Abstract
A number of thinkers today, including open theists, find reasons to attribute temporality to God. According to Robert W. Jenson, the Trinity is indispensable to a Christian concept of God, and divine temporality is essential to the meaning of the Trinity. Following the lead of early Christian thought, Jenson argues that the “persons” of the Trinity are relations, and these relations are temporal. Jenson’s insights are obscured, however, by problematic references to time as a sphere to which God is related. Schubert M. Ogden gives the notion of divine temporality coherent content by arguing that God’s actuality is best understood as an unending succession of experiences. This paper was delivered in the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.
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- 1.
Pinnock, C., Rice, R., Sanders, J., & Hasker W. (1994). The openness of God: A biblical challenge to the traditional understanding of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity).
- 2.
Jenson develops his views on the Trinity primarily in two major projects. Jenson, R. W. (1982). The triune identity: God according to the gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress), and Jenson, R. W. (1997–1999). Systematic theology, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press).
- 3.
Cf. Jenson, Triune identity, 139, 157. Karl Rahner’s familiar maxim, “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity,” has become a virtual mantra for recent Trinitarian thought. (1970). The trinity. Trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder & Herder), 22.
- 4.
Cf. The triune identity, 34.
- 5.
Ibid., 59, 58.
- 6.
Ibid., 79.
- 7.
Ibid., 81–82.
- 8.
Ibid., 89–90.
- 9.
Ibid., 112.
- 10.
Ibid., 107.
- 11.
Ibid., 119–120.
- 12.
Ibid., 117–118.
- 13.
Augustine’s Trinitarian meditations were a magnificent mistake, of course. For in his attempt to describe the inner life of the divine, Augustine discovered the inner life of the person and thus began the long journey of introspection that produced our Western concept of the individual. As far as human consciousness is concerned, we are still benefiting from his insights. The emergence of the self in Western thought, as well as its subsequent demise, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The most comprehensive discussion to date is no doubt Charles Taylor’s magisterial account. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). A number of works deal with various aspects of the modern and/or postmodern self. Seligman, A. B. (2000). Modernity’s wager: Authority, the self, and transcendence (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Schrag, C. O. (1997). The self after postmodernity (New Haven: Yale University Press). An influential sociological study of the self in contemporary America is Bellah, R. Madsen, R., Sullivan, W., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press). Stanley J. Grenz provides an account of the self’s long history and proposes a revisionary interpretation of the self that draws on the recent emphases in Trinitarian thought on personness and community. Grenz, S. J. (2001). The social God and the relational self: A Trinitarian theology of the imago dei (Louisville: Westminster John Knox).
- 14.
The triune identity, 125–126 (emphasis his).
- 15.
The triune identity, 165.
- 16.
“Created time is accommodation in God’s eternity for other than God” (Systematic theology, 2:25; italics his).
- 17.
Ibid., 46.
- 18.
Jenson, Systematic theology, 2: 345.
- 19.
We find the same problem in the work of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Like Jenson, Pannenberg affirms God’s relation to history as the key to understanding the divine reality, and, again like Jenson, he affirms the principle that the immanent Trinity is identical to the economic Trinity. But when he describes the ultimate future, he variously identifies it as “the coming of eternity into time,” and “the dissolving of time in eternity”. Pannenberg, W. (1991–1998). Systematic theology, 3 vols. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (3 vols.; Eerdmans) 3:595, 607. In other words, time gives way to timelessness, and temporal succession comes to an end. The final future is not a transition to a continuing life of temporal experiences, but a single, all-encompassing, momentary experience, an endpoint that subsumes the entire course of history that precedes it.
What happens to the divine temporality in the face of assertions like these? It evaporates. Instead of experiencing time sequentially, God experiences all things at once. The divine life is characterized by an “eternal simultaneity,” says Pannenberg. “To God all things that were are always present.” In the eternity of God, time is “taken up” into “the eternal simultaneity of the divine life” (ibid, 3:607). God exists in “an undivided present” (ibid., 3:630). Whereas creatures are “subject to the march of time,” “All things are always present to [God].” “The eternal God has no future ahead of him that is different from his present.” (ibid. 1:410).
- 20.
