Chapter 13

God, Time, and the Edge of Mortality

Does the God Who Meets the Dying Soul Act in Time?

Full-Length Edition

A woman lies in a hospital bed. The monitors slow. Her daughter holds one hand, her son the other. A nurse checks the drip and quietly steps back. The room is still except for the soft beeping, and then even the beeping fades. And somewhere in those final seconds, something happens that this book has spent twelve chapters building toward. Christ meets her. He speaks. She listens. He shows her the truth of her life. She responds. He waits for her answer. She decides.

Read those verbs again. Speaks. Listens. Shows. Responds. Waits. Every one of them is a time-word. Each one assumes a before and an after. Christ speaks before she answers. He waits while she considers. He responds after she cries out. This is not a frozen tableau. It is a living exchange, unfolding step by step, like any real conversation between two persons.

And that raises a question we have not yet faced directly. What kind of God can do these things?

If God exists outside of time altogether, in a single changeless "eternal now," can he really pursue a dying soul step by step? Can he listen to a cry that hasn't been cried yet? Can he respond to a refusal that, from his vantage, has already happened and has not yet happened, all at once? If God's life has no before and after, can the encounter at the threshold be what the previous chapters have described: a real conversation, a real pursuit, a real decision?¹

I don't think it can. Not easily, at least. And in this chapter I want to explain why.

The question of God's relationship to time is one of the oldest and hardest in all of Christian theology. Whole libraries have been written on it. I have no illusion of settling the debate here. The full philosophical case lives in the Part Two appendices at the back of this book, especially Appendix F, Appendix G, and Appendix H.² What I want to do here is sketch the landscape clearly enough that you can see why it matters for the dying. Then I want to take a position.

Here it is, stated plainly: the moment-of-death encounter, as this book describes it, requires a God who is genuinely temporal. Not a God trapped in time the way we are. But a God who experiences real sequence, real before-and-after, real responsiveness to what his creatures do and say. A God who acts in time, not merely from above it.³

If you hold a different view of God's relationship to time, this chapter will not ask you to abandon it. Appendix G shows how the encounter model can be adjusted to fit divine timelessness, at some cost. But I think the encounter works best, and most naturally, if God is the kind of being who can meet you where you are, when you are there.

Two Ancient Views

The Christian tradition has wrestled with God's relationship to time from its earliest centuries. Two broad families of answers have emerged.⁴

The first is divine timelessness. On this view, God exists outside of time entirely. He does not experience moments passing one after another. He possesses his entire life "all at once." The sixth-century philosopher Boethius gave the classic definition: eternity is the complete and perfect possession of unending life, grasped whole and all at once. The Latin phrase is tota simul, meaning "simultaneously whole." It became the standard formula for centuries.⁵

Augustine laid much of the groundwork. God made time, he argued, and stands outside what he made. In Confessions Book XI, Augustine wrestled with the mystery of time more deeply than anyone before him. He concluded that past, present, and future exist only in the human soul's memory, attention, and expectation. God, who made the soul and its time, is not himself caught within it.⁶

Aquinas built on this foundation. In the Summa Theologiae, he argued that God's eternity has no succession, no past, no future. Only an unchanging present. Anselm agreed. DeWeese, in God and the Nature of Time, calls this "the medieval consensus." It was all but unanimous.⁷

In our own day, the view has strong defenders. Paul Helm's Eternal God gives the most sustained case. Helm argues that a timeless God can still be personal, purposive, and loving. He also makes a methodological claim worth taking seriously. The biblical data, he contends, do not settle the question on their own. Scripture uses temporal language for God freely. But Scripture also describes God as unchanging and self-sufficient. The texts pull in both directions. The issue must be decided on philosophical and theological grounds, not proof-texts alone.⁸

Beyond Helm, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann offered a sophisticated model called "ET-simultaneity." We'll come back to it shortly. Brian Leftow developed a "reference-frame" model of eternity. Katherin Rogers has argued for timelessness on "perfect being" grounds. The classical position is alive and well defended.⁹

The second family of answers is divine temporality. On this view, God does experience real succession. He has a genuine before and after. His time may differ from ours in quality. It may be richer, deeper, more fully lived. But it is real time, with real sequence. God genuinely acts, then waits, then responds. Time is not a cage for God. It is the medium of his love.¹⁰

This view also has deep roots. The Bible's narrative structure assumes it everywhere. God calls Abraham, then later delivers Israel, then still later sends his Son. The prophets portray God as responding to events as they happen. The Psalms cry out to a God who hears "now," not timelessly. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, divine temporality has been defended with increasing rigor. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, Alan Padgett, Garrett DeWeese, R. T. Mullins, and William Lane Craig (in a distinctive hybrid form) have all argued that God experiences temporal succession.¹¹

The landscape, then, is a genuine disagreement among serious Christian thinkers. Neither side is fringe. Neither side lacks biblical or philosophical resources. But for our purposes, the question is not abstract. It has direct consequences for the bedside.

