Appendix F
Why the God Who Meets the Dying Must Be a God Who Acts in Time
Condensed Edition
Picture Christ meeting a 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 forward from what came before and leans into what comes next. Attending comes before pursuing. Listening comes before responding. Waiting comes before concluding. If you strip the sequence out, the verbs lose their meaning. A God who does all of this "at once," in a single undivided eternal act, is not attending and then pursuing. He is not listening and then responding. He is doing something, but it is not what those verbs describe.1
This appendix makes the case that the moment-of-death encounter requires a God who genuinely acts in time. The thesis of this book claims that every dying person meets the risen Christ at death, in a real pursuit, a real conversation, a real decision. For that encounter to be what it claims to be, God must experience temporal succession. He must be the kind of being who can hear a cry when it is cried and respond to it after hearing it. That is what we mean by dynamic divine temporality.2
This is a contested claim. Some of the greatest minds in Christian history have held the opposite view. So let us lay out the debate honestly, develop the case for divine temporality, and then show why it matters for the dying.
The Western Christian tradition has largely held that God is timeless. On this view, God does not experience one moment after another. He possesses his entire life "all at once." Boethius gave the classic definition: eternity is "the simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life" (tota simul et perfecta possessio). Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm all built on this foundation. In our day, Paul Helm, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, Brian Leftow, and Katherin Rogers defend versions of divine timelessness.3
The rival view says God does experience succession. God has a real before-and-after. His time may differ from ours in kind, but it is genuinely temporal. He remembers, anticipates, and responds. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, Alan Padgett, Garrett DeWeese, R. T. Mullins, William Hasker, and William Lane Craig (in a hybrid form) all defend divine temporality.4
The debate is real and deep. This appendix does not pretend it is settled. But I believe the stronger arguments favor divine temporality, and I believe this book's thesis requires it. Readers who hold divine timelessness should turn to Appendix G, which shows how the moment-of-death thesis can be adapted to that framework, with some loss.
R. T. Mullins, in his landmark study The End of the Timeless God, presses four distinct problems against the timelessness position. Each strikes at a point where the doctrine conflicts with something else that orthodox Christians hold dear.5
The creation problem. Christians confess that God created the world out of nothing. That confession involves a transition: a state in which God exists alone, and then a state in which God exists with creation. But a timeless God cannot undergo a transition. He cannot move from "alone" to "with creation," because moving from one state to another is itself a temporal act. Mullins develops this argument at length, engaging the ancient attempt by John Philoponus to solve it. His conclusion: presentism and timelessness together cannot account for creation ex nihilo and divine sustaining.6
The omniscience problem. God knows everything. But does he know what time it is now? If it is three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon and you are reading this sentence, God, if he is omniscient, knows that it is three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon. That is a tensed fact. It changes from moment to moment. But a timeless God cannot track changing facts, because nothing changes for a timeless being. Craig formalizes this into a crisp argument: if God is omniscient, and tensed facts are real, and the content of tensed facts changes from moment to moment, then God's knowledge changes. And a being whose knowledge changes is temporal, not timeless.7
Key Argument — The Encounter Requires a Temporal God
The moment-of-death encounter is built from temporal verbs: Christ attends, then pursues, then listens, then responds, then waits, then concludes. Each verb requires a before and an after. A strictly timeless God, who possesses his entire life "all at once," cannot perform acts that unfold in sequence. The encounter either requires a God who acts in time, or it must be redescribed in ways that drain the verbs of their natural meaning. This appendix argues for the first option.
The Incarnation problem. The eternal Son of God entered time. He was born in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth, died on Golgotha, and rose on the third day. Each of those events is temporal. Each stands in a before-and-after relation to the others. But "entering time" is itself a temporal predicate. If the Son was timelessly eternal and remained so even while incarnate, then his "entering" time is incoherent. Mullins develops this fully, and Richard A. Holland Jr. devotes an entire book to the argument. The Incarnation is the strongest single indicator that there is genuine sequence in God's life.8 We return to this in Appendix M.
