Appendix F

Dynamic Divine Temporality and the Reality of the Encounter

Why the Verbs of the Encounter Require a God Who Acts in Time

Full-Length Edition

Picture Christ meeting the dying soul. He attends. He pursues. He listens. He responds. He waits. He concludes.

Every one of those verbs is a temporal verb. Each one points to a God who acts in real time, one moment after another. If God exists outside of time in a changeless "eternal now," then none of those verbs can mean what they seem to mean. The attending is not really attending. The waiting is not really waiting. The whole encounter collapses into a single, frozen, timeless act that merely looks like a conversation when viewed from our side.

This book's thesis says otherwise. The encounter is real. The pursuit is real. The response is real. The conclusion is real. And each of these is real on God's side, not only on the soul's side. That claim requires a God who genuinely experiences time. This appendix shows why that claim is philosophically defensible.¹

Chapter 13 sketched the case for divine temporality and deferred the deeper treatment here. What follows is that deeper treatment. We will look at the strongest arguments for a God who acts in time, address the most common objections, and then bring the whole discussion back to the bedside where it belongs.

Two Views of God and Time

The debate about God's relationship to time is one of the longest-running conversations in Christian thought. Two broad positions have shaped that conversation for centuries.

The first is divine timelessness. On this view, God exists entirely outside of time. He possesses his whole life "all at once." Augustine held this view. So did Boethius, who gave it its classic definition: eternity is the complete and perfect possession of life without beginning or end, held all at once.² Aquinas and Anselm agreed. In our own day, Paul Helm, Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, Brian Leftow, and Katherin Rogers have defended timelessness with care and rigor.³

The second is divine temporality. On this view, God genuinely experiences succession. There is a real before-and-after in God's life. God's time may be vastly different from ours, but it is real time. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, Alan Padgett, Garrett DeWeese, R. T. Mullins, William Hasker, Clark Pinnock, and William Lane Craig (in a hybrid form) have all defended some version of this view.⁴

This appendix argues for the second position. The moment-of-death encounter, as this book describes it, requires a God who is genuinely temporal. The reader who holds to classical timelessness should turn to Appendix G, which shows how the thesis can be salvaged on that view, with some adjustments.

Four Problems for Timelessness

R. T. Mullins has pressed the case against divine timelessness with great force. In The End of the Timeless God and From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, he identifies four deep problems with the view. Each one draws on the project sources that anchor this book's argument.⁵

First, creation. If God is timeless, he exists in an undifferentiated, changeless state. But creation is a causal act that brings about something new. A timeless God cannot stand in a temporal causal relation to the beginning of the universe without contradiction. His eternal will should produce an eternal effect. If God timelessly wills the universe to exist, why didn't the universe always exist? Aquinas tried to resolve this tension, but as Mullins shows, the answers remain unsatisfying.⁷

Second, the knowledge of tensed facts. This is perhaps the sharpest single argument against divine timelessness. A timeless God cannot know what time it is now. He can know that event A happens at date D. But he cannot know whether date D is happening right now, because "right now" is a tensed fact that changes constantly. Craig states the argument in five clean premises: a temporal world exists; God is all-knowing; if a temporal world exists and God is all-knowing, then God knows tensed facts; if God is timeless, he does not know tensed facts; therefore, God is not timeless.⁸ Mullins develops the same point at length: a being who truly knows everything must know what is happening now, and that requires being in time.⁹

Third, the Incarnation. The Christian confession holds that the eternal Son of God entered human history at a specific moment. He was born. He grew. He suffered. He died. Each of these is a temporal event. If the Son was timelessly eternal and remained timelessly eternal, then his entry into time is incoherent. He cannot both lack temporal properties and possess them. Mullins devotes an entire chapter to this argument, and Appendix M develops it further through Richard Holland's detailed case.¹⁰

Fourth, relational engagement. The God of the Bible grieves (Gen 6:6). He relents (Exod 32:14). He hears prayer at the moment it is uttered. He responds to his people's cries when they are crying. None of these actions can be done from an undifferentiated, static eternity. Mullins brings this point home in his chapter on what eternity actually is, including his memorable section on divine impassibility. The Bible, he argues, portrays a God who is moved by what happens in the world. A timeless God, by definition, cannot be moved.¹¹

The Positive Case: God in Time

The case for divine temporality does not rest only on problems with timelessness. Several strong positive arguments support it.

