God, Time, and Eternity

Abstract

God is the 'high and lofty One who inhabits eternity'," declared the prophet Isaiah, but exactly how we are to understand the notion of eternity is not clear. Traditionally, the Christian church has taken it to mean 'timeless'. But in his classic work on this subject, Oscar Cullmann has contended that the New Testament 'does not make a philosophical, qualitative distinction between time and eternity. It knows linear time only...'2 He maintains, 'Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a timeless God. The "eternal" God is he who was in the beginning, is now, and will be in all the future, "who is, who was, and who will be" (Rev. I: 4) .'3 As a result, God's eternity, says Cullmann, must be expressed in terms of endless time. When we speak of God as eternal, then, we may mean either 'timeless' or simply 'everlasting'. The question is: which understanding of God's relation ship to time is to be preferred? Taking sharp issue with Cullmann's study, James Barr has shown that the biblical data are not determinative. He argues that Cullmann's study is based too heavily upon etymology and vocabu lary studies, and these cannot be determinative in deciding the meaning of a term apart from use.4 Barr thinks that Genesis may very well teach that time was created along with the universe, and that God may be thought of as timeless.5 Barr's basic contention is that, 'A valid biblical theology can be built only upon the statements of the Bible, and not on the words of the Bible. 6 When this is done, the biblical data are inconclusive: '.. . if such a thing as a Christian doctrine of time has to be developed, the work of discussing it and developing it must belong not to biblical but to philosophical theology'.7 Therefore, the issue lies in the lap of the philosopher, not the theologian. Are there, then, good philosophical arguments for preferring one of these competing notions of God's eternity to the other? I think that there are. According to the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the universe began to exist a finite amount of time ago. This doctrine receives philosophical confirmation from arguments demonstrating the absurdity of an infinite