This blog entry is another thought exercise, an adjunct to my previous entry "A Possibly Useful Way of Thinking About the Nature of God."
A Possibly Useful Way of Thinking About the Nature of God
Idealism as a model of God and His creation.
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I call this Vacation Bible School or Bumper Sticker faith. It's fine as far as it goes, but it is very limiting. The giants of Christendom, from the Apostolic Fathers to the great modern theologians, have never been content to remain at this level. O'Darby would need a lobotomy to do so.
Time is one of the great mysteries of physics, philosophy and theology. Take a quick look at these two entries in the respected Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"Eternity in Christian Thought" - Eternity in Christian Thought (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
"God and Time" - God and Time | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"God and Time" - God and Time | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Read them in depth if you like, but be forewarned they are both headache-inducing. The bottom-line takeaway is that no one really has a convincing answer to the riddle of Time and its relationship to God. There are highly sophisticated models, such as those of William Lane Craig (Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time, https://www.amazon.com/Time-Eternit...craig+time+and+eternity&qid=1711636959&sr=8-1) and J. M. E. McTaggart (The Unreality of Time, Amazon.com), but all are subject to dispute and criticism and none is regarded as the definitive solution.
The Bible provides some clues:
"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." Psalm 90:2. Everlasting to everlasting, another way of saying God is eternal, timeless.
"God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’" Exodus 3:14. What a great answer! God is not this or that. He simply is.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Genesis 1:1. Unlike God, the universe is not timeless. It had a beginning in time and will have an end in time.
In classical Christian theology, God is omnipresent, not bound by time or space. The word omnipresent doesn't appear in the Bible, but the concept is supported by numerous verses. Hence, the creation that does have a beginning and an end cannot be separate from the omnipresent God who does not.
This is why I like the Idealism model described in my prior blog entry about the nature of God: God is a timeless, eternal consciousness or mind. All created reality, be it the heavenly realm or our universe, is a mental construct of God's master consciousness. It all exists within God in roughly the same way my dreams exist within me. We as individuals collectively experience the mental construct in which we live, but we are likewise mental constructs with our private interior lives of perceptions, thoughts, emotions and perhaps genuine free will.
The Idealism model isn't just a philosophical or theological exercise. Some scientists insist it's the best fit with multiple disciplines of science. This is why secular scientists have in recent years taken seriously the possibility that our reality is in fact a virtual one, a simulation, a "cosmic computer game" as one of my atheist friends puts it.
(Just an aside, but a Christianity Board regular named @Mr E and I have previously discussed that we think dreams are a major clue to what it's all about. I don't know about you, but my most vivid dreams are so real, so full of highly realistic people and places I don't really know, that they are one of the great puzzles of my existence. When I first heard the old saying "Our reality is God's dream," I sensed at some intuitive level it was true. The ultimate lucid dream!)
Can we grasp, even as a thought exercise, this eternal master consciousness? No, we have to do our thinking at a level or two below this.
I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I've been watching a scholarly 24-part series on the Gnostics. Their theology perfectly captured the ineffability of God as master consciousness. The actual, ontological reality of God, they said, is completely beyond our grasp – don't even try thinking about it. Instead, they related to "aeons" that were emanations from God and aspects of Him to which our minds can more easily relate.
If this sounds like non-Christian woo-woo, the fact is that the Old Testament includes similar notions. God's Wisdom (Sophia) and other attributes are personified throughout the OT. See https://www.biblehouseofgrace.com/u...sonification_in_the_old_and_new_testament.pdf. This is one reason the Jews who became Christians were able to accept Jesus as divine and later the doctrine of the Trinity. Although the Shema describes God as one, aspects or emanations of the divine had always been part of their thinking.
For that matter, consider the Trinity. The Son and Holy Spirit existed from all eternity, yet the Father somehow "begat" the Son and the Spirit somehow "proceeds from" the Father (and the Son, if that's your theology). The Son and Spirit sound very much like Gnostic emanations. This is why I personally find the Trinity more a useful way of thinking about the mystery of God than something I insist upon as an ontological reality.
If the heavenly realm and our universe are mental constructs of God's master consciousness, how would time operate? All I can offer is my own thinking, which isn't necessarily better than yours or anyone else's.
To start with our universe, I view it as a time-bound bubble within God's master consciousness. Time as we know it operates from our perspective in a tensed, linear manner exactly as we perceive it: past, present, future. It will eventually have an end, and the mental construct will go poof.
Why would God have created this bubble? For one thing, I believe His omni attributes include omni-creativity. He is the Supreme Artist. Our universe is a work of art He enjoys the process and the result as any human artist might. Whether this is the only such work of art He has ever created, we have no idea.
Moreover, the universe fulfills His plans and purposes as Christianity describes them. It reveals and glorifies Him. It is an expression of His love and relational character. It fulfills His plan of salvation.
How would God relate to and interact with this bubble? Well, if it's a mental construct within His master consciousness, it seems to me He could interact in any way He wants – hearing and answering prayers, performing miracles, resurrecting Jesus or whatever pleases Him.
Would God see the bubble all at once, from our past to what will be our end? Possibly or possibly not. Some theologians would say His omniscience requires perfect foreknowledge. Ergo, the answer has to yes. OK, fine. The bubble is a complete work of art that God merely observes.
I lean toward no. I lean toward something like Open Theism, whereby we have genuine libertarian free will and God does not know the choices we will make or the events that will occur. He still has the ability to intervene – it's all ultimately within His control - but basically He allows things to run their course.
With Open Theism, it seems to me, the universe is more a genuine expression of God's creativity and would be more interesting and satisfying to Him as the Supreme Artist. I don't see that creating beings with genuine free will and allowing their free will to operate without divine foreknowledge would be contrary to God's omni attributes. Isn't this analogous to what most Christians think Jesus did – i.e., self-limited His divine attributes during the Incarnation? Few Christians think you could've asked Jesus how to fix the transmission on a 1984 Ford Mustang and gotten anything more than a blank stare (or perhaps a parable about asking silly questions!).
What about the heavenly realm? Basically the same, it seems to me. A time-bound bubble that may or may not operate in synchronization with ours but that can interact with ours as God allows – both bubbles just being mental constructs of God's master consciousness anyway. Like our universe, it serves God's plans and purposes.
God's master consciousness is "in time" within any time-bound mental construct but always "above" such time in its fulness. When God decides to pop the bubbles and implement a New Heaven and New Earth, it will be as simple (for God, anyway) as weaving new mental constructs.
I don't insist any of this is ontologically correct, but I do find it useful and defy anyone to tell me it's contrary to mainstream Christian doctrine. Not only do I think it's consistent with Christian doctrine, but I also find it resolves a lot of problematical issues that Bumper Sticker Christians simply choose not to think about in any depth.
Now you know why The Little Church of What O'Darby believes has only one member! Even Mrs. O'Darby walks out of O'Darby's sermons, insisting she really needs to rearrange her sock drawer right now.
