Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time - Softcover

Craig, William Lane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1581342411 ISBN 13: 9781581342413

Publisher: Crossway, 2001

Synopsis

This remarkable work offers an analytical exploration of the nature of divine eternity and God's relationship to time.

About this title

About the Author

William Lane Craig (PhD, University of Birmingham, England; DTheol, University of Munich) is research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, and at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas. He has authored or edited over thirty books and is the founder of ReasonableFaith.org, a web-based apologetics ministry.

Research Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology; Founder, Reasonable Faith, www.reasonablefaith.org

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Time and Eternity

Exploring God's Relationship to Time

By William Lane Craig

Good News Publishers

Copyright © 2001 William Lane Craig
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-58134-241-3

Contents

Preface, 11, 
1. TWO VIEWS OF DIVINE ETERNITY, 13, 
2. DIVINE TIMELESSNESS, 29, 
3. DIVINE TEMPORALITY, 77, 
4. THE DYNAMIC CONCEPTION OF TIME, 115, 
5. THE STATIC CONCEPTION OF TIME, 167, 
6. GOD, TIME, AND CREATION, 217, 
7. CONCLUSION, 239, 
APPENDIX: Divine Eternity and God's Knowledge of the Future, 243, 
General Index, 266, 
Scripture and Extra-biblical Literature Index, 271, 

CHAPTER 1

Two Views of Divine Eternity

I. The Nature of Time

Time, it has been said, is what keeps everything from happening at once. When you think about it, this definition is probably as good as any other. For it is notoriously difficult to provide any analysis of time that is not in the end circular. If we say, for example, that time is duration, then we shall want to know what duration is. And duration turns out to be some interval of time. So time is some interval of time — not very enlightening! Or if we say that time is a dimension of the world, the points or inhabitants of which are ordered by the relations earlier than and later than, we may ask for an analysis of those relations so as to distinguish them, for example, from similar relations such as behind and in front of or less than and greater than, only to discover that earlier and later, on pain of circularity, are usually taken to be primitive, or unanalyzable, terms. Perhaps we may define earlier and later in terms of the notions past, present, and future; but then this triad is irreducibly temporal in character. Even if we succeed in defining past and future in relation to the present, what is the present except for the time that exists (where "exists" is in the present tense)?

Still, it is hardly surprising that time cannot be analyzed in terms of non-temporal concepts, and the proffered analyses are not without merit, for they do serve to highlight some of time's essential features. For example, most philosophers of time would agree that the earlier than/later than relations are essential to time. It is true that in certain high-level theories of physics one sometimes speaks of "imaginary time" or "quantum physical time," which are not ordered by these relations; but it would be far less misleading simply to deny that the geometrical structures posited by the relevant theories really are time at all. Some philosophers of time who deny that the past and future are real or existent have also denied that events or things are related to one another as earlier than or later than; but such thinkers do affirm the reality of the present as an irreducible feature of time. These features of time are common to our experience as temporal beings, even if ultimately unanalyzable.

Time, then, however mysterious, remains "the familiar stranger." This is the import of St. Augustine's famous disclaimer, "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; but if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not."

II. The Biblical Data on Divine Eternity

The question before us concerns the relationship of God to time. The Bible teaches clearly that God is eternal. Isaiah proclaims God as "the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" (Isa. 57:15). In contrast to the pagan deities of Israel's neighbors, the Lord never came into existence nor will He ever cease to exist. As the Creator of the universe, He was there in the beginning, and He will be there at the end. "I, the Lord, the first, and with the last; I am He" (Isa. 41:4). The New Testament writer to the Hebrews magnificently summarized the Old Testament teaching on God's eternity:

"Thou, Lord, didst found the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of thy hands; they will perish, but thou remainest; they will all grow old like a garment, like a mantle thou wilt roll them up, and they will be changed. But thou art the same, and thy years will never end" (Heb. 1:10-12).

Minimally, then, it may be said that God's being eternal means that God exists without beginning or end. He never comes into or goes out of existence; rather His existence is permanent. Such a minimalist account of divine eternity is uncontroversial.

But there the agreement ends. For the question is the nature of divine eternity. Specifically, is God temporal or timeless? God is temporal if and only if He exists in time, that is to say, if and only if His life has phases which are related to each other as earlier and later. In that case, God, as a personal being, has experientially a past, a present, and a future. Given His permanent, beginningless and endless existence, God must be omnitemporal; that is to say, He exists at every moment of time there ever is. I do not mean that He exists at every time at once, which is an incoherent assertion. I mean that if God is omnitemporal, He existed at every past moment, He exists at the present moment, and He will exist at every future moment. No matter what moment in time you pick, the assertion "God exists now" would be literally true at that time.