The relational-engagement problem. The God of Scripture grieves. "The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (Gen. 6:6, ESV). The God of Scripture relents. "And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people" (Exod. 32:14, ESV). The God of Scripture hears prayer in the moment it is uttered. The God of Scripture walks with Abraham, argues with Moses, and weeps over Jerusalem. None of this is the behavior of a being who exists in a single undifferentiated eternal now. It is the behavior of a being who engages with his creatures in time.9
Primary Source — The Biblical Portrait
"Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts." — Psalm 95:7–8, ESV
The word "today" does real theological work. God speaks now, and the hearer responds now. The urgency is temporal. It assumes a God who is present to this moment, not stationed outside all moments equally. For the dying soul, "today" is the moment of death. Christ's voice comes in that moment, and the soul hears it in that moment.
Taken together, these four problems do not prove that timelessness is false. Thoughtful defenders have answers to each. But they do show that the timeless position carries real costs, and those costs grow heavier the more you want God to interact with his creatures in the way Scripture describes.10
Nicholas Wolterstorff, writing in "Unqualified Divine Temporality," builds his case on a simple observation. Scripture describes God as having a history. God spoke first to Moses, later to Jesus. God freed Israel from Egypt, and then centuries later sent his Son. God responds to his people's cries, and you can respond to a cry only when it is being cried. This history should be read at face value unless strong reasons forbid it. The burden of proof, Wolterstorff argues, falls on the one who denies the plain reading.11
Wolterstorff adds a philosophical argument. An agent must know what is happening now. His example is simple: if you want to turn on the radio for the one o'clock news, you need to know when it is one o'clock. Tenseless knowledge of all the times at which it is one o'clock won't help you unless you also know which one of those times is happening now. God's knowledge of tensed facts gives his knowledge a history. It changes as the world changes.12
What puts something in time? Wolterstorff offers a test. Numbers are not in time. They have no history, no story to tell. His cat, on the other hand, is in time. The cat has a life full of events. The question about God is simply this: does God have a history? The God who unfolds redemption across centuries, who speaks first to one prophet and then to another, who responds to the cries of his people when they cry out, plainly does. And a being with a history is a being in time.13
Apply this directly to the dying soul. The soul cries out. God hears the cry when it is uttered. He responds after hearing it. He waits while the soul deliberates. On Wolterstorff's test, this is straightforwardly temporal engagement.
William Lane Craig offers a carefully reasoned hybrid view. Before creation, when God exists alone, there are no events and therefore no time. God in that state is timeless. But the moment God creates, he enters into real relations with temporal beings, and his knowledge begins to track tensed facts. From that point forward, God is temporal. Craig summarizes the hybrid position in both Time and Eternity and his chapter in God and Time: Four Views.14
This book follows Mullins in questioning Craig's "timeless without creation" phase. Mullins argues that the transition from timelessness to temporality is itself mysterious. If God is timelessly intending to create but not yet exercising causal power, how exactly does the shift occur? Helm himself notes Craig's "explanatory silence" on this point.15 But Craig's argument for God's temporality since creation stands firm: a God who sustains a changing world and knows what is happening now is temporal.
