Eternal in His Being
By
“eternal in His being” the Catechism intends to teach God’s eternality in “both
directions,” that God has always existed in the past and always will exist in
the future. He never began to be, knows no growth or age, nor will he ever
cease to be. The following verses underscore this attribute of God:
Genesis 21:33: “Abraham planted a tamarisk tree [a
small evergreen] in Beersheeba, and
there he called upon the name of the Lord, the Eternal God.”
Psalm 29:10: “The Lord
sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord
is enthroned as King forever.”
Psalm 45:6: “Your throne, O God, will last for ever
and ever.” (See Heb. 1:8, where the writer applies this passage to the Son of
God, and Heb. 13:8, where the writer says of Jesus Christ: “Yesterday and today
[he is] the same [ὁ αὐτός, ho autos],
even forever [καὶ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, kai eis
tous aiōnas].”)
Psalm 48:14: “For this God is our God for ever and
ever; he will be our guide even to the end.”
Psalm 90:2, 4: “Before the mountains were born or
you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you
are God … a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.” (See also 2 Pet. 3:8: “With the Lord a day is
like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”)
Psalm 102:25–27: “In the beginning you laid the
foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will
perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing
you will change them and they will be discarded. But you remain the same, and
your years will never end. (See Heb. 1:10–12, where the writer applies this
passage to the Son of God.)
Isaiah 40:28: “The Lord
is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.”
1
Timothy 1:17: “Now to the King eternal [τῷ δὲ βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων, tō de
basilei tōn aiōnōn], immortal [ἀφθάρτῳ, aphthartō],
invisible [ἀοράτῳ, aoratō], the only God [μόνῳ θεῷ, monō theō],
be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
These verses clearly ascribe everlastingness to
God. But what is not so clear is whether his everlasting existence should be
understood, with most classical Christian thinkers (for example, Augustine,
Anselm, Aquinas), as also involving the notion of timelessness.
In his discussion of God’s eternality Berkhof
makes, I think, a highly significant observation: “The form in which the Bible
represents God’s eternity is simply that of duration through endless ages.” But
he immediately aborts the significance of his statement with the remark: “We
should remember, however, that in speaking as it does the Bible uses popular language,
and not the language of philosophy.” But it is sheer dogmatism to assert that
the Bible is using “popular language” here, implying that the real truth of the
matter is something else and that to arrive at the real truth one must appeal
to philosophical categories. How does Berkhof know this?
His
comment, of course, reflects the influence of Augustine and others who argue
that time is the succession of ideas in a
finite mind, and since God being omniscient can have no such succession in
his mind, therefore, he is “timeless,” which “timeless eternality” is to be
viewed as qualitatively separate and distinct from time. Gordon H. Clark, also
following Augustine, explains:
If there is a succession of ideas in God’s mind,
then the ideas that succeeded today were not present yesterday, and presumably
some of yesterday’s ideas have now passed by. But this means that God did not
know all things yesterday, neither is he omniscient today.
Is it not clear that a temporal
succession of ideas in God’s mind is incompatible with omniscience? Man is not
omniscient precisely because his ideas come and go. Man’s mind changes from day
to day; God is omniscient, immutable, and therefore eternal.
Aside from the fact that the Augustinian view seems
to make God’s “eternality,” viewed in terms of timelessness, more an inference
from God’s attribute of immutable omniscience (note Clark’s “therefore”) than
an attribute of God’s essential being as such (where any longer in his
definition of God’s eternality, so understood, is God’s “everlastingness” which
the Bible speaks so much about?), it seems to me to be sheer dogmatism to
declare, because God is omniscient (which I do not deny), that there can be no
consciousness of successive duration in his mind. And it is a non sequitur to conclude from the fact
of God’s omniscience that God has no idea
of succession, that is, that relative to his own existence he has no
knowledge of a past, present, and future applicable to his own existence. This
is to confuse the notion of the succession
of ideas, which is surely not
true of God if one means by this notion that God learns new facts, with the
notion of the idea of succession
which I submit God surely has. Robert Lewis Dabney observes:
If
… the divine consciousness of its own existence has no relation to successive
duration, I think it unproved, and incapable of proof to us. Is not the whole
plausibility of the notion hence; that divines … infer: Since all God’s
thoughts are ever equally present with Him, He can have no succession of His con-sciousnesses;
and so, no relation to successive time. But the analysis is false and would not
prove the conclusion as to God, if correct.… In all the acts and changes of
creatures, the relation of succession is actual and true. Now, although God’s
knowledge of these as it is subjective to Him, is unsuccessive [I take him to
mean here that God does not first learn about them as the creature thinks and
acts these changes—author], yet it [his knowledge] is doubtless correct, i.e.,
true to the objective facts. But these [the objective facts] have actual
succession. So that the idea of successive duration must be in God’s thinking.
