Appendix G
Why the Moment-of-Death Thesis Does Not Require You to Abandon Classical Theism
Condensed Edition
Appendix F made the case for dynamic divine temporality. On that view, God really experiences before-and-after. He genuinely pursues, listens, responds, and waits. The temporal verbs are literally true on God’s side as well as ours.
But many readers will not follow Appendix F there. Many hold that God is timeless, existing beyond all succession, possessing his entire life at once. They hold this not because of anything in this book. They hold it because of a long and serious theological tradition. That tradition stretches from Augustine through Boethius and Aquinas to major voices in our own day. For those readers, a pressing question arises. Is the moment-of-death thesis tied to divine temporality? If you believe God is timeless, must you abandon the claim that every dying person meets Christ?
The answer is no. The thesis can survive on the timelessness view. It requires some adjustment. It costs something real. But the encounter at the bedside holds. This appendix shows how.
Note — Who This Appendix Is For. If you came here from Chapter 13 or Appendix F and already hold divine temporality, you may skip ahead to Appendix H. This appendix speaks to the reader who holds classical divine timelessness and wants to know whether the book’s central thesis still works on that view.
Divine timelessness is not a fringe view. It is the dominant position in the Western theological tradition. Its roots go back to the early church, and its finest statement comes from Boethius in the sixth century. In his Consolation of Philosophy (Book V, prose 6), Boethius gave his famous definition. Eternity, he wrote, is “the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life.”1 The Latin is famous: aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio.2 On this definition, God does not experience one moment after another. He holds his entire life at once. There is no past in God’s experience, no future waiting to arrive. All is present, complete, and whole.
Aquinas followed Boethius closely. Eternity, he argued, follows from God’s changelessness. Because God is wholly free of change, the very concept of temporal flow does not apply to him. Aquinas put it this way: numbering the stages of change produces the notion of time, while awareness of something altogether free from change produces the notion of eternity.3 Anselm agreed. So did Augustine, at least in his most philosophical moments.4
In our own day, the most thorough defense of divine timelessness comes from Paul Helm. In Eternal God (1988), Helm argues two things that matter for our discussion. First, he claims that the scriptural data on God’s relation to time are not precise enough to settle the question by themselves. “It would be unwise for the eternalist to claim that divine timeless eternity is entailed by the language of Scripture,” he writes.5 The issue is decided by theological and philosophical reasoning, not by proof-texts alone. Second, Helm defends the coherence of timeless personal life. Can a timeless being think, purpose, and love? Yes, Helm argues, because these are not necessarily sequential activities. A timeless being can possess knowledge, intention, and love as a single, undivided act.6
Helm makes a further move that deserves attention. He acknowledges that the biblical language of God grieving, repenting, and responding in dialogue appears deeply temporal. His answer is divine accommodation. God represents himself in ways that are accessible to temporal creatures. But these ways are not “literally true” of God’s inner experience.7 The dialogue is real, but it is enacted by a God who, from his own side, does not experience the before-and-after that the narrative portrays.
Alongside Helm, the classical view has been developed by Brian Leftow and Katherin Rogers.8 Leftow proposed that eternity functions as a kind of reference frame, distinct from any temporal frame. Garrett DeWeese gives a careful treatment of Leftow’s model in God and the Nature of Time, chapter 6, and the reader wanting a fuller engagement should begin there.9
The picture, then, is of a God whose life is metaphysically prior to creaturely time and ontologically superior to it. God does not wait for anything. He does not anticipate anything. He is not surprised by anything. He holds the whole story at once.
Primary Source — Boethius on Eternity.
Eternity is the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life. The meaning of this can be made clearer by comparison to temporal things. For whatever lies in time lives in the present, proceeding from past to future, and nothing is so constituted in time that it can embrace the whole span of its life at once. — Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, V, prose 6 (as quoted in DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5)
The deepest challenge for divine timelessness has always been this: how can a God who is outside time relate to beings who are inside it? If God’s life has no before-and-after, how does he know what is happening now? How does he act in a specific moment?
The most influential attempt to solve this problem was offered by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann in their landmark 1981 article “Eternity.”10 They introduced a concept called ET-simultaneity (for “eternal-temporal simultaneity”). The idea goes like this. Ordinary simultaneity relates two events within the same mode of existence: two things happen at the same time. But God’s mode of existence (eternity) and our mode of existence (time) are different. So we need a new kind of simultaneity that can bridge the gap.
