Interacting with “Most Moved Mover”
1: Introduction
2: Hyper-Relationality
3: Sovereignty
4: Changeability
5: Temporality
6: Conclusion
TEMPORALITY
A final component to the open view of God is the concept of His temporality. While God is above Time, in the sense that He is above finite experience and measurement of it, He is not beyond Time’s sequence of events, thus God is a temporal agent. Though He gives no specific reference, Clark Pinnock says Scripture presents God as “temporally everlasting, not timelessly eternal.” Indeed as Savior, God in Christ must somehow be in time and a realm in which he can function. Though an entirely different discussion could exist on what exactly is time, Pinnock declares that we must not loose site of the fact that God relates to His creatures within time and along a temporal path.
Pinnock says Classical Theism took a wrong step when it declared God was outside the temporal order. Classical Theists reasoned that if He was bound to the past and future, He would have lost something and also not yet arrived in another state of being. This is why timelessness and changeability are so intertwined: if God is temporal then he can change, because temporality is to experience change. Thus, the Platonic notion of timelessness was intertwined with the Christian notion of God. But Pinnock correctly reveals that a timeless God could not create a time-bound world nor exist within its history as our Redeemer. Furthermore, it would be difficult to take God’s actions within time seriously if God was timeless, just as it would be hard to imagine God as relational if He were unable to change. In the end, God is above time in the terms of our finite experience and measurement of Time, but not beyond it’s sequence.
While I understand the historical impetus behind the timelessness argument, why does this necessitate an existence inside, not outside Time? At one point he writes, “God is not thought in terms of timelessness. He makes plans and carries them out…God is inside not outside of time.” Why can God not exist both within and without Time? I understand why he critiques descriptions of a God that stands so far outside of Time that He does not directly move within nor is He directly affected by it. To say, though, that God is only time bound does not seem to resonate with Scripture’s revelation regarding the nature of God and eternity. In it we God is both the “beginning and the end” in addition to acting within History.
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