Garrett DeWeese defends what he calls omnitemporality. God is present at every moment of physical time, but God's own time is not identical with physical clock time. It is grounded in something deeper: the causal succession of God's own mental states. Even before creation, there was divine time, constituted by the inner life of the Trinity. DeWeese reads the perichoretic relations among Father, Son, and Spirit as genuinely dynamic. The mutual love and communication within the Trinity is itself a succession, and that succession is the foundation of all temporal reality.16
DeWeese develops three main arguments for temporality. First, the argument from personality: a personal God thinks, purposes, and loves, and these acts have a temporal shape. Second, the argument from dynamic time: time itself is grounded in causation, and God is the supreme causal agent. Third, the argument from the Incarnation: the Son's entry into created time presupposes a capacity for temporal existence.17
Mullins moves beyond critique to construction in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. His positive case rests on the Trinity. In the inner life of God, the three persons exist in perichoretic inseparability: Father, Son, and Spirit dwell in one another in an eternal communion of love. Mullins argues that this communion is not static. It involves real relational exchange, and relational exchange involves succession.18
Mullins also addresses the charge, pressed by Helm, that divine temporality leads to Arianism (the ancient heresy that the Son is a lesser, created being). Mullins replies by rejecting the traditional doctrine of divine processions. The processions, he argues, are in tension with the homoousios doctrine itself. Without processions, the charge of Arianism dissolves, and the temporalist is free to affirm the full equality and co-eternality of Father, Son, and Spirit within a genuinely temporal divine life.19
On sovereignty and providence, Mullins shows in chapter 7 that a temporal God can govern the world just as effectively as a timeless God. Providence does not require timelessness. It requires wisdom, power, and love, all exercised in real time. This is directly relevant for a God who pursues the dying soul in real time.20
Primary Source — Mullins on the Timeless God's Failure
Mullins concludes his critique of the timeless research program with a striking verdict: the problems with timelessness are not minor puzzles awaiting clever fixes. They are structural failures. A timeless God cannot create a presentist universe. A timeless God cannot know what time it is now. A timeless God cannot enter time through the Incarnation without contradiction. The program, Mullins argues, should be abandoned so that theologians can "devote their attention to developing models of divine temporality and the implications that it has for the rest of Christian theology."21
Natalja Deng, in her concise overview God and Time, maps the contemporary debate. On the temporalist side, she identifies a family of views united by the conviction that God genuinely experiences succession. They differ on the details. Does God have an infinite past (DeWeese) or a temporal beginning (Craig)? Is God's time identical with physical time (Swinburne) or metaphysically distinct (Craig, DeWeese)? But all agree that God is the kind of being who acts, responds, and engages in time.22
Even Luis R. Scott, who writes to defend exhaustive divine foreknowledge against open theism, insists on God's temporal presence. Scott's concern is different from ours. He wants to show that God's advance knowledge of the future does not destroy human freedom. But along the way, he affirms a point that this book needs: we are bound to the present moment, and God meets us there.23 The dying soul's present moment is the moment of death, and God meets the soul there.
There is one more argument for temporality that deserves its own treatment. Mullins develops it in God and Emotion. The question is simple: can a timeless God genuinely feel?
Scripture is full of divine emotions. God's wrath burns against injustice. God's compassion moves him to rescue. God's love endures forever. God's grief over sin is real enough to break a reader's heart. These are not decorative metaphors. They are core claims about who God is.24
Mullins shows that divine wrath, as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, is not blind anger. It is a rational, patient, morally grounded judgment. God's wrath is a response to what creatures actually do. It is caused by creaturely sin and answered by creaturely repentance. That word "response" is doing serious work. A response requires awareness of what has happened and a reaction to it. Awareness-then-reaction is temporal. A timeless being, for whom nothing ever changes, cannot respond in this sense.25
The classical theist tradition has long held that God is impassible, meaning he cannot be acted upon or affected by anything outside himself. Mullins examines this claim and finds it in tension with the biblical portrait. The impassible God "cannot be moved." But the God of Scripture is moved by his people's suffering. He hears their groaning and acts. If God truly cannot be influenced by his creatures, then the biblical language of divine grief, divine patience, and divine compassion reduces to metaphor about creatures, not literal truth about God.26
Apply this to the moment-of-death encounter. Christ meets the dying soul, and the soul responds. If the soul turns toward Christ, Christ rejoices. If the soul refuses, Christ grieves. These are emotional responses to the soul's actual decision. They require a God who is really affected by what the soul does. A timeless, impassible God cannot be genuinely joyful or genuinely grieved by a decision that, from his perspective, has no before-and-after. The emotion is temporal through and through.27
Common Objection — Divine Simplicity and Temporality
"If God is temporal, he has parts: a before-part and an after-part. But divine simplicity says God has no parts."
