Appendix G
The Timelessness Alternative: Can the Encounter Survive a Timeless God?
If God stands outside of time, can the dying soul still meet him at the moment of death?
Full-Length Edition
Suppose you are convinced that God stands outside of time. You have read the case for divine temporality in Appendix F, and you respect it. But your own reading of the tradition leads somewhere else. You stand with Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, and Anselm. You believe that God exists in an eternal "now" that has no before and no after. The whole of God's life is given at once, like a single perfect act that never unfolds because it never needed to.
Here is your question: Does that belief break this book's thesis?
The thesis says every dying person meets the risen Christ at the moment of death. It says this encounter is real, conscious, and free. The soul is pursued by love, invited to respond, and given room to choose. In Appendix F those verbs were given their full force. God pursues. God waits. God responds. Each verb is a temporal verb, and the temporalist takes each one at face value.
But what if God does not wait, because waiting takes time, and God has no time? What if God does not respond in sequence, because sequence requires a before and an after, and God's life has neither?
The answer this appendix offers is short: the moment-of-death thesis survives. It survives with adjustments, and those adjustments cost something. But the encounter itself, the one that matters to the dying soul, holds firm. The reader who holds classical divine timelessness need not set this book aside.
Note: This appendix is written for the reader who holds Boethian-Augustinian-Thomistic divine timelessness and wonders whether the moment-of-death thesis is compatible with that view. It presents the timelessness position fairly and shows how the thesis can be restated on that framework. The book's own preferred view is dynamic divine temporality (Appendix F), but the thesis is not held hostage to that preference.
The Classical Position: God Beyond the River of Time
The idea that God is timeless has deep roots. It runs through patristic theology, medieval philosophy, and the best of the Reformed and Catholic traditions. It is not a dusty relic. Some of the sharpest minds in analytic philosophy of religion defend it today.1
The classic statement comes from Boethius, writing in the sixth century. In the Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, Prose 6, he defines eternity this way: "Eternity is the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of boundless life."2 The Latin is famous: aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio. Every word carries weight. God's life is boundless: it has no beginning and no end. It is whole: nothing is missing. It is simultaneous: nothing comes before anything else. It is perfect: nothing needs to be added or completed. And it is possessed all at once: not spread out like a river but held like a single diamond, every facet present at the same moment.3
Primary Source: "Eternity is the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of boundless life." Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, V.VI, as translated in Natalja Deng, God and Time, §3. The Latin original, aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, became the touchstone for more than a thousand years of Christian reflection on God's relation to time.
Aquinas built on Boethius. In the Summa Theologica, I, q. 10, he argued that the notion of time arises from change. Since God is free from all change, God exists in eternity, not in time. Eternity belongs to God alone because God alone is altogether unchangeable.4 Anselm, writing in the Monologion and Proslogion, drew the same conclusion. The God who exists in the fullness of his being cannot be subject to the passing of moments.5
In our own day, the strongest defender of divine timelessness is Paul Helm. His 1988 work Eternal God sets out two claims that deserve attention here.
