Is God Eternal or Everlasting?
One thing that all Christians believe is that God is without beginning or end. Nevertheless, there is some disagreement about whether he is eternal, existing outside of time, or everlasting, existing within time (using these terms in a technical manner, not the common use of them as synonyms). By far most Christian theologians throughout the centuries have regarded God as being outside of time, and I would venture to say that most lay Christians believe the same thing (as popularized by the works of CS Lewis and Phillip Yancey). But is this the right answer?
There doesn’t seem to be any clear biblical statements on the matter, and William Kneale has argued in his “Time and Eternity in Theology” that the Christian view of the timelessness of God wasn’t derived from the Bible at all, but was rather a hang-up from the Greek philosophy that was so prevalent during the years that the early church was first forming doctrine. This seems a likely origin for the idea to me, but I will not pursue it further here. And, at any rate, whether its origin was the Bible or hellenistic philosophy is a different debate than whether it is true or not (although, of course, if it were the case that careful exegesis showed it was actually what the Bible taught, then I would be compelled to believe it as true). Instead, I will seek to show that if God is anything like the Christian view says he is, particularly a redeeming and creating God, timelessness is an untenable position. It isn’t a very difficult argument, and I can see no real way of getting around it.
The philosophy of time, at least the little I have been exposed to, can get very complex, but all we need to examine this question is a very simple test of whether or not something is in time. I think change will do the job. What I mean is that it seems to be absolutely necessary that if anything undergoes change, it is in time. There may be more to time than this, and so change may not be a necessary condition, but it is at least a sufficient condition to establish the passage of time. Well then, how can we know if some being has undergone a temporal change? One way is to see if there is anything true of that being that either was or will be false of that being. If there is, then it seems as if it has changed, and therefore that some time had to have passed. How can we apply this test to God? Well, let’s think of creation for a second. Let’s think of the property of being “the one who created the universe.” Hopefully all Christians will say that this is a property that is had only by God. That is, it is true of God that he has the property “the one who created the universe.” But pay attention to the tense of created. If God really did create the universe from nothing, then it has not always been true of God that he has had this property, for presumably the universe has not always existed. This means that time has passed from God’s perspective.
Here’s a further example. Think of the property of “knowing it is true that Jeremy is at this very moment writing a blog.” I’d like to think that this is a property that God has, but which he did not have twenty minutes ago (since that would have made him mistaken). Something about God then has changed, namely his knowledge. Twenty minutes ago, he knew the proposition “Jeremy is at this very moment writing a blog” was false, but now he knows it is true. What else can this mean but that time is passing from his perspective as it is from mine.
There are many similar examples I could give, as well as other arguments from the type of absurdities that arise from the block universe that is implied in God-as-timeless views, but I think the examples given suffice to show that God must experience the passing of time along with us. There is a difference, however, that must be stressed: God is still the master of time in that everything that occurs within it is under his control. In addition, the view of God as everlasting but not eternal in no way diminishes his foreknowledge nor makes him any less powerful. It just allows us to have a more realistic (and biblical) view of God.
As Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff concludes in his survey of the matter, “Though God is within time, yet he is Lord of time. The whole array of contingent temporal events is within his power…And that, along with the specific pattern of what he does, grounds all authentically biblical worship of, and obedience to, God. It is not because he is outside of time…that we are to worship and obey God. It is because of what he can and does bring about within time…”