God & Time: Four Views (Spectrum Multiview Books)
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
The eternal God has created the universe. And that universe is time-bound. How can we best understand God’s relationship with our time-bound universe? For example, does God experience each moment of time in succession or are all times present to God? How we think of God and time has implications for our understanding of the nature of time, the creation of the universe, God’s knowledge of the future, God’s interaction with his creation and the fullness of God’s life. In this book, four notable philosophers skillfully take on this difficult topic—all writing from within a Christian framework yet contending for different views. 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. And Nicholas Wolterstorff advocates a doctrine of unqualified divine temporality. Each essay is followed by responses from the other three contributors and a final counter-response from the original essayist, making for a lively exchange of ideas. Editor Gregory E. Ganssle provides a helpful introduction to the debate and its significance. Together these five scholars conduct readers on a stimulating and mind-stretching journey into one of the most controversial and challenging areas of theology today.
Top Highlights
“But I reject the phrase ‘God is in time,’ because of its negative theological connotations. Rather, I want to argue that God is the metaphysical precondition for the existence of eternity (understood here as a pure duration that is relatively timeless). 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.” (Page 106)
“Not only do eternalists believe that this position is consistent with the biblical data about God and time, but they hold that by employing the idea of timelessness it is possible to articulate the distinction between the Creator and the creature, and to make clear that divine creation is a unique metaphysical action, the bringing into being of the whole temporal order, not a creation of the universe by One who is already subject to time.” (Page 33)
“What I mean to stress here is it is possible for God to exist without time. If past time is finite, and if God brought time into being, he is independent of time in this way.” (Page 11)
“For divine eternality is timelessness, and it cannot be expected that human analogies and models will throw much light on what more positively it is or is like.” (Pages 37–38)
“The question of why God created the universe when he did and the Kalam argument give us good reason to think that time came into existence.” (Page 18)