The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Rod Dreher wrote “to order the world rightly as Christians requires regarding all things as pointing to Christ”
Christ is the One in Whom in all things consist and humanity is not the measure of all things. If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder then the most fundamental act of resistance is to discover and life according to the deep, divine order of the heavens and the earth.
In this series we want to look at the big model of the universe that the Bible and Christian history provides.
It is a mind and heart expanding vision of reality.
It is not confined to the limits of our bodily senses - but tries to embrace levels fo reality that are not normally accessible or tangible to our exiled life on earth.
We live on this side of the cosmic curtain - and therefore the highest and greatest dimensions of reality are hidden to us… yet these dimensions exist and are the most fundamental framework for the whole of the heavens and the earth.
Throughout this series we want to pick away at all the threads of reality to see how they all join together - how they all find common meaning and reason in the great divine logic - the One who is the Logos, the LORD Jesus Christ - the greatest that both heaven and earth has to offer.
Colossians 1:15-23
The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Episode 118 - Beyond the Space-Time Continuum: Rethinking Divine Immutability
Divine immutability stands as one of theology's most captivating mysteries. What exactly do we mean when we say "God cannot change"? This question takes us on a fascinating journey through biblical revelation, philosophical speculation, and even modern physics.
The living God experiences time in ways utterly foreign to our own experience. For us, time brings aging, decay, forgetting – but the Father, Son and Spirit know no such limitations. Yet philosophers and theologians throughout history have proposed various models for understanding this divine relationship to chronology. Some suggest God exists in an "eternal moment" from which He can observe our timeline from beginning to end, like viewing a line that stretches from creation to consummation. This "timeless now" allows God to access any moment in cosmic history while maintaining His own separate existence outside our universe's constraints.
Modern conversations have grown more complex with Einstein's relativity theory linking time intrinsically to physical space. If time is fundamentally a property of material existence, and God transcends the material universe, some argue God must be completely "timeless" – experiencing no sequential events whatsoever. This radical position suggests the Trinity has no "before" or "after" within divine life, a concept that challenges our understanding of the dynamic relationships between Father, Son and Spirit described in scripture.
Scripture points to different "heavens" – from our atmosphere to outer space to a "third heaven" with different physical laws – yet affirms that even this cannot contain God. The Trinity has existed eternally, before any creation, with relationships that transcend all created reality. But does this transcendence mean a complete absence of sequence? As we explore these profound questions, we balance intellectual curiosity with faithful reasoning, recognizing both the mystery of divine transcendence and the living, active God revealed in scripture. How do you understand God's relationship to time?
The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore
Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. As we continue our investigations into what we mean if we say that God is immutable, god cannot change. When the Bible says the Lord does not change, what does that mean in the Bible? And we've tried to investigate that. But we also want to consider, now, what is it that religious philosophers have tried to say when they talk about immutability in a kind of more abstract or speculative sense? Now, we've tried to think about what the relationship between the Father, son and Holy Spirit, on the one hand, and time or chronology or history might be, and we've seen that in the Bible, that the living God does not experience the sequential flow of events in the way that we do. For us, time is sort of against us. We only have a small amount of time, but with the Father, son and Spirit, there is no aging, there's no decay, there's no forgetting, there's no loss of anything as time goes on or as sequence of events go on. There are those, though, who say God is not full of time, but they would argue that God is timeless, has less time even than us. In fact, god has no sequential. There are no sequential events at all within God or for God, and many people link the immutability of God to this claim, this specific immutability of God to this claim, this specific philosophical claim that God is timeless. So let's try to explore that argument. So the idea is that time is linked only to the history of the universe, so that before and we have to put that in inverted commas once we're in this kind of speculation before the universe there just wasn't any sequence of events at all, there was no before and after of any kind, and there was something like an eternal moment, a timeless now. Now I just want to clarify something before we open that up more. There's quite a big shift on understanding this before the 20th century and then after the 20th century or within the 20th century and onwards Before the 20th century.
Speaker 1:When people try to say this, they are saying something a little bit simpler and what they're probably saying is something like that the living god exists now and from that perspective of now can see all the sequence of the history of the universe from it, from start to finish. So it um all at once, so that god exists in a and like a moment, like now, he has a present existence in which, like for the Father, son and Spirit, in that moment they experience sequential events, like one thing happening after another. But from that present eternal moment, that existence of being present in this other way, so within that eternal moment of God's Father, son and Spirit, can look out sort of towards the universe of time and history and see the entire sequence of the universe's history, from its start to its conclusion. Illusion and all of the history of the universe from start to finish is kind of contemporary to that whatever kind of mode of existence the father, son and spirit live in I know this sounds hard to grasp, but it's important that we understand that what historically people meant by timeless is not quite the same as what is meant now, now kind of the way that people take a more extreme view of it. So I think and I'm only doing the best I can with this I think that what we get perhaps from Augustine and onwards is this idea then that the Father, son and Spirit have an existence, that's a kind of different mode of existence, and within their mode of existence they experience sequential events or something.