If God is timeless, then the encounter at the moment of death is not a real-time conversation. It is a predetermined pattern, experienced by the soul but not improvised by God. If God is temporal, then the encounter is what it feels like: a living exchange between two persons, unfolding in real sequence. The difference may sound academic until you are the one standing at the bedside, praying for someone you love. Then it matters whether God is there, in the moment, hearing and acting. That is why this question belongs in this chapter rather than only in the appendices.

The Argument from What God Knows

One of the cleanest arguments for divine temporality comes from William Lane Craig. It concerns God's knowledge. Specifically, it concerns what philosophers call tensed facts.¹²

A tensed fact is a fact that includes a "now." Consider the statement: "It is now three o'clock." That is a tensed fact. It is true at three o'clock and false at four o'clock. Its truth changes with time. Compare it with a tenseless fact: "The Battle of Hastings occurs in 1066." That is true regardless of when you say it. It does not depend on what time it is now.

Craig's argument turns on a simple but powerful claim: God is omniscient. He knows everything. And if tensed facts are real, then God must know them. God must know what time it is now. He must know which events are happening right now, which are past, and which are still future.¹³

Craig lays out the argument in five premises in Time and Eternity. Let me walk through them, because the logic is tight and each step matters.¹⁴

The first premise is that God is omniscient. Few Christians would deny this. God knows everything there is to know. The second premise follows from the first: if God is omniscient, he knows all true statements. Any truth that exists, God knows it. The third premise is where the argument gets its force: some statements are tensed. Their truth depends on when "now" is. "It is raining in Jerusalem right now" is true at some moments and false at others. It changes. And its changing is not a flaw. It is what makes it a tensed truth.

The fourth premise is the crucial move. Knowing a tensed truth requires being located at the relevant "now." You cannot know that it is raining in Jerusalem right now unless you are present to the "now" in question. You can know the tenseless fact that it rains in Jerusalem on a certain date. But that is a different piece of knowledge. It leaves out the "now." And the "now" is exactly what tensed knowledge is about.

The fifth premise closes the loop. Being located at a "now" means being in time, not outside it. A timeless being has no "now." That is what timelessness means. So if God knows tensed truths, and knowing tensed truths requires a "now," and having a "now" requires being in time, then God is in time.

The conclusion follows: God is in time. He has a "now." He experiences the present moment as present, not as one point on an eternal map that he surveys from above.

Think about what this means for the dying. If a woman's heart is stopping right now, God knows that it is stopping right now. He doesn't just know the tenseless fact that her heart stops at 3:47 PM on June 3. He knows the tensed fact: it is happening now. And knowing that it is happening now means he is present to it as something current, not as something he views from outside of time.

The objection to this argument usually targets premise three. The defender of timelessness says tensed facts are not real. There is no objective "now." What we experience as "the present moment" is just our location in the block of four-dimensional spacetime. From God's timeless vantage, all moments are equally real. None is specially "present."¹⁵

Craig has an answer. He argues that our experience of the present is properly basic. We don't infer that there is a "now." We live in it. The B-theory of time, which denies the reality of tense, asks us to reject the most basic feature of our experience. It asks us to treat the difference between past, present, and future as an illusion. And Craig does not think we should accept that trade. Neither does Mullins, who identifies the problem of tensed knowledge as one of four decisive objections to timelessness in The End of the Timeless God.¹⁶

You don't have to follow every twist of this debate to see the point. If God knows what is happening now, then God lives in time. And if God lives in time, then he can meet a dying soul at the moment of death. The soul's "now" is God's "now" too. The encounter happens in a shared present.

