Thursday, July 28, 2005

God and Time: Biblical Evidence, re-worked

I think I could have made the section on Bilical evidence clearer - if I had more clarity of thought that is. I could also have made it a lot longer but I think the essay was meant to be based mainly on reason not exegesis.

In many parts of the OT God seems to interact with people. It's impossible to truly interact without time. So, Atemporalists are forced to say that these sections are anthropomorphic presentations of God or else find another explanation. It seems true to me that there are instances when the OT presentation/understanding of God is anthropomorphic, or possibly just a bit odd. For instance, in the Garden of Eden:

Gen.3:8 They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in
the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the
presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 Then the LORD God
called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"

Or after Jonah's amazingly successful preaching:

Jonah 3:10 And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not. (I wouldn't normally favour the KJV but, in this case, I think, it best preserves the untamed language)

Are these passages really anthropomorphic or do they reflect the author's understanding of God? I suspect the latter.

In the genre of allegory/fable/metaphor it's easy enough to present God as one with a body walking through the Garden of Eden. (The popular Footsteps does something similar) But surely, if the author of Genesis 3 were a Calvinist it would look quite different. I don't think anyone brought up with the fundamental assumption that God is totally omniscient could portray him/her as one who really doesn't know what's going on around about him/her. Of course, it's possible to say that God was just pretending not to know where Adam and Eve were but that imposes our view onto the text. And if the author was trying to make God understandable to the his/her audience, why confuse them by suggesting that God might not be omniscient if he/she knew that God really is omniscient all along? By the same token, why use the word 'evil' about God's proposed actions if one believes God to be incapable of evil?

But what of the numerous accounts of prophets who seem hear and interact with God. (I'm far too lazy to list them right now) God calls: 'Samuel, Samuel'. Obviously, it takes twice as long to say the same thing twice, you need time. How can God do this without time? Paul Helm suggests that all apparent manifestations of God within the realm of time and space are written-in to the fabric of the universe from eternity. (I read this about two years ago, he probably didn't use such pretentious language - I'm not sure how he explains Jesus) Basically, knowing from eternity all our questions, requests... God's responses are preprogrammed and so it's not true interaction. This seems to make all of history, sacred and secular, into a bit of a pantomime. I can't disprove it but I choose not to believe it.

So, I think the OT writers generally thought of God as one inside time, or at least, it probably never occurred to them that God could stand outside of time - such categories of temporal/atemporal are probaly quite alien to them. God's temporality, nevertheless, seems to be assumed by most of them but I wouldn't use this alone as the basis for my thinking on the subject. The idea of existence without time seems to come later with the Greek influence. Pretty much as I concluded before.

posted by Rowland @ Thursday, July 28, 2005

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