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God and Time: Toward a New Doctrine of Divine Timeless Eternity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Alan G. Padgett
Alan G. Padgett
Affiliation:
Oriel College, Oxford
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Extract

In this essay I wish to defend the intuition that God transcends time, of which he is the Creator. To do this, I will develop a new understanding of the term ‘timeless eternity’ as it applies to God. This assumes the inadequacy of the traditional notion of divine eternity, as it is found in Boethius, Anselm and Aquinas. Very briefly, the reasons for this inadequacy are as follows. God sustains the universe, which means in part that he is responsible for the fundamental ontological status of things. Because the universe is an everchanging reality, things do change in their fundamental ontological status at different times – a change we must ascribe to God, and cannot ascribe to the objects themselves, since this has to do with their very existence. God himself, therefore, does different things at different times. This implies change in God. Whenever a change occurs, a duration occurs. Therefore, God is in time. But I do not think it is proper to say that God is in our time. God transcends time, and he is the Creator of our space-time. It is theologically more proper to say that we are in God's time, and I will adopt this language here.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 209 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 209 note 1 This paragraph is a brief presentation of conclusions argued for at length in my Oxford thesis, ‘Divine Eternity and the Nature of Time’.

page 209 note 2 Confessions, 11.14.

page 209 note 3 The Language of Time (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 5.

page 210 note 1 This is the definition given by Pike, Nelson, God and Timelessness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 7.Google Scholar

page 210 note 2 ‘The “Eternity” of the Platonic Forms’, Phronesis XIII (1968), 131–44. Whittaker calls absolute timelessness, ‘non-durational timelessness’, and relative timelessness he labels ‘durational timelessness’. See also his ‘Ammonius on the Delphic E’, Classical Quarterly XIX (1969), 185–92.

page 213 note 1 Swinburne, R. G., Space and Time (2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 28.Google Scholar

page 213 note 2 See further, Swinburne, R. G., The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: O.U.P., 1977), pp. 99–125;Google ScholarWainwright, W. J., ‘God's Body’, journal of the American Academy of Religion XLII (1974), 470–81;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Tracy, T. F., God, Actions and Embodiment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).Google Scholar

page 214 note 1 A Treatise on Time and Space (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 306.