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“Our time, created time, exists within the pure duration of God’s time, which is relatively timeless. And God’s time exists because God exists (not the other way around). What many people seem to imply by “God is in time” is that God exists only if time exists—and this is what I deny.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 106)
Padgett, A. G. (2001). Eternity as Relative Timelessness
“Nothing that is temporal can also be timeless. In the second place, all times cannot and do not coexist in any sense—and certainly not “timelessly” or “in eternity.” Different times are not all present, and only present things are fully real (on the process view). Things have happened in the past, and things will happen in the future, but those things are not real. Therefore they cannot coexist with present things.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 98)
Padgett, A. G. (2001). Eternity as Relative Timelessness
“The main problem with the everlasting model is not logical consistency but theological inadequacy. Given our notion of God as an infinite, personal Creator, we would expect God to transcend time in some way. Merely knowing the future and living forever is not enough to satisfy this demand. Recent developments in physics would join with St. Augustine and many traditional philosophers to insist that time is a created category that came into existence with the physical universe. Space-time as we know it has a beginning—but God does not. Space-time is warped by the presence of matter—but God is not. Thus God must be beyond time as we know it, in some sense. David Braine may overstate the case when he writes, “If we understand eternity as mere everlastingness, then it seems that we are in danger of reducing him who is worshiped to the level of the creature,” but he is giving voice to a common and powerful objection to a merely everlasting eternity for God. Proponents of an everlasting view of eternity have difficulty overcoming this objection, in my view.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 93)
Padgett, A. G. (2001). Eternity as Relative Timelessness
“The relationship between God and time may seem an obscure subject. Yet the more one studies it, the more convinced one becomes that this doctrine plays a key role in our grasp of the relationship between God and the world. How we understand God’s relationship to the world, in turn, is a central part of any theistic worldview. So despite the seeming obscurity of the topic, the doctrine of divine eternity is an important part of any fully developed theology.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 92)
Padgett, A. G. (2001). Eternity as Relative Timelessness
“It seems to me that if the eternalist view were correct, then God would not respond to what happens in time, and that the way God acts within time would simply be the way that deists have always held that God acts within time. I see the crux of the debate as located at this point: An eternalist God is necessarily a deistlike God.
Think of God’s action in the world, says Paul, on the model of one of us setting the timer on our central heating system. As the result of my one act of setting the timer, the system may go on at 7:00 in the morning, go off again at 10:30 in the evening, day after day. Let us add that the system has a thermostat that I set at 65 degrees Fahrenheit—so that when the system is on during the day, if the temperature dips a bit below 65 in the room the furnace will light, and if it gets a bit above 65 degrees the flame will go out.
I agree that this is a rather good model of how the eternalist thinks of God’s action vis-à-vis the world. So let us ask, first, whether on the model I respond to the time of day or the temperature in the room. It seems to me obvious that I do not. I program the timer so that it responds to the time of day, and I program the thermostat so that it responds to the temperature in the room. But I myself don’t respond to those events. Probably a good many of them I don’t even know about. And in any case, when I set the timer and the thermostat, those events hadn’t even occurred yet
I performed some basic actions a week earlier when I programmed the timer and the thermostat; but those are the last basic actions I performed relative to the heat in the room. Having performed those then, I may well have gone off on vacation.
On the eternalist’s picture of God’s action in the world, God in eternity formulates a plan for world history, initiates the first stage of the plan and then watches the scroll unroll. God does not respond to the actual events of history any more than I respond to the actual events of temperature fluctuation when I set the thermostat in advance. And the only basic actions God performs are whatever basic actions are necessary for instituting the first stage in cosmic history. After that, God acts “in” history only in the sense that I act “in” my room by doing something a week before which has the consequence that now the flame turns on at 2:10.”
God & Time: Four Views (pp. 76–78)
Wolterstorff, N. (2001). Response to Paul Helm
“I find this an interesting, though ultimately baffling, answer to the question. I understand Paul to be saying that “dialogue, real dialogue,” is impossible between two persons unless both are mutable; if one is not capable of change, then it’s only “make-believe” dialogue that can take place between them, not “real” dialogue. If we now add to this thesis about dialogue—which seems to me eminently correct—Paul’s thesis that God is immutable, then it follows that, on Paul’s view, there can be no genuine dialogue between God and human beings. Nonetheless—this seems to be his view—it was indispensable to God’s achievement of “his purposes for his people on whose behalf he intervenes in time” that the people believe that they were engaged in genuine dialogue with God.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 72)
Wolterstorff, N. (2001). Response to Paul Helm
“The incarnation is the “projection” of the eternal God. There is therefore no sense in talking of the eternal Son of God apart from the incarnation except to make the point that the incarnation was logically contingent. That is, there is no point to it if by this we mean there was a time when the eternal Son of God existed unincarnated. It is of course possible for us to think of the eternal Son of God as unincarnated, by an abstraction of thought, but that is a different matter. The point is, as Herbert McCabe says, there is no preexistent Christ with a life history independent of and prior to the incarnation. There was no time when the eternal God was not Jesus of Nazareth. There is no other life story—story in time—of God than the story of the incarnation. There was no time when the Son of God was not willing himself to be incarnate, but only decided at a particular time to become incarnate in our history. God did not exist and then at some later point decide to become incarnate, for there is no change or succession possible in the timeless eternity of God’s life.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 54)
Helm, P. (2001). Divine Timeless Eternity
“According to Aquinas, though the universe is really related to God, God is not really related to the created universe.