God Responds When You Cry

Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a different route to the same conclusion. His strategy is not about what God knows but about what God does.¹⁷

Wolterstorff makes three moves. First, he argues that the Bible's portrayal of God as having a history should be read at face value unless strong reasons forbid it. The atemporalist bears the burden of proof. The Bible everywhere describes God as acting in sequence: promising, then fulfilling; warning, then punishing; hearing, then answering. If this temporal language is all metaphor, the atemporalist must say what literal reality it stands for. Wolterstorff does not think the atemporalist can give a satisfying answer.¹⁸

Second, he presses the problem of tensed knowledge, as Craig does. Wolterstorff uses a vivid example. Imagine you are listening to the radio. The announcer says it is one o'clock. You glance at your watch and confirm: yes, it is one o'clock. You know something now that you did not know a moment ago. You know that it is now one o'clock. No amount of tenseless information could give you this knowledge. You could memorize every fact about the universe's history without knowing what time it is right now. Knowing "now" requires being in time. And if God knows what time it is now, then God is in time.¹⁹

Third, Wolterstorff offers a test for what it means to be "in time." What places something in time is having a history. A number, like seven, has no history. It doesn't change, act, or respond. It is the same yesterday, today, and forever, but not in the theologically rich sense. It is just inert. A cat, by contrast, has a history. It is born, grows, hunts, sleeps, and dies. It changes over time. God, Wolterstorff argues, passes the cat test. God unfolds a plan of redemption. He speaks first to Moses, later to Jesus. He responds to his people's cries. He grieves. He relents. He has a history.²⁰

And here is the line that cuts to the heart of our question: you can respond to a cry only when it is being cried.

This is not a technicality. It is a pastoral truth dressed in philosophical clothing. Think about what it means in practice. A mother cries out in grief. God hears her. But if God is timeless, he doesn't hear her cry when she cries it. He "hears" it timelessly. That is to say, he doesn't hear it at a particular moment at all. From his timeless vantage, every cry that will ever be cried is already present. But that is not hearing. That is not responding. That is something else entirely.

Imagine a friend who already knows what you will say before you say it, and who has already decided what to do about it, and who cannot be moved or changed by anything you say. That is not a friend who is listening. That is a friend who is going through the motions. Wolterstorff's point is that the biblical God is not like this. He is a God who genuinely hears. Psalm 34:17 says: "The righteous cry out, and the LORD hears them." The verb "hears" is most naturally read as happening when the cry happens. God meets the grief where it is, in the moment it occurs.²¹

Now apply this to the moment of death. The dying soul cries out. Maybe the cry is for mercy. Maybe it is a gasp of recognition. Maybe it is a confused "Who are you?" Whatever it is, God must hear it when it is cried. He must respond after the cry, not before it. The encounter that this book describes is an encounter, not a pre-scripted performance. And encounters require a God who lives in time.

Craig's Hybrid and the Wider Landscape

Craig himself does not simply say "God is temporal, full stop." He offers a more careful position. God, Craig argues, was timeless without creation. Before anything existed, God existed alone in a timeless state. But the moment God created the universe, he entered into time. Creation introduced real change into God's life: the change from being alone to being in relationship with a world. And where there is change, there is time. This is Craig's "hybrid" view: timeless without creation, temporal since creation.²²

The hybrid preserves the classical intuition that God is not trapped in time. It also preserves what the biblical narrative requires: a God who acts in real sequence within the created order. For our purposes, the critical point is what Craig affirms about God since creation: God acts in time. He has a "now." He experiences before and after. He can meet a dying soul at the moment of death, in that moment, and respond to what happens there.

Mullins goes further. He rejects even the "timeless without creation" stage. The very life of the Trinity, Mullins argues, involves real succession. The Father begets the Son. The Spirit proceeds. These eternal relations are not frozen. They are dynamic. The perichoretic life of the three persons, their mutual indwelling, is itself an ongoing, active exchange. In From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Mullins develops the case that God's time is grounded in the Trinitarian life. If the inner life of God involves real sequence, then God was temporal even before he created anything. The perichoretic inseparability of the persons is not a static structure. It is a living, relational dynamism.²³

DeWeese offers a related position. God's pre-creation "time" is constituted by the succession of God's own mental states. Before the universe, God thought, purposed, and loved in real sequence. These acts gave structure to a divine "before" that preceded created time. DeWeese calls this a "third option" between timelessness and simple temporality: metaphysical time prior to creation, grounded in the causal succession of God's own inner life. The perichoretic life of the Trinity, read dynamically, provides the foundation. The three persons are not frozen in a changeless relation. They know, love, and indwell one another in a living, ongoing exchange.²⁴

I follow Mullins in rejecting the "timeless without creation" stage.²⁵ But the differences among temporalists are, for our purposes, secondary. What matters for the moment-of-death encounter is the point they all share: since creation, God acts in real time. He has a "now." He can meet a dying soul at the moment of death and respond to what happens there. The encounter does not require the reader to settle every internal debate among temporalists. It requires only the shared conviction that God acts in sequence.

