While at SBL, I got into one of those theological discussions. You know, one of those…
The question at issue: Does God exist outside of time, such that all time (past, 
present, and future) as we know it is always present to God?
Time is a function of creation, as much as physciality. For God to create a physical world is not to bind God to being in everything, or to give God physical substance.
Should the same be said of time? That though time exists and we cannot conceive of a world without past, present, and future, that God is not contained within this system?
I’d be interested to hear what you think, and what’s driving your position on the matter.
For my part, I tend toward the idea that by creating a time-bound creation God became bound to time. The past for us is past for God as well. God patiently waits, and waits in the present, as the word God sends forth goes out and becomes effective in the world.
To say that God is bound by time in this way is not to say that God doesn’t know everything past, present, and future. Such omniscience can still be maintained by a God who knows over the course of history rather than affirming a God who knows all as what we would call a “present” reality.
So what do you think? Is God outside of time? Or does creating time necessarily bind God to it?
And do you think it matters?
Years of watching the Highlander series have convinced me of this: If immortals can travel through time then so can God. Therefore, God exists outside of time
I don’t know if I agree or not with the idea that having created time makes God bound to it… bound is a strong word… perhaps more, he decided/decides to work within its confines? Which we see in the metanarrative of the bible unfolding over time and throughout history rather than in one fell swoop.
I like Karl Barth’s argument about time and eternity in relation to the incarnation… In the incarnation of Jesus, God took upon himself our temporality. “That created temporality can be taken up into God’s eternity implies that time can conform to the shape of eternity and eternity to the shape of time”. In Jesus, “the unity and distinction of eternity and creaturely time are echoes of the unity and distinction within the Trinitarian relationship. Eternity and time coexist in a form of mutual indwelling as God becomes human without ceasing to be God and eternity becomes time without ceasing to be eternity”.
(Quotes from Martin HC. Eternity and Temporality in the Theology of Karl Barth. Science & Christian Belief. 2009;21(2):101-110.)
Thanks for that reference Bec.
Physics is starting to tell us a story in which time does not exist, but is a phenomenological adjective we use to describe entropy and change. From that perspective, the question is not whether God exists within or without “time” but what God is doing about entropy and change.
Ooh. Sounds interesting. Can you say a bit more?
I’m not sure, though, that time only speaks to entropy and change. There’s a yesterday that isn’t today, a second ago that isn’t now. We don’t necessarily correlate those to sameness or difference, but have a sense of past and future. Help?
Daniel: “There’s a yesterday…” Bill: Is there? Where is it? What is it? Is it, still? It is? Curious. (I trust that makes my point.)
Thom is absolutely correct. In Physics, time is merely a convention we use to describe relative motion(s) – what Einstein called “inertial frames”. In this layman’s understanding, the phrase “Time is relative” is another way of saying, “Time is not a thing.”
It’s like distance. There’s no such thing as distance. Only space, and objects of relatively consistent length which fill that space. Or don’t.
So, brother Daniel. Thom is again correct.
The question is, what does God have to do with change.
Or, with Motion.
I would say God is both inside and outside of time. He experiences a timeless eternity outside of time, but also experiences past, present, and future within time.
Whatever we say about God also has to include some kind of temporal attribute or component – therefore God is in some respect, “in time.” It seems compatible with scripture that as the Creator of all, he voluntarily makes himself subject to time; maybe not to the degree that humans would be, but certainly in some way analogous to human experience. To conclude otherwise would seem like a contradiction, and would also lead one to possibly conclude that God is not legitimately involved in creation, which goes against the grain of the biblical witness.
This is especially true when we think of the incarnation. Forever since that time God is directly and intimately involved ‘in time,’ reconciling the world to himself through Christ.
I’ve always had issues with understanding time. We often resort to spatial categories “inside”/”outside”, “contained within” etc.
A couple of questions:
1. Why does time have to be created? What would qualify as biblical support for the idea? Couldn’t time be an attribute/characteristic of God?