The first is a claim about method. Helm argues that the Bible's language about God and time does not settle the question by itself. The scriptural data, he writes, are "not sufficiently precise so as to provide a definitive resolution of the issue one way or the other." It would be "unwise for the eternalist to claim that divine timeless eternity is entailed by the language of Scripture."6 The question is settled, Helm believes, by theological and philosophical reflection on the concept of God, not by proof-texting. This is an honest move, and it matters. It means the debate over God and time is a debate about what best fits the whole of our theology. Both sides can appeal to Scripture; neither side can claim a knockout text.7
The second is a claim about coherence. Critics often charge that a timeless God could not think, plan, or love, since all of those activities seem to unfold over time. Helm pushes back. In the opening chapters of Eternal God, he argues that personal life can be timeless. God's knowledge is not a series of thoughts that follow one another. It is a single, whole, undivided act of knowing. God's love is not a feeling that rises and falls. It is a perfect and complete act of self-giving. These are real activities of a real person, Helm insists, even though they do not happen in sequence.8 The reader may or may not find Helm's defense persuasive. But it deserves to be heard, because it is the best version of the case.9
Helm also writes in God and Time: Four Views, in his essay "Divine Timeless Eternity," that the idea of divine timelessness best preserves the Creator-creature distinction. If God were in time, then part of God's life would be "over and done with," and this would conflict with God's fullness and self-sufficiency.10 God's timelessness, Helm believes, signals "fullness, not deficiency."11
Beyond Helm, other thinkers have built on the classical tradition. Brian Leftow, in his Time and Eternity, treats eternity as a kind of reference frame. As Garrett DeWeese explains in his summary of Leftow's model, Leftow proposes that "relative to God, the whole span of temporal events is actually there all at once," and God's frame of reference is one "in which nothing changes."12 Katherin Rogers defends timelessness from an Anselmian angle, arguing that it represents "the most ontologically perfect way to exist."13 These are sophisticated positions, and readers who hold them are in good company.14
ET-Simultaneity: The Bridge Between Eternity and Time
If God is timeless and the world is temporal, how do the two relate? This is the central technical problem for divine timelessness. In 1981, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann proposed a solution in their landmark paper "Eternity." They called it ET-simultaneity, short for eternal-temporal simultaneity.15
The idea runs like this. Regular simultaneity means two things existing at the same time. But God does not exist at a time. So we need a different kind of "at once." ET-simultaneity is a relation between something eternal and something temporal. It says that for some eternal entity and some temporal event, both are present to each other, but not in the same way. The eternal entity is present in its own mode of being (eternity). The temporal event is present in its mode (time). Neither shares the other's mode. Yet they are, in a real sense, both "there."
Deng, in God and Time, §3, sets out the formal definition drawn from Stump and Kretzmann. Two items are ET-simultaneous if and only if one is eternal and the other temporal, and, from the standpoint of the eternal reference frame, both are present, and, from the standpoint of any temporal reference frame, both are present.16 In plain English: every moment of your life is ET-simultaneous with the whole of God's eternal now. And the whole of God's eternal now is ET-simultaneous with every moment of your life. God is not earlier or later than you. God is with you, timelessly, at each of your moments.17
DeWeese, in God and the Nature of Time, chapter 6, walks through the Stump-Kretzmann proposal in detail. He notes that the definition was modeled on the relativity of simultaneity in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Just as simultaneity in physics is relative to reference frames, ET-simultaneity is relative to modes of existence. The analogy is suggestive. But DeWeese raises a sharp question: does the definition actually explain anything, or does it simply restate the problem in new language?18 Helm himself put the criticism bluntly: Stump and Kretzmann's "solution" is found "simply by rewording the problem with the help of the device of ET-simultaneity. ET-simultaneity has no independent merit or use, nothing is illuminated or explained by it."19
That is a serious charge, and it comes from a friend of timelessness, not an opponent. Still, the concept of ET-simultaneity does something useful for our purposes. It gives us a vocabulary for describing what happens at the moment of death on the timelessness view, even if that vocabulary does not solve the deeper metaphysical puzzles. And it is the vocabulary we need in the next section.20
Why the Critics Are Not Wrong
Before we show how the encounter survives, honesty requires a pause. The critics of divine timelessness have real arguments, and this book tilts toward their side.
R. T. Mullins, in The End of the Timeless God, presses two problems that bear directly on the encounter.
The first is the problem of God's knowledge of what is happening now. Mullins argues in chapter 4 that a timeless God cannot know tensed facts. He cannot know that it is now three in the afternoon, because "now" is an indexical that picks out a moment in time, and a timeless being has no moment.21 Craig formalizes the point in a five-premise argument: if there are tensed facts, and God is omniscient, then God knows those tensed facts. But knowing a tensed fact requires being at the time it is true. A timeless God is at no time. So a timeless God cannot know tensed facts.22 If this is right, a timeless God cannot know what the dying soul is experiencing right now. And a God who cannot know what you are going through right now is a strange candidate for a personal encounter.23
The second is the interaction problem. In The End of the Timeless God, chapters 3 through 5, Mullins argues that a timeless God cannot stand in real causal or relational contact with temporal creatures without becoming temporal. If God truly interacts with the dying soul, responding to her cry, adjusting his approach to her need, then God undergoes something like change. And change requires time.24
Common Objection: "If God is timeless, he cannot interact with the dying soul in real time. Interaction requires sequence: first the soul cries, then God responds. Timelessness has no sequence. So there can be no real encounter." Reply: The defender of timelessness has a response. Leftow, Helm, and others argue that God's timeless act has temporal effects without being itself temporal. God's single eternal act of love is such that, at each moment of the soul's encounter, the effect appropriate to that moment is present. The soul experiences pursuit, response, and invitation. God's act is one, but its effects unfold in the soul's time. Whether this reply fully works is debatable. But it is not nothing. It preserves the reality of the soul's experience, even if it redescribes what is happening on God's side. See Appendix M for the hardest challenge to this reply.
