Time in the Advent of God: Nonclosure, Eschatological Future, and the Ground of Human Responsibility

This paper argues that the ground of human moral responsibility cannot be located in the intrinsic continuity or self-completing capacity of temporal existence, but only in the “advent” structure of God’s relationship to time. Drawing on the distinction between futurus (the future as extension of the present) and adventus (the future as arrival from beyond), the paper contends that human temporal experience is constitutively “non-closed” – it does not form self-completing narratives or generate immanent meaning. The futurus model, which understands the future as the perfection of the present, cannot ground responsibility because it makes the meaning of action dependent on a historical process that is itself non-closing. Only the adventus structure – in which the future arrives as the gift of the Other – can render present action morally weighty by constituting the present as kairos, a decisive moment of response. The paper develops this argument through an engagement with Moltmann’s eschatology, the philosophy of time in Heschel and Boulad, and the biblical concept of kairos. It concludes that responsibility is not self-completion but response to summons, and that eternal life is not the achievement of human effort but the gift of the arriving God.