Wolterstorff builds his case in three steps in his essay "Unqualified Divine Temporality." First, he argues that Scripture portrays God as having a history. God speaks first to Abraham, later to Moses, later still to the prophets. The biblical narrative is not a timeless snapshot. It unfolds. The atemporalist must show strong reasons for reading this unfolding as mere appearance. Until then, the burden of proof rests on the one who denies the obvious surface meaning.¹²

Second, Wolterstorff argues that tensed facts cannot be eliminated. He uses a simple example: suppose you want to turn on the radio to hear the one o'clock news. To do so, you need to know that it is now one o'clock. Knowing that the event of its becoming one o'clock exists somewhere in the temporal spread is not enough. You need to know which event is present. The tenseless theorist, for whom all events have the same ontological status, has no way of picking out the present.¹³ The same applies to God. If God knows all tensed facts, then his knowledge changes as the facts change. And a being whose knowledge changes has a history.

Third, Wolterstorff asks what places something in time. His answer is elegant: having a history. His cat has a history. Things happen to it. A story can be told about it. Numbers do not have a history. Nothing happens to them. They neither come into being nor pass away.¹⁴ The question, then, is whether God has a history. And the answer, Wolterstorff argues, is plainly yes. The God who unfolds redemption, who speaks first to Moses and later to Jesus, who responds to his people's cries only when they are crying, has a history. And a being that has a history is in time.¹⁵

Apply that directly. The dying soul cries out in the moment of death. God hears the cry when it is uttered, not before and not after. That hearing is a temporal event. The soul is in time. God meets the soul there. A God without a history cannot hear a cry that has just now been cried. He can only "know" it timelessly. But knowing a cry and hearing a cry are very different things. One is a fact in a file. The other is a moment of compassion.

Wolterstorff presses one more point. The Incarnation settles the matter. The life of Jesus was not merely a set of human events caused by God from outside time. It was God's own life lived among us. God walked on dusty roads. God wept at a tomb. God bled on a cross. If Jesus is God, then God has a history. And if God has a history, God is in time.³⁷

Craig offers a different route to the same conclusion, though with a distinctive twist. He argues that God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation. The act of creating brought God into new causal relations that he did not have before, and that transition marks the beginning of God's temporal existence.¹⁶ The author of this book follows Mullins in finding Craig's hybrid view difficult to sustain. If God is tenselessly timeless, then "God is timeless" is true now. But "God is temporal" is also true now. That looks like a contradiction. DeWeese makes the same point: the two phases of God's life have no clear relation to each other, and the confusion only grows deeper the harder one looks.¹⁷

DeWeese himself offers what he calls a third option. He proposes that God has always been temporal. Before creation, metaphysical time was constituted by the causal succession of God's own mental states. The doctrine of perichoresis (perichōrēsis, "mutual indwelling") supports this picture. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share a dynamic relational life. If that relationality involves anything like the exchange that human persons experience, then it involves change. And change takes time.¹⁸ DeWeese argues for divine temporality from three directions: from the nature of personality, from the reality of dynamic time, and from the Incarnation.¹⁹

Mullins builds his own constructive case in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. He grounds God's time in the Trinity itself. The mutual indwelling of the three persons is not a static arrangement. The life the persons share is relational and dynamic. Mullins defends this claim against the charge of Arianism, arguing that affirming succession in God's inner life does not make the Son less than the Father. It simply takes seriously what the tradition means when it calls God's life a life of love.²⁰ In a second move, Mullins develops divine sovereignty and providence on temporalist terms. A temporal God governs in real time, responding to what creatures actually do. This is not a lesser sovereignty. It is a richer one.²¹

Natalja Deng provides a helpful landscape of the whole debate. In her survey of the case for God in time, she notes that the temporalist position has gained ground in recent decades. The arguments from tensed knowledge, from creation, and from the Incarnation have proven difficult for the atemporalist to answer without significant cost.²³

The Argument from Divine Emotion

Mullins makes a further case for divine temporality from the nature of God's emotional life. In God and Emotion, he argues that genuine emotional responsiveness requires real engagement in time.²⁴

The biblical portrayal of God's wrath is not an irrational outburst. It is rational, patient, and responsive. It is never separated from love. In Hosea 11, God's compassion toward Israel is the very reason God turns from wrath to mercy. As R.W.L. Moberly observes, the meaning of such passages is clear: God's sovereignty is exercised responsively, interacting with the moral actions of human beings.²⁵ Mullins shows that this responsive moral judgment is precisely what the impassible God cannot do. An impassible God cannot be moved or influenced by anything outside the divine nature. He cannot have compassion in any literal sense. He cannot respond to the soul's actual behavior.²⁶

Mullins also argues that omniscience includes experiential knowledge. God does not merely know that his creatures suffer. He knows what it is like for them to suffer. That experiential dimension requires a God who engages with his creatures in real time.²⁷

Apply this directly to the encounter. Christ grieves over the soul that refuses. Christ rejoices over the soul that turns. These are temporal responses to the soul's actual decision. If God cannot be moved by what the soul does, then the grief is not real grief and the joy is not real joy. The encounter becomes a performance played out before a God who already knows the ending and feels nothing new about it.