The Timelessness Reply: ET-Simultaneity

The defender of divine timelessness has a reply. It comes in the form of a model called "ET-simultaneity," proposed by Stump and Kretzmann in a landmark 1981 paper.²⁶

The basic idea is this. God's timeless life and our temporal lives are not simply disconnected. They are related by a special kind of simultaneity. God's eternal "now" is simultaneous with every moment of created time. So God is present to your birth, your death, and every moment in between, all at once. This is not temporal simultaneity, happening at the same clock-time. It is a unique relation between two different modes of existence: the eternal and the temporal.

The model draws on the Boethian tradition. Boethius used the image of a man standing on a hill, watching travelers pass below. The travelers see only the road in front of them. The man on the hill sees the whole road at once. Timelessness, on this picture, is the hill. Deng, in her concise overview God and Time, notes that this image has shaped centuries of theological reflection on divine eternity.²⁷

The model is clever. It preserves something real: the idea that God is not absent from any moment of your life. He is present to all of it. And for many purposes, this may be enough. A timeless God can, on this model, ensure that the right things happen at the right moments. Providence still works. The universe unfolds as God wills it to. The model has real theological merits, and I do not dismiss it lightly.

But the model has attracted serious criticism. The most common objection is the transitivity problem. If God's eternity is simultaneous with the year 100 AD, and also simultaneous with the year 2025, then by the normal rules of simultaneity, those two moments should be simultaneous with each other. But they are not. Events in 100 AD and events in 2025 are separated by almost two thousand years. Something has gone wrong with the logic. Stump and Kretzmann tried to avoid this by saying ET-simultaneity is a special, non-transitive kind of simultaneity. But many philosophers find that move ad hoc. DeWeese devotes a chapter of God and the Nature of Time to this objection and concludes that ET-simultaneity is ultimately incoherent.²⁸

But set the technical objections aside for a moment. Grant, for the sake of argument, that ET-simultaneity works as a logical model. Does it preserve the kind of encounter this book describes?

I believe it does not. Here is why.

ET-simultaneity preserves God's presence to every moment. It does not preserve God's responsiveness within a moment. On the Stump-Kretzmann model, God does not first hear your cry and then respond to it. He eternally wills, in one undivided act, both your cry and his response. There is no sequence on God's side. There is no "first I hear, then I act." There is only an eternal, simultaneous willing of everything at once.²⁹

For ordinary providence, this may be acceptable. God can timelessly will that the sun rises and the rain falls. He can timelessly arrange a providential meeting. The universe can unfold exactly as God wills it, even if God's willing is a single eternal act rather than a sequence of temporal decisions.

But the moment-of-death encounter is not ordinary providence. It is a meeting. In a meeting, what happens next depends on what the other person does. Christ pursues. The soul resists. Christ adjusts his approach. The soul breaks. Christ receives. Each step is a response to the one before it. Take away the responsiveness and you take away what makes it a meeting at all.

On ET-simultaneity, this responsive character disappears. What looks like a conversation is really a pre-arranged sequence, willed all at once from eternity. The soul experiences it as a dialogue. But on God's side, there is no dialogue. There is only a single, undivided eternal act that includes everything at once. The "give and take" of the encounter is an illusion. Or rather, it is real for the soul but not for God.

This is the heart of my pastoral objection to the timelessness model. The encounter's comfort depends on its character as a genuine meeting. The dying soul is not watching a recording. It is speaking to a living person who hears and answers. If God's "hearing" and "answering" are not sequential but are both part of a single timeless act, the comfort thins. It becomes more abstract. It is still real, in a philosophical sense. But it is not the kind of "real" that matters to a dying person who needs to know that God is right here, right now, listening to this cry, responding to this fear.

I do not say the encounter cannot happen on a timeless model. Appendix G develops the adjustments required. The soul's experience is real. The encounter is real. But the divine side of it looks different. And I think something is lost.

