Appendix F

Dynamic Divine Temporality and Time in the Dying Moment

The full case that God lives in real time, and why that matters for the soul He pursues

Imagine a father whose daughter is drowning. He hears her scream. He dives in. He reaches her. He pulls her to shore. Now imagine that someone tells you this father did not experience any of those moments in order. He did not hear the scream before he dove in. He did not dive in before he reached her. He did all of it at once, in a single frozen instant that had no before and no after.

Would you call that a rescue?

Most people would not. A rescue is something that happens in time. It has a beginning and an end. It responds to a cry. And a God who rescues must be a God who can respond in time.

That is the question this appendix takes up. Does God live in time? Does He experience a real "now," a real "before" and "after"? Or does He exist in a timeless eternity where past, present, and future are all the same to Him? The answer matters for everything this book has argued. If God truly pursues the dying person, meets the soul in Hades, and confronts every last holdout at the judgment, then He must be a God who acts in sequence. He must respond to the cry while it is being cried.¹

Chapter 9 gave a summary of this case and applied it to the dying moment. This appendix is the full treatment. The ideas here are harder than most of the book, so I will keep the sentences short and the words plain. But I will not water down the argument. Hard ideas, easy sentences.

Two Ways to Think About Time

Philosophers of time split into two broad camps. The labels are dry, but the ideas are simple enough. One camp says time is like a river. The other says time is like a frozen lake.

On the A-theory, time flows. Things happen. New moments come into being. Old moments slip into the past. This is how most people experience the world. You wake up. You eat breakfast. You go to work. Each event happens after the one before it. The "now" keeps moving forward.³

On the B-theory, time does not flow. All events exist together, spread out across a kind of four-dimensional block. Your birth, your breakfast, and your death are all equally real. You only think the present is special because you happen to be located at that point on the timeline.⁴

Think of it this way. On the A-theory, time is like a parade. You are standing on the curb. The floats come past you one by one. Each float is "present" for a moment, and then it moves on. On the B-theory, time is like an aerial photograph of the parade taken from a helicopter. All the floats exist at once. None of them is more real than any other. The sense that they "pass by" is just a trick of your ground-level viewpoint.

Why does this matter for God? Because the classical Christian tradition, for most of its history, tied its picture of God to something like the B-theory. It said God sees all of time at once. He does not move through it. He stands outside it, looking down at the whole thing at a glance.⁵ That is the doctrine of divine timelessness. And it has a long and impressive pedigree.

This book works with the A-theory. Most of the philosophers who argue for divine temporality do the same. William Lane Craig argues at length that the A-theory is both philosophically and theologically stronger. He says tense cannot be removed from language. Our experience of temporal becoming is real, not a trick of perception. And the Bible's own doctrine of creation out of nothing makes better sense on a dynamic view of time.⁶

I will not repeat Craig's full case here. But let me highlight one point. On the B-theory, your future death is just as real as your present reading of this sentence. Both exist in the block. The difference between them is only a matter of perspective. On the A-theory, your death has not happened yet. The future is open. The past is gone. And the present is the cutting edge of reality, the place where things actually happen.

For our purposes, the key point is this: if the A-theory is true, time is real, the "now" is real, and the past is genuinely gone. That has consequences for what God can be. A God who responds to a cry must have a "now" in which the cry is happening. A God who pursues a soul through Hades must experience the pursuit as a sequence of real moments. A God who waits for an answer must be the kind of being for whom waiting is possible. All of these require real, dynamic time.

The Classical Doctrine: God Outside Time

I want to state this view fairly before I push back on it. It deserves respect. Some of the greatest minds in Christian history held it. Augustine wrote about time with more insight than any philosopher before or since. Boethius gave the definition that shaped a thousand years of theology. Anselm and Aquinas built their systems on it. In our own day, Paul Helm has defended the view with philosophical rigor and care.⁷

The idea goes something like this. God is perfect. He does not change. He does not gain new knowledge or lose old knowledge. He does not wait for things to happen. He does not look forward to the future or remember the past. He simply is. Boethius, writing in the sixth century, gave the classic definition. Eternity, he said, is the complete and perfect possession of endless life, all at once.⁸ There is no sequence in it. No before, no after. Just one vast, simultaneous act of existing.

Aquinas took this further. For Aquinas, there is no "before" and "after" in God. No sequence at all. God's whole life is a single, undivided act.⁹ To say that God "first" knew something and "then" did something is to speak from our limited point of view, not to describe the way God actually exists.

Paul Helm has defended this view with great energy. In Eternal God, Helm argues that God exists as a timelessly eternal being. In the God and Time: Four Views volume edited by Gregory Ganssle, Helm states the point with full directness: God does not exist in time; He exists "outside" time.¹⁰ When Scripture describes God as acting in sequence, hearing prayers, and responding to cries, it is (on this view) speaking from our point of view. It is not describing what God actually experiences.

On Helm's account, God can timelessly will His own "reactions" to human events. God may eternally will a certain event, knowing it will produce a certain human response, and eternally will a further event in answer to that response. In this way, everything looks sequential from our end, but from God's end, it is all one timeless act.¹¹

There is something noble in this picture. It protects God's sovereignty. It guards against the idea that God is dragged around by events. It says that nothing surprises Him, nothing catches Him off guard. And it has the weight of centuries behind it.

I want to add that I do not think the defenders of timelessness were foolish. They were wrestling with real problems. How do you honor God's perfection? How do you protect Him from the messiness and unpredictability of a created world? If God changes, does that mean He was imperfect before the change? If He learns something new, does that mean He was ignorant before? These are genuine worries. The timelessness tradition answered them by saying: God does not change, does not learn, does not grow. He is complete from eternity. That answer has real appeal.

