I have recently been reading several books on God's relationship to time. The first is a book called 'Time and Eternity' by William Lane Craig, and the second is called 'God and Time: Four Views'. Not surprisingly it contains four different views on God and Time.

• Paul Helm argues that divine eternity should be construed as a state of absolute timelessness.
• Alan G. Padgett maintains that God's eternity is more plausibly to be understood as relative timelessness.
• William Lane Craig presents a hybrid view that combines timelessness with omnitemporality.
• Nicholas Wolterstorff advocates a doctrine of unqualified divine temporality.

I must admit that before I started readying these books and thinking critically about how God and time interact, I had just held to the traditional view of divine timelessness - i.e. God is outside of time. But this position was not really justified because, all four of the authors note, the evidence in the Bible does not really support one view or the other. Any of the verses referring to God and time can be understood just as well if God is either inside or outside of time. Thus an understanding of God and time more properly belongs to the field of philosophical theology than biblical theology.

So why should we even consider abandoning the concept of the 'eternal present' where God is outside of time. Well, consider this summary of an argument against it from Craig and Padgett (there are others as well).

1. If God is omniscient, then either:
1. there are no tensed facts or
2. God knows tensed facts.
2. God is omniscient.
3. Tensed facts exist.
4. Therefore, God knows tensed facts.
5. If God knows tensed facts, then he must be temporal (inside of time).
6. Therefore, God is temporal.

The logic involved is fairly simple, so the only way to escape the conclusion is to deny one of the premises [1], [2], [3], or [5].

Denying premise [1] involves redefining omniscience so that God can still be omniscient, but have no knowledge of tensed facts.

Removing premise [2] would simply be to state that God is not omniscient (as far as I know, no theologian holding to biblical inerrancy has opted for this approach).

A denial of premise [3] would be to state that there are in fact no tensed facts - any fact containing tense could be restated in tenseless terms.

Denying premise [5] is to adopt a static (or statis, or theory-B) view of time, which allows God to be timeless, but still know tensed facts.

Over the next few posts on this topic, I intend to explore the different parts of this argument, and examine the conclusions reached by each of the authors.

Posted by Dave Bryant at 5:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)