What the Bible Shows Us

The philosophical arguments point toward divine temporality. But what about the Bible? Helm's challenge is worth taking seriously: he says the biblical data do not settle the question by themselves.³⁰

I think Helm is partly right. Scripture does not contain a philosophical treatise on God's relation to time. The biblical writers were not trying to settle a question that would not be asked in its modern form for over a thousand years. But I think Helm underestimates what the biblical portrayal actually shows. The Bible may not argue for divine temporality in the way a philosopher would. But it everywhere assumes it. Two texts in particular deserve attention here, because this chapter owns their exegesis for the book's purposes.³¹

The first is Genesis 6:6. After the wickedness of humanity has spread across the earth, the text says that "the LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled" (NIV). The Hebrew verb is nacham in the Niphal form. It carries the sense of grief, sorrow, a change of feeling. The same root appears in Exodus 32:14 and 1 Samuel 15:11, 35.³²

On a timeless model, God does not grieve in response to human sin. He eternally, changelessly wills whatever state corresponds to grief. There is no "before the grief" and "after the grief." There is only an eternal, undifferentiated divine life that somehow includes grief as one of its timeless features. The grief is not caused by the sin in any temporal sense. It simply coexists with it in God's single eternal act.

But the text does not read that way. The text places God's grief in a sequence. Humanity sins. God sees. God grieves. The sequence is part of the point. The grief is a response. It comes after the sin, not alongside it from eternity. The narrative force of the verse depends on the order: first the sin, then the grief. Reverse the order and the verse loses its meaning. Remove the order altogether, as timelessness requires, and the verse becomes nearly unintelligible.

You can insist that this is anthropomorphic language, that it describes how God's changeless will appears to us. And perhaps it does. But if we strip every temporal verb in Scripture of its temporal meaning, we are left with a God who does not really act, respond, or feel in any way we can recognize. Mullins makes this point forcefully: the relational engagement of the biblical God cannot be captured by a static eternity.³³

The second text is Exodus 32:14. After Moses intercedes for Israel at Sinai, the text says that "the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people" (ESV). Again the Hebrew is nacham. God had declared a judgment. Moses prayed. God changed course. The narrative insists on the order.³⁴

This is the passage that Wolterstorff's argument illuminates most sharply. God responds to Moses' prayer. The response comes after the prayer, not before it. If God is timeless, then God eternally wills both the threat and the relenting, with no real sequence between them. Moses' prayer does not cause God's relenting in any straightforward sense. It is just part of the eternal package. God never really "decided" to judge and then "changed his mind." He simply willed, from all eternity, a complex pattern of events that includes a threat, a prayer, and a relenting.

But the text insists on the sequence. Moses pleads. Then God relents. The word "then" is doing real work. Remove it and the passage collapses into a static tableau. The prayer matters because it is heard when it is prayed. The relenting matters because it comes as a genuine response to the prayer, not as a pre-set element of an eternal plan. Wolterstorff's test applies directly: you can respond to a prayer only when it is being prayed.³⁵

Other texts reinforce the pattern. God walks with Adam in the cool of the day (Gen 3:8). He is present, at that time, in that place. God calls to Moses from the burning bush and waits for his answer (Exod 3:4). The call happens first. The answer comes second. God sends prophets one after another over the centuries, each one arriving at a particular moment in Israel's history (2 Chr 36:15). Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, overcome with grief at that moment, not from eternity (John 11:35). The tears are fresh. They fall now, at this grave, for this friend. In each case, the Bible presents a God who acts in real time. He is not watching a completed movie. He is living through a story alongside his creatures.³⁶

Mullins draws on this pattern in God and Emotion. Genuine emotional responsiveness requires real engagement in time. God's wrath is not an eternal attribute. It is a response to particular acts of injustice, encountered in real time. God's compassion is stirred by specific suffering. A God whose emotional life has no sequence cannot be the God who grieves at Genesis 6:6 or relents at Exodus 32:14.³⁷

I am not saying these texts "prove" divine temporality in a philosophical sense. Helm is right that the defender of timelessness can reinterpret them. But the reinterpretation comes at a price. The more temporal verbs you strip of their temporal meaning, the less the biblical God looks like the God the Bible describes. At some point, the reinterpretation becomes a revision. The temporalist reading takes the Bible at its word. The atemporalist reading adds a layer of philosophical reinterpretation that the text itself does not require and that the text, on its face, resists. I believe the simpler reading is the stronger one.