Has He not all the ideas we have; and infinitely more? But if God in thinking
the objective, ever thinks successive duration, can we be sure that His own
consciousness of His own subsistence is unrelated to succession in time?
I concur with Dabney’s analysis. Not to do so and
to insist that God is timeless, that is to say, that the distinctions of time
and hence existence with succession have no reference to him, lies behind much
theological mischief. For example, Charles Hodge, who stands in the classical
tradition, writes that “with [God] there is no
distinction between the present, past, and future, but all things are equally and always present to Him. With Him duration
is an eternal now,” that “to Him
there is neither past nor future … the past and the future are always and
equally present to Him [as an eternal
now (or present)],” and that “to Him there is neither past nor future, neither
before nor after.”
But such words seem to go too far, first, in that,
if taken literally, they reduce to zero significance the temporal reference in
every finite Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek verb form God employed in his
revelational description to us of his thoughts, words, and actions, and
virtually transform them all into timeless participles.
Second, they also reduce to zero significance the
prepositions בְּטֶרֶם (beṭerem, “before”) in such
verses as Psalm 90:2 and Jeremiah 1:5 and אַחַר (ʾaḥar, “after”) in
such verses as Joshua 24:5 and Jeremiah 12:15, as well as the significance of
the preposition πρό, pro, in “foreknow” (προγινώσκω, proginōskō)
and “predestine” (προορίζω, proorizō) in Romans 8:29 and in the expression, “He chose us in
him before [πρὸ, pro]
the creation of the world” (Eph. 1:4; see also John 17:24). Does not God inform
us in these verses that he had a plan (his “eternal purpose”) before he created the world? Does this
data not mean that before the
creation of the world God could have said, indeed, would have had to say as the
God of truth if an angel had asked him about the “when” of the world’s
creation: “I have not yet created the world. Its creation is still in the
future”? And does he not now have to say as the God of truth: “I have created
the world; its creation is no longer
in the future, it is now in the
past”? It would certainly seem that the past is past for God, the present is
present for God, and the future is future for God as surely as they are for us!
And while he certainly and infallibly knows
the future because he ordained it, it is still as the future that he knows it. It is odd, to say the least, to argue as
does E. L. Mascall that all of God’s acts are dipolar, and that a given act at
the creature’s end is temporal (either past, present, or future), while at the
Creator’s end the same act is timeless.
If God’s “time-words” to us respecting his plans and actions do not mean for
God the same as they mean for us, then for
him the creation of the world may not have actually occurred yet, for him Christ’s first coming may still
be only a thing of predictive prophecy, for
him Christ’s second coming may be a thing of the past, for him the Christian may still be in his sin and still under
divine condemnation, or for him these
things and everything else may be past, present, and future all at the same
time. In short, if God is timeless and if all of his acts are for him timeless
acts, then we can have no true and certain knowledge of anything except perhaps
pure mathematics.
Third,
there seems to be an inherent contradiction in saying that a timeless person lives in the “eternal
present” because the referent of the word “present” has significance only in
the ordering category which includes past and future as well. Nicholas
Wolterstorff points out:
In
order for something to be timeless, none of these ordering relationships [past,
present, or future] can be applicable to that being. If a being is truly
timeless, it should be impossible for it to exist simultaneously with anything
else, or before anything else, or after anything else. Once it is established
[or argued, as Hodge does—author] that a being does occupy one of the ordering
relations, then that being is clearly temporal.
For these three reasons it would seem that the
ascription to God of the attribute of timelessness (understood as the absence
of a divine consciousness of successive duration with respect to his own
existence) cannot be supported from Scripture nor is it self-consistent. At
best, it is only an inference (and quite likely a fallacious one) from
Scripture. These reasons also suggest that the Christian should be willing to
affirm that the ordering relationships (before, now, after) that are normally
represented as relationships of time are
true for God as well as for man. (Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic
Theology of the Christian Faith [2d ed.; Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998] 172-76)
Further Reading
R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)