The author of this book tilts toward Mullins. The encounter reads most naturally as a genuinely temporal event on both sides. But this appendix is not written for those who share that tilt. It is written for those who stand with Helm and who need to know whether the thesis still holds. Let us show that it does.
How the Encounter Survives
The key move is a simple one. On the timelessness view, we describe the encounter from two sides and accept that the descriptions differ.
From the dying soul's side, the encounter is fully temporal. The soul experiences everything that the NDE literature reports. Time slows. The room recedes. A presence appears. The soul hears, responds, remembers, reviews, and chooses. Each moment follows the last. The subjective extension of the encounter, which may feel like hours or days, is as real as any other experience the soul has ever had. Nothing in the timelessness view changes this side of the picture. The soul is a creature. Creatures are in time. The soul's experience unfolds in creaturely time, just as it does on the temporalist view.25
From God's side, the description changes. God does not "pursue" the soul in sequence. God does not "wait" for the soul's answer. God's whole eternal act of love toward this soul is a single, undivided act. That act is ET-simultaneous with every moment of the soul's extended encounter. At each subjective moment the soul lives through, the fullness of God's eternal love is present. Not a piece of it. Not a stage of it. All of it, whole and complete, brought to bear on this soul at this moment.26
Key Argument: The moment-of-death encounter survives on the timelessness view because the encounter's reality is grounded in what the soul experiences, not in what God's metaphysical description looks like. On the temporalist view, God pursues in time. On the timelessness view, God's single eternal act produces the same experienced pursuit in the soul's time. The soul is met, loved, and invited. The metaphysical backdrop differs. The bedside reality does not.
Think of it this way. The soul, at the moment of death, enters a subjectively extended experience. During that experience, the soul meets Christ. Christ speaks. Christ listens. Christ offers grace. On the temporalist view, Christ is doing these things in real time, moment by moment, in his own divine life. On the timelessness view, Christ's eternal act is such that, from the soul's side, these things are experienced in real time, moment by moment, in the soul's creaturely time. The soul does not experience a "lesser" encounter. The encounter is not thinner or less real. It is the same meeting, described differently on God's side.27
This is the salvage. It works because the NDE time-dilation that grounds the encounter's duration is entirely on the soul's side, not on God's side. The subjective extension of the dying moment is a feature of how the soul experiences time as it separates from the brain. Whether God himself is in time or beyond time, the soul's hours of subjective encounter remain intact. The time-dilation is in the creature, not in the Creator.28
What Is Lost
The salvage works, but it is not free. Something is lost when we move from the temporalist picture to the timelessness picture, and we should be honest about what it is.
On the temporalist view, God literally waits. He gives the soul time. He holds back, out of respect for the soul's freedom, and lets the soul come to its own decision. There is a real before-and-after in God's experience of the encounter. God is with the soul in the same way a friend sits at the bedside: present in the moment, sharing the moment, moving through the moment with the one who is dying.29
On the timelessness view, this relational dynamism is reframed. God does not "wait," because God's act is whole and complete. The response the soul eventually gives is, from God's timeless standpoint, already eternally known and eternally responded to. This does not mean the soul's choice is coerced or bypassed. The soul's choice is genuinely free, genuinely open, genuinely lived through in the soul's own time. But the dynamic interplay that the temporalist pictures between God and soul, the give-and-take, the moment-by-moment responsiveness, is, on the timelessness view, something the soul experiences rather than something that structures God's own inner life.30
This is a real cost. Readers who feel it should take that feeling seriously. It may be one reason, among others, to favor divine temporality. But it is not a cost that destroys the encounter. It shifts the encounter's center of gravity from God's experience to the soul's. And the soul's experience, on either view, is the same.31
What Is Preserved
Everything that matters to the dying soul is preserved.
