Chapter 7: Conclusion
WE HAVE REACHED the end of our long and arduous trail, and now it is time to summarize our argument. Divine eternity is one of those attributes of God which is underdetermined with respect to the biblical data. A literal reading of the biblical texts gives the overriding impression that God is eternal in the sense of existing at all times, not in the sense of being timeless. But there are passages which point in another direction, especially those suggesting that time had a beginning. More importantly, the fact that the biblical authors did not write as philosophers should make us wary of pressing their descriptions of God into categories which may not have been germane to their purposes. The Christian who wants to understand more profoundly the nature of divine eternity and God’s relationship to time has no recourse but to reflect philosophically on these issues if he is to come to some well-founded views on such questions.
In our first chapter we examined the principal arguments for God’s being timeless and found most of them to be either unsound or inconclusive. Although divine timelessness could be deduced from divine simplicity or immutability, those doctrines are too controversial to serve as a firm foundation for taking divine eternity as timelessness. Although some proponents of divine timelessness have appealed to Relativity Theory in support of their doctrine, that theory can be interpreted along the lines advocated by H. A. Lorentz as a theory about the behavior of clocks and rods in motion, in which case it is entirely compatible with the existence of a privileged, divine time such as Isaac Newton believed in. The one argument for divine timelessness which did have some bite is the argument based on the inherent deficiency of temporal life, whose fleeting nature seems incompatible with the life of a most perfect being. A theorist of tenseless time who holds that God is in time could avert this argument, since he denies the reality of temporal becoming—unless the argument is understood experientially. For even on a tenseless theory of time, a temporal deity will still experience the fleeting nature of His life as lived even though none of it actually passes away or comes to be. If the argument is construed experientially, however, then it is not so obvious that an omniscient God, who could bring to mind past and future experiences with a vividness comparable to that of present experiences, should find temporal passage so melancholy an affair. We concluded that the argument from the incompleteness of temporal life might justifiably motivate a doctrine of divine timelessness if there were not off-setting arguments for divine temporality.
The conclusion of this study is that there are, indeed, such arguments. Not that the very idea of a timeless God is incoherent—we examined and dismissed arguments that timelessness and personhood are logically incompatible. Critics of timeless personhood have failed to show either that in order to be personal God has to possess properties inconsistent with timelessness, or that a timeless God cannot possess those properties which are essential to personhood. On the contrary, we saw that it is quite plausible that a timeless being could exemplify properties sufficient for personhood. So it is not true that a timeless God cannot be personal.
Rather I argued that, given the truth of a dynamic or tensed theory of time, God cannot be timeless if a temporal world exists. For if a tensed theory of time is correct, there are tensed facts and temporal becoming. In that case God, in virtue of His omniscience and creative activity, must know tensed facts and be the cause of things’ coming to be. But in doing those things, God changes both extrinsically and intrinsically and therefore must be temporal.
The crucial assumption here is that a dynamic theory of time is true. We therefore devoted two chapters to an exploration of arguments for and against the dynamic and static theories of time. In favor of a dynamic theory of time are the facts that we experience tense and temporal becoming in a variety of ways and that there seem to be tensed facts, as disclosed by the ineliminability of tense from language. The objections typically lodged against a dynamic theory of time are really aimed at a straw man, a sort of hybrid theory according to which all events in time are equally real and “presentness” moves along the series of events. On the other hand, the principal arguments in favor of a static theory of time from Relativity Theory and the so-called mind-dependence of becoming are based upon a fundamentally flawed understanding of time which collapses time to our physical measures of time—a reductionism which theists have every reason to reject. Moreover, powerful philosophical and theological objections stand against the static theory of time. The most plausible view of the nature of time, then, is that time involves an objective distinction between past, present, and future, and that temporal becoming is a real, mind-independent feature of the world.
It therefore follows from our arguments that God is (present tense) in time. He exists now. But on the Christian doctrine of creation, the world had a beginning, though God did not. Did time exist prior to the moment of creation? Is God, existing alone without creation, timeless or temporal in such a state? I presented three arguments to show that (metric) time is finite in the past, so that God existing without the world must exist either in an amorphous time or, more plausibly, timelessly. In short, given the reality of tense and temporal becoming, the most plausible construal of divine eternity is that God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation.
This remarkable conclusion merits our reflection. Like the incarnation, the creation of the world is an act of condescension on God’s part for the sake of His creatures. Alone in the self-sufficiency of His own being, enjoying the timeless fullness of the intra-Trinitarian love relationships, God had no need for the creation of finite persons. His timeless, free decision to create a temporal world with a beginning is a decision on God’s part to abandon timelessness and to take on a temporal mode of existence. He did this, not out of any deficit in Himself or His mode of existence, but in order that finite temporal creatures might come to share the joy and blessedness of the inner life of God. He stooped to take on a mode of existence inessential to His being or happiness in order that we might have being and find supreme happiness in Him. His taking a human nature into intimate union with Himself in the incarnation of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, was thus not what the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard regarded as “the Absurd,” the union of eternity with time, for God was already temporal at the time of the incarnation and had been since the inception of creation. But in the incarnation God stooped even lower to take on, not just our mode of existence, our temporality, but our very nature.
As a result of God’s creation of and entry into time, He is now with us literally moment by moment as we live and breathe, sharing our every second. He is and will be always with us. He remembers all that has transpired, knows all that is happening, and foreknows all that is to come, not only in our individual lives but throughout the entire universe. Unfettered by the finite velocity of light and clock synchronization procedures, He is, as Newton said, the Lord God of dominion throughout His universe. Well did St. Jude exclaim, “To the only God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time, and now and forever! Amen!”