cphil_contin2

From the Christian view of reality, all these proposed solutions to the problem of continuity attempt to solve it by either ignoring God or reducing God to an impersonal being, an super “It”, and ignoring the fundamental ontological difference between God as the Creator and all other beings as created by Him. Augustine’s solution has dominated Christian theology; that is, that God is timeless, beyond time and space, and that time with space was created by God when in the beginning He created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1). This solution is only partially correct; God created time and space (space-time) when He created the heavens and the earth. But as we saw above, Augustine borrowed the Neo-Platonic concept of God (the one Being) as timeless, and interpreted it as an “eternal now”, without a before or after, without a beginning or end. This solution of Augustine’s has raised many problems: for example, if God is timeless, then how could the Son of God (the second person of the Trinity) become a man and enter into time? And how could God make a decision of His will to create the heavens and the earth?

(“Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things, and by the will they existed and were created.”)    (Rev. 4:10)

In any decision of the will, there is a before and an after the decision. If God is timeless, then how can there be a before and after the decision to create? To these complications of Augustine’s solution of God’s relation to time that God is timeless, Christian theology has usually declared that they are mysteries beyond our human understanding. But instead of retreating into mysteries, why didn’t Christian theology recognize that these complications were produced by the Greek and Neo-Platonic philosophical view of God as timeless, and to reject this view of God and Its relation to time? Again, the Greek view of God is a Super-It, and things, even super-its, can not make decisions because they do not have wills. Persons do have wills, and in fact their existence is in their decisions. “I choose, therefore I am.” Choices involve time; there is a before the decision, the now of the decision, and an after the decision. Since God has revealed Himself as three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, time must exist in God; God is not timeless. But God’s time is not our created time. The statement of II Pet. 3:8 makes this clear. “…that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” This language is not metaphorical but is a statement of reality. God has time, but His time is not our created time. God’s uncreated time is absolute time; it has no beginning nor end. But it is not our created relative time. Just as God created space (the heavens and the earth), He created time. Newton’s mistake was that he identified relative created time with God’s absolute time. What the theory of relativity shows us is the true character of created time as relative and Newton’s mistake in absolutizing it. The complications introduced by Augustine’s view of God as timeless are thus now removed. When God decided to create the heavens and the earth, there was in God’s time a before and after the execution of the decision to create, but that act of creation was the beginning of our created relative time. And in the incarnation, the Son of God decided in His absolute time (in eternity) to take upon Himself our relative created time.