ok, I’m ambivalent when it comes to religion but as a historian I do find it fascinating. And one aspect of Christianity I’ve been pondering over recently was what is the relationship between God and time. I’m looking for informed opinions, random thoughts and hopefully some doctrinal cites.
Basically I thought about it this way. Say God decided that he was going to save Jesus from crucifiction. Is there any reason why God couldn’t go back and do so or is God just as much a slave to time as we are? Or if you’re looking for something less important say God decided that he wanted a leaf to fall from a tree an hour earlier then it actually did, could he go back and make it fall?
Jesus did not die on the cross. He was a great king who ruled the world. Everyone became Jewish and we all lived in peace. God got bored last Thursday and decided to let his Son die on the cross. That is the real reason that Jesus said “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Of course, since we live in this timeline now, we don’t remember all that. God also put a couple of leaves back on trees, and he added a final book to the Bible – Revelations – just for a goof.
Growing up as a good lil’ Mormon, one of the cutesy things that was thrown around was that “though 10,000 years may pass, it shall be as like unto one day to God” or something like that. Looking back, it implies that, yes, God’s “timeline” is linear, but on a much more massive scale than we perceive.
Note that this is Mormonism, and I’m not even sure if it’s official church doctrine.
Incidently, I’ve always felt that “God” (or whatever higher power may exist) isn’t truly omnipotent/omniscient/omnipresent in the pure sense of the terms, but is simply more powerful than we are and by comparison, it only seems as if he/she/it were omnipotent/etc.
Which just goes to show that it always depends on your individual beliefs… sorry, Brer Rat, no straight answer on this one.
The truth is that both worlds exist today in different universes (along with every variation conceivable in other universes). The split between these two universes occurred about 2000 years ago as did all the universes where Jesus wasn’t born and the ones where he finished out his life building cabinets.
There is no such thing as time. Time is relative. For example, the reason why things seem to slow down when you are in an emergency is because your brain speeds up so you can deal with the emergency. Time does literally slow down to you. And for time to be real and for people to be able to travel in it, everything would have to be happening all the time. Think about it.
Soup du Jour (where did this ridiculous custom of bolding other people’s names come from?) has it right. God is outside time. But so are we, or our deepest, truest selves are. Time is where we make our choices; Eternity is where we live with the consequences.
I commend to you The Great Divorce. This is a short novel, and a very fast read; it is common enough that you should be able to find it though your local library if you don’t want to pay for it. The main theme is the essential choice we all have to make, but it has a section at the end on Time, and the relation between our choices and Time. It is the clearest explication on the subject I have read of a very, very difficult subject: the relation between time and Eternity, and our temporal and Eternal selves. Whatever else you say about Lewis, he explains some things much more clearly than anyone else.