by Mark Brumley

Because there are any number of popular misconceptions about eternity, catechists and other religious educators would do well to think through the subject, drawing on theology and traditional Catholic philosophy.

The human soul is also eternal but not as God is. Unlike God, the soul has a beginning and is subject to change. Once created, however, it will continue to exist forever. Its fate will be either eternal life with God (heaven) or the eternal death of damnation without Him (hell). The same is true of pure spirits known as angels. They too are eternal, either eternally saved or damned. But they also had a beginning and are subject to change, though in a different manner than human beings, who constantly undergo change due to their physical existence. Angels exist in what is known as aeviternity, a state which lies between the constant change of time as we experience it and timelessness.

Traditional Christian theology — Catholic, Ortho dox and Protestant — affirms that time itself is an aspect of creation. It is meaningless, then, to speak of the time before creation or ask, “What was God doing before He created the universe?” “Before” is a time-related word, hence it is meaningless without time. How then can we hold that time, like the creation itself, had a beginning? The answer is: insofar as time, like creation as a whole, is finite. The past is composed of a finite number of events, hence the time in which these events occurred is finite. There have been only so many things that have happened, however staggering a number that might be.

Interestingly, the scientific theory of relativism also links time to the cosmos. This scientific notion of time must be distinguished, however, from the philosophical understanding of time. Science means by time what is really “measurable time.” If time cannot in a given circumstance be measured, many scientists argue it does not exist. But our inability to measure time accurately in a particular circumstance does not automatically mean there is no time. It may only mean that our instruments are ineffective or, as is the case with measurements at the subatomic level, that our instruments affect what they are trying to measure, not that time does not exist there.

Of course we can not go into an elaborate response here. Suffice it to say that God, being outside time, does not foresee or foreknow, in the strictest sense. For foreseeing and foreknowing, imply seeing or knowing in advance. And “in advance” implies ahead of time. Since God is beyond time, He simply “sees” or “knows” from his vantage point in eternity, so to speak, what you are doing, at all points in your existence, not what you will do. All moments of your life are equally present to God. As your freedom is not impeded by my seeing or knowing what you are doing now, neither is it by God’s seeing or knowing it. The difference is, of course, that for God, all moments of your life are equally available, whereas for me, traveling along in time with you, I experience only one moment at a time.

The idea that an eternal God cannot be personal is based on an anthropomorphic view of what makes a person. Because human persons exist in time, it does not follow that all persons must or that in order for God to be personal, He must exist in time.

Another criticism of God’s timelessness is that it supposedly denies Him the power to love. This view is often espoused by process theologians, who hold that God Himself is evolving and growing over time. The traditional understanding of God as timeless and therefore changeless means that he is not affected by anything and, a fortiori, by anything in time. But, so it is argued, if God really loves us, He will be affected by our suffering, our joys, our prayers, etc. For human beings who love are affected by such things; those who are not, we say, do not truly love. And if God is affected by things such as our suffering, our joys, our prayers, the argument goes, He must be capable of change and therefore He cannot be timeless.

One problem with this argument is that it makes human love the measure of divine love. Merely because a human being who is unaffected by others’ sufferings and joys cannot be said to love others, it does not follow that God cannot love us, despite His being unaffected or changeless. For we experience the sufferings, joys and prayers of others in succession. Con sequently, we must be affected or changed by them. God, on the other hand, knows them “all at once,” so to speak, from His eternal vantage point. Consequently, His love comprehends them “all at once”; He does not need to pass from one state of awareness regarding us to another.

Furthermore, the argument is sometimes made that for God to truly love us, He must suffer along with us, which implies change and therefore time in God. To this at least two things can be said. First, even if God were understood as, in some sense, suffering along with us, this need not imply change in Him. For God could have “suffered with us” from all eternity — though, in fact, He did not. Second, once again we must not make human love, which is by nature finite, the criterion by which we measure the divine love, which is infinite. Human love may well require the lover to suffer with the beloved in the sense of undergoing some diminution of being or enduring along with the beloved some evil. But God’s love, being infinite, need not do so. He is not limited to loving as we love. Unlike human beings, God can truly love us without also having to suffer evil Himself along with us. True love of another involves willing the good of the other. There is nothing in the idea of God’s timelessness that prevents Him from eternally willing the good of others. Therefore, there is no contradiction between God’s timelessness and His love for us.

Critics also hold that divine atemporality eliminates God’s freedom. For if God is eternal and therefore changeless, His will cannot change either. And if so, so the argument goes, He can not will not to create; He must will to create; He has no time in which to change His will. If He must create, He is not free not to create and therefore is not free at all.