2. I have the same problem (the problem may be me) with a “timeless” god that I have with an impassible one. Time involves events, sequence and change. These all seem to be involved in the relationship within the Trinity before the creation of the cosmos. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not a static being. Seems to me that the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and exaltation will always have future ramifications “in eternity” that they did not have before. I may be fishing, but isn’t the God of scripture an eschatological one – a “timely” God?
Alex, I think that the same reasons I am cautious about “God outside of time” are the sorts of things you outline here. I’m not a fan of impassibility because it makes nonsense of too much of the biblical witness. I’m afraid of the same thing being the case for this time issue, though I’m listening to this chorus of those who know better than I.
I’ve always thought that 2 Peter 3:8 seems to hint at God being “unbound” by time.
The context of the passage you reference is “The Day of the Lord” and Peter’s focus was to respond to the question posed in verse 4, “where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” The “scoffers” seemed to believe that since many years had passed since Christ promised he would return (“ever since our fathers died”), that means that he would never return. Peter replied to their line of reasoning by highlighting that God had always accomplished what he set out to do. In this instance, God’s word will also come to past relative to Christ’s return. Just because a significant amount of time had passed does not mean that his promised had been nullified. Hence Peter’s expression, “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” Time does not remove God’s ability to act; it didn’t in the past (vs. 5-7), and it will not in this instance either.
So, the passage doesn’t refer to how God experiences time (or doesn’t), but how time does not nullify God’s ability to act “in time.”
What about Isaiah 57:15? It seems to speak about a God who exists inside and outside time. He dwells in the high and holy place (inhabits eternity), but also with the lowly and contrite of spirit.
So maybe he exists outside of time, but he enters into relationship with those bound by time. Could it be that he is bound by time is through his being bound in relationship?
Oh, yes. And as to what’s driving this…
I don’t know who started which views, at which points throughout Christendom’s history, but it seems clear who benefits from holding on to the “outside of time” view.
If you want people to be frozen participants, unmoving, content with their place, with their caste, with the status quo… if you want to support the view that change is bad and the authorities are to be left in control… if you want to suggest to the peons of your city that all their hopes for justice are best served not today or even tomorrow, but in the life yet to come… if you want to cover over the obvious fact (even) that God doesn’t seem to work much (or often) among your citizenry… and if you want to prevent God from creating change in your perfect world, also…
Then promote a view of a purely immutable God, free from anything resembling dynamic activity or change instigation. What he willed, he willed long ago. What he did is all done. What he wants is for you to accept this (oh yes, and to behave well). What is coming has already happened.
If you want change to be outside of your peons’ purview, then put God outside time. And whenever you speak of God “acting within History”… make sure it’s clear that applies to History gone past. Not to now.
As for me?
I want stuff to get stirred up. So I embrace an alternative view.
So sue me.
So God is defined by what you want to see?
Seriously? No, of course not.
No matter how much of Genesis 1-3 I treat as story, I will not surrender the truth that a God has to be a creator of the greatest conceivable whole. And I really think this requires that God must have an eternal existence before Hawking’s history of time begins.
Yes, this does cause problems for Christology – except the Creed can be read to affirm the pre-existent Jesus as creator of the time-space parts if not the eternal whole, which is not chopped liver.
But what did God do in eternity before the history of time began? Maybe that’s the mystery of the ‘Paradise’ which Paul talks about in 2 Cor 12:3. – a highest heaven or a ‘heaven of heavens’ (1 Kings 8:27) i.e. an absolutely perfect and eternal creation with perfect creatures, etc… well I can see how that might want some adventure (as Bill suggests, above).
My wife (the agnostic) likes to complain that if she were God things would be different – no evils, etc. She’s clearly talking about heaven-on-earth. I try to explain, Give God a break – maybe he already did heaven in a way that was and is as eternally perfect as it can be done. Maybe we’re living in an imperfect universe that is creatively open and (in faith) destined for perfection…
Then I get that look.
John, I’m afraid that if the scenario you outline is true that evil ultimately wins, God couldn’t come up with anything that would give God the upper hand and victory in the world gone wrong. The paradise for which we long is the transformation of this world, when heaven and earth are one. You do well to remind us of the perfect heaven where God’s will is done, but the prayer is for that to be so on earth, as well. If that can never happen, then Satan wins the battle for God’s creation. I don’t think I’m down with that.
