Chapter 13
Why the Encounter Requires a God Who Acts in Time
Condensed Edition
Picture a woman dying. Her body is failing. And in that slim passage between her last steady heartbeat and the silence that follows, Christ meets her.
He attends. He listens. He speaks. She resists. He pursues. She questions. He answers. She breaks. She surrenders. He receives.
Every verb in that sentence is a time verb. Each one points to a before and an after. Listening comes after hearing. Answering comes after being asked. Receiving comes after the surrender it receives. The whole encounter unfolds in a sequence, step following step, moment giving way to moment.
This matters more than it may seem at first. The book's central thesis says that every dying person meets the risen Christ at the moment of death. That meeting is not a flash of light or a wordless impression. It is a real encounter: pursuit, persuasion, conversation, decision. And if it is real, then the God doing the pursuing must himself be able to act in time.1
Can he? That question has occupied Christian philosophers for nearly two thousand years. And how we answer it shapes everything else this book claims.
I want to sketch two broad positions. I'll keep the sketch short here, because the full philosophical case lives in Appendix F and the rest of the Part Two appendices. But the reader needs to see the terrain before we cross it.
The first position is divine timelessness. On this view, God exists entirely outside of time. He does not experience a past, a present, or a future. He possesses his whole life "all at once," in a single eternal moment that never passes. The Latin phrase for this is tota simul (roughly, "all together"), and it comes from the sixth-century philosopher Boethius.2
This has been the dominant view in Western theology for centuries. Augustine taught it. Aquinas built his theology around it. Anselm assumed it. In our own time, philosophers like Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, Brian Leftow, and Paul Helm have defended it with care.3
The intuition behind it is real and worth respecting. A God who exists outside time cannot be surprised, cannot be threatened by decay, and cannot be limited by the passage of moments the way you and I are. His knowledge is complete, his life fully realized, always. There is grandeur in this picture.
But there is also a problem. And the problem is the one I opened this chapter with.
The second position is divine temporality. On this view, God genuinely experiences time. He has a real before and a real after. His life includes real succession: he acts, then acts again. He responds to prayers when they are prayed, grieves over evil when it occurs, and meets the dying soul in the soul's own now.4
God's time may be very different from ours. It may be richer, deeper, unconstrained by the clock that ticks on our nightstands. But it is real time, with real progression, and it allows for the kind of dynamic, back-and-forth interaction that words like "pursuit" and "persuasion" demand.
This view has strong defenders today. Nicholas Wolterstorff argues for what he calls "unqualified divine temporality." William Lane Craig defends a hybrid position: God was timeless before creation and has been temporal ever since. Garrett DeWeese defends what he calls "omnitemporality," with God's time grounded in the relational life of the Trinity. R. T. Mullins has mounted what I think is the most thorough recent case against timelessness and for a fully temporal God.5
I follow this second view. And the rest of this chapter will explain why, in compressed form. The full argument lives in the Part Two appendices. Appendix F develops the positive case for divine temporality. Appendix G asks how timelessness defenders might respond. Appendix H takes up the philosophy of time itself.
I think the simplest and strongest argument for divine temporality is the one Craig states as five premises in Time and Eternity. It runs like this. If God knows everything, then God knows what is happening right now. He knows, for instance, that it is now June and not December. He knows that the prayer being offered in this moment is being offered, not merely that it will be offered or has been offered. Philosophers call facts like these tensed facts, because they include tense: "now," "is happening," "was," "will be."6
Here is the catch. If God is timeless, he cannot know tensed facts. A timeless being has no "now." For a timeless God, every moment is equally present (or equally absent, depending on how you look at it). He cannot know that this prayer is being prayed now, because for him there is no "now" to anchor the knowledge.7
Key Argument. If God knows everything, he knows what is happening now. But a timeless being has no "now." So either God is not timeless, or he does not know everything. Since Christians affirm God's complete knowledge, the argument pushes toward affirming that God is temporal.
