Saturday, September 4, 2021

Robert L. Reymond (Reformed) vs. God Being Timeless

  

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 [ 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)