Daniel, the logical flow of your response tells me I failed to make it clear that I believe a real Son of God is right here in the very thick of the thing-gone-wrong, as its Lord and creator (and redeemer) – that’s what I meant when I invoked the Creed. But the Son did not create himself.
I did say our imperfection was mitigated by the chance of a perfect destiny. Evil wins only if God is indeed limited to the resources of a finite creation. There have to be immanent spiritual resources available (and these imply transcendent sources – the Holy Spirit is not ‘home-grown’).
I admit I am ill-equipped to understand or express God’s transcendence in a way which does not take away God’s immanence. But I believe both senses must be true. The commenter who spoke of our crabbed time-space prepositional language said alot. Maybe I cannot say God is and was ‘before’ the history of time began but I don’t feel unorthodox for believing Jesus is the Son of God above time. I use ‘above’ in a qualitative sense and not spatially.
Thanks for engaging. I started reading your book this morning, so go easy on me here.
I think it’s tough to think about God on a cosmic scale. From the frontiers of relativity and quantum physics, we know that time itself is relative and malleable, seemingly capable of even travelling backwards in some instances. For God to be beyond all that, outside our own captivity to the monodirectionality of time where effect follows cause and not vice versa, almost demands a deistic God too ephemeral be what Christians demand of him.
Or maybe He’s as big as the universe but not bigger, confined to restraints of time and space much vaster than ours but confined all the same.
I would disagree that Physics says that time does not exist (perhaps metaphysics says that). Physics says that time is another aspect of space. Space and time, space-time, is one 4-dimensional entitiy. In fact, space and time can be traded off for each other depending on the relative velocity of two observers of an event (when time stretches, space contracts). Gravitational fields, which warp space around matter, also warp time. Thus mass is also wrapped up in space-time, but Physicists haven’t fully figured that one out yet.
To be consistent, whatever Theologians say about God and space, they also must say about God and time, since space and time are two sides of the same coin.
I would add that our language and limited experience makes it nearly impossible to think about God (or anything else) existing outside of time. Time prepositions are much harder to extract from our language and thinking than space prepositions. As soon as you start asking what was God up to “before” Creation, you’ve asked a nonsensical question: the word “before” presumes the existence of time, which only started at Creation. Notice that I couldn’t even consistently state that sentence, since the word “started” also presumes continuous time “before” and “after” Creation.
You run into the same problems when you start thinking about God existing outside of time, able to observe all of time “at once”. We naturally want to think of events happening before and after, even when God is “outside” of time. We do the same thing when we imagine God existing “outside” of space. Invariably, we will imagine God existing in a meta-space that contains our own.
Our limited experience leads us quickly to nonsense when we try to imagine an existence fundamentally different from the one we know. Physics has only been able to go as far as it has thanks to the rigor of mathematics and the demand for consistency in explanation of the phenomena that we are able to observe (Einstein developed Special Relativity because Galilean Relativity, the common-sense kind, is not consistent for electromagnetism).
Speaking of events, I should have also mentioned that the skewing of space-time thanks to relative velocities and gravitational fields also means that the idea of “simultaneous” does not exist in the real world. Two events that appear simultaneous to one observer can appear to happen at separate times for another observer.
Bill put finger on what’s driving this, particularly in faith-and-science discussions: is God impassible? If God is bound to time, then God experiences change. If God experiences change, then God is not impassible. Classical theism asserts God’s impassibility. God Himself does not suffer; but God knows suffering in the human nature of Christ.
This view of God’s impassibility always was problematic, but it perhaps becomes particularly acute when creation is understood not in terms of a static fiat, but rather in an evolutionary framework. Jurgen Moltmann’s theology of creation — and Teilhard de Chardin, and process theology — have been very influential among faith-and-science people as a sort of theodicy of evolutionary creation: that God Himself suffers along with the evolving creation because “time” and “change” and even “creation” are part of God’s own being. And of course most people who adopt this sort of view are open theists of some sort.