The soul meets Christ. This is not a metaphor. On both views, the risen Christ is present to the dying soul. On the temporalist view, Christ is present in his own time, meeting the soul in the soul's time. On the timelessness view, the eternal Christ's love is brought to bear, fully and completely, at every moment the soul experiences. The meeting is real on both views.32
The soul is freely offered a choice. This is preserved because freedom is a property of the soul's act, not of God's metaphysical mode of being. Whether God knows the soul's choice from eternity (as the timelessness defender says) or comes to know it in the moment (as the temporalist says), the soul's act of choosing is the soul's own. Helm himself insists on this point: God's timeless knowledge of the future does not cause the future. It accompanies it.33
The NDE time-dilation is preserved. The subjective extension of the dying moment is a feature of creaturely consciousness, not of divine metaphysics. Whether God is in time or beyond it, the soul's experience of hours within clinical seconds remains intact. The empirical case for the encounter's duration (Appendix J) stands on its own.
Insight: The compatibility of the moment-of-death thesis with both divine temporality and divine timelessness rests on a single structural fact: the encounter's duration is in the soul, not in God. NDE time-dilation is a creaturely phenomenon. Whether God experiences the encounter in his own divine time or brings his timeless love to bear on each of the soul's subjective moments, the soul's hours of grace are the same. The philosophical debate about God and time changes the theology. It does not change the bedside.
What the Rest of the Cluster Looks Like
How does the timelessness view affect the other appendices in this Part Two cluster?
The A-theory and B-theory discussion (Appendix H) is still natural for the timelessness reader. A-theory and B-theory concern the metaphysics of creaturely time. Holding that God is timeless does not require holding that creaturely time is tenseless. A reader can hold divine timelessness and A-theory together. The soul's experience of temporal flow is still best described in A-theoretic terms.34
The empirical NDE appendices (Appendix J, Appendix K) are unchanged. The data concern what dying people experience. The data say nothing about God's mode of being. Whether God is in time or beyond it, the cases remain the same.35
The biblical theology of time (Appendix L) remains intact. When the Bible says "today, if you hear his voice" (Ps 95:7-8), "today" is the soul's today. The soul's kairos, its appointed moment of encounter, does not depend on whether God himself has a "today" in the same sense. The biblical invitation is addressed to the creature, and the creature is in time.36
The Incarnation (Appendix M) is where timelessness faces its hardest challenge. If the eternal Son truly took on human nature, and if human nature is temporal, then at least one divine person entered time. Mullins argues that this is incoherent on the timelessness view. Holland, in God, Time, and the Incarnation, presses the same point in depth. The reader who holds timelessness should read Appendix M with special care, because it poses the strongest question for the classical position.37
The working model (Appendix O) can be recast in timelessness terms with mostly cosmetic changes. The stages of the encounter are all described from the soul's side. The soul separates from the brain. The soul is oriented. The soul meets Christ. The soul reviews its life. The soul chooses. Each stage is a moment in creaturely time. On the timelessness view, God's single eternal act underlies every stage. The model's structure does not change. Only the metaphysical description of what God is doing at each stage changes.38
The Pastoral Equivalence
Here is what this all comes down to.
You are sitting beside your dying mother. Her breathing has slowed. The room is quiet. You are wondering: Is she alone? Is anyone with her? Does she know what is happening?
This book's answer is the same on both views. She is not alone. Christ is with her. She is being met. She is being loved. She is being given the chance to respond.
On the temporalist view, Christ is with her in the moment, sharing her now, walking with her through the subjective hours of her encounter. On the timelessness view, Christ's whole eternal love is present to her in her now, fully and completely, at each moment she lives through. The meeting is real. The love is real. The choice is real.
