God exists outside of time. That’s according to the
classical view of God. God is uncreated. God exists without reference to time
and space. “In the beginning, God created.” So say the first words of the Bible. Time
and space only came into existence because God willed it.
Outside of time and space is somewhere you can’t “go” to. God can “be” in that state, “there,” but you can’t “go” there, because only in time
and space can you “go” anywhere.
Now, time and space are measurements between created things. And this all matters to better appreciate a Christian conception about Jesus. And this particular conception is called the "eternal generation of the Son." That’s the topic for this post. Spoilers: the 'proof' is at the end and it relates to John 1:1-3. Along the way, I'll touch on the science of physics and what it says about a time - a couple of things anyway. This will be my touchstone to talk about the concept of "outside of time." Expert minds have written on the philosophy of time, but I will use physics as a touchstone instead.
Let’s get into it.
God has an existence without a ticking clock marking minutes
or hours, without a calendar marking days.
Insofar as God is interested in hours and days, that’s an
interest in us and our world. Within the being of God, outside of time, there
are no minutes and days any more than there are yards and miles.
God exists outside time. Therefore, anything that flows from
within the being of God exists outside time. Whereas anything that exists
separate from God exists in time and space.
God and the Word and the Spirit
So what flows from within God? Well, God’s Holy Spirit does. It’s his own Spirit, so of course it is intrinsic to the being of God. The Holy Spirit is not separate from God. The Holy Spirit proceeds from within God, right from out of God’s very being. Therefore, the Holy Spirit must exist outside of time, if its source, God the Father, exists outside of time.
The Holy Spirit
shares that existence in common, outside time. God and his Spirit are outside
of time in a shared existence together.
What else flows from within God? Well, God’s Word (God’s Son) does. The son is “begotten” from within God’s own being. As such, God’s Word must exist outside of time, as God exists outside of time. That which is begotten "outside of time" exists outside of time. The creed speaks of “light from light.” It’s light flowing from within light without a break between them. Just as light doesn’t age, neither do they.
So God and his Word and his Spirit exist outside of time.
They are uncreated, not created. They are of one existence together. There is
no point of reference outside of time that they can be measured against. If
there were such a measurable point, it would disqualify God from being outside of time. They would be inside
time and space being measured against a point of reference! To be outside of
space and time, then, is a unique existence that must be God’s and God’s alone.
To draw that out a bit, let’s suppose an imaginary line. On
one side of the line is time and space where we are, all milling about,
products of time and space - creation – everything in heaven and earth. On the
other side of the line, there is only the uncreated God. This is God and his
Word and his Spirit, uncreated, not products of time and space.
In the words of the early church, this is the eternal generation of the Son. The Son, the Word, exists by “eternal generation,” timelessly generated within the very being of God, where there can be no beginning and no end. The Word is generated outside of time and space, not within time and space.
The language of metaphor
We need to take a breath to remember that so much of
language is metaphor. When God speaks to us as a Father, he’s talking our
language. Father = metaphor. Which is fine. It helps us to know God as a loving
Father. It doesn’t mean we have to imagine God sitting in the clouds with
children on his knee. It’s the language of metaphor. The same goes for the
language of “begetting." It's all metaphor and analogy to human experience.
But within the being of God, it is obvious that it is all metaphor, fatherhood
and begetting, and shouldn’t be pressed into literalness. God is beyond our
conventional understanding of the physical universe. We who inhabit space and
time need a picture to hang onto. Our brains are well wired for finding
concrete things like food and shelter and a mate. And God gives us metaphor to
help us understand him.
And, since we're talking about metaphor, “outside” of time isn’t even a very good description of
what this is about! Maybe a better phrase would be “that which is not
time-able.”
The word “space” is also a problem, because what physicists
mean is a “void” – with things in the void that can be measured for distance. You
can’t touch space – it’s just a void.
So “outside of time” would mean something like “other than
measurable and other than time-able.” But “outside of time” trips off the
tongue more easily and helps us picture in metaphors!
What is time anyway?
Space and time are numerical values. They are not stuff you
can touch. They are metrics. A watch isn’t time. It’s just measuring.
Time and space are measurements between things in creation. Physicists
don’t know that the void of space is a ‘thing’ in itself. (I'm not saying that space-time is nothing, either. See below about current speculation.) When physicists talk
about space, they mean they are measuring distances between things. And when physicists
talk about time, they mean they are timing something – something starts and
ends and they are timing it. It’s best to think of time as a verb, “to time
something.” Space and time are metrics, not stuff. As soon as something exists,
metrics exist. In science fiction, they sometimes make a technical mistake by
speaking of time speeding up or slowing down – it doesn’t really, it's just a measurement being made from different perspectives.
Where there’s stuff – mass and energy, like the Sun, Earth
and Moon – it can be measured. Space and time between them can be measured.
Now, of course, scientists used to think that time was absolute and constant, that a second was a second. But Einstein demonstrated that when a second ticks, it is a matter of perspective.
Your perspective means where you are, how far from other people, and how fast you are moving compared to them. Other people are not in the same place as you, and are not moving at the same speed as you, and a second to them looks slightly different. In theory anyway. The difference is too small to notice but atomic clocks in different places in vehicles travelling at vastly different road speeds would show the difference – or at least a spacecraft orbiting round the earth at immense speed does.
A second
isn’t just a second. It’s something time-able from a perspective. Everything in
the universe, scientists realised, has a very “relative” relationship with anything one tries to time, and anything one tries to pinpoint.