For myself: I love Moltmann’s theology but I do think there are points at which his Trinitarian formulations are, shall we say, less than orthodox. We really, really have to avoid process theology, which leads to a wholly other god IMHO. But there are ways of understanding the dynamic, relational Trinity in connection with creation and time without rendering God in His essential being changeable (D.B. Hart’s “The Beauty of the Infinite” does this very well.)
Thanks, Dopderbeck. Btw, I think God experiencing change OR being changeless is a false dichotomy. What is a Creator if not a change bringer? And yet, He controls that “change”. He does not bear or withstand change, as if change comes from elsewhere. Even the incarnation, whatever “change” that brought, did not undo the nature of who and what the Godhead was. In one set of terms, there’s a difference between alteration and growth/increase/expansion.
Great discussion–and thanks, Daniel, for raising the question. I think it’s one of the most interesting theological discussions we can have in a world where our cosmology is still being reshaped by Einstein and quantum theory. (T.F. Torrance was the master at all this.)
I think we really don’t know enough to give any definitive answer. (1) We simply don’t understand time at a fundamental level. (The current work of Sean Carroll is very helpful here.) (2) As Einstein demonstrated, we really need to think of “spacetime”–the four dimensions together. (But why are three bidirectional and only time unidirectional, at least in our experience?) (3) If God is omnipresent, therefore, he must be omnitemporal in some sense. But does this mean that God can change the past?
I think we must affirm that time, like space and all of his creation, is real, and that means that it is real to God. (I like the comment above on relationships. God–especially in the Incarnation–has entered into our spacetime existence.) On the other hand, God’s lordship should extend to time just as it does space. And those are, at best, paradoxical.
Looking for the insights of those more clever than me!
I am mostly agnostic to issues such as this (well, I’m most agnostic about a lot of things), but my first thought (and random musings to follow) is that time is something the aged are bound to. That is, what is time to an ageless God? For Him, events happen in sequence, to be sure, but other than that time is irrelevant.
The crux of the matter, however, really, concerns God and the future. Is God present in the future, does he know the future, etc. For an orthodox Christian, one might say God knows the future, but it just is a bit odd to say He is also living in the future and thus not bound by time (He’s living in a world not yet existing? Is God also present in my imaginary day-dreaming world?).
Many presuppositions come to surface here. Is every detail of the future set? Are only the major happenings set? Is the future not set at all? For me, the future, though temporal, is a sequence of events that happen later. For this reason, God is not present, because the sequence has not yet unfolded. Maybe.
Hey, Rob. Here’s one more: in “Eternity Past”, did God experience a sequence of moments in his own awareness? Did he think thoughts with any sequentiality to them? Oh, his thoughts are higher than our thoughts, but I’m getting at something.
When the father loved Jesus before they said let (John 17)… did that love exist in a static but ultimate love-ness? Or was it ongoing? Was it, perchance, developmental? Was there a moment when the Godhead deigned to create?
All of those unanswerables are just to ask this: did God experience sequential ‘moments’ of Godself-awareness, in Eternity, which some would call “before time”?
If not, then what? But if so, then what is “time”?
I’m amused that folks are treating theoretical science as foundational in a theological sense.
While I would defend the beauty and truth of scientific method to the end and to the nth degree, I will not anchor or fix my theology on what’s passing currently for findings of that marvelous method. “Results” might well be provisional without doing any harm to the value of scientific investigation.
One of the beauties of science is that, in 100 years humanity will be 100-years to the better for its use of scientific method but nobody is going to be teaching from today’s textbooks anymore (there’s a huge probability that today’s theories will constitute something of a professional embarrassment by then). I understand that grad students in physics are not often encouraged to pursue Relativity theory if they want ‘science jobs.’
And yet Augustine and Kant will still be just as loved and hated as they are today.
John — unless you’re profoundly anti-realist (ala Kuhn), that sort of philosophy of science won’t cut it, and it doesn’t fairly describe the history of science since the contemporary scientific method became widely used.
Relativity theory doesn’t supplant classical mechanics, it reveals deeper structures not disclosed by classical mechanics. You’re probably right that science textbooks 100 years from now will look very different than they do today, but not likely because today’s essential, established theories will have been completely overthrown — rather because yet more basic structures and laws will have been discovered.