Three Philosophical Worries

Three standard objections to divine temporality deserve brief attention. Each is real. None, I believe, is fatal.³⁸

The first is divine simplicity. Classical theology holds that God is absolutely simple: he has no parts, no composition. If God is temporal, he seems to have different states at different times. And different states seem to imply parts. This would violate simplicity. The response is that strong divine simplicity, as Aquinas understood it, has been widely questioned even among classical theists. Many who hold a moderate version allow that God can have different relations to the world at different times without being composed of parts. Craig, Wolterstorff, and Mullins all argue that simplicity, properly understood, does not require timelessness. The simplicity objection has force only on the strongest version of the doctrine, and that version is itself contested.³⁹

The second is divine immutability. If God changes over time, doesn't that mean he can improve or decline? Doesn't it imply imperfection? The response distinguishes two kinds of change. God does not change in his character, his purposes, or his being. He is always loving, always just, always faithful. But he does change in his relations to creatures. Before I was born, God did not sustain me. Now he does. That is a relational change, not a change in God's nature. DeWeese distinguishes "intrinsic" immutability, which the temporalist affirms, from "relational" change, which the temporalist accepts. God's character is rock-solid. His engagement with creatures is dynamic.⁴⁰

The third is relativity theory. Einstein showed that there is no absolute "now" in physics. Different observers, moving at different speeds, disagree about which events are simultaneous. If there is no objective present moment, how can God have a "now"?⁴¹

This is a real challenge, and Appendix N addresses it at length. The short answer, developed by Craig and others, is that Einstein's relativity does not prove time is unreal. It proves that clock-readings differ between reference frames. But this is compatible with a preferred cosmic reference frame. Craig favors a neo-Lorentzian interpretation in which there is an objective present. Modern cosmology's use of "cosmic time," defined by the cosmic microwave background radiation, supports this. DeWeese makes the same point. General relativity's cosmic time provides a natural candidate for the "now" that the temporalist requires.⁴²

None of these objections is trivial. But none of them, in my judgment, outweighs the cumulative case for temporality. The full arguments are in the appendices. For now, I note only that the objections have answers, and that the answers are serious.

What the Encounter Requires: Five Temporal Verbs

Return to the bedside. The woman is dying. The monitors are slowing. And Christ is there.

What does the encounter actually involve? I've used a set of verbs throughout this book to describe it. Each one is a time-word. Each one requires a God who acts in sequence. They are not decorative. They are structural. Remove the temporality from any one of them and the encounter changes shape. Let me take them one at a time.

God attends. Before the encounter begins, God is present. He is there, at the threshold, before the soul arrives. This is not a generic omnipresence, the diffuse "God is everywhere" that we affirm in Sunday School. It is a focused, personal attention. God turns toward this soul, at this moment. Think of a doctor attending to one patient at a time. Not because the doctor forgets the others. But because this patient needs her now. God's attending is like that, but infinitely deeper. He brings the full weight of his love to bear on one dying person. It is a temporal act. You attend to something that is happening now. You can only attend in the present tense.⁴³

God pursues. The encounter is not passive. God does not simply stand and wait for the soul to come to him. He goes after it. If the soul turns away, God follows. If the soul hides, God seeks. This is the God of Luke 15, the God who tells three parables in a row about going after what is lost. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to find the one. The woman sweeps the whole house for one lost coin. The father runs down the road to meet the prodigal. In every case, God moves toward the one who is lost. Pursuit is inherently sequential. You cannot pursue someone without acting in time, adjusting your approach to their movements, going where they go.⁴⁴

God responds. The encounter is a two-way exchange. The soul speaks. God answers. The soul weeps. God comforts. The soul resists. God offers a different angle, a different word, a different memory from the life review. Response is the heart of what makes the encounter personal rather than mechanical. It is what separates a meeting from a monologue. And it is inherently temporal. A response, by definition, comes after the thing it responds to. That is what makes it a response and not a pre-set script. A God who "responds" from eternity is not really responding at all. He is executing a plan that was settled before the soul ever cried out.⁴⁵

God waits. Perhaps the most striking of the five. God does not rush the soul to a decision. He gives time. He allows the soul to think, to feel, to remember, to struggle. The NDE data, which we examined in Chapter 10, suggest that the dying soul experiences radical time-dilation. Minutes or seconds of clinical time may correspond to subjective hours or days. God waits through all of it. He does not tap his foot. He does not impose a deadline. He gives the soul the space it needs. Waiting is the most purely temporal act there is. It is the choice to let time pass before acting. A timeless God cannot wait, because there is nothing to wait through. Waiting requires a "not yet" and a "now." It requires duration.⁴⁶