This objection has real force in its strong form. But many contemporary theologians, including those committed to divine perfection, have qualified or rejected strong simplicity. The biblical portrait demands genuine temporal engagement, and if that conflicts with a philosophical doctrine, the biblical portrait takes priority. The temporalist can still affirm that God is essentially unified. His character does not fragment over time. But his life unfolds in a real sequence of acts. Essential unity is not the same thing as metaphysical partlessness.28
Divine immutability. If God changes, is he unreliable? The temporalist distinguishes two kinds of immutability. Essential immutability says God's character never changes. He is always loving, always just, always faithful. The temporalist affirms this wholeheartedly. Relational immutability says God's relations to creatures never change. The biblical text repeatedly contradicts this. God enters into new relationships, responds to new situations, and acts at specific moments. The temporalist denies relational immutability while affirming the unchanging character that makes God trustworthy.29
Relativity. Does Einstein's theory of relativity show that there is no objective "now" and therefore no divine temporality? No. Physical relativity concerns the measurement of simultaneity within physical reference frames. It does not settle the metaphysical question of whether there is a privileged present. Neo-Lorentzian interpretations of relativity preserve all the empirical content of Einstein's theory while maintaining an objective present. God's time is not identical with measured physical time. The full case appears in Appendix N.30
Here is where the philosophy cashes out at the bedside.
Christ attends. He is really present, in real time, to the dying soul. He is not "knowing" the encounter from a vantage point outside time. He is there, in the soul's now, as the soul's now unfolds.
Christ pursues. He acts to draw the soul toward himself. When the soul resists, Christ responds with deeper pursuit. When the soul asks a question, Christ answers. The pursuit is personal, fitted to the specific person, shaped by what would reach this soul.
Christ listens. Really hears the soul's response. Not as a timeless act of knowing-all-responses-at-once, but as a personal attending to what the soul is saying right now.
Christ responds. To submission with deepening love. To refusal with continued offer. To fear with reassurance. To questions with truth.
Christ waits. Gives the soul subjective time to decide. Does not rush. Does not coerce. The patience is real because the time is real.
Christ concludes. When the soul's response is final, the encounter reaches its end. The conclusion is temporal because it follows the conversation. It is a real ending to a real dialogue.31
Each of these verbs requires a God who acts in time. Take the temporality away, and you can still salvage a version of the encounter (see Appendix G). But the verbs lose their natural force. The encounter becomes something the soul experiences as temporal while God's side is a single undifferentiated act. That is philosophically possible. It is not what the verbs mean.
Insight — Where Philosophy Meets the NDE Data
The philosophical case and the empirical data point the same direction. Philosophy shows that God is the kind of being who can meet the soul in time. NDE research shows that the dying soul experiences radical subjective time-extension: what takes seconds on the clock can feel like hours, days, or longer from within (Appendix J). Put them together: God's time is enough for genuine pursuit, and the soul's expanded subjective time provides the room in which the pursuit unfolds. The two streams converge at the bedside.32
One more thread deserves mention. The doctrine of perichoresis says 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 dwells in both. This mutual indwelling is the inner life of God. If that inner life involves real relational exchange, as DeWeese, Mullins, and others argue, then the Trinity itself is a form of intra-divine dynamism. The same God whose inner life is relationally dynamic meets the dying soul relationally dynamically.33
This is not a proof. It is a convergence. The relational dynamism within God fits naturally with a God who relates dynamically to creatures. The static timeless model, by contrast, must explain how a God with no internal succession can produce the relational richness Scripture ascribes to both the inner-Trinitarian life and God's engagement with the world.
The book's central thesis depends on divine temporality. A God who really pursues, really responds, really waits, and really concludes is a God in time. The philosophical case for that conclusion is strong, grounded in Mullins, Wolterstorff, Craig, DeWeese, and others. The biblical case is even stronger: the God of Genesis 6, of Exodus 32, of Psalm 95, of the Incarnation itself, is a God who acts in temporal sequence.34
Readers who are committed to divine timelessness for other reasons should not put this book down. Appendix G shows how the encounter can be reframed on the timeless view. The cost is some loss of relational dynamism on God's side. The core of the thesis survives: the dying soul still meets Christ, still chooses, still decides. But the natural and primary framework for the encounter is the one this appendix has developed: a God who acts in time, meeting a soul whose subjective time has been opened wide.