Their formal definition runs as follows. Take some eternal entity x and some temporal entity y. They are ET-simultaneous if, from the viewpoint of the eternal reference frame, both are present; and from the viewpoint of a temporal reference frame, both are present.11 More simply: every moment of creaturely time is ET-simultaneous with God’s whole eternal now. And God’s whole eternal now is ET-simultaneous with every moment of creaturely time. God is not “before” or “after” any event. He is present to all of them, all at once, in his timeless act.
Stump and Kretzmann built the definition carefully. ET-simultaneity is symmetric (if x is ET-simultaneous with y, then y is ET-simultaneous with x). But it is not transitive. This is crucial. My typing is ET-simultaneous with God’s eternal now. The fall of Rome is also ET-simultaneous with God’s eternal now. But it does not follow that my typing and the fall of Rome are simultaneous with each other.12 The famous objection from Anthony Kenny is blocked by design. Kenny imagined that if my typing and Nero’s fiddling are both simultaneous with eternity, they must be simultaneous with each other. The non-transitivity of ET-simultaneity prevents exactly this collapse.13
Why does this matter for the moment of death? Because ET-simultaneity, if it works, gives the timelessness defender a way to say that God is genuinely present to the dying soul without saying that God enters the soul’s time. God’s whole timeless act of love is ET-simultaneous with the soul’s temporal encounter. The encounter is real on both sides, even though the two sides exist in different modes.
R. T. Mullins, in The End of the Timeless God, mounts a sustained challenge to this framework. His critique runs through chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 asks what timeless eternity is. Chapter 4 asks whether a timeless God’s knowledge can track a dynamic, presentist world. Together they put heavy pressure on the entire ET-simultaneity project.14
Mullins raises several problems. First, he argues that ET-simultaneity amounts to a restatement of the problem rather than a solution. The definition tells us that an eternal being and a temporal being are “both present” from each reference frame. But what does “present” mean when applied across radically different modes of existence? As Helm himself noted, the Stump-Kretzmann definition has “no independent merit or use; nothing is illuminated or explained by it.”15 DeWeese agrees: “an incoherent idea cannot merely be defined into coherence.”16
Second, Mullins presses the problem of tensed knowledge. If time is dynamic (the A-theory), then there are tensed facts: it is now three o’clock. But a timeless God cannot know tensed facts without being in time himself. Craig makes the point sharply: “If He is to know tensed facts, He must know that t is present. Thus, His factual knowledge must be constantly changing, in which case God must be in time.”17 If God cannot know what time it is now, can he know that a particular soul is dying now?
Third, the ET-simultaneity framework seems to require a B-theory of time (the “block universe” view) in which past, present, and future are all equally real. DeWeese argues that on a dynamic view of time, future events do not exist and therefore cannot be ET-simultaneous with anything.18 If the timelessness defender adopts B-theory, other difficulties arise. (See Appendix H and Appendix N for the full case.)
Common Objection — “If God is timeless, he cannot interact with a temporal world at all.” This is the interaction problem, and it is real. But the timelessness defender has a reply. Helm argues that God’s timeless act has temporal effects without being itself temporal. Think of an automatic thermostat set once: a single act with many temporally scattered effects.19 God timelessly wills that certain things happen at certain times, knowing from eternity what creatures will do. The analogy is imperfect, as Helm himself concedes. But it shows that the position is not incoherent on its face. The author of this book tilts toward Mullins. But the debate is genuinely open, and fair-minded people stand on both sides.
Suppose, then, that you hold divine timelessness. Can the moment-of-death encounter still work? It can. Here is how.
From the dying soul’s side, nothing changes. The soul is a temporal creature. It experiences the encounter in sequence: the initial awareness, the presence of Christ, the life review, the pursuit, the response, the decision. NDE time-dilation gives the soul subjective hours within clinical seconds. All of this is creaturely time. It does not depend on what God’s relation to time is.
From God’s side, the entire encounter is a single timeless act. God does not first attend, then pursue, then wait, then conclude. He timelessly acts in such a way that the soul experiences attending, pursuit, waiting, and conclusion. The sequence is real for the soul. It is the way the soul receives God’s timeless act of love.