The technical question of whether God's relation to time is temporal or eternal does not change what is happening in that room. It changes the theology you use to describe it. It does not change the reality you believe is unfolding. Your mother is being met. That is the thing that matters.39
Synthesis
This book's primary framework is dynamic divine temporality, developed in Appendix F. On that view, the encounter's verbs are literally true on God's side. God pursues. God listens. God waits. God responds. The encounter is a real, two-sided, temporal event.
But the thesis is robust enough to survive a shift to classical divine timelessness. The encounter, redescribed in ET-simultaneity terms, remains real from the soul's side. God's single, timeless act of love toward the soul produces, in the soul's creaturely time, a fully sequenced, fully conscious, fully free encounter. The cost is the loss of God-side dynamism. The benefit is the preservation of the classical metaphysical tradition. The soul's experience is the same on either view.
Readers should follow their own convictions about God's relation to time. The moment-of-death thesis does not depend on settling that question first. It invites the temporalist and the timelessness defender alike to stand at the bedside and believe the same thing: Christ is there. The soul is being met. And the hours of grace, hidden in seconds of clock-time, are real.40
Note: Whether you hold that God meets your dying loved one in time or that God's eternal love intersects her moment from beyond time, the picture at the bedside is the same. She is not alone. Christ is there. The question of God's relation to time is a question about the furniture of heaven. It is not a question about whether love is in the room. For the full case for divine temporality, see Appendix F. For the Incarnation's challenge to timelessness, see Appendix M. For the synthetic working model, see Appendix O.
Notes
↑ 1. Contemporary defenders of divine timelessness include Paul Helm, Brian Leftow, Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, and Katherin Rogers. For a concise survey of their positions, see Natalja Deng, God and Time, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), §3, "God Beyond Time."
↑ 2. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, V.VI. The translation follows Deng, God and Time, §3, which reproduces the Stewart et al. (1973) translation. The original Latin, aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, is quoted in the same section.
↑ 3. On the influence of this definition across the medieval period, see Garrett DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (London: Routledge, 2004), ch. 5, "The Medieval Consensus," which traces the line from Augustine through Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas.
↑ 4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 10, a. 1-3. Aquinas writes that "just as numbering the antecedent and the consequent in change produces the notion of time, awareness of invariability in something altogether free from change produces the notion of eternity." Quoted in Richard A. Holland Jr., God, Time, and the Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), p 119.
↑ 5. Anselm, Monologion 21-22, 24; Proslogion 13, 19, 22. For a discussion of Anselm's position in the context of the broader medieval consensus, see DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5.
↑ 6. Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time, 1st ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Introduction. See also Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 111-112, which discusses Helm's acknowledgment that the scriptural texts "are consistent with eternalism in that they can fairly be interpreted in an eternalist way" but "can equally well be interpreted in a temporalist way."
↑ 7. This methodological concession is often overlooked. It means the discussion is not a simple exegetical dispute. Both temporalists and atemporalists can read the same biblical texts and find their position "consistent with" the data. The question is which theological and philosophical framework makes the best overall sense of the data. See Helm, "Divine Timeless Eternity," in Gregory E. Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001).
↑ 8. Helm, Eternal God, chs. 1-4. For the argument that timeless personal life is coherent, see especially his response to Nelson Pike's challenge that a timeless being could not remember or anticipate, and hence could not be a person. Helm contends that the concept of a person does not require temporal succession in the way Pike assumes.
↑ 9. DeWeese offers a helpful summary of Helm's position in God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6, "The 'Classical View' Revisited: Paul Helm." DeWeese identifies Helm's central argument as resting on two claims: divine simplicity and strong immutability. DeWeese argues that if strong immutability is replaced with weak immutability (God cannot change in his essential nature but can undergo relational change), Helm's argument does not go through.
↑ 10. Helm, "Divine Timeless Eternity," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. DeWeese quotes the relevant passage: the temporal view "flouts the basic theistic intuition that God's fullness is such that he possesses the whole of his life together. To many, the idea that God is subject to the vicissitudes of temporal passage, with more and more of his life irretrievably over and done with, is incompatible with divine sovereignty, with divine perfection and with the fullness of being that is essential to God." DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6.