Speaker 1:They they have their own ongoing life and so on. But from that perspective, that mode of existence they can view, they see the history of the universe as one continuous thing that they access. They can sort of step into the history of the universe at any point, from start to finish, and all of it is like now to them. I know again, don't worry if this just doesn't make any sense, it may not be, but it may not be possible to fully grasp this. But that's the idea then, and so I've had it explained to me by one of the religious philosophers who's written books on this and he says, advocating this kind of slightly older view line, and that from your perspective you can see the whole of the history of the universe from start to finish, because you can look anywhere along that line, and that you are seeing the whole of history from one viewpoint. And then you yourself, I suppose, um, a kind of time, don't you going on as you you first may look at one end of the line and then after that you may look at a different, the other at the end of the line, and then you may look at the middle of the line, so you yourself may have a sequential thing, but that whatever kind of sequence of events are going on for you, they're not part of that history of the universe, and that history of the universe is something that almost exists all at once for the father son spirit.
Speaker 1:That's the argument, though it's a it's kind of philosophical thing and an abstract thing, but in a way it's something which we couldn't say for certain that that is what the Bible is teaching, that it is specifically teaching that view, but it's a view that probably doesn't create quite as many problems, although we're going to see there are some problems attached to that. But that's one possibility. But within that, then all that could be said is you, I can't see that that would rule out any possibility of any change whatsoever within the father, son and spirit, because they appear, under that model, to have their own. So what you would say is the any, anything, any change of any kind. So, say, um, the father sends the son to the universe. So you could argue that is some level of change, that the son is at the side of the father and now he's on earth.
Speaker 1:Say so you could argue that some measure of, or even just a conversation within the trinity or something, um, so you could say whatever change or events happen for the father, son and Spirit happen within their own kind of time or history or biography, and any events like that within the Trinity are not part of the history of the universe. So I think what's being said in this kind of idea and I think this is what Augustine is trying to say something like this, that when he says that if he was to say God is timeless, he'd be really trying to say that God is not part of the timeline of the universe, of the timeline of the universe, kind of meaning that the Father, son and Spirit are not contained within the universe, they're not objects within the nowadays people would say the space-time continuum, that they have an existence that is outside the space and history of the universe, so that they act completely independently of the universe, in that sense that the laws of the universe, the laws of space and time do not apply to the Father, son and Spirit. Now, if that's all that's being said, I imagine we could say, well, that does seem relatively compatible with the Bible. I mean, there are probably aspects of it where we'd say, well, that is kind of human philosophical speculation, but in general measure that kind of view where we're saying the father, son, spirit have a kind of life and existence that obviously is not subject to the laws within the universe of space and time and their ex, their, their, um experience of sequence of events and so on is um completely independent of, so they're not part of the cause and effect chain. If we wish to cause, even that, though, gets complicated, but let's just for now. So the, the laws of cause and effect and everything that go on within the heavens and the earth, the father, son and spirit, are not subject to that and are not objects within the universe. Okay, now, that's that. So we put. We leave that as something to chew on, that possible idea.
Speaker 1:But I think there's a different idea. That isn't only in the modern world, because I think some more abstract, older philosophers are reaching for this, but that it's a very, it's something, see, I think one when, in the modern, the post 20th century or 20th century onwards, this idea is that time, and by the word time here, is like time and space. So this is something that comes from the experience of time. Time and space are mutually related, are mutually related. So hence the theory of relativity, and that the speed at which material events occur within space or at which they are experienced, is tied up, or one's experience of time is tied up with the, the relative speed at which material events happen, so that you could like and science fiction films tend to like to explore this idea that people could be travelling extremely quickly and an enormous amount of energy is required to do that, and that for them events would continue to be experienced as going at the same rate, but relative to outside observers, the experience of time will be exceedingly slow.
Speaker 1:So you know, someone on earth my age 10 might have experience like a year, whereas a person traveling close to the speed of light might. It might be for them 100 years relative to the person on Earth. So for the person on Earth, so the person who's traveled close to this time of light, speed of light, may return and to them they feel they've only, they've only been gone, say a year. They've only been gone, say, a year, but when they get back to Earth it turns out that on Earth a hundred years have gone by and that totally different experience of the passage of time, and really what that is is not so much like time, because when we say time there, what we're really saying is the measurement or the experience of material events, and that what is happening spatially or materially has a direct effect, so that the way that a person experiences the flow of events and the way they measure the flow of events. It is very different according to the, to the spatial and material conditions they are experiencing within the universe. I'm trying to simplify it.