But this argument fails to grasp what it means to say God is eternal and that God freely chooses to create. Certainly, according to the traditional view of God’s timelessness, God is eternally the Creator. That is, from eternity God wills the creation of the world in time (i.e., He eternally wills it to have a beginning and to exist in a succession of events). God’s will to do so cannot change, not because He has no freedom but because He exists fully in the divine now; there is no subsequent moment for His will to change in. What He wills, He wills. It is true that “He wills changelessly to will as He wills,” as we might say. But this is no more a violation of freedom than the fact that I will right now to discuss God’s freedom and cannot at the same instant will not to do so is a violation of my freedom. Of course I can subsequently change my mind because for my limited way of existing there must be a “subsequently” in which to change it. For God there is not. But this does not diminish His freedom to will as He chooses in the eternal now, nor does it oblige God to create. It means only that if God chooses to create — and He need not — He unchangingly chooses to do so.

A fourth argument against divine atemporality: it contradicts the Bible. Such a claim, however, is based on a literal, anthropomorphic interpretation of biblical language about God. Some Fundamentalists hold this view, as do Mormons.

With Fundamentalists, one might argue as follows. That God, outside of time, causes from eternity certain effects in time which give the appearance, from a finite, human vantage point, of His “moving along in time,” should no more be taken as reflecting the whole story than does the fact that in Scripture, God speaks as if He had a body, is said to change His mind or does not seem to know everything. We would not say that God has a body because the Scripture speaks of “the arm of the Lord,” or that God is unsure of Himself because He “repented of having made man” (Gen 6:6). Nor do we say that God is ignorant because He brought animals “to the man to see what he would name them” (Gen 2:19) or because He asked Adam, “Where are you?” (Gen 3:9). Likewise, we shouldn’t conclude that God is limited by time because the Bible speaks of Him as if He were temporal as we are. To reveal Himself to finite, human beings in time God had to speak this way to some extent.

Unfortunately, this argument will not work for Mormons, who hold a more thorough-going anthropomorphic view of God, i.e., they believe that God has a body and is really an “exalted man.” Tackling Mor mon ideas about God requires a combination of philosophical, theological and biblical arguments. In es sence, it amounts to showing Mor mons that their God is too small — that the God of the Bible is infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing and uncaused. The God of the Bible was never a man, contrary to what Mormonism affirms. Ultimately, one must choose between the God of biblical revelation, on the one hand, and the God of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on the other.

A final argument against God’s atemporality is that the notion is incoherent — that it is self-contradictory or meaningless. All moments cannot be equally present to God, so the argument goes, otherwise all moments would be occurring simultaneously, which would be nonsense. Consequently, God cannot be atemporal, if by this one means that God exists in such a way that all moments of time are simultaneous to Him. Moreover, to say that God does not exist at any point in time is tantamount to saying God does not exist. For it means that we cannot say God exists now, and if He does not exist now, He does not exist (present tense). Therefore, if we wish to affirm God’s existence, we must affirm that He exists now. And if He exists now, He must exist in time, for now is a moment in time.

The trouble with this argument is that it misconstrues the sense in which we can speak of all moments being equally or simultaneously present to God and of God’s eternity as an eternal now. Strictly speaking, all moments are not simultaneous to God, for even simultaneity implies a measure of time and God is utterly timeless. As God’s omnipresence does not reduce all places to one, nor does it mean God is “spread out” over all places, so too God’s eternity does not reduce all moments to one, nor does it mean God “extends” over all moments. Rather, it means God transcends the limitation of time altogether, as He transcends the limitations of place.

As for whether God must be thought of as being in time if He is to be thought of as existing at all (for if He exists, He must be said to exist now), God can be said to exist immanently in time, so to speak, as, among other things, the cause of temporal things coming to be and continuing to be. Thus, there is a sense in which He does exist now. It is just that He is not limited to existing now, as we are.

Furthermore, to say that for something to exist it must be said to exist now, can mean at least two things. It can mean that if it exists (present tense) it has ordinary existence and must therefore exist in time (existing now, possibly in the past and possibly still in the future). Or it can mean, as in the case of God, that its existence is not bound by time at all; it simply exists. We can speak of God existing now, in an accommodated sense, as if He were a thing with ordinary existence (existing now, possibly in the past and possibly still in the future). But we do so on the analogy of finite things which exist in time, not because existence as such requires God to be in the present the way finite beings are (in time).

An analogy often used to illustrate God’s relation to things in time is that of an author and his story. The events of the story unfold in relation to one another — this follows that, and so on. The author knows the beginning, middle and end of the story all at once (even though, being finite, he could not write it that way). In a sense, he is in every scene of the story, along with his characters. And yet he is beyond the story. His time is not the story’s time. The events of his life transpire on a separate temporal track, so to speak, from that of his characters.

We can think of something similar with respect to God and the “story” of our lives. Of course the analogy limps in a number of respects. The author of a story is in time, albeit a different time than his characters; his characters have no free will to help determine how the story ends. God, on the other hand, is not in time at all. And his “characters” really affect the outcome of the “story.” Never theless, the main point of the analogy holds.

There are no good reasons, then, to reject the traditional Christian understanding of God’s eternity. Even so, making this truth our own requires thinking and praying, which is time well-spent because it prepares us for eternity.