The view that time is sequential requires extensive development, which space prevents us from providing here. For a classic discussion of the issues, see Pike, N. (2002). God and timelessness (Eugene: Wipf and Stock; reprint edition). For a more recent discussion, see Ganssle, G., & Woodruff, D. (Eds.), (2001). God and time (New York: Oxford University Press). William Lane Craig argues for the tensed theory of time endorsed here. Craig, W. L. (2000). Omniscience, tensed facts, and divine eternity. Faith and Philosophy, 17, 225–241. Richard E. Creel also deals with a wide range of issues connected to the theme of divine eternity. Creel, R. E. (1986). Divine impassibility: An essay in philosophical theology (New York: Cambridge University Press). Creel argues, confusingly, that God’s knowledge of the actual world changes but that God is nevertheless changeless in his will and his feeling, as well as in his nature (204–206).
- 21.
Ogden, S. M. (1966). The reality of God and other essays (New York: Harper & Row). In this essay Ogden provides a succinct account of the process view of God and time, which receives its definitive expression in the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology (New York: Macmillan). Hartshorne, C. (1970) Creative synthesis and philosophic method (La Salle: Open Court); Hartshorne, C. (1948). The divine relativity: A social conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press). Hartshorne, C. (1953). Reality as social process: Studies in metaphysics and religion (New York: Macmillan).
- 22.
Since our own reality is the best entrée we have to reality as such, human existence gives us an answer to “the ultimate philosophical question of the meaning of being itself” (The reality of God, 148).
- 23.
This view of things reverses the familiar notion that reality consists of “things,” or enduring objects, which “have” experiences. Rather, reality consists of a welter of momentary experiences, some of which share certain qualities with previous experiences and therefore belong to a sequence of events that have sufficient similarity for us to think of them as an enduring object, that is, as a “thing,” or a person.
- 24.
As Ogden puts it, our everyday sense of time is grounded in “a more primal temporality.” The truly primary time of our experience is not something we are within, as if it were a container or some sort in which we order the objects of our ordinary external perceptions. Instead, it is “the time constituted by our experiencing itself, as actual occurrence” (The reality of God, 151).
- 25.
Ibid., 152.
- 26.
Perhaps the best way to express this is to say, not “God is in time,” but “time is real for God.”
- 27.
Ibid., 157.
- 28.
“In the case of God,” Ogden argues, “what is distinctive is the complete absence of… temporal finitude and limitation.” “God’s temporality is not itself temporally determined, so that there is neither a time when God was not yet nor a time when he shall be no more.” “God’s being has neither begun nor will it end, and the past and future to which he is related in each successive occasion of his present experience can be nothing less than a literally limitless past and future” (ibid., 154).
- 29.
“In their truly primal forms, temporality and relations structure are constitutive of being itself, and God’s uniqueness is to be construed not simply by denying them, but by conceiving them in their infinite mode through the negation of their limitation as we experience them in ourselves” (The reality of God, 154). Cf. Whitehead’s insistence that God is not the exception to metaphysical principles, but their supreme exemplification (Process and reality [Free Press edition, 1959], 405).
- 30.
This is the title of one of Clark H. Pinnock’s books. Pinnock, C. (2001). Most moved mover: A theology of God’s openness (Grand Rapids: Baker).
- 31.
For further discussion of the idea that God expresses his innermost life in creation but does not depend on the world for his existence, see Rice, R. (2000). Process theism and the open view of God. In Cobb, J. B., & Pinnock, C. (Eds.), Searching for an adequate God: A dialogue between process and free will theists (pp. 163–200) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).
Suggested Readings: Open Theism
1.Basinger, David. 1996. The case for freewill theism: A philosophical assessment. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
2.Basinger, David, and Randall Basinger (eds.). 1986. Predestination and free will: Four views of divine sovereignty and human freedom. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
3.Boyd, Gregory A. 2000. God of the possible: A biblical introduction to the open view of God. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.
4.Cobb Jr., John B., and Clark H. Pinnock (eds.). 2000. Searching for an adequate God: A dialogue between process and free will theorists. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
5.Hall, Christopher, and John Sanders. 2003. Does God have a future? A debate on divine providence. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.
6.Hasker, William. 1998. God, time and knowledge. Cornell Studies in Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
7.Hasker, William. 2004. Providence, evil, and the openness of God. Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. New York: Routledge.
8.Pinnock, Clark H. 2001. Most moved mover: A theology of God’s openness. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press.
9.Pinnock, Clark H., Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger. 1994. Openness of God: A biblical challenge to the traditional understanding of God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
10.Rice, Richard. 2004. God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers.
11.Sanders, John. 2007. The God who risks: A theology of providence. 2nd ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
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Rice, R. (2013). Trinity, Temporality, and Open Theism. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_25
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