Think of it this way. A great novel tells a story that unfolds in sequence: crisis, struggle, turning point, resolution. The author does not live those stages one at a time the way the reader does. The author holds the whole story in mind at once. Yet the story is real. The reader genuinely lives through it. The characters genuinely face their turning points. The timelessness defender says something like this about God and the dying soul. God holds the whole encounter at once. The soul lives through it moment by moment. Both are real, in different modes.20
On the ET-simultaneity model, we can say that God’s whole timeless act of meeting the dying soul is ET-simultaneous with the soul’s whole temporal encounter. Each moment of the encounter, from the soul’s side, is ET-simultaneous with God’s undivided eternal now. The soul experiences pursuit. God timelessly acts so that pursuit-as-experienced is real.21
Key Argument — The Encounter Survives Timelessness. The moment-of-death thesis does not require the reader to settle the God-and-time debate. On divine temporality (Appendix F), the encounter is a real temporal event on both sides. On divine timelessness, the encounter is a real temporal event on the soul’s side, and a single timeless act on God’s side. Either way, the dying soul meets Christ. The metaphysical description of what is happening on God’s side differs. The bedside reality does not.
Honesty requires us to say what the timelessness view gives up. The cost is real, and the reader deserves to weigh it.
On divine temporality, God literally pursues. He literally waits for the soul’s answer. He literally responds to resistance with deeper love. Each of these verbs has its full relational weight. The encounter is a genuine dialogue, with real give-and-take on both sides.
On divine timelessness, these verbs describe the soul’s experience rather than God’s inner reality. God does not literally wait, because waiting requires a before (not yet answered) and an after (answered). God does not literally pursue in sequence. The pursuit is a timeless act with sequential effects. The relational dynamism that the temporalist cherishes is, on the timeless view, a feature of how the soul receives God’s act rather than a structure within God himself.22
This means the language of Chapter 19 (the dynamics of the encounter) must be read differently by the timelessness reader. When the chapter says that Christ “presses in” or “waits patiently,” the timelessness reader hears this as a description of the soul’s experience of a timeless act, not as a report on God’s sequential inner life.
The question is whether this translation preserves enough. The temporalist says no: the whole point is that God really engages, really responds, really adjusts his approach to the individual soul. The timelessness defender says yes: the soul’s experience is fully real, and God’s timeless act is no less loving for being undivided. The debate is old, and we will not settle it here.23
There is also the question of divine emotion. Mullins argues in God and Emotion that genuine compassion requires experiencing the other’s situation in real time. A God who timelessly knows your grief is not the same as a God who sits with you in it, moment by moment, feeling the weight of it as it unfolds. The timelessness reader may respond that God’s timeless compassion is no less real for being undivided. But the temporalist will insist that the biblical picture of a God who grieves (Genesis 6:6), relents (Exodus 32:14), and weeps (John 11:35) requires genuine temporal engagement. At the bedside, the question becomes pointed. Is Christ present to your dying mother as one who is now moved by her fear? Or does his compassion come from outside her time, complete and perfect but never unfolding?34
The good news for the timelessness reader is substantial. Four things remain fully intact.
First, the soul’s encounter is still real and temporal. It has sequence. It has duration. It has content. NDE time-dilation gives the dying soul subjective hours in which to see, hear, and respond to Christ. This is a feature of creaturely time, not of divine eternity. It works the same way on either view.24
Second, the Christ who meets the soul is the same Christ. Timelessness does not change who the soul encounters. The risen Lord, with wounded hands and a human heart, is present. The love is the same love. The offer is the same offer.
Third, the freedom of the soul is preserved. Whether God knows the soul’s response from eternity or learns it in real-time, the soul still genuinely chooses. (This is a complex issue in its own right, and Helm devotes significant attention to showing that timeless foreknowledge is compatible with genuine freedom.)25
Fourth, the pastoral picture is the same. The dying loved one is not slipping away into nothing. She is being met. The silence between her last two breaths holds more than the clock can see. This is true whether God meets her from within time or from beyond it.
How does the timelessness reader engage the other appendices in Part Two? Most of them work without adjustment.
Appendix H (A-theory and B-theory) remains relevant. The A-theory and B-theory debate applies to creaturely time. A reader can hold divine timelessness and still hold that creaturely time is genuinely dynamic (A-theory). These are separate questions, though they do interact. The timelessness reader who also holds B-theory faces a harder path, because the block universe raises its own challenges for the encounter (see Appendix N).26
The empirical NDE appendices (Appendix J, Appendix K) are unchanged. NDE time-dilation is a feature of creaturely experience. It does not depend on divine metaphysics.
