob, a governing star set nigh unto the throne of God, 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). An 1843 revelation 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 in the affirmative (D&C 130:4-5). Alma had already taught that “all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men” (Alma 40:8).

Latter-day Saint philosophers have divided over how far these passages depart from the classical view. Sterling M. McMurrin described the God of Mormon theology as a being within time, and Blake T. Ostler has argued for a God who experiences temporal succession, while others retain much of the Boethian framework and read the revelations as accommodations to mortal understanding. All parties nevertheless hold that Restoration eternity extends backward as well as forward. The Book of Abraham teaches that spirits “have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal” (Abraham 3:18). Persons on this account share God’s lack of a beginning, and their progression unfolds through a real sequence of experience.

## Time Without End

Biogerontologists now seek to slow or reverse the cellular damage that constitutes aging, and some advocates, Aubrey de Grey most prominently, anticipate a point at which therapies would add more than a year of life expectancy for every year that passes. The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation counts immortality among the prophetic visions that technology may help realize, and the immortality it envisions is unmistakably embodied. Lincoln Cannon has insisted that Mormon transhumanists do not use “eternal life” as a euphemism for death, as some Christians do, and he urges Latter-day Saints to aspire to an embodied immortality that medicine and engineering may hasten. The revelation to Martin Harris nevertheless raises a question this aspiration cannot settle alone, whether endless duration and eternal life are the same thing.

Literature and philosophy have already sketched the shadow side of the question. Jonathan Swift imagined the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, who never die yet continue to age, and Bernard Williams argued that an unending human life would eventually exhaust the projects that give it meaning and decline into tedium. Both portraits describe duration emptied of growth, which by the measure of the 1829 revelation is endlessness of the wrong kind. The risk bears directly on life extension. Therapies that postpone death without restoring vigor would produce Swift’s immortals in clinical form, and years added without growth in knowledge and love would confirm Williams’s prediction. Restoration scripture answers the tedium argument with an eternity in which intelligences progress and continue to grow in the knowledge that defines eternal life.

Eternity, in its first definition, is the time hidden beyond the horizon of human sight, and the Preacher’s verse records that God has set it in the heart while concealing His work from beginning to end. Restoration scripture enlarges that definition in two directions. It names God Eternal and Endless, so that eternal life becomes participation in the life of God, and it calls the spirits of His children *gnolaum*, so that the hidden horizon lies behind every person as well as before. Mormon transhumanists who labor toward radical life extension pursue a real good in lengthening embodied life, and by the reckoning of these revelations the added years become eternal as they are filled with the knowledge of the only wise and true God, which is the life God Himself lives.

*See also*: [Afterlife](/topical-guide/afterlife), [Exaltation](/topical-guide/exaltation), [Immortality](/topical-guide/immortality), [Intelligence](/topical-guide/intelligence), [Life/Live](/topical-guide/life-live), [Longevity](/topical-guide/longevity), [Longevity Escape Velocity](/topical-guide/longevity-escape-velocity), [Old Age](/topical-guide/old-age), [Senescence](/topical-guide/senescence)