Monday, July 10, 2023

Blake Ostler on the Problems with Divine Timelessness

  

Problems with Divine Timelessness

 

There are some very severe problems with the view that God is timeless. Mormons cannot adopt the view that God is timeless for the simple and dispositive reason that spirit is essentially material and God the Father is corporeal. Any material being has spatial position and thus is located within time-space. Indeed, God is contemporaneous with all spatial positions, or everywhere present. If our idea of time entails a number of consecutive temporal positions, then even a perfected body must relate to time. Because material is uncreated, it follows that space-time is an external feature of the material universe. Both spirit and matter are described as material states of affairs in Mormon thought, and therefore spirit also occupies space and move in spatio-temporal dimensions.

 

A second reason for rejecting timeless eternity applies to both Judeo-Christianity in general and Mormonism in particular. For the biblical God is conceived as a distinctly personal being who can univocally be described in human terms such as caring, judging, forgiving, responding, planning, deciding, deliberating, remembering, anticipating, freely choosing and so on. Yet none of these acts is consistent with the notion of an atemporal God, for all of these actions entail a succession of time, either in the sense of taking time to perform (such as deliberation) or in requiring a temporal viewpoint as a requisite performance (such as remembering or anticipating .For example, all of the scriptures reviewed in the discussion of contingent omniscience indicate that God had not fully determined what course of action he would take in interaction with humans who may nor may not repent. A God who interacts in such ways with free beings cannot timelessly implement his will with regard to them. Rather, the implementation of his will must await the time of their actual decision to be determined. Indeed, the very notion of deciding which action to undertake makes no sense if there is no time prior to the time at which the decision is already determined. “Deciding” essentially involves determining a course of action which was not previously determined.

 

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A third reason for rejecting divine timelessness is peculiar to Christianity, for Jesus Christ is the preeminent instance of an actual person who reveals God in time. I will argue that the notion of a timeless God cannot be resolved by either the traditional “two nature” or the “kenotic” theories of christology. I will merely summarize the argument here. The kenotic view asserts that there was a time when God emptied himself of divinity and became mortal. After his death, Christ again took upon himself a fullness of divinity. The problems for timelessness on the kenotic view is that an atemporal entity itself enters time and becomes temporal. Of course, the notion that an entity becomes temporal entails that the being is in fact temporal, for it can clary be affirmed that the being existed before it became mortal. There is no coherent concept of becoming temporal if it means that there was “a time before becoming temporal” at which the begin was timeless. If at any time an entity will exist in time, it follows that there is necessarily a succession of states of affairs for such an entity. For one thing, it is clear that any being that undergoes such change is mutable, and a mutable being is not atemporal. A being who exists at time will always have the property of having existed at that time and so temporal predicates will apply to it. Thus, any entity which is temporal at any time cannot become or cease to be temporal if it continues to exist.

 

Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001), 344-45, 346