Craig states this argument crisply: a being that knows all truths must know truths like "the year 2025 is present." But that truth changes with time. Yesterday it was true that "December 31, 2024 is present." Tomorrow it will not be. A timeless being, stuck in an unchanging eternity, cannot track these changes. And a God who cannot track them does not know everything.8
Mullins presses the same point from a different angle. In The End of the Timeless God, he argues that timelessness creates problems not just for God's knowledge but for God's ability to create. A timeless God cannot stand in a before-and-after causal relation to creation without contradiction. If God timelessly causes the universe, there is no moment "before" the universe and no transition from non-existence to existence. But creation, on its face, is exactly that kind of transition.9
And there is the Incarnation. The eternal Son of God became a human being in time. He was born. He grew. He died. He rose. These are events in a sequence. Mullins and Holland both argue that a truly timeless being cannot undergo events in sequence. If the Son entered time at the Incarnation, then the divine life includes temporal succession, and strict timelessness is false.10
Wolterstorff adds a test I find hard to resist. He asks: what places something in time? His answer: having a history. A number, like the number seven, has no history. It does not do anything, then do something else. A cat has a history. It is born, it hunts, it sleeps, it dies. Things with histories are in time; things without histories are not.11
Does God have a history? Wolterstorff says yes. God spoke to Moses at the burning bush. Later, God spoke to the prophets. Later still, God sent his Son. Still later, God raised him from the dead. That is a history. And a being with a history is a being in time.12
Here is the part that matters most for this book. Wolterstorff observes that God responds to his people's cries. And you can only respond to a cry at the time it is being cried. You cannot respond to Tuesday's cry on Monday. If God responds to the dying soul's prayer at the moment the soul prays it, then God is acting in that moment. He is in real engagement with a real person in a real now.13
Wolterstorff also points out that tensed facts cannot be translated away. His example is simple but effective: suppose it is one o'clock and you are listening to the radio, waiting for the news. You know that the news starts at one o'clock. But you also need to know that it is one o'clock right now. That second piece of knowledge is a tensed fact. A timeless being, with no "now," cannot possess it. And a God who cannot know what time it is cannot respond to a prayer at the time it is prayed.
This is not a minor point for our purposes. The entire encounter this book describes is built on the idea that Christ meets the dying person in the dying person's present. He hears. He speaks. He waits for a reply. He responds to that reply. Take away the present tense, and the encounter collapses into something static, something more like a photograph than a conversation.
Primary Source.
"In death the individual existence takes its place on the confines of all being, suddenly awake, in full knowledge and liberty. The hidden dynamism of existence by which a man has lived until then—though without his ever having been able to exploit it in its fullest measure—is now brought to completion, freely and consciously." — Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death, Preface
Boros's description of the dying moment is packed with temporal verbs: takes its place, awake, is brought to completion. The soul does something. It arrives somewhere. A process finishes. Every phrase assumes that the moment of death has an inside, a duration, a sequence. That assumption only works if the God who meets the soul in that moment is himself acting in time. (We will meet Boros in full in Chapter 16.)
There is one more philosophical thread worth mentioning before we turn to Scripture. DeWeese and Mullins both argue that God's temporality is grounded in the life of the Trinity itself. The three persons of the Trinity relate to one another in real, dynamic love. The Father gives. The Son receives. The Spirit proceeds. Theologians call this mutual indwelling perichoresis, a Greek word that suggests a kind of circling dance. If that inner life is genuinely relational, then it includes before and after, giving and receiving, acting and responding. God's time does not begin with creation. It begins in the eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit. DeWeese develops this argument in God and the Nature of Time, chapters 9–10. Mullins develops it in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chapter 6.
The philosophical arguments do not stand alone. Scripture consistently describes God as a being who acts in time, who responds to what happens, and who is moved by what he encounters.14
In Genesis 6:6, God looks at the corruption of the earth and grieves. The Hebrew is vivid: "The LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (ESV). This is not a timeless being contemplating all events at once. It is a God who sees what has happened and is pained by it.15
In Exodus 32:14, Moses pleads with God after the golden calf incident. God relents. The text says he "relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people." Whatever we make of the metaphysics, the biblical portrait is clear. God heard a prayer, reconsidered, and changed course. That is a temporal sequence.16
In Genesis 18, God walks with Abraham and discusses the fate of Sodom. He listens to Abraham's negotiation. He agrees to spare the city if ten righteous are found. That is a conversation, and a conversation requires before and after, speaking and listening, proposal and response.17
I know the traditional reply. These are anthropomorphisms, figures of speech. God does not really grieve, really relent, really walk. He only appears to, accommodating himself to human language. I respect this reading, but I think it costs more than it gains. If every temporal verb applied to God in Scripture is a figure of speech, then we know almost nothing about what God actually does. We are left with a God who is real but unreachable by our language. And I'm not sure that is the God the Bible is trying to show us.18
For the fuller biblical case, including the theology of chronos (clock-time) and kairos (appointed time), see Chapter 15 and Appendix L.