The biblical theology of time (Appendix L) remains intact. The distinction between chronos (clock-time) and kairos (the decisive moment) applies to the soul’s side. “Today, if you hear his voice” (Psalm 95:7–8; Hebrews 3:7) is the soul’s today.
The hardest challenge for the timelessness reader comes in Appendix M (the Incarnation as precedent). The Incarnation is the point at which God the Son entered creaturely time. On the temporalist view, this is straightforward: the eternal Son became temporal. On the timelessness view, it is notoriously difficult. Helm argues that the Son is “eternally incarnate” with “no time in his existence when he was not incarnate.”27 Mullins, Holland, and others press hard on this. If the Son truly entered our world of before-and-after, grew tired, wept, and died, then he experienced temporal succession.28 The reader who holds timelessness must grapple with this problem on its own terms. Appendix M develops the case in full.
The working model in Appendix O can be recast in timelessness terms with mostly cosmetic changes. The sequence of stages (release, orientation, meeting, life review, pursuit, decision, conclusion) describes the soul’s experience. On the timelessness view, these stages are the soul’s reception of a single divine act. On the temporality view, they are a real temporal interchange. The stages themselves look the same either way.29
Insight — The NDE Data Are Neutral. NDE time-dilation reports work on either metaphysical framework. The dying soul experiences hours of subjective time in seconds of clinical time. This is a feature of the soul’s experience, grounded in creaturely psychology and the soul’s partial release from the brain’s clock. It does not depend on whether God is inside time or outside it. The encounter’s experiential reality is the same on both views.
A reader who has followed this discussion may be feeling lost in metaphysics. So let us come back to the bedside.
Your mother is dying. The monitors are slowing. Her breaths are farther and farther apart. You are holding her hand, and you want to know: Is she alone? Is something happening in that silence?
On either view, the answer is the same. She is not alone. Christ is there. The encounter is real. She is seeing him, hearing him, being loved by him. On the temporality view, God is with her in real-time, pursuing and responding moment by moment. On the timelessness view, God’s timeless love is being received by her soul in a sequence that feels like hours. Either way, the silence between her last two breaths holds something vast.
The technical question of God’s relation to time matters for metaphysics. It matters for philosophical theology. It does not change what is happening in that room. The dying person is being met. The encounter is real. The love is real. The choice is real.30
Wolterstorff, a strong temporalist, once pressed the point that for an entity to exist “at” a time just is for it to be true at that time that the entity exists. “God doesn’t exist now,” he heard the eternalist saying, “but it’s nonetheless now true that God exists.” He found this indistinguishable from atheism.31 The charge is sharp, and the timelessness defender must answer it. But note what the charge does not touch. It does not touch the soul’s experience. It does not touch the reality of the encounter from the dying person’s side. And that is where the pastoral weight of this book rests.
There is also a middle way. William Lane Craig argues that God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation. On this hybrid view, the act of creating a temporal world brought God into time. God now experiences before-and-after alongside us.35 Craig’s position avoids the worst of both extremes. It preserves the classical intuition that God’s essential life is beyond time. It also preserves the temporalist claim that God genuinely responds to creatures. For our purposes, the hybrid view has a clear advantage. The encounter at the moment of death happens in the created order. On Craig’s view, God is temporal in precisely the domain where the encounter takes place.
This book’s primary metaphysical framework is dynamic divine temporality, developed in Appendix F. On that framework, the temporal verbs of the encounter are literally true on both sides. God really pursues. He really waits. He really concludes.
But the thesis is robust enough to survive a shift to classical divine timelessness. The cost is the loss of God-side temporal dynamism. The encounter’s relational language must be read as describing the soul’s experience of a timeless act rather than a sequential divine process. The Incarnation becomes harder to explain (Appendix M). The tensed-knowledge problem presses (Appendix H).32
But the encounter stands. The NDE data are unchanged. The soul’s subjective time is unchanged. The Christ who meets the soul is unchanged. And the dying person’s experience of being loved, pursued, and offered a choice is unchanged.