That said, I’m not really convinced that relativity theory and quantum mechanics really have all that much to say about Divine impassibility and the possibility of Divine action.
Right. It’s not that relativity is a theoretical model we now apply to God. It’s that “time” is a theoretical convention we’ve wrongly enthroned as a phenomenon all its own.
Stuff moves around. Consistent movements become standards for comparison. But there is no “time”. It’s all movement. Thus, the issue has never been “time”. The issue is dynamism.
I humbly submit that those of you who are saying that time must exist because of Einstein’s general relativity are not following the latest physics on time, which do suggest that time is phenomenological and that something like “entropy” is a better way to get at the problem. I’m not a scientist, but I try and follow the literature, and that’s the way the literature is going, as I understand it. Thus, we are freed from “out or in” polarities. From there, I go on to a theology of the cross, which says that what we can say about the existence of God is only available to us through the incarnation. (This also frees us from theology of glory argumentation about God’s existence in or out of time by nailing it to the cross). The theologia crucis, then, suggests, with Barth, that entropy and change has been assumed (real humanity) and thus can be and is being redeemed (real divinity) in a sort of doctrine of hypostatic ecology. On a different note, speaking to the doctrine which says that theology should have nothing to do with the products of science. Indeed, that is all it has ever had to do with. Theology is what grace makes of blasphemy, and in this age that is all it will ever be.
Thom,
I may not be up to speed on the physics literature. However, from what I’ve read, if you look into the arguments that time doesn’t exist, you also find that, by the same reasoning, space doesn’t exist (the only arguments I’ve seen are based on the Wheeler-Dewitt equation and apply below the Planck-scale). Conversely, if we assume that space exists, time exists, and the two are actually one entity.
I’m fairly certain that the theories that are suggesting such things have made no testable predictions. Thus they are not, yet, true scientific theories. They’re proto-theories.
As for entropy, this is a subject I do know something about. It’s not a replacement for time, it’s a constraint on the direction in which time may flow for thermodynamic processes. For physical thermodynamic processes, the entropy of the entire system may not decrease (for ideal processes, which don’t really exist either, entropy remains the same). This is known as the second law of thermodynamics. Any process which, in theory, would decrease entropy for the entire system is not physically possible. A typical example is that coffee that has become cold after sitting on the table will not spontaneously become warm again.
I’m not a theologian, so I’m not qualified to comment on the rest of your post. I don’t even understand it!
But if what you’re saying is that God experienced time as a human experiences time through the incarnation, and that the incarnation is all that really matters, then I (mostly) agree.
Regarding the topic, I think God chose to keep some things about himself mysterious. Or, from a different point of view, we’re too small and limited to comprehend the nature of God beyond what he chooses to reveal to us.
To put it another way, I suspect that many of the ideas that we consider mutually exclusive in regards to the nature of God (in/out of time, predestination/free will), are not. We just think that they are.
You could always try to think how this works through the lens provided by the conjunction of God and man in Christ; or the Incarnation.
It seems to me, really, that it’s not an issue of whether God is in time or out of it; but instead how “super-time” (Trinitarian or relational time) relates to “historic-time?” And for this the *Incarnation* can be instructive.
I do not believe the literature demands that there must be time because there must be space. Take, for example, a quote from this 2007 article in Discover magazine:
“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”
No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time. (http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time)
Re. ” treating theoretical science as foundational in a theological sense,” we already do that when we assume that eternity is merely linear time that goes infinitely in two directions.
Is space a 3-D container that exists apart from whether anything is in it? Or is space a relation amongst objects? If we go with the latter, then perhaps time also is not a similar container, but a set of relations generated by events. Thus there is not necessarily an “eternity past”, or a “time before time,” but rather another set of relations generated by God’s events. In that case, God is both inside and outside “our” time, and other events can have temporal relations to each other and to our events that would fry our minds – or generate quantum physics.
This gives God other options besides a frozen impassibility and changeableness.
Well I for one did not mean to imply that eternity is simply an infinite number of finite moments.
My ‘before the history of time’ phrase only meant to suggest that, ‘whenever’ the scientist’s physical time-space universe (our finite cosmos) begins its initial expansion out of singularity, I have to take it on faith that the Trinity and some absolutely creative eternal reality is already and forever has been (will be).
