Editorial July 17, 1989 Issue

It has been said that eternal life is not, in relation...

Editor

It has been said that eternal life is not, in relation to life on earth, a continuation in linear sequence; that rather, eternal life is with us every moment, at right angles to life on earth. I find that illuminating, recognizing that eternity intersects our immediate existence and we live from day to day in an added dimension. ... And I certainly could not improve on the definition given long ago in the Gospel: "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent" [John 17:3]—though nowadays one has to be able to translate that also into alternative phrasing for those whose language of discourse, whose experience, whose social context, is of a form other than the traditional Christian.

©Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Professor emeritus of the Comparative History of Religion at Harvard University, in the 1988 Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard Divinity School. Quoted in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Fall 1988. Reprinted with permission.

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Pure Christian healing and the practice of religion
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