This paper was originally written for the Glencar Summer School, the theme of which for that year was Liberation. The space for this contribution was entitled ‘Liberation in the Family’. As a Christian feminist, my own concern in the area of family is how women can serve in the family of God; this latter I take to be as different from The Family (of popular and sociological imagination) as the Kingdom of God is different from say, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the two parts of this article, I hope to explore the experience of a group of women so as to demonstrate the meaning that is fully entailed by ‘Liberation in the Family’. That is, I believe, that it necessarily involves us in a reappraisal of our whole theological understanding of the Body and the Spirit.

Recently there have been several attempts to introduce Latin American liberation theology into this country. These attempts can usually be recognized by their chief catchphrase — ‘doing theology’. ‘Doing theology’ is represented as being a practical and political affair which everyone can take part in, and which is the opposite and alternative to academic theology, which is believed to be remote, abstract and oriented to the elite. But the problem with this approach to ‘doing theology’ is that it tends to leave us with another abstraction. What in Latin America was the result of a historical and political process, and the naming a new reality as a result of this process, becomes in translation to our historical reality simply a new abstraction.

The doctrine of God’s timelessness is now very unpopular. Several major objections have been levelled against it, and these can be summarised thus:

1. 1 If God is timeless, he cannot be a person.

2. 2 If God is timeless, his knowledge entails absurd consequences or is restricted.

3. 3 If God is timeless, he cannot act.

4. 4 If God is timeless, he cannot command our admiration or love.

5. 5 There is Biblical precedent for rejecting the view that God is timeless.

6. 6 There is no good reason for supposing that if there is a God, then he is timeless.

I think these objections are answerable, and here I propose briefly to say why.

What might be meant by the assertion ‘God is timeless’? The most detailed discussion of this question known to me is Nelson Pike’s God and Timelessness (London, 1970). And, as Pike suggests, it seems reasonable to argue as follows:

As Pike indicates, these views can be found in writers like Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Aquinas.

Professor Mary Hesse wrote as follows:

No doubt that is a provocative formulation of the problem of understanding other people. In fact, as the context shows, what she means by understanding her dog is that she can teach him tricks and predict his visible behaviour. What she is suggesting, then, is that, confronted with people of a radically different culture from our own, we might find it impossible to teach them anything because their behaviour was unpredictable — so unpredictable as to make communication between us impossible. With the nearing prospect of inter-planetary, and eventually of inter-galactic, travel, of course, the question of communication with deeply alien beings is no longer entirely academic. But for a long time now, certainly, since the expansion of ethnography and social anthropology in the wake of the European colonisation of the rest of the world, we have been increasingly troubled by the thought that, even on Earth, human beings may already be, or may always have been, hopelessly unintelligible out of their own culture. It might even be something of a relief, in view of the appalling atrocities that have occurred this century, to accept that some people may simply see everything in a completely different conceptual framework from others. It would explain the horrifying breakdowns of consensus about moral and political values.