godrulz said:
God is not 'bound' by time. It is an aspect of any personal being's existence. Timelessness negates will, intellect, and emotions which require sequence/succession/duration (time). See J.R. Lucas "A treatise on time and space".
It is perfectly coherent to say that God experiences an endless duration of time vs timelessness (what ever that means). Time is a limitation for us since we are not omnipresent and are not from everlasting to everlasting. You are projecting man's limitations on God (not OT doing what you accuse us of).
You are also using circular reasoning/begging the question. A God who is from everlasting to everlasting and correctly distinguishes the fixed past from the potential future (presentism vs eternalism) is just as infinite as a so-called timeless one. This is philosophically and logically defensible. You also must wrongly assume that time is a created thing. Just as God's love is eternal with His being, so His experience of duration within His triune being has always been. This in no way limits God. It is simply how He has revealed His reality. God has always had will, intellect, emotions. This does not make those qualities greater than God anymore than saying He thinks and acts sequentially makes time greater than God. The incarnation as a significant example of God's history (=> time) and change (change implies duration/time).
The tensed phrases in Ps. 90:2 and Rev. 1:4, 8 support endless time vs timelessness.
First of all, your arguments concerning God's will, intelect and emotions are all based on anthropomorphisms of God, as if God's image could be understood by human characteristics. All humans have will, intelect, emotions, ect., yet none of those characteristics are a reflection of God in a humanity that is in sin. The image of God is not held in us but in Christ (who had will, intelect and emotions the same as us, thus making God's image something quite distinct from those qualities). Will, intelect, and emotions are not what make us like God. In fact, I find that even animals have volition (will), intelect, and emotions, yet they are not "created in the image of God." On top of this, any argument made concerning the fact that such traits must be grounded in time assumes that we could actually know what timelessness was. And the fact that such traits are contingent qualities (i.e. dependent on a cause and effect relationship) would ground them within a mortal reality, not within the immortal (or timeless). If God's will is made to depend on anything (as a will contingent upon something else), what makes God to be God has been removed. God ceases to be transcendent at all and becomes utterly contingent (not even immanant). God is driven by the Creation just as much as God is the mover of Creation (and you have accomplished nothing greater than the process theologians).
Open theists claim to be expressing a novel idea, and yet continue to succomb to Process Theology, claiming that it is not Process Theology. The God who is in "relationship" with the Creaiton in such a way as to place both the Creation and Creator into a category of agency is to follow the move of Process Theology. You are trying to get the best of both worlds and instead you frustrating the two.
A God who knows all possible futures is a God that is powerless, for the God who "knows" all futures yet who fails to be able to bring those futures about is a God with no more power than the scientist who looks at the universe and disiphers its secrets. So what if God knows the future? Such knowledge is no better than the knowledge of academicians in our own world. It is the picture of a god who sits back and lets things happen (both to God and to the Creation). Your view of the cross is that God is passively engaging the world (because if God were active in the world, that activity would necessarily be expressed in violence and coercive power, with an absence of love). Your assumption is that if God is driving events in the world, God must enter into the world in violence and coersion (God's activity will violate our "freedom"). What's funny is that you hold onto the very understanding of power that the fundamentalists claim for their own view of God, only pushing it off into the eschatological future. In this much you have distinguished yourself from the Process Theologians, only now God is schitzophrenic and not simply ignorant.
Your understanding of the Biblical grammar is appalling. First of all, tense in the Hebrew (the Psalms) has nothing to do with time. There are only two "tenses" in the Hebrew (perfect and imperfect) and both can convey past, present and furture timed actions. We only translate the tenses within finite time grounded tenses in the English because there is no other way to express action in English. The Hebrew doesn't express the time; English does. As far as your example is concerned for the Greek in Revelation, once again you have misunderstood the grammar. In verse eight we have participles being used to express God, and if you know anything about Greek grammar, tense in participles has nothing to do with time, and everything to do with aspect. A present participle expresses continuous action. The only finite verb (which has time) is the past form of
eimi (
en ). Yet the participles that we translate as "the one who is" and "the one who will be" are both present indicting a continuous action within the timeframe of the finite verb (past). So God in the past was both present and future, which is a really muttled idea (and might have something to do with the fact that John is not the best at Greek grammar). Nonetheless, the phrases neither lend themselves to being "timeless" nor expressions of "endless time."
Yet the phrase that begins verse eight does give us a concrete image of time as bounded by God. "I am the alpha and the omega," which is later qualified in Revelation by another phrase "the beginning and the end." You see, the scriptures assume that time has begun and that time will move forward towards a purpose (a
telos). Time by nature must begin and must move towards an end (otherwise there is no time). Time has limits, it is not "unlimited." Time is the contingency in which the Creation is bound (we are not eternal, i.e. unbound). For events to occur in time there must be something that initiates those events and there must be a reaction of events to the initial cause. Time by definition is a series of cause and effect (and thus time by nature has a beginning, a "head" if you will, as the scriptures convey it). If God is bounded by time (i.e. caught up in the series of cause and effect) God ceases to be God, for the real God is the one who drives the events (the one who initiates the actions and brings them to their
telos). Either time has become God, or you have caught God and the Creation up in a nihilism that is worse than any we have ever faced.
No, God is the bounds for time, and God also draws the whole Creation into Godself. Please, godrulz, tell me how you would interpret these wonderful phrases of Paul: "In God we live and move and have our being," (Acts 17) and "For out of God, and through God, and unto God are all things" (Rom. 11:36). These phrases seem to fly in the face of what you are saying.
Peace,
Michael
I actually don't see a problem with either, but I think I get your meaning, that in the OV God must act in a certain amount of time, if He wants to precede a certain event. That's probably a fair assessment of Open Theism.