Readers should follow their convictions about divine eternity. The moment-of-death thesis is not held hostage to that debate. Whether God meets your dying loved one in time or whether his eternal love intersects her moment from beyond time, the picture at the bedside is the same: she is not alone. Christ is there. The question of what God’s relation to time is does not change what is happening in that room.33
Note — The Pastoral Equivalence. On either view of God’s eternity, the dying person’s encounter with Christ is real, conscious, extended by time-dilation, and decisive. The metaphysical description of what is happening on God’s side differs. The bedside reality does not. If you hold timelessness, hold it with confidence. Christ still meets the dying. The thesis survives.
↑ 1. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, V, prose 6. The translation given here follows DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5. Stump and Kretzmann translate the phrase as “complete possession all at once of illimitable life”: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981), p. 430. DeWeese notes that “endless” captures interminabilis better than “illimitable.”
↑ 2. The Latin is cited in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001), in Helm’s chapter “Divine Timeless Eternity,” and in Deng, God and Time, §3.
↑ 3. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 10, a. 1. Cf. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5, for discussion.
↑ 4. Augustine, Confessions, XI.11–13. Augustine’s view is complex. He may have held a psychological rather than a strictly atemporal theory. See DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5, for the interpretive difficulty.
↑ 5. Helm’s admission is documented in Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 112–113, where Holland cites Helm’s concession that the scriptural statements “are not sufficiently precise so as to provide a definitive resolution of the issue one way or the other.” Cf. Helm, Eternal God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Introduction.
↑ 6. Helm, Eternal God, chs. 1–4. The argument is that personal attributes (knowledge, intention, love) can be predicated of a timeless being if they are understood as non-sequential states. The key claim is that thinking, purposing, and loving do not require temporal succession in the thinker, even though temporal creatures experience them sequentially.
↑ 7. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 117–118, summarizes Helm’s accommodation argument: God “must do so by representing himself to them in ways that are not literally true.” Helm’s phrase appears in his treatment of scriptural language about God acting in time.
↑ 8. Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Katherin Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Neither is project-resident. Engage via DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6.
↑ 9. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6 (“Eternity as a Reference Frame: Brian Leftow”). Leftow proposes that eternity is a reference frame distinct from any temporal frame, and that God’s timeless life is not “in” time but “at” eternity, which bears its own kind of duration.
↑ 10. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981), pp. 429–458. The article revived philosophical discussion of divine timelessness in analytic philosophy and remains the standard point of departure. It is not project-resident; the exposition here follows the treatments in Deng, God and Time, §3, and DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6.
↑ 11. The formal definition is quoted in both Deng, God and Time, §3, and DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6. Deng identifies four ingredients in the Boethian passage: life, illimitability, duration, and tota simul (all-at-onceness), then introduces the ET-simultaneity definition as Stump and Kretzmann’s attempt to explain how an entity with these features can relate to temporal beings.
↑ 12. Deng, God and Time, §3. ET-simultaneity is symmetric but not reflexive and not transitive. No event can be ET-simultaneous with itself, and the transitivity failure blocks the collapsing of all temporal events into mutual simultaneity.
↑ 13. Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 38–39. Quoted in both Deng, God and Time, §3, and DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6.
↑ 14. R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chs. 3 (“What is Eternity?”) and 4 (“Presentism, Omniscience, and the Timeless God”).
↑ 15. Helm is quoted in Craig, “Timelessness & Omnitemporality,” in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views, and in Craig, Time and Eternity, p. 91. Helm’s actual words: the Stump-Kretzmann “‘solution’ to the problem is found simply by rewording the problem with the help of the device of ET-simultaneity. ET-simultaneity has no independent merit or use, nothing is illuminated or explained by it.”
↑ 16. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6. DeWeese uses a carefully constructed analogy (the nominalism-realism debate about universals) to show that a formal definition cannot make an incoherent concept coherent simply by defining it.
↑ 17. Craig, Time and Eternity, p. 100. This is part of Craig’s five-premise argument from God’s knowledge of tensed facts, which he develops against Kvanvig, Wierenga, and Leftow through approximately pp. 100–107.
↑ 18. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 6. His argument: “Not even an eternal entity can be simultaneous with a nonexistent event (any more than an omnipresent entity can be ‘present to’ a nonexistent spatial location), and no stipulative definition of ET-simultaneity can make it so.”
↑ 19. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 114–115, summarizes Helm’s thermostat analogy. Helm’s own words: “The correct way to think of God’s eternally willing something in time is to think of one eternal act of will with numerous temporally scattered effects.”