Fair enough, says the defender of timelessness. But we have a reply. Stump and Kretzmann developed a concept called ET-simultaneity (short for "eternity-time simultaneity"). The idea is that God, though outside time, is simultaneously present to every moment in time. Think of a person standing on a hilltop who can see the whole road at once, while the traveler on the road sees only the stretch in front of him. God's view is like the hilltop view.19
On this model, God does not need a "before" and "after" to interact with the dying soul. He is eternally present to that moment, just as he is eternally present to every other moment. The interaction is real, but it is not sequential on God's side.
I understand the appeal of this. It preserves God's timelessness while trying to maintain genuine interaction. But I think it loses something essential to the encounter this book describes. If God does not genuinely wait for the soul's response before offering his next word, then the conversation is not really a conversation. It is a finished script, performed all at once from eternity. The soul may experience it as sequential, but God does not. And a pursuit that is not experienced as a pursuit by the pursuer is a strange kind of pursuit.20
Note: The Timelessness Alternative. I believe the moment-of-death encounter works best with a temporal God. But readers who hold to divine timelessness can still find the core thesis of this book plausible, especially through the ET-simultaneity framework. Appendix G is written specifically for those readers. It explores how far the encounter can be preserved on a timeless view, what must be adjusted, and what dynamism is lost. The argument in the rest of this book assumes divine temporality, but it does not absolutely require it.
Let me name three philosophical objections to divine temporality and give brief replies. Each receives a fuller treatment in the Part Two appendices.21
First, divine simplicity. Traditional theology holds that God has no parts. He is not composed of attributes the way a house is composed of bricks. Some philosophers worry that divine temporality introduces composition into God, because a temporal being has different states at different times. Reply: having different states at different times is not the same as having parts. I can be happy now and sad tomorrow without being "composed" of happiness and sadness. DeWeese argues that omnitemporality is fully compatible with a properly qualified doctrine of simplicity.22
Second, divine immutability. If God changes over time, isn't he mutable? And doesn't mutability imply imperfection? Reply: the relevant changes are relational, not constitutional. God does not become more wise or more good over time. He responds to changing creatures. A doctor who adjusts treatment as the patient's condition changes is not less stable than one who prescribes the same medicine regardless. God's character is immutable; his engagement with the world is dynamic.23
Third, Einstein's relativity. Doesn't the theory of relativity show that there is no single "now" shared by all observers? If so, talk of God acting "now" seems confused. Reply: this objection is real but overstated. Craig argues that relativity is compatible with a neo-Lorentzian interpretation that preserves absolute simultaneity. And even apart from that, God's acting in the dying person's present does not require a universal "now." It requires God's engagement with a particular soul at a particular moment.24 The fuller discussion belongs to Appendix N.
Now bring it back to the dying person.
If the thesis of this book is right, then at the moment of death, Christ meets the soul in a real encounter. The encounter is not a single instant. As Chapter 10 showed, near-death experiencers consistently report a radical stretching of subjective time. What lasts seconds by the clock may feel like hours, or longer, on the inside. And if God is temporal, then this stretching is real on both sides. God is genuinely present in the soul's expanded moment, genuinely listening, genuinely pursuing.25
Think about what this requires of God.
God attends. He turns his attention to this particular soul, in this particular moment. Not as an event he has always known about in static eternity, but as a meeting that is happening now, for him as well as for her.
God pursues. He does not simply present himself and wait. He acts to draw the soul. When she resists, he responds to the resistance. When she questions, he speaks to the question. This is back-and-forth. It is responsive. It takes time.
God waits. He gives the soul subjective time to process, to feel, to decide. He does not rush the conclusion. He is patient, as 2 Peter 3:9 says he is patient, "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance."26
God concludes. When the soul's response is finally settled, God receives the soul or honors its refusal. There is an ending to the encounter. That ending comes after a beginning. And between the beginning and the ending, something real has happened.
Every one of these verbs requires a God who is in time.