↑ 11. Helm, "Divine Timeless Eternity," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. Helm writes that "impassibility in God is not a defect but a perfection; it signals fullness, not deficiency." Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, p 120, analyzes this connection between impassibility and timelessness in Helm's thought.
↑ 12. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6, "Eternity as a Reference Frame: Brian Leftow." Leftow argues that "given the Zero Thesis, (M), and one very general property of time (its being a fourth dimension of an extensive continuum), it follows that in the actual world there is no motion or change relative to God." DeWeese offers an extended critique of Leftow's key theses.
↑ 13. Katherin Rogers, cited in R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 6, "Concluding Remarks." Rogers argues that unless divine timelessness "entails some logical or metaphysical impossibility," Christians ought to hold to it.
↑ 14. For a comprehensive survey of the landscape, see Deng, God and Time, §3. Deng identifies several distinct strategies: pure atemporalism, the Stump-Kretzmann approach, Leftow's reference-frame model, and Pasnau's approach. Each tries to solve the problem of how a timeless God relates to a temporal world.
↑ 15. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, "Eternity," Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 8 (1981): 429-458. This paper is not project-resident. The exposition here follows the two project-resident treatments: Deng, God and Time, §3, and DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6.
↑ 16. Deng, God and Time, §3, reproducing the formal definition from Stump and Kretzmann (1981). The definition requires three conditions: (i) one relatum is eternal and the other temporal; (ii) from the eternal reference frame, both are present; (iii) from any temporal reference frame, both are present. Deng also reproduces Stump and Kretzmann's four claims about the timeless being's life: it is without succession, without beginning or end, involves atemporal duration, and is possessed all at once.
↑ 16. A consequence worth noting: ET-simultaneity is symmetric but non-transitive. The fact that your present moment is ET-simultaneous with God's eternity, and that Julius Caesar's death is also ET-simultaneous with God's eternity, does not make your present moment temporally simultaneous with Caesar's death. See DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6, and Deng, God and Time, §3.
↑ 16. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6. DeWeese constructs a clever analogy: a nominalist could equally well define "IM-copresence" (immaterial-material copresence) to explain how a universal can be present in a material object, but the definition would not convince anyone who found the idea incoherent to begin with. "Definitions simply can't do that work."
↑ 16. Helm's critique, cited by William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), p 91. Craig adds his own analysis: the observation language in the original definition is "wholly obscure," and in the absence of any procedure for determining ET-simultaneity, the definition "reduces to" a restatement of the problem.
↑ 16. Stump and Kretzmann later revised their definition to use causal rather than observational language. See Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 91-92. Even the revised definition faces criticisms, but it does provide a conceptual framework for describing how a timeless God and a temporal creature might be related.
↑ 16. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 4, "Presentism, Omniscience, and the Timeless God." The basic problem is that tensed propositions change their truth value over time. "It is now raining" is true at some times and false at others. A timeless God, who exists at no time, seems unable to track which tensed propositions are currently true.
↑ 16. Craig, Time and Eternity, p 100. Craig's five-premise argument: (1) A temporal world exists. (2) God is omniscient. (3) If a temporal world exists, then there are tensed facts. (4) If there are tensed facts, then an omniscient being must know tensed facts. (5) If an omniscient being knows tensed facts, that being is temporal. Therefore, God is temporal. The atemporalist must reject at least one premise.
↑ 16. Helm's reply, in his "Response to Critics" in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views, introduces the concept of "eternal indexical knowledge." God's timeless knowledge of contingent truths is indexed to eternity, not to any moment. This is not like our temporal indexical knowledge, and Helm admits we "have and can have no positive idea" what it is like. But he insists it is sufficient for omniscience. The reader must judge whether this suffices for a personal encounter.
↑ 16. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, chs. 3-5. The argument from creation (ch. 5) is especially pointed: a timeless God who creates a temporal world must, at minimum, stand in a new relation to something that did not previously exist. If "new relation" implies change, and change implies time, then a creating God is temporal. See also Appendix F for the full treatment of Mullins's arguments.