↑ 20. The novel analogy is the author’s, but it draws on a familiar pattern in timelessness literature. Helm uses a similar structure when he speaks of God’s single timeless act containing “responses” to future creaturely actions: “God may eternally will the burning bush and his temporally subsequent utterances to Moses, eternally knowing that Moses’ attention will be attracted by the burning bush.” Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, p. 115.
↑ 21. This is the key salvage move. The soul experiences temporal sequence; God acts timelessly. The encounter is real from both sides, but its metaphysical description differs depending on which side you start from. Cf. Deng, God and Time, §3, on the two reference frames in the ET-simultaneity model.
↑ 22. This cost is acknowledged honestly throughout the timelessness tradition. Craig makes a parallel point: on divine temporality, God’s responses to creatures are “real responses”; on timelessness, they must be reconceived as timelessly intended effects. See Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 86–87 (on the hybrid view).
↑ 23. The debate between timelessness and temporality is surveyed concisely in Deng, God and Time, §§3–4, and at length in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. The book’s position is that divine temporality is more natural for its thesis, but the thesis is not dependent on it.
↑ 24. See Appendix I for the philosophical foundation of psychological time-dilation, and Appendix J for the empirical NDE case studies that document it.
↑ 25. Helm, Eternal God, chs. 7–8 (on foreknowledge and freedom). Cf. Boethius, Consolation, V, prose 6, which is itself an attempt to reconcile divine foreknowledge and human freedom through timelessness. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 86–87, accepts timelessness sans creation and temporality since creation, partly to preserve genuine responsiveness.
↑ 26. Craig notes that “the decision between an A- or a B-theory of time constitutes a fundamental watershed for our conception of divine eternity.” Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Craig’s chapter). On a B-theory plus timelessness, the God-and-time picture becomes static in every direction, making genuine encounter harder to describe. Appendix N takes up the block-universe challenge.
↑ 27. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 115–116, quotes Helm: “There is no time in [Christ’s] existence when he was not incarnate” and “there is no preexistent Christ with a life history independent of and prior to the incarnation.”
↑ 28. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, develops this challenge in detail. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 7 (“The Incarnation of the Timeless God”), argues that the Incarnation is incoherent on strict timelessness. See Appendix M for the full case as it bears on the moment-of-death thesis.
↑ 29. See Appendix O. The working model describes the encounter from the soul’s side; the divine-side metaphysics can be supplied by either framework.
↑ 30. The pastoral equivalence is a deliberate feature of the book’s design. The thesis is constructed so that readers on both sides of the God-and-time debate can affirm it. See Chapter 13 for the introductory framing of this neutrality.
↑ 31. Wolterstorff, “Unqualified Divine Temporality,” in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views. His challenge: “All attempts on my part to understand this proposal in such a way that it comes out true have failed. To me it seems that for an entity to exist ‘at’ a time just is for it to be true at that time that the entity exists.”
↑ 32. Deng, God and Time, §3, provides a balanced summary of the difficulties for timelessness: the interaction problem, the tensed-knowledge problem, the Incarnation problem, and the emotional-responsiveness problem. Each is a genuine challenge; none is a knockdown refutation. The debate continues.
↑ 33. Cf. Chapter 13; Appendix F; Appendix O. The full argument of the cluster moves from divine-side metaphysics (F–G) through the metaphysics of time (H–I), the empirical evidence (J–K), biblical theology (L), christological precedent (M), the scientific objection (N), and the synthetic model (O).
↑ 34. Mullins, God and Emotion, §§3.2 and 4.3.2, argues that the impassible God “cannot be moved” by creatures and therefore cannot experience genuine empathy. The richest material on divine wrath as patient, creature-responsive moral judgment appears in §§5.1–5.2. Cf. Appendix F for the temporalist case that emotional engagement requires real divine participation in time.
↑ 35. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 86–87. Craig’s hybrid view: God is timeless sans creation and temporal since creation. He argues that “the decision between an A- or a B-theory of time constitutes a fundamental watershed for our conception of divine eternity,” and that on A-theory “the concept of a timeless God who is really related to the world does seem incoherent” (Craig’s chapter in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views). The hybrid view is criticized by Mullins in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, who argues that the transition from timelessness to temporality is itself incoherent.