God concludes. The encounter has an end. The soul makes its decision. God receives the "yes" or honors the "no." The encounter closes. Whatever follows begins after the encounter ends. Conclusion is a temporal act. It means that something that was open is now settled. What comes next is different from what came before. The encounter is technically antemortem: it occurs within the singular dying, before final soul-body separation. But it still has an ending. And an ending requires time.⁴⁷

Each of these verbs requires sequence. Each requires a God who has a "now." None of them fits comfortably into a model where God's life is a single undifferentiated moment. I believe the encounter requires divine temporality. Without it, the encounter can still be affirmed, but only at the cost of treating every one of these verbs as a metaphor for something that does not really involve sequence. And that cost, I think, is too high.

Boros and the Problem of Time at the Threshold

One of the remarkable things about Ladislaus Boros's 1959 Mystery of Death is that he saw this problem clearly. He saw it decades before the current philosophical debate took its present shape and decades before the NDE data existed. Chapter 16 gives Boros the full treatment he deserves. But his reflections on time at the threshold belong here.⁴⁸

Boros faced an immediate objection to his hypothesis of a final decision at the moment of death. The objection said that the hypothesis packs too many mental acts into a single moment. A perception, an awakening, a decision, a response. Surely the mind requires some length of time to do all this. A single moment is not enough.

Boros's answer was that this objection confuses different levels of time. He distinguished three.⁴⁹

The first is what he called the "sub-personal time-level." This is the regular, uniform ticking of the physical world. Clocks and heartbeats and planetary rotations. The kind of time you measure with a stopwatch. It marches forward at the same rate regardless of what is happening inside the person. When the doctor records time of death, this is the time he records.

The second is personal time. Our inner experience of duration. This level varies with attention and significance. An hour of boredom crawls. An hour of deep conversation flies. A moment of extreme danger can stretch to feel like minutes. This is familiar to everyone. We have all felt time slow down or speed up depending on how deeply we are engaged. Decisions of profound significance, Boros wrote, "compress time and turn it into a kind of thick black line." Our personal duration is something proper to each of us. It does not march in lockstep with the clock on the wall. It speeds up and slows down with the weight of what we are living through.

The third is spiritual time. This is the mode of temporal experience the soul enters when it is freed from the body's clock. At this level, the soul's succession becomes entirely interior. It is no longer tied to the physical world's ticking. The soul is "able to realize fully the whole continuity of its being, all at once, in one and the same act."⁵⁰

Boros saw that the "moment of death" is not a clock-moment. It is a personal and spiritual moment, measured by the soul's own inner life. The clock at the bedside may show seconds. The soul at the threshold may experience something far richer and far longer.

He wrote this decades before the NDE literature confirmed his insight. But when researchers like Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, and Pim van Lommel documented the radical time-dilation in near-death experiences, they found exactly what Boros had predicted. The dying moment holds far more subjective time than the clock can measure. Howard Storm reported an encounter that felt like hours. Many life-review experiencers describe reliving entire lifetimes in what clinical records show was only a few seconds of cardiac arrest.⁵¹

Boros's framework reinforces this chapter's argument. The encounter at the threshold is not squeezed into a clock-second. It unfolds in the soul's own time, in Boros's "spiritual duration." And the God who meets the soul there is a God who acts within that duration. He pursues through it. He responds within it. He waits across it. Divine temporality is not just a philosophical preference. It is the condition for the encounter being what Boros, the NDE researchers, and this book all say it is: a real, responsive, unfolding meeting between the soul and God.

Where the Two Streams Converge

This chapter has drawn on two streams of evidence that might seem unrelated. The first is the philosophical case for divine temporality: the arguments of Craig, Wolterstorff, Mullins, and DeWeese. The second is the empirical NDE data on time-dilation: the evidence from Chapter 10 that the dying moment holds extended subjective time.⁵²

The two streams converge at the bedside.

If God is temporal, then he can act within the dying moment. He can pursue, respond, wait, and conclude. But for the encounter to be more than a flash, the dying moment must hold enough subjective time for a real conversation, a real life review, a real decision. This is what the NDE data provide. The philosophical case tells us God can act in time. The NDE data tell us the dying soul has time for God to act in.