By contrast, God is timeless if and only if He is not temporal. This definition makes it evident that temporality and timelessness are contradictories: An entity must exist one way or the other and cannot exist both ways at once. Often laymen, anxious to affirm both God's transcendence (His existing beyond the world) and His immanence (His presence in the world), assert that God is both timeless and temporal. But in the absence of some sort of model or explanation of how this can be the case, this assertion is flatly self-contradictory and so cannot be true. If, then, God exists timelessly, He does not exist at any moment of time. He transcends time; that is to say, He exists but He does not exist in time. He has no past, present, and future. At any moment in time at which we exist, we may truly assert that "God exists" in the timeless sense of existence, but not that "God exists now."

Now the question is, does the biblical teaching on divine eternity favor either one of these views? The question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. On the one hand, it is indisputable that the biblical writers typically portray God as engaged in temporal activities, including foreknowing the future and remembering the past; and when they speak directly of God's eternal existence they do so in terms of beginningless and endless temporal duration: "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting thou art God" (Ps. 90:2). "'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!'" (Rev. 4:8b). After surveying the biblical data on divine eternity, Alan Padgett concludes, "The Bible knows nothing of a timeless divine eternity in the traditional sense."

Defenders of divine timelessness might suggest that the biblical authors lacked the conceptual categories for enunciating a doctrine of divine timelessness, so that their temporal descriptions of God need not be taken literally. But Padgett cites the first-century extra-biblical work 2 Enoch 65:6-7 as evidence that the conception of timeless existence was not beyond the reach of biblical writers:

And then the whole creation, visible and invisible, which the Lord has created, shall come to an end, then each person will go to the Lord's great judgment. And then all time will perish, and afterward there will be neither years nor months nor days nor hours. They will be dissipated, and after that they will not be reckoned (2 Enoch 65:6-7).

Such a passage gives us reason to think that the biblical authors, had they wished to, could have formulated a doctrine of divine timelessness.

Paul Helm raises a more subtle objection to the inference that the authors of Scripture, in describing God in temporal terms, intended to teach that God is temporal. He claims that the biblical writers lacked the "reflective context" for formulating a doctrine of divine eternity. That is to say, the issue (like the issue of geocentrism, for instance) had either never come up for explicit consideration or else simply fell outside their interests. Consider the parallel case of God's relationship to space: Just as the biblical writers describe God in temporal terms, so they describe Him in spatial terms as well: "Am I a God at hand, says the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord" (Jer. 23:23-24).

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me (Ps. 139:7-10).

God is described as existing everywhere in space. Yet most theologians would not take Scripture to teach that God is literally a spatial being. The authors of Scripture were not concerned to craft a metaphysical doctrine of God's relation to space; and parity would require us to say the same of time as well. Padgett considers Helm's point to be well-taken: "The Biblical authors were not interested in philosophical speculation about eternity, and thus the intellectual context for discussing this matter may simply not have existed at that time." Thus, the biblical descriptions of God as temporal may not be determinative for a doctrine of divine eternity.

Moreover, it must be said that the biblical data are not so wholly one-sided as Padgett would have us believe. Johannes Schmidt, whose Ewigkeitsbegriff im alten Testament Padgett calls "the longest and most thorough book on the concept of eternity in the OT," argues for a biblical doctrine of divine timelessness on the basis of creation texts such as Genesis 1:1 and Proverbs 8:22-23. Padgett brushes aside Schmidt's contention with the comment, "Neither of these texts teaches or implies that time began with creation, or indeed say [sic] anything about time or eternity." This summary dismissal is all too quick. Genesis 1:1, which is neither a subordinate clause nor a summary title, states, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." According to James Barr, this absolute beginning, taken in conjunction with the expression, "And there was evening and there was morning, one day" (v. 5), indicating the first day, may very well be intended to teach that the beginning was not simply the beginning of the physical universe but the beginning of time itself, and that, consequently, God may be thought of as timeless. This conclusion is rendered all the more plausible when the Genesis account of creation is read against the backdrop of ancient Egyptian cosmogony. Egyptian cosmogony includes the idea that creation took place at "the first time" (sp tpy). John Currid takes both the Egyptian and the Hebrew cosmogonies to involve the notion that the moment of creation is the beginning of time.