Note — For the Timelessness Reader
If you hold classical divine timelessness and have read this appendix with growing discomfort, Appendix G is written for you. It takes the Stump-Kretzmann ET-simultaneity model seriously, shows how the encounter can be redescribed within it, and is honest about what is preserved and what is lost. This book does not require you to abandon timelessness. It does ask you to consider what price timelessness pays at the bedside.
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. Really listening. Really speaking. Really waiting for her answer.
The verbs are true.
Note — The Verbs Are True
This is the pastoral heart of the appendix. When we say Christ pursues the dying, we do not mean he is the static cause of an experience the soul labels "pursuit." We mean he pursues. When we say he waits, we do not mean the soul experiences a delay that has no corresponding patience in God. We mean he waits. Divine temporality makes the verbs literal. And the dying need them to be literal.35
↑ 1. The problem of temporal predicates applied to a timeless God is developed rigorously in Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 3, "What is Eternity?" The section "Can We Talk About Eternity?" addresses this point directly.
↑ 2. "Dynamic divine temporality" is the term used throughout this book for the view that God genuinely experiences temporal succession while transcending creaturely clock-time. For a broader survey, see Deng, God and Time, §4 ("God in Time").
↑ 3. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, V.VI. The Latin definition is: aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio. The translation and context are given in Deng, God and Time, §3 ("God Beyond Time"). For the major contemporary defenders: Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time (1st ed., 1988); Stump and Kretzmann, "Eternity," Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981); Leftow, Time and Eternity (1991).
↑ 4. The four-views survey in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001) offers the best entry point. The four positions: Helm (timeless eternity), Padgett (relative timelessness), Craig (timelessness and omnitemporality), Wolterstorff (unqualified divine temporality).
↑ 5. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). The preface, "Why Bother Thinking About God and Time?", frames the stakes with an eschatological case study.
↑ 6. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 5, "Presentism, Creation, and the Timeless God." Mullins states the two main problems: "First, the timeless God cannot create a presentist temporal universe out of nothing. Second, the timeless God cannot sustain a presentist universe in existence."
↑ 7. Craig formalizes this argument in Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), p. 100. He restates it in "Timelessness & Omnitemporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. Mullins develops the same argument independently in The End of the Timeless God, ch. 4, "Presentism, Omniscience, and the Timeless God."
↑ 8. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 7, "The Incarnation of the Timeless God." Holland develops the argument at book length in God, Time, and the Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), esp. chs. 2 and 5–6. DeWeese calls it "the Argument from the Incarnation" in God and the Nature of Time, ch. 8.
↑ 9. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 3, esp. the sections "Divine Immutability" and "Behold the Happy Wrath of God: Divine Impassibility." The framing of why the question matters appears in the preface.
↑ 10. For the most careful contemporary defense of timelessness against these arguments, see Helm, Eternal God (1st ed., 1988), and his "Divine Timeless Eternity" with "Response to Critics" in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views.
↑ 11. Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. Holland summarizes the strategy well: "the atemporalist bears the burden of proof: an answer must be given as to why important passages of Scripture describing God's relation to time require a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation" (Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, p. 143).
↑ 12. Wolterstorff develops the radio/one-o'clock example in "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. Holland's summary: Wolterstorff argues that "in order to make the determination on when to turn on the radio, he must be aware of when the present event is" (Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, p. 138).
↑ 13. The cat-versus-numbers test appears in Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality." Wolterstorff's criterion: "When it comes to nonevents, I propose that we take whether or not something has a history as the determinate of whether or not it is in time" (quoted in Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, p. 139).
↑ 14. Craig develops the hybrid view in Time and Eternity, pp. 86–87, and in "Timelessness & Omnitemporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. Craig's summary in Four Views: "So God is timeless without the temporal creation, and he has become temporal since creating a world in which time is real" (p. 27).
↑ 15. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology (London: Routledge, 2025), Section II. Helm's remark about Craig's "explanatory silence" is quoted in Mullins's discussion of the transition problem.