Insight: Two Streams Converge. The philosophical case for divine temporality and the empirical NDE data on time-dilation point in the same direction. Philosophy says God can act in time. NDE research says the dying person's time expands. Put those together and you get an encounter that is real on God's side and roomy on the soul's side. A meeting long enough for pursuit, persuasion, and a free response. The two streams meet at the bedside.
There is a pastoral consequence that I don't want to pass over quickly.
If God is temporally engaged with the dying person, then your prayers at the bedside are not too late. You are praying into a live moment. God hears you in the same present in which he is meeting your loved one. Your prayer participates in what is happening right now, in the encounter that is unfolding inside what looks to you like silence.27
I have sat with families who kept praying long after the monitors went flat. Some felt foolish. They shouldn't have. If this book is right, and if divine temporality is right, then those prayers were landing in real time. A conversation was still going on inside that final moment, a conversation the clock could not measure.
That is what the question of God and time comes down to at the bedside. Not an abstract debate about eternity. A question about whether God is really there, really listening, really working, in the moment your loved one needs him most.
Let me gather the threads.
The moment-of-death encounter requires a God who can act in time. The philosophical arguments give strong grounds for believing that he does. Craig's tensed-fact argument, Wolterstorff's history test, Mullins's case against timelessness: each points the same way. The biblical portrait confirms this, showing a God who grieves, relents, listens, walks, and responds. The philosophical objections to divine temporality (simplicity, immutability, relativity) are real but answerable. And the alternative, ET-simultaneity, preserves a form of interaction but loses the responsive, dynamic character that the encounter demands.28
This chapter has offered only a sketch. The fuller treatment lives in Appendix F (the positive case), Appendix G (the timelessness alternative), and Appendix H (the philosophy of time itself). The next chapter, Chapter 14, takes up the question from the human side. How do subjective time and clock time come apart? And what does that mean for the length of the dying moment?
But the central claim of this chapter is simple. When you sit beside your dying loved one, the God who is meeting her is not "outside time" in some way that makes the meeting unreal. He is with her in her now. He is really listening, really speaking, really waiting for her answer.
The verbs are true.
↑ 1. The relationship between God's temporality and the possibility of a genuine encounter is the organizing question of the Part Two appendices (Appendix F through Appendix O). This chapter introduces the question; those appendices develop it.
↑ 2. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, V.VI. The classic definition: eternity is "the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of boundless life" (interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio). For a clear survey of the atemporalist tradition from Boethius to the present, see Natalja Deng, God and Time, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), §3, "God Beyond Time."
↑ 3. Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Introduction and chs. 1–4; Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, "Eternity," Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 8 (1981): 429–458; Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). The Stump-Kretzmann and Leftow works are not project-resident; I engage them through Deng, God and Time, §3, and Garrett DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, Routledge Philosophy of Religion Series (London: Routledge, 2004), ch. 6, "Atemporality: Contemporary Statements."
↑ 4. Deng, God and Time, §4, "God in Time," provides a concise overview of the temporalist positions, including Wolterstorff, Craig, Swinburne, Padgett, and DeWeese.
↑ 5. Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Gregory E. Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001); William Lane Craig, "Timelessness & Omnitemporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views; Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), pp. 86–87; DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chs. 8–10; R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology (London: Routledge, 2025), Section III.
↑ 6. The five-premise formulation appears in Craig, Time and Eternity, p. 100. The argument also appears in compressed form in his Four Views chapter, "Timelessness & Omnitemporality."
↑ 7. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 100–107, where he addresses the objections of Kvanvig, Wierenga, and Leftow to this argument. Mullins develops the same point independently in The End of the Timeless God, ch. 4, "Presentism, Omniscience, and the Timeless God."
↑ 8. The force of the argument depends on affirming the A-theory (or "tensed" or "dynamic") view of time, on which the distinction between past, present, and future is real and not merely a feature of human perception. Craig defends the A-theory at length in Time and Eternity, chs. 4–5 (especially pp. 130–131, where he argues that our experience of temporal passage is a properly basic belief). See also Appendix H for the full A-theory/B-theory discussion.
↑ 9. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 5, "Presentism, Creation, and the Timeless God." The argument: if God timelessly wills the existence of the universe, then the universe exists at every moment of God’s life—but God’s life has no moments. Creation ex nihilo implies a transition, and transitions require time.