I like your idea that instead of time and space there are only ‘relations generated by God-events’ (are you saying these engender what to us appears as time and space?
I don’t mean to explain what an eternity existence might look or feel like. I’m a finite creature with a mind that allows me to function with meanings and values in a time-space cosmos (a la Kant). Only – again – I am against the idea that eternity is simply an infinite number of finite moments (I think I’m agreeing with you on that). ‘Infinite finites’ misses the qualitative difference, I think.
To all who cringe at concepts of the ‘impassability’ of God, I will only remind you that suffering is different than change. it was Kierkegaard who pointed out that the value of a concept like an unchanging God is that it transforms prayer into a function that is bound to change us. Prayer doesn’t change God. But this doesn’t need to alter the fact that God is affected by spiritual need.
Gods that change, that are subject to time, can end up being revealed as mere epiphenomena of religious desires, idols created in human likeness. I think the real God wills that we humans (eventually) come around to the likeness of God. The real God may ‘suffer’ and be afflicted in our afflictions in order to accomplish that, sees our need, gives us grace, but ‘changeth not.’
Just by the by…
“Space” isn’t technically anything that exists, either. By definition, space is the absence of matter. So the *material* in our universe may have expanded from a singularity… but *space* didn’t necessarily do that. (In other words, the question of whether God created matter is different from the question of whether God created “space”.)
In other words… assuming there was a time before any physical matter… the pre-existent Godhead might have inhabited an immaterial realm… OR, for all that we know… an immaterial God may simply have occupied limitless space.
If the latter, then God’s Spirit could roam endless stretches of three-dimensional nothingness… moving left, right, up & down (relative to no thing and to no place elsewise).
If the former, then we’d have to imagine God’s spirit “inhabiting” (?) a non-dimensional realm. His “activity” would have been non-dimensional. His “movements” would have been non-dimensional. BUT… His self-awareness and self-interaction, IF persistent, would have been, strictly speaking, temporal.
Again, if there was no dimensional space, and no matter, then there was no motion, and there could have been no change. And yet, God begat, and God created.
Q: How did the ‘unmoved mover’ get from non-dimensional nothingness [to] physical something-ness? A: God must have powers of spiritual inertia which operate completely unlike material inertia(s).
Thus, God’s “space” and God’s “time” are unlike our “space” and “time”.
Yet, God moves, acts, and IS [in a continuous sense].
I still lean toward conceiving of God in classical theist terms (i.e. God is timeless). There’s something about ontological immutability which seems to be an appropriate foundation for his absolute perfection. I also think it’s the best way to make sense of God’s foreknowledge, because to speak of his omniscience temporally at least seems to make his knowledge a sufficient cause for that some event to happen. But this would deny human responsibility and free will, something I personally don’t feel I have reason to concede. Lastly, the timeless view seems to be the only way to avoid the logical problems associated with asserting there can be an actual infinite (enter Kalaam argument). To conceive of God as a temporal being would be to affirm that an infinite number of moments in time can occur, but this is impossible since neither he nor we would never have arrived at the present.
Some are doing interesting (promising?) things with this problem. I know Craig & Moreland say God is “timeless without creation and temporal subsequent to creation.” Others propose that temporal things can exist both in timeless eternity and within time itself simultaneously.
Personally, I think Barth’s view ignores God’s activity previous to and following the incarnation.
Pardon all of the qualifications (‘seems’). Just trying to make clear I am still exploring and working to understand this issue myself!
I always enjoy thinking about this particular topic. And I find it rather fitting that this post comes up as I’m re-reading one of my favorite Star Trek novels, Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky, in which the characters spend a fair amount of time discussing the true nature of time, entropy, and all that.
I’m pretty in-line with what Andy D wrote above. For me, the central issue at play here is God’s sovereignty. If God exists inside of time as a temporal being would, then to my mind, that means that He’s beholden to something outside of Himself. And if that’s the case, then is He still really and truly sovereign? Is He still really and truly God?