↑ 16. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, Routledge Philosophy of Religion Series (London: Routledge, 2004), chs. 9–10. DeWeese's "third option" holds that metaphysical time prior to creation is constituted by the causal succession of God's mental states, with perichoresis read dynamically.
↑ 17. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 8: "The Argument from Personality," "The Argument from Dynamic Time," and "The Argument from the Incarnation."
↑ 18. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Section III, ch. 6, "The Trinity." The perichoretic argument for divine temporality is the heart of Mullins's constructive case.
↑ 19. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, ch. 6, subsections on "The Charge of Arianism" and the inconsistency problem. Mullins argues that "the doctrine of divine processions leads to ontological subordinationism" and that the temporalist is better served by abandoning it.
↑ 20. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Section III, ch. 7, "Divine Sovereignty and Providence."
↑ 21. Deng quotes and summarizes Mullins's conclusion in God and Time, §4. The quotation is from Mullins, The End of the Timeless God.
↑ 22. Deng, God and Time, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), §4, "God in Time."
↑ 23. Scott, The God of Time: How God's Foreknowledge Protects Freewill (TopLink Publishing, 2018). Scott writes to defend exhaustive foreknowledge against open theism, not to argue for the position this book takes. His affirmation of God's temporal presence is incidental but welcome. See the chapter "Definition of Terms."
↑ 24. Mullins, God and Emotion, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), §5, "The Wrath of God and Other Moral Judgments." Mullins notes that the concept of divine wrath appears over 400 times in the Hebrew Bible.
↑ 25. Mullins, God and Emotion, §§5.1–5.2. Divine wrath is "rational, patient, and responsive" (the terms are Mullins's). It is a moral judgment "caused by and answering to" what creatures actually do.
↑ 26. Mullins, God and Emotion, §4.3.2, "The Impassible God Cannot Be Moved." For the connection between omniscience and experiential knowledge, see §3.2, "Omniscience and Experiential Knowledge."
↑ 27. The application of Mullins's argument to the moment-of-death encounter is this book's own extension. The connection between divine emotional responsiveness and the temporal character of the encounter is developed more fully in Chapter 13.
↑ 28. Mullins discusses divine simplicity in The End of the Timeless God, ch. 3, "Divine Simplicity." The distinction between essential unity and metaphysical partlessness is developed in the temporalist literature by DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 8, and by Wolterstorff in "Divine Simplicity," Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991).
↑ 29. The distinction between essential and relational immutability is a standard move in the temporalist literature. See Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 86–87. Mullins treats immutability in The End of the Timeless God, ch. 3, "Divine Immutability."
↑ 30. Craig discusses the neo-Lorentzian interpretation of relativity in Time and Eternity, pp. 54–56, including the John Bell material on the "sea change" in physics. DeWeese treats the issue in God and the Nature of Time, ch. 3, "Physics and Time." The full treatment for this book is in Appendix N.
↑ 31. The application of divine temporality to the stages of the moment-of-death encounter is developed in the book's working model, Appendix O, and in the synthetic treatment in Chapter 28.
↑ 32. The convergence of the philosophical and empirical streams is the organizing insight of the Part Two cluster. The empirical data are presented in Appendix J and Appendix K. The philosophical framework is established in this appendix (F) and in Appendix H (A-theory).
↑ 33. The perichoretic grounding of divine temporality is DeWeese's argument in God and the Nature of Time, chs. 9–10, and Mullins's in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, ch. 6. Both read perichoresis dynamically rather than statically.
↑ 34. The biblical texts most relevant to the case for divine temporality include: Gen. 6:6 (God grieves); Exod. 32:14 (God relents); Ps. 95:7–8 ("today, if you hear his voice"); Isa. 46:9–10 (God declares the end from the beginning, implying he knows the difference between the two); 2 Pet. 3:9 (God is patient, "not wishing that any should perish"); Jer. 18:7–10 (God changes course in response to a nation's repentance or stubbornness). Each presupposes temporal engagement. For the exegetical case, see DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, "The Evidence from Scripture."
↑ 35. The pastoral significance of divine temporality is developed in Chapter 34 and returned to in the book's conclusion, Chapter 35.