When physicists think about space and time, it’s with a mind
like a tape measure. Space and time are not the ‘thing’, they are just the
measurements. A referee’s watch is not the football match. If you see what I
mean.
Still, we have to think in pictures. Where there are things like the Sun and the Moon and the Earth, space-time is curved round them, and people like to talk about that as curved “fabric” of space-time, but it’s not fabric. There’s no fabric.
That doesn't decisively mean that space-time is nothing either - it's something that physicists are working on in attempts to reconcile two theories - special relativity with quantum mechanics. In fact, some of those scientists are researching the idea of the emergence of space-time from a more fundamental underlying structure! Although one needs to be fairly reserved about this as a commentator. If there is an underlying structure, perhaps it too is, in a sense, a matter of time and space!
That all matters for our subject - we'll see how in a moment.
What does ‘outside of time’ mean anyway?
Back to God. God exists outside of time. We’re not talking about a timeless “space.” If you have space, then you have time. If a space can be measured, then something in it can be timed too. And it’s true the other way round too. If something can be timed, then there is a space between things that can be measured. Neither of these things applies to God. God is outside of time.
If God “has a thought” outside of time, so be it. That’s “where”
it “happens.”
But, let’s be clear, the concept of “outside of time”
currently belongs in philosophy, theology and science fiction. Scientists are
not conducting any experiments on anything ‘outside of time’ because it would be
impossible to begin or end an experiment.
It’s not an easy concept anyway because as humans we generally
need to picture things. Seconds and minutes don’t exist outside of time.
It’s not that there are zero seconds or an infinite number of seconds there. It’s not
a place of zero time or infinite time. The point is that measurements don’t
belong outside of time at all. That’s kind of central to the concept.
And being without time, it has to be without space too. It’s
simply different to our experience, and the possibilities transcend our experiences.
Scientists can’t do anything to prove there is an “outside
of time” existence. Unlike time and space, God cannot be measured in numerical values.
You have to be inside time and space to have anything measurable about you. We
only have space-time science. Maybe one day, there will be a way for scientists
to hypothesise about the effects of what God does in our universe, and then triangulate
(analogy again!) something about God’s existence. But we’re not there at the
moment!
Physics can’t answer a question about what exists outside
the realm of physics. Physics wants something to time and something to measure
and see how they connect together. And the problem of “outside of time” is that
it’s difficult even for theoretical physics to speculate about it, because how
could you write an equation for something that has no measurements to measure?
God and time
As said, God is beyond our conventional understanding of the
physical universe. God is beyond all that.
God can choose to engage with our time and space, all of it.
To us time is the long gone past, or the present, or the future beyond us. To God,
it is all available to hand, all open to view. With God, there is no timer on
it.
(In another post, I talk about whether an omnipotent God can veil the future from his view to any degree. But that's another subject!)
Why eternal generation of the Word?
Back to what John chapter 1 calls the Word, which was with God in the beginning.
Now, when anything exists separate from God, that’s creation. It’s
what God made. Indeed, when anything exists separate from God, then time and space automatically exist with it. That’s a given, because if a created thing is there, then there is something measurable in some way.
But God is outside of time, and therefore that which comes from within his being is outside of time. That is, I mean same kind from same kind. For the Holy
Spirit, that’s timeless procession. For the Son, that’s timeless begotten-ness.
(The biblical words in John’s Gospel are: the Spirit proceeds; and the Son
is begotten.)
Here’s the issue that it comes down to. The eternal
generation of God’s Word. There are only three possibilities:
A) The Word hails from an existence where there is no time and space. The Word shares an uncreated existence with God.
B)
Or the Word was created, is therefore measurable, and therefore time and space were automatically created in the identical moment of creation.
C)
Or the order is different: time and space were created first, and after that the Word was created.
But B and C would inadvertently destroy the vital sense of John 1:3, which actually says, “All things were made through him [the Word], and without him was not any thing made that was made.” That means time and space were created through the Word.
But B and C clumsily fail to allow for that. You see, if the Word were created, then the Word is not with God outside of time, and therefore is in time and space and didn't create time and space.
Having space-time is an automatic consequence of any created thing existing.
Here's the problem then. If the Word were created, created separate from God, then space-time automatically got created with it, which would mean the Word wasn't the one who created space-time.
But, in contrast, John says that nothing was created except through the Word. That means time and space were created through the Word. John effectively means that time and space came into existence after the Word was already existing. That rules out B and C. That leaves only option A: the Word hails from an existence where there is no time and space.
The Word is generated outside of time and space, not within time and space.
Only God is outside of time. And that's where the Word is. As I said earlier, that which is begotten "outside of time" exists outside of time.
So that means we must relate God's Word to God's out-of-time existence.
Nothing but God and Word and Spirit exist outside of time. The Word therefore has to be uncreated. The Word exists by “eternal generation,” timelessly generated, timelessly begotten, within the very being of God. Eternal generation is an 'outside of time' generation.
Just as the Holy Spirit timelessly proceeds from the eternal God.
God and Word and Spirit are uncreated. Nothing else is. They are one.
Afterthoughts
An article could be written on the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit, but it would cover much of the same ground, so I won't write that for the moment.
I sometimes wonder if Father and Son and Spirit experience
something analogous to time, relating to each other, which – if it was a thing
- would be an attribute of God like omniscience and omnipotence. But I won’t
push that further than analogy.
And what implications does all this have for the Open View
of God? That one is for another time! I must re-read Greg Boyd's God of the Possible!
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