Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 127
nificance it surely possessed in Christ's time. The issue then is
not one of how long, but rather of when, or of what frame of
reality-what realm, that is, within or beyond history.
IVThen again, perhaps the issue is in another sense, every bit as
essentially, one of origin or nature. In John's gospel, at least, it
often seems as if the qualification aionios indicates neither vast
duration nor simply some age that will chronologically suc-
ceed the present age, but rather the divine realm of reality that,
with Christ, has entered the cosmos "from above." In fact, I
tend to think that John's gospel employs the word in a manner
not unlike the use Plato made of it in the Timaeus: to indicate
a supercelestial realm immune to the inconstancy and mor-
tality of the terrestrial realm here below. Whatever the case,
however, if one takes the fourth gospel as a kind of second
reflection upon the person of Christ, so to speak, a theologi-
cal commentary on the saving act of God within fallen time,
one finds that its language seems irresistibly to point toward
a collapse of the distinction between the final judgment of all
things and the judgment endured by Christ on Calvary, or be-
tween the life of the Age to come and the life that is made im-
mediately present in the risen Christ, or even between Christ's
elevation on the cross and his ultimate exaltation as Lo RD and
God over all things. I do not mean that the eschatological hori-
zon of history is erased in the gospel; it is preserved, but is also
most definitely in some sense transposed into the here and
now, as a divine reality that does not simply follow fallen his-
tory, but instead dwells ever above it. John's eschatology is so
totally realized in the present, so immanent, that perhaps all
that remains of that eschatological horizon within historical