God In Eternity And Time

This book focuses on the timelessness of God, providing a detailed analysis of the nature of time and eternity. Padgett offers a biblical and historical survey of the doctrine of eternity, rejecting both theories of eternity being both 'timeless' and 'everlasting'. Padgett argues that traditionally the doctrine of absolute divine timelessness is not compatible with God's actions in the world. ÒGod is in some sense temporal, yet He is the ground of time, the Lord of time and is 'relatively' timeless.

This remarkable work offers an analytical exploration of the nature of divine eternity and God's relationship to time.

Editor Gregory Ganssle calls on four Christian philosophers to present and defend their views on the place of God in a time-bound universe. The positions taken up here include divine timeless eternity, eternity as relative timelessness, timelessness and omnitemporality, and unqualified divine temporality.

According to Robert John Russell, one of the foremost scholars on relating Christian theology and science, the topic of “time and eternity” is central to the relation between God and the world in two ways. First, it involves the notion of the divine eternity as the supratemporal source of creaturely time. Second, it involves the eternity of the eschatological New Creation beginning with the bodily Resurrection of Jesus in relation to creaturely time. The key to Russell's engagement with these issues, and the purpose of this book, is to explore Wolfhart Pannenberg’s treatment of time and eternity in relation to mathematics, physics, and cosmology. Time in Eternity is the first book-length exposition of Russell’s unique method for relating Christian theology and the natural sciences, which he calls “creative mutual interaction” (CMI). This method first calls for a reformulation of theology in light of science and then for the delineation of possible topics for research in science drawing on this reformulated theology. Accordingly, Russell first reformulates Pannenberg’s discussion of the divine attributes—eternity and omnipresence—in light of the way time and space are treated in mathematics, physics, and cosmology. This leads him to construct a correlation of eternity and omnipresence in light of the spacetime framework of Einstein’s special relativity. In the process he proposes a new flowing time interpretation of relativity to counter the usual block universe interpretation supported by most physicists and philosophers of science. Russell also replaces Pannenberg’s use of Hegel’s concept of infinity in relation to the divine attributes with the concept of infinity drawn from the mathematics of Georg Cantor. Russell then addresses the enormous challenge raised by Big Bang cosmology to Christian eschatology. In response, he draws on Pannenberg’s interpretation both of the Resurrection as a proleptic manifestation of the eschatological New Creation within history and the present as the arrival of the future. Russell shows how such a reformulated understanding of theology can shed light on possible directions for fundamental research in physics and cosmology. These lead him to explore preconditions in contemporary physics research for the possibility of duration, copresence, retroactive causality, and prolepsis in nature.

The relationship between eternity and time is a common subject for theologians and philosophers. What difference does it make for this discussion that God became man and inhabited time in Jesus Christ? In God’s Time for Us, James J. Cassidy examines the theology of Karl Barth to show that God is our Father who does not neglect us for lack of time; he is the God who has time to be with us. God also quite literally has time in his own being by virtue of the incarnation. Cassidy shows that Barth seeks a rapprochement between eternity and time, which is overcome by Jesus Christ. There is today a resurgence in interest in the theology of Barth, especially among evangelicals. Yet Barth is often read without discernment and discussed in churches without full understanding. Cassidy illuminates his thought so evangelicals can make a better, more well-informed appraisal of the man and his theology.

In this highly original and ground-breaking work, the author brings together discussions in the philosophy of time and space, philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of science, Special and General Relativity, classical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and so forth, with the concerns of philosophy of religion and theology, in order to craft a philosophically informed and scientifically tenable doctrine of divine eternity and God's relationship to time.

Fairacres Publications 136 God has given us the gift of time. Through that gift, we have the opportunity to grow in response to God’s love, but we are always free to choose whether or not we wish to do so and thereby to live eternity. The life of the Trinity is the life of eternity, yet God accepted the limitations of our lives, including our mortality, in taking on human form in Jesus. Because of the incarnation of Jesus, time enters into eternity, and eternity is brought into time.

When theology begins with God’s eternal will and knowledge, determinism results. In God in Eternity and Time, eminent scholar Robert Picirilli argues that we should look first to God’s creation and the incarnation—to the created order where God has chosen to act and reveal himself. As God’s decrees and foreknowledge in eternity are then read in light of his acts within time, his interactions with human beings on the personal level clearly reveal themselves. God in Eternity and Time is divided into two sections. The first part explores how God speaks and acts in creation. The second carefully examines foreknowledge and “middle knowledge” to demonstrate the fallacy of logical arguments against freedom based on foreknowledge. Based on these two sections, the reader will discover Picirilli’s fresh argument for libertarian human freedom.