Standard Objections, Brief Replies

Two other objections deserve brief attention here.

Divine immutability. This objection says that God cannot change, and temporal experience involves change. The reply distinguishes two kinds of immutability. Essential immutability means that God's character, his goodness, his faithfulness, his love, never waver. This book affirms essential immutability. Relational immutability means that God's relations to his creatures never change. This the biblical text repeatedly denies. God enters new relations. He becomes the God of Abraham. He becomes incarnate. He hears a prayer that was not yet uttered a moment ago. Essential immutability is consistent with divine temporality. Relational immutability is not consistent with the biblical portrait.²⁹

Relativity. This objection says that Einstein's theory of special relativity shows there is no objective "now." If there is no objective present moment, then divine temporality is incoherent. The reply is that physical relativity describes clock-time as measured by physical instruments. It does not settle the metaphysical question of whether time has a real direction or whether there is a privileged present. Neo-Lorentzian interpretations of relativity preserve all the empirical content of Einstein's theory while maintaining the reality of the present. Appendix N develops this reply in full.³⁰

The Encounter Itself

Now bring the whole discussion back to the bedside. What does divine temporality mean for the moment-of-death encounter? It means every verb in the encounter is doing real work.

Christ attends. He is really present in real time to the dying soul. He is not merely "knowing" the encounter from some vantage point outside of time. He is there, in the soul's now.

Christ pursues. He acts to draw the soul toward himself. When the soul resists, he responds with deeper pursuit. That response requires a before (the resistance) and an after (the deeper pursuit). It requires succession.

Christ listens. He really hears the soul's response. Not a response that is timelessly "already there" in a static block. A response that unfolds, that takes shape, that the soul gives in real time.

Christ responds. To the soul that turns in trust, he responds with deepening love. To the soul that holds back, he responds with continued offer. Each response follows the soul's act. It does not precede it.

Christ waits. He gives the soul subjective time to decide. The waiting is real. It is not the timeless equivalent of already knowing what the soul will do. It is the patience of love in real time.

Christ concludes. When the soul's response is final, the encounter reaches its end. There is a real before-the-conclusion and a real after-the-conclusion. The conclusion is a temporal event.³¹

Each of these verbs requires a God who acts in time. A timeless God cannot pursue, because pursuit requires sequence. A timeless God cannot wait, because waiting requires the passage of moments. A timeless God cannot respond, because response requires that one thing comes after another. The moment-of-death encounter, as this book describes it, is built on temporal verbs. And temporal verbs require a temporal God.

Perichoresis and the Inner Life of God

A brief note on Trinitarian theology strengthens the case. The doctrine of perichoresis holds that the three persons of the Trinity mutually indwell one another. The Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father, and the Spirit fills and animates the communion between them. Many theologians have read this mutual indwelling in dynamic terms. The inner life of God is not a static arrangement of three persons frozen in place. It is a living, relational, dynamic communion.³³

If that inner life involves anything like the mutual giving and receiving that love requires, then it involves succession. Love listens. Love responds. Love gives. And each of those is a temporal verb. The same God whose inner life is relationally dynamic meets the dying soul relationally dynamically. The encounter at the moment of death is not an anomaly. It is an expression of who God already is in himself.³⁴

The Implication

The book's central thesis depends on divine temporality. The encounter works best, and means most, on a view where God genuinely acts in time. The verbs are true. The pursuit is real. The response is real. The conclusion is real.

This does not mean the thesis collapses entirely without divine temporality. Readers committed to classical timelessness should turn to Appendix G, which shows how the encounter can be re-described in timelessness terms, with adjustments. But the natural and primary framework for the moment-of-death encounter is dynamic divine temporality. A God who acts in time. A God who meets the soul in the soul's now.³⁵

The A-theory of time (Appendix H) fits naturally with this picture. If tense is metaphysically real, then the soul's present moment is genuinely present, and God meets the soul there. The Incarnation (Appendix M) provides the precedent: the Son of God entered time once before, at Bethlehem. The encounter at the moment of death is not a strange new thing. It is the same God doing what he has already shown himself willing to do.³⁶

When you sit beside your dying loved one, the God who is meeting her is not "outside time" in a way that makes the meeting unreal. He is with her in her now. He is really listening. He is really speaking. He is really waiting for her answer. The conversation between Christ and the dying soul is not a frozen tableau. It is a living exchange, unfolding moment by moment, in the time that matters most.

The verbs are true.