That being said, I wonder if it’s more helpful to think of God’s sovereignty manifesting itself, not as a tyrannical “top down” approach that He exercises from some remote, ethereal, and immutable realm, but rather, as a “bottom up” approach. Here, God doesn’t rule over creation, i.e., space-time, but rather “rules under” it by actively and intimately sustaining it.
Such a view doesn’t constrain God’s sovereignty or His timeless nature. Also, it doesn’t relegate Him to that aforementioned immutable realm, nor does it hinder His ability to exercise dominion over, and insert Himself into (via the Incarnation), creation in the way that the view of a time-bound God does. I also think it’s reconcilable with what Scripture seems to imply, specifically in a passage like Romans 11:36.
There’s a fine line here, though, because I don’t want to somehow suggest that such an intimate relationship between God and His creation means that they are somehow one in the same or that they share essences, but I don’t think that the above view inherently lends itself to that notion. God is still wholly “other”, but again, being “other” doesn’t mean He’s not here sustaining us along with the whole of space-time.
Jason, what if God has chosen, by the act of creation, to sovereignly set aside his freedom to be free of time, analogous to how he chooses in covenant to set aside his freedom to be free of ties to particular humans?
I feel compelled to jump into the conversation, albeit quite late, seeing as I was the original conversation partner in the aforementioned “one of *those* conversations,” and despite the fact that the conversation has now sped off in directions that I am much less qualified to comment on (physics, in particular) than some of the other participants. But since, as Daniel might well note, those conditions probably pertained way back at SBL and it hardly slowed me down much less stopped me from participating in the conversation then, I might as well throw in my $.02.
First, the original conversation mostly centered around Augustine’s construal of God’s relation to time. This bit of context would, on the whole, be irrelevant, except that I see a couple of Augustine’s points coming up in the course of the conversation here. In particular, there’s this exchange between our esteemed blogger and Bill:
J. R. Daniel Kirk says:
“…I’m not sure, though, that time only speaks to entropy and change. There’s a yesterday that isn’t today, a second ago that isn’t now. We don’t necessarily correlate those to sameness or difference, but have a sense of past and future. Help?”
Bill says:
“Daniel: “There’s a yesterday…” Bill: Is there? Where is it? What is it? Is it, still? It is? Curious.”
Augustine tackles just this question in Confessions XI.20 (though you really need the lead up in 13-19 to appreciate it) and seems, as I understand him, to come to the conclusion that the future and the past do not exist:
But even now it is manifest and clear that there are neither times future nor times past. Thus it is not properly said that there are three times, past, present, and future. Perhaps it might be said rightly that there are three times: a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future. For these three do coexist somehow in the soul, for otherwise I could not see them. The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation.
Thus it seems that Augustine is saying that the future and the past continue to exist only in so much as they are “present” in the soul, either as memory or expectation. Now in the original conversation, I was advocating for Augustine’s (and thus the traditional tradition’s) understanding of God as “outside” of time in as much as time is a attribute of creation and God as the creator and not a creature is not defined by the attributes of creation. But since creation cannot exist apart from God, it must exist “within” God; thus God is both “outside” of creation (and time) inasmuch as he is not bound within it, but he is not disconnected from creation in that creation continues to exist only because God continues to sustain and interact with it.
But when Augustine gets to the above point—the point of saying there is no future and no past—this is where I feel I have to get off the Augustine time-train. And the reason is precisely because (Daniel, you will be shocked to hear) I think that God has “bound Godself to time” in just the way described above—if creation (and thus time) exist “within” God, then all of the aspects and moments of creation (including past and future) have a continuing existence by their participation in God who is eternal.
(BTW, I wholeheartedly agree with Jonathan’s post of December 7, 2010 at 5:10 am, regarding the limitations of human ways of conceptualizing and speaking of God’s relation to creation [“outside,” “inside,” “before,” etc.], though as a fan of Ricouer, I don’t take resorting to metaphors as a sign of deficient understanding, but the contrary.)
Okay, here’s where I want to switch gears. Y’all have done a fine job of answering Daniel’s first question—is God outside of time? Or does creating time necessarily bind God to it?—but I have not seen as much explicit attention to his second–Does it matter?