↑ 16. On the soul's temporality, see Appendix H, which argues that the dying soul's experience is best described in A-theoretic terms. The soul is a temporal creature whose experience unfolds in genuine temporal succession, regardless of the metaphysics on God's side.
↑ 26. This is where the concept of ET-simultaneity earns its keep. God's single timeless act is ET-simultaneous with every moment of the soul's encounter. At each moment, the soul receives what it needs from that act. The act does not change; the soul's reception of it unfolds in creaturely time.
↑ 16. An analogy may help, though all analogies break. Think of a letter that a parent writes before the child is born, containing every word of love, every piece of wisdom, every answer to every question the child will ever ask. The child reads it over many years, receiving each word at the right moment. The letter was written all at once; the child's experience of it unfolds. On the timelessness view, God's love is something like that letter, except that it is not passive words on a page but the living act of the risen Christ, fully present to the soul at each moment.
↑ 26. See Appendix J for the empirical evidence of NDE time-dilation. The cases document subjective time-extension during clinical seconds. The phenomenon is in the dying person's experience, not in the external world, and not in God.
↑ 16. This is the vision developed in Appendix F. On the temporalist view, God's relational engagement with the dying soul is genuinely dynamic: God acts, the soul responds, God responds to the response. The encounter unfolds in real time on both sides.
↑ 26. Helm's own framing is helpful here. God has "a unique perspective on the world, a perspective necessarily free of temporal and spatial indexicals." Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, p 117. The soul's encounter is real from the soul's standpoint; from God's standpoint, the whole encounter is present in one eternal act.
↑ 16. DeWeese captures the force of this cost when he asks: "How would a timeless person enjoy a symphony? And if God is temporal, certainly his perfect memory and his perfect foreknowledge would attenuate the 'loss' to some degree." DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6. The encounter with the dying soul is, in a sense, a symphony. The temporalist hears God playing it in real time. The timelessness defender says the whole composition exists at once in God's eternal act, and the soul hears it unfold.
↑ 26. The risen Christ's presence to the dying soul is the christological heart of the thesis. See Appendix M for the Incarnation as precedent, and Chapter 13 for the main text's introduction to the God-and-time question.
↑ 16. Helm, Eternal God, chs. 3-4, on timeless knowledge and freedom. Helm argues that God's timeless knowledge of future free acts does not determine those acts. The acts are free; God's knowledge accompanies them without causing them. This point is important for the encounter, because the soul's choice must be genuinely free.
↑ 26. The relationship between divine timelessness and the A-theory/B-theory question is complicated. Helm himself seems to lean toward a B-theoretic view of creaturely time, but his position does not require it. See Appendix H for the full discussion. The timelessness reader who combines timelessness with B-theory faces a harder challenge, which Appendix H addresses honestly.
↑ 16. The NDE data are phenomenological reports. They describe what the dying person experienced. Whether God is temporal or timeless does not affect what Pam Reynolds saw or what Howard Storm reported. See Appendix J.
↑ 36. See Appendix L for the full treatment of chronos, kairos, and aiōnios in the biblical theology of time.
↑ 26. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 7, "The Incarnation of the Timeless God." Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, develops the argument at length. The basic problem: the Incarnation involves a divine person acquiring a temporal nature. If divine timelessness is a necessary feature of divinity, then either the Son ceased to be divine at the Incarnation (heresy) or the Son did not truly acquire a temporal nature (Docetism). See Appendix M.
↑ 16. The working model in Appendix O describes six stages of the encounter, each from the soul's perspective. On the timelessness view, God's relationship to each stage is a single timeless act with differentiated temporal effects. The soul's side of the model is identical on both views.
↑ 36. This is the pastoral landing of the entire appendix. The technical debate about God and time, important as it is, does not alter the hope this book offers to the grieving. For the full pastoral treatment, see Chapter 34.
↑ 26. For the full case for divine temporality, see Appendix F. For the A-theory/B-theory question, see Appendix H. For the Incarnation as the hardest challenge to timelessness, see Appendix M. For the synthetic working model, see Appendix O. For the main text's introduction to the God-and-time question, see Chapter 13.