Heavy Theology | The Hardest Concepts in Christian ThoughtSample

“Time Cannot Contain You”

When we call God eternal, we say that his life, his essence, and his acts all exist outside of the limits and connections time sets for us. By calling him Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, we imply that all other beginnings and ends do not apply to him — no numbers that we use to count duration, whether planck time or eons, minutia or days, zero succession of moments can count him. He has no order — not order per se as in contrasted with chaos, but order as in chronology. He doesn’t think of himself saying, “I will do something” or “I did something,” but rather “I have done” and “It is finished” and “I am.” If we say “he will” or “he did,” we mean that “he is” and “he does.” All of his actions happen now by his perspective, all moments exist in an eternal present before him and this is necessarily why no computer will ever be God: even the greatest demigod singularity exists in a temporal reality. Machines may kill us, but that doesn’t make machines eternal. And it’s the same with the chronology of any god in a fantasy series: they have beginning and end.

Said in another way, when we say God is eternity, we don’t mean that he simply has more minutes, more hours, more days than anything else. Otherwise, God becomes part of the created order and therefore imperfect.

Boethius called it interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio which means “the simultaneously whole and perfect possession of interminable life” or that God has completely full and completely flawless life that submits to no beginning, no end, and no succession. 

Eternity follows from self-existence and infinity because time measures finitude and God must transcend finitude to have the self-existence to explain why there’s something and not nothing. Though he coexists with time and creatures and incarnates himself as time and creatures, he does not exist in time outside of incarnation and therefore rules over all connections and relationships the measurements of sequence give to time and creatures. Divine eternity is divine essence.

Even still, when measurements of duration imply things that persist and achieve permanency, true persistence as such and true permanency as such do belong to God and God predicates them.