Certain New Testament authors may be taken to construe Genesis 1:1 as referring to the beginning of time. The most striking New Testament reflection on Genesis 1:1 is, of course, John 1:1-3: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." Here the uncreated Word (logos), the source of all created things, was already with God and was God at the moment of creation. It is not hard to interpret this passage in terms of the Word's timeless unity with God — nor would it be anachronistic to do so, given the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo's doctrine of the divine Logos (Word) and Philo's holding that time begins with creation.

As for Proverbs 8:22-23, this passage is certainly capable of being read in terms of a beginning of time. The doctrine of creation was a centerpiece of Jewish wisdom literature and aimed to show God's sovereignty over everything. Here Wisdom, personified as a woman, speaks:

"The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, Before His works of old. From everlasting I was established, From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth" (nasb).

The passage, which doubtless looks back to Genesis 1:1, is brimming with temporal expressions for a beginning. R. N. Whybray comments,

It should be noted how the writer ... was so insistent on pressing home the fact of Wisdom's unimaginable antiquity that he piled up every available synonym in a deluge of tautologies:

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], beginning,qedem,the first, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of old, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ages ago, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], at the first or "from the beginning" (compare Isa. 40.21; 41.4, 26), miqqade mê'ares,before the beginning of the earth: the emphasis is not so much on the mode of Wisdom's coming into existence, ... but on the fact of her antiquity.

The expressions emphasize, however, not Wisdom's mere antiquity, but that there was a beginning, a departure point, at or before which Wisdom existed. This was a departure point not merely for the earth but for time and the ages; it was simply the beginning. Plöger comments that through God's creative work "the possibility of speaking of 'time' was first given; thus, before this time, right at the beginning, Wisdom came into existence through Yahweh [the Lord]." The passage was so understood by other ancient writers. The Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament renders [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Proverbs 8:23 as pro tou aionios (before time), and Sirach 24:9 has Wisdom say, "Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all ages I shall not cease to be" (cf. 16:26; 23:20).

Significantly, certain New Testament passages also seem to affirm a beginning of time. This would imply just the same sort of timelessness "before" the creation of the world which Padgett sees in 2 Enoch "after" the end of the world. For example, we read in Jude 25, "to the only God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and for ever" (pro pantos tou aionos kai nun kai eis pantas tous aionas) (emphasis added). The passage contemplates an everlasting future duration but affirms a beginning to past time and implies God's existence, using an almost inevitable façon de parler, "before" time began. Similar expressions are found in two intriguing passages in the Pastoral Epistles. In Titus 1:2-3, in a passage laden with temporal language, we read of those chosen by God "in hope of eternal life [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] aioniou] which God, who never lies, promised before age-long time [pro chronon aionion] but manifested at the proper time [kairois idiois]" (author's translation). And in 2 Timothy 1:9 we read of God's "purpose and grace, which were given to us in Christ Jesus before age-long time [pro chronon aionion], but now [nun] manifested by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus" (author's translation). Arndt and Gingrich render pro chronon aionion as "before time began." Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 2:7 Paul speaks of a secret, hidden wisdom of God, "which God decreed before the ages [pro ton aionon] for our glorification." Such expressions are in line with the Septuagint, which describes God as "the one who exists before the ages [ho hyparchon pro ton aionon]" (LXX Ps. 54:20 [Ps 55:19]). Expressions such as ek tou aionos or apo ton aionon might be taken to mean merely "from ancient times" or "from eternity." But these should not be conflated with pro expressions. That such pro constructions are to be taken seriously and not merely as idioms connoting "for long ages" (cf. Rom. 16:25: chronois aioniois) is confirmed by the many similar expressions concerning God and His decrees "before the foundation of the world" (pro [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] kosmou) (John 17:24; Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20; cf. Rev. 13:8). Evidently it was a common understanding of the creation described in Genesis 1:1 that the beginning of the world was coincident with the beginning of time or the ages; but since God did not begin to exist at the moment of creation, it therefore followed that He existed "before" the beginning of time. God, at least "before" creation, must therefore be atemporal.

Thus, although scriptural authors speak of God as temporal and everlasting, there is some evidence, at least, that when God is considered in relation to creation He must be thought of as the transcendent Creator of time and the ages and therefore as existing beyond time. It may well be the case that in the context of the doctrine of creation the biblical writers were led to reflect on God's relationship to time and chose to affirm His transcendence. Still the evidence is not clear, and we seem forced to conclude with Barr that "if such a thing as a Christian doctrine of time has to be developed, the work of discussing it and developing it must belong not to biblical but to philosophical theology."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Crossway
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1581342411
• ISBN 13: 9781581342413
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272