Together, they answer the most obvious objection to the moment-of-death encounter: "There isn't time." Yes, there is. The clock says seconds. The soul says hours. And the God who meets the soul is a God who can work within those hours, step by step, moment by moment, with all the patience that love demands.

This is the convergence. It is not proof. It is something better for our purposes: a picture that holds together. The philosophy says God acts in time. The empirical data say the dying moment is rich with subjective time. Together they make the encounter credible.

Neither stream, on its own, would do the work. Without divine temporality, the encounter loses its responsive character. God is present to the dying moment, perhaps, but not responsive within it. The five temporal verbs become metaphors, not descriptions. Without NDE time-dilation, the encounter has no room to unfold. A clock-second is not enough for a life review, a conversation, and a decision. You need both streams. You need a God who acts in time, and a dying moment that holds enough time for God to act in.

Together, they give us a model that is both theologically coherent and empirically grounded. The theology provides the actor. The data provide the stage. And the encounter is the drama that plays out between them.

Chapter 14 will develop the distinction between subjective and objective time further. Chapter 15 will bring the biblical vocabulary of time to bear. Together, these three chapters build the time-architecture on which the encounter rests.⁵³

What This Means for Prayer

One more implication before we close. If God is genuinely temporal, then our prayers for the dying are more than expressions of hope. They are real-time participation in a real-time encounter.

Think about what this means. You stand at the bedside of someone you love. You pray for them as they slip away. On a timeless model, your prayer is heard by a God who already knows, from eternity, how the encounter will end. Your prayer changes nothing in God. It may change you, perhaps. It may comfort you. But it does not enter into the encounter as a live factor.

On a temporalist model, the picture is different. God hears your prayer now. He is present to the dying moment now. Your prayer participates in that moment. You are not sending a message to a God who will receive it timelessly. You are praying to a God who is right there, at the threshold, doing what love does. And your prayer may be part of how he does it. The prayer, the encounter, and the dying are all happening in the same shared "now." Your cry and Christ's pursuit are unfolding side by side.⁵⁴

I don't want to overstate this. The mechanics of prayer remain mysterious. I am not claiming that your prayer at the bedside determines the soul's eternal destiny. That is between the dying soul and Christ. But I am saying that your prayer matters in the way that prayers always matter when directed to a God who hears them when they are spoken. It matters in the same way that Moses' prayer mattered at Sinai. God heard. God responded. The prayer entered into what God was doing, as a real factor in a real moment.

Divine temporality makes prayer at the deathbed more than a ritual of comfort. It makes it a participation in something that is happening right now, in real time, between the soul and its Maker. When you pray at the bedside, you are not shouting into the void. You are speaking into the encounter.

What Rests on This

Let me be honest about what this chapter does and does not accomplish.

It does not settle the question of God's relationship to time. That debate is centuries old and will continue. Christians who hold to divine timelessness are not making a mistake. They are holding a view with deep roots, serious defenders, and genuine theological merits. I respect their position. I engage it fairly in Appendix G.

What this chapter does is show why the question matters for this book. The moment-of-death encounter is not a timeless decree. It is a meeting. Meetings happen in time. They involve sequence, response, waiting, and conclusion. The God who meets the dying soul must be the kind of God who can do these things. I believe that God is.⁵⁵

If you are persuaded by the case for divine temporality, then the encounter model works naturally. God acts in the dying moment the way he acts in every moment: responsively, personally, in real time.

If you hold divine timelessness, the encounter can still be affirmed, but with adjustments. God's "pursuit" and "response" become his eternal willing of a particular pattern of interaction. The soul experiences the encounter as temporal. But God does not. The soul's experience is real. The encounter is real. But the divine side of it looks different. Appendix G develops this alternative carefully. It works. But I think it loses something that matters pastorally: the sense that God is genuinely there, in the moment, hearing and responding. The dying person does not need a God who has timelessly willed a response. The dying person needs a God who is responding now.

The chapters that follow develop the time question from two more angles. Chapter 14 explores the relationship between subjective time and objective time. Chapter 15 brings the biblical vocabulary of time, from chronos and kairos to aion and aionios, to bear on the moment of death. Together, these three chapters build the time-architecture on which the encounter model rests.

But the heart of it is here. The God who made time is not a prisoner of timelessness. He acts. He pursues. He meets. He waits. And at the edge of mortality, when the clock runs out and the monitors fall silent, he is there. Not watching from above. Not knowing from eternity. There. Present. Responding. In time.

Between the last heartbeat and the silence, God is at work.