↑ 10. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 7, "The Incarnation of the Timeless God." See also Richard A. Holland Jr., God, Time, and the Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), chs. 2 and 5–6. Holland argues at book length that the Incarnation is the most fundamental doctrine distinguishing Christianity from other theisms, and that it indicates the presence of sequence in the divine life. Appendix M develops this argument in full.
↑ 11. Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. The cat-versus-numbers test is Wolterstorff’s way of distinguishing temporal from atemporal entities: anything that has a history is temporal; anything that does not (like a number) is not.
↑ 12. Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. His argument is that the burden of proof lies on the atemporalist, since Scripture portrays God as having a history—speaking first to Moses, later to Jesus—and this should be read literally unless strong reasons forbid it.
↑ 13. Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. The "responds to cries" observation is closely tied to Wolterstorff’s radio/one-o’clock example: an agent who knows it is one o’clock knows a tensed fact, and an agent who responds to a cry must know when the cry is being uttered.
↑ 14. This chapter owns the exegesis of Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:14, and Genesis 18 as divine-temporality texts. See the Argument Ownership Map in the master prompt. For the fuller biblical theology of time, see Chapter 15 and Appendix L.
↑ 15. Gen 6:6 (ESV). The Hebrew verb nacham (here in the Niphal) carries the sense of being grieved or moved to sorrow. Mullins uses this and similar passages in The End of the Timeless God, ch. 3, including the section "Behold the Happy Wrath of God," to argue that the relational engagement of the biblical God is incompatible with an undifferentiated static eternity. See also Mullins, God and Emotion, §§5.1–5.2.
↑ 16. Exod 32:14 (ESV). Paul Helm contends that such texts are anthropomorphic and do not describe real temporal change in God; see Helm, Eternal God, Introduction. I discuss why I find this reading unsatisfying in the body text. The fullest philosophical case is in Appendix F.
↑ 17. Gen 18:16–33 (ESV). Abraham bargains with God: fifty righteous, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten. At each step, God agrees. The text presents this as a real-time negotiation, not a predetermined outcome merely revealed in sequential language.
↑ 18. Wolterstorff argues that the atemporalist carries the burden of proof: the default reading of Scripture's temporal language is literal, unless strong philosophical reasons compel otherwise. He finds that the philosophical reasons usually offered (simplicity, immutability) are not strong enough to overturn the plain sense of the text. See "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views.
↑ 19. Stump and Kretzmann, "Eternity," Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 8 (1981): 429–458. The ET-simultaneity concept is summarized in Deng, God and Time, §3, and discussed at length in DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6. The "hilltop" analogy is a common illustration, though the precise formulation varies among defenders.
↑ 20. DeWeese's critique of ET-simultaneity is in God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6. His concern, which I share, is that the model preserves a kind of relation between God and creatures but not the responsive, sequential interaction that the biblical portrait and the moment-of-death thesis both require.
↑ 21. Each objection receives sustained treatment in the Part Two appendices: simplicity and immutability in Appendix F; the timelessness alternative in Appendix G; relativity and the block universe in Appendix N.
↑ 22. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chs. 9–10. DeWeese argues that the perichoretic life of the Trinity grounds God’s pre-creation time without requiring composition in the strong metaphysical sense.
↑ 23. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 86–87, discusses God’s new relational states upon creation. The distinction between intrinsic and relational change is standard in the literature; see also Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, ch. 7, "Divine Sovereignty and Providence."
↑ 24. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 42–66 (the relativity discussion), with the neo-Lorentzian interpretation and the "sea change" in physics around pp. 54–56. See also DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 3, "Physics and Time." The fuller discussion belongs to Appendix N.
↑ 25. On NDE time-dilation, see Chapter 10. On the subjective-vs.-objective time distinction, see Chapter 14. The convergence between God’s temporality and the soul’s expanded subjective time is one of the central threads of this book.
↑ 26. 2 Pet 3:9 (ESV). The passage itself uses a temporal verb: God is patient. Patience is a disposition that unfolds in time; a timeless being cannot, strictly speaking, be patient, since patience requires waiting, and waiting requires a before and an after.
↑ 27. The pastoral implications of divine temporality for bedside prayer are developed further in Chapter 19 and Chapter 34.
↑ 28. For the fuller case: Appendix F (the positive case for divine temporality), Appendix G (the timelessness alternative), Appendix H (A-theory and B-theory). The working model in Appendix O integrates these threads into a single picture of what the moment of death looks like from the inside.