I think we have to answer that question with a resounding yes and no. Again, I think Jonathan’s post above gets at an important point: “Our limited experience leads us quickly to nonsense when we try to imagine an existence fundamentally different from the one we know.” This was what Luther was getting at in his critique of the scholastic theologians. When we try to get at the nature of God in Godself (en se) by contemplating God in the abstract, we will always run amok in some way: we will either get ourselves into logical contradictions that we cannot solve or, more likely, we will create a God who is merely a projection of what we assume God should be. Doing this is what Luther called “theology from above,” that is, from the abstract.
Luther’s idea was that instead we ought to do “theology from below,” that is to start with the concrete revelation that God has given in God’s word, particularly in the Word—the person of Jesus. Here we see the nature of God most clearly since he was God incarnate. When we work from below like this, looking especially at Christ, we will be seeing God not really *en se* but rather *pro me*–how God is “for me,” that is, in relationship (a “storied theology” ). This would be the resounding No answer to the question “Does it matter?” Inasmuch as we cannot know what it is to be God—creator, not creature; bound to time yet outside of it—all these God and time questions are sheer unhelpful speculation compared with reflection on God as God has been revealed in Jesus “for me.”
BUT… I do think there is also a resounding yes to be heard to the question of whether this matters. Theology is, I think we could agree, in some fundamental ways the teasing out of implications. Just because the Bible nowhere explicitly says God is bigger than (“outside of”) creation, that is still the logical implication of God as creator. (In the same way, we sing that “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” Even though the Bible nowhere says word for word “Jesus loves you,” it communicates the idea.) And I would say, it makes a difference what we think about God’s relationship to creation, including what we think about time.
For example, I am not a big one for apologetics, but when my students ask why God does not do something about suffering and injustice and evil in the world, I think we have to make a case for God’s activity and goodness but also the reality of evil and the fact that there is much that goes on contrary to God’s will. If we think of God as somehow time-bound, with a future and a past like a creature, then we have an extremely valid but also (I would say) insoluble and faith-damaging critique: why doesn’t God use God’s power NOW to fix what’s wrong in the world. Why is God waiting? Doesn’t God care?
If, however, we think of God as outside of time in as much as all times are present to God at the same time—past and present and future are all “now” to God—then we can affirm that God has in fact acted, both in the person of Jesus (which is past to us) and in the eschaton (which is still future to us) but also in the million x a million ways God is acting in all times through anyone who does God’s will. God has already, from God’s perspective, righted all wrongs and healed all creation, though to us stuck in one little part of time, it still seems very much future, but still, since it does exist “in” God we can experience aspects of it proleptically.
There are undoubtedly other reasons it “matters,” reasons I’ll leave to others to enumerate, but I should say that this model doesn’t, I think, lead necessarily to a conclusion of impassability. On the contrary, it places all suffering and struggle squarely “within” God, and God is enmeshed in and active all over in creation to bring about God’s will and justice, but the outcome is never in doubt. God has already overcome and righted the wrongs, though we do not have eyes to see. I will also leave it to others to enumerate the problems with my model and the above articulation of it.
Ready, set, go!
Judy, thanks for bringing up the theodicy issue, because I’m beginning to wonder myself if the classic Why does God allow evil? question does not kind of bring in through the back door the assumption of God’s eternal infinite nature.
When the question starts out, “IF God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then…” I feel I am in the midst of some unannounced ‘background’ absolutes which can only be Eternity and Infinity. i.e. How could a being be all-powerful and the guarantor of all good if NOT ‘above’ time-space creation, the source and center of all? (oh, I realize ‘centers’ are out of fashion in our current cosmologies)
Anyway, IF the all-powerful and all-good must be, by the very terms which are implied in the theodicy question, above or outside time-space, then your interesting observations apply – that we have to at least consider how all wrongs might or could be already righted in an eschaton of which we can only say ‘not yet.’
Meanwhile the ‘here and now’ still has to connect to this outsidedness in a scheme of effort and change, or Daniel will be warning us that this outside God is exactly the kind of thing which nullifies our duty to do God’s will.
He has a good point when it comes to equipping preachers and evangelists to reach the many who can’t picture the supreme eschaton in a strong-willed way.