Speaker 1:So the idea, then, is that time is completely tied in to the space and materiality of the universe and so, if we adopt that definition of time, that they all operate only with that conceptuality, there is no time, there is no sequence, because if we say the only events that can possibly occur are material, spatial events within the universe, within the heavens and the earth, therefore that if time and space are completely correlated, are completely correlated, and if our definition of time is that, then there can be no time whatsoever outside of the material universe, because we've defined time as a function or completely related to space and materiality. So what you get with that perspective is this idea that if God, if the Father, son and Spirit are not part of the material spatial universe, they're not objects within the heavens and the earth. Therefore there is no time for them at all. That tends to be the way that reasoning happens, because, as a like, is time as completely related to physicality and materiality and space within the universe. So if we simply say that isn't really what time is, what we mean by time is simply a sequence of events, that's all that it really means, or kind of, we might say, the measurement of the distance or the experience of the flow of a sequence of events. It's how we experience a sequential flow of events and that, you know, um, we might experience the flow of events as we might say oh, that seemed to go very quickly or this seems to go very slow. That's our personal experience of it.
Speaker 1:What einstein does with that, uh, theory of relativity is he shows that the subjective experience of time it has an object, can have this kind of objective basis to it within the laws of the universe. Right. But if you, what the Bible is proposing is that there are orders of reality that are not not part of that space-time continuum that we think about in terms of, say, earth. The first heaven is the atmosphere of Earth, the second heaven is the galaxies and the stars and all that kind of thing. So we might say that the Earth, with the first and second heavens, is a space-time continuum and however that operates, that's that, but that there is at least a third heaven that we don't know the relationship of space and time, how that operates in that third layer or mode of creaturely existence, because the third heaven is still only a creaturely mode of existence, only a creaturely mode of existence. It's created but it nevertheless seems to operate with, let's say, laws of physics that are extraordinarily different, different and that at points of interaction between creatures, that whose native abode is the third heaven, and creatures of the first heaven at earth, us on planet earth.
Speaker 1:So, like in ezekiel, chapter 1, or ezekiel, chapter 10, or some of daniel's experiences or things in revelation or or other examples where angels roll up, seem to be space and time, and even up to the second heaven, that we can assert the same or completely continuous patterns of how time is experienced, even to the third heaven. And then, if we are to say which we must say that the Father, son and Spirit's life is beyond the third heaven. Even the highest heaven cannot contain even one member of the Trinity, that the Father, son and Spirit cannot be contained by even that third heaven. The scripture explicitly and strongly states that, because even before there was any heavens and earth, there has always been from everlasting the Father, who eternally begets the Son and eternally breathes out the Spirit, so that they have a kind of existence and an experience of the sequence of events that that is beyond even whatever is going on in the third heaven. However, things operate in the third heaven you get just, as a way of some, just to take the pressure off us for a moment, because we're pushing into quite deep thoughts here.
Speaker 1:You'll remember how CS Lewis with the Narnia series has that way in which time passes differently in Narnia with respect to Earth, and it's in that way that he is obviously trying to reach into this idea of different experiences of the flow of time and that events can seem to only take a small amount of time relative to Earth in Narnia and all that kind of thing. All of that is kind of relevant imaginatively for this. So what we're really trying to say at the moment is that nowadays people quite often define time in entirely in terms of this universe, and by this universe they mean the planet earth with our atmosphere and the second heaven, so what we call space, the galaxies and things, and they, they, they mean that and they'll, and it is completely related to time, and by time there is meant the experience of spatial material events operating within that universe. And so if God is not part of the universe and we're happy to agree that he is not then God has no time. And what then is meant by that?
Speaker 1:That God has no experience of sequential events at all, that within the life of the Trinity there is no before or after, like no events happen that can be put on a timeline, like no events happen that can be put on a timeline. There is no. One event happens, then another event happens, then another event happens, or one member of the trinity does this and then after that another member of the trinity does something else and then after that another member of the trinity does something else. So there there's a quite a strong and I know you, if you're listening to this, you'll be like that's crazy.
Speaker 1:How could anyone say such a thing that they that no events or sequence of events or occurrences or or actions.
Speaker 1:There are no sequence of actions within the life of the trinity.
Speaker 1:How, why would anyone say that?
Speaker 1:How could anyone say, yeah, I know, I know, and that's part of why this debate has become quite intense really in modern times, because there's a feeling that we were happy to say yeah, the way that the father, son and spirit experiences time and the sequence of events is entirely different than our own experience of that, and in fact, that the way the Father, son and Spirit experience time or history or sequence of events is completely separate from all creaturely existence.
Speaker 1:All of those things are easy to say and in some ways we can find biblical support for that. But to go this extra step and to say Is their existence independent of and utterly different from the heavens and the earth, even the third heaven, even beyond whatever kind of existence goes on in the third heaven. But there are those who wish to assert what to me is an extraordinarily spec, is not only a speculative claim that seems to be overreach, but it's also quite a dangerous claim, and that is that there is no sequence of before and after of any kind within the life of the Trinity the Father, son and Spirit. Now that is what we're going to open up in our next episode.