Whenever two things are related to each other in such a way that one depends upon the other but the other does not depend upon it, there is a real relation in the dependent member, but in the independent member the relation is merely one of reason—simply because one thing cannot be understood as being related to it. The notion of such a relation becomes clear if we consider knowledge, which depends on what is known, although the latter does not depend on it.
Consequently, since all creatures depend on God, but he does not depend on them, there are real relations in creatures referring them to God. The opposite relations in God to creatures, however, are merely conceptual relations; but, because names are signs of concepts, certain names we use for God imply a relation to creatures, even though, as we said, this relation is merely conceptual.
Thomas Aquinas De Veritate 4.5, quoted by Craig, “Tensed vs. Tenseless,” p. 225.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 48)
Helm, P. (2001). Divine Timeless Eternity
“The fundamental point is that such language is not dispensable but necessary, not necessary only for the plowman but necessary for us all, in view of our moral and metaphysical position vis-à-vis God. If a timelessly eternal God is to communicate to embodied intelligent creatures who exist in space and time and to bring about his purposes through them, and particularly to gain certain kinds of responses from them, then he must do so by representing himself to them in ways that are not literally true. How could God put Moses to the test, apart from testing him step by step and so appearing to change his mind? So the impression we may form, reading the biblical narrative, that God changes is an illusion that arises because we learn of God’s purposes for the actors in the narrative (and perhaps for others) only bit by bit.
On the theory of divine accommodation, statements such as “God repented” are false if taken literally, because God does not literally repent and cannot do so. But although they are literally false, some truth about God may nevertheless be conveyed by them.
. In G. E. Ganssle (Ed.), God & Time: Four Views (pp. 45–46). Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic.”
God & Time: Four Views (pp. 45–46)
Helm, P. (2001). Divine Timeless Eternity
“Aquinas is emphatic that God’s will is unchangeable. And so words ascribing change to God, or words ascribed to God which entail change:
have a metaphorical turn according to a human figure of speech. When we regret what we have made we throw it away. Yet this does not always argue second thoughts or a change of will, for we may intend in the first place to make a thing and scrap it afterwards. By similitude with such a procedure we refer to God having regrets, for instance in the account of the Flood, when he washed off the face of the earth the men whom he had made; to speak of God as repenting is to use the language of metaphor.… The conclusion to this argument is not that God’s will changes, but that he wills change.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Thomas Gilby (London: Spottiswoode, 1966), 1a.19.7.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 44)
Helm, P. (2001). Divine Timeless Eternity
“Nothing of his life is past, and nothing of it is future. God possesses his life “all at once.” Boethius’s famous definition of eternity captures this idea. “Eternity, then, is the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of boundless life.”
Those who think that God is in some way temporal do not want to attribute weakness or inadequacy to God. Nor do they hold that God’s life is less than maximally full. They will deny, rather, that God cannot experience a maximally full life if he is temporal.”
God & Time: Four Views (p. 23)
GREGORY E. GANSSLE, Thinking About God & Time
“What is the Now? The A-theorist says that the Now exists in a way that the past and the future do not. The Now is a privileged temporal location. The B-theorist holds that the Now is dependent on the psychological states of knowing minds. In other words, it is part of how we are conscious of the world. If there were no minds, there would be no Now. It is part of our subjective take on the world. Each moment of time, according to the B-theory, is as real as any other moment.
Take some particular event, such as the event of a particular elephant taking a drink of water 141 years ago. Most A-theorists will hold that this event does not exist. It is not real. It did exist (141 years ago), but it no longer does. The B-theorist will believe that the event in question is real. It does exist. It exists now even if it is not occurring now. It occurred 141 years ago.
These theories are important to our topic because many philosophers think that if the A-theory of time is true, then God must be a temporal being. God can be atemporal only if the B-theory is true. Not every philosopher thinks there is this connection between the atemporality of God and the B-theory, but many, including some of our authors, do. Why do some philosophers make this connection? There are two reasons. First, they believe that, if the A-theory is true, God must change (and therefore he must be temporal). Second, they also think that if the A-theory is true, an atemporal God could not be omniscient. The claim that God knows everything that can be known is a claim with strong scriptural support.
God must change, it is held, because he stands in relation to a changing reality. For example, if God sustains a changing world in existence, he sustains Caesar’s existence before he sustains the existence of the Caesar salad. On the A-theory, the existence of Caesar is most fundamentally past. So God no longer sustains Caesar’s existence. Now he is sustaining the existence of the Caesar salad. God is doing different things at different times. He is changing.”
Time: Four Views (pp. 14–15)
GREGORY E. GANSSLE, Thinking About God & Time
“Most philosophers today disagree. While agreeing that God is eternal, they understand his eternality as his being temporally everlasting. He exists at all times and through all times.3 God never began to exist, and he will never go out of existence, but he is in time. God experiences temporal succession. God experiences the birth of Caesar before he experiences the making of the Caesar salad. God, on this view, exists at all times. He exists at the present moment, he has existed at each past moment, and he will exist at each future moment.”
God & Time: Four Views
GREGORY E. GANSSLE, Thinking About God & Time