But I think it protects too much. It protects God right out of the story. It turns the biblical narrative of God's dealings with His people into something like a play that God wrote and watches from the audience, never stepping onto the stage Himself. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not a playwright. He is a character in the drama. He walks in the garden. He argues with Moses. He weeps over Jerusalem. And the Incarnation is not a costume He puts on. It is a life He lives.

The Case Against Divine Timelessness

The problems with the timeless view have grown harder to ignore over the last few decades. A new generation of Christian philosophers has pressed three arguments with real force. Each one comes from a core Christian belief. And together, they make a strong case that the timeless picture cannot stand.

The Argument from God's Knowledge of "Now"

William Lane Craig, in Time and Eternity, lays out a tight argument from God's knowledge of tensed facts. A "tensed fact" is a fact that uses time words like "now," "yesterday," or "tomorrow." For example: "It is now 3 p.m." That fact is true at 3 p.m. and false at 4 p.m. It changes with the clock.¹²

Craig's argument has five steps. First, God is all-knowing. Second, if time is dynamic, there are tensed facts. Third, to be all-knowing, a being must know all tensed facts. Fourth, if God is timeless, He does not know tensed facts, because He has no "now." Fifth, therefore, God is not timeless.¹³

The argument is surprisingly hard to escape. You might try to say that God knows the content of all tensed facts without experiencing them. But Craig presses back: knowing that it is 3 p.m. is different from knowing it is 3 p.m. now. The second kind of knowledge requires a "now." And a timeless being has no "now."¹⁴

The only clean escape, Craig argues, is to deny that time is dynamic. If you adopt the B-theory (the frozen-lake view), then there are no tensed facts. Everything just is, spread out across the block. And a timeless God can know the whole block at a glance. But if time is dynamic (the river view), then this escape closes. There are real tensed facts. God must know them. And knowing them requires a "now."¹⁵

The History Test: Wolterstorff

Nicholas Wolterstorff presses a different line in his essay "Unqualified Divine Temporality," published in the same God and Time: Four Views volume. Wolterstorff starts not with philosophy but with Scripture. The Bible tells a story about God. God speaks to Abraham. He hears the cries of Israel in Egypt. He sends Moses. He responds to Moses's protests by performing a series of actions, one after the other.¹⁷

Here is the episode that Wolterstorff highlights. God speaks to Moses from the burning bush. Moses protests. God answers. Moses protests again. God answers again. This back-and-forth has a clear temporal shape. God's second answer comes after Moses's second protest. That is sequence. And sequence means time.¹⁸

Wolterstorff's point is simple and powerful. God has a history. A story can be told about Him. He did one thing and then another. He responded to what His creatures did. And if something has a history, it is in time. As Wolterstorff puts it: if something has a history, then that being is, of necessity, in time.

Wolterstorff adds a key methodological point. Christians confess Scripture as their authority. Scripture describes God as having a real history with real sequence. The plain reading of the text is temporal. Anyone who wants to deny the plain reading bears the burden of proof. Without strong arguments, the temporal reading stands.¹⁹

Think of what the atemporalist must say about the Exodus story. God heard the cries of Israel. He sent Moses. He performed signs in Egypt. He parted the Red Sea. He led His people through the wilderness. Every one of those sentences uses a past tense. Every one describes a sequence: first this, then that. The atemporalist must say that this sequence is only apparent. God did not first hear the cries and then act. He timelessly willed the entire sequence as one act. But that is a massive reinterpretation. It requires treating nearly every verb in the Old Testament as figurative when applied to God. And Wolterstorff is right to ask: where is the argument that justifies such a move?

The same point holds for the New Testament. Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). That is a statement of priority in time. The Son existed before Abraham. If the Son is timeless, the word "before" has no meaning. It becomes a metaphor, and a strained one at that. The Gospel writers use temporal language about God constantly. They describe a God who plans, acts, waits, and responds. Either that language is telling us something true about God, or it is systematically misleading. Wolterstorff takes the first option. I do too.

Ganssle summarizes the force of Wolterstorff's case in his editorial introduction. God responds to His people's cries, and He can respond to those cries only when they are crying out.²⁰ A God who timelessly decrees all things in a single act does not respond in any real sense. He does not hear and then act. He just is. But the God of Exodus, the God of the prophets, the God who sent His Son does not "just is." He hears. He acts. He waits. He acts again.

Holland, in his analysis of Wolterstorff, identifies the strongest point in the argument: it is grounded in Scripture and does not require a fancy interpretation to sustain itself. The atemporalist, by contrast, must explain why key passages about God's actions and responses should be read as merely figurative.²² That is a heavy burden.

The Incarnation: Mullins

The most powerful argument against divine timelessness comes, I think, from the Incarnation. If God the Son became human, then something changed in His life. There was a before (the Son existed without a human nature) and an after (the Son existed with a human nature). That before-and-after is enough. Any change, of any kind, creates a before and an after. And a before and an after is time.²³

R. T. Mullins develops this argument in full in The End of the Timeless God, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Mullins walks through the major models of the Incarnation and asks a pointed question: Can a timeless God be embodied?²⁴

To answer the question, Mullins uses a five-condition test for embodiment. A mind is embodied in a body if certain things are true. The body's disturbances cause pain or pleasure in the mind. The mind can feel the inside of the body (like an empty stomach). The mind can move the body. The mind looks out at the world from where the body is. And the body affects the mind's thoughts and feelings.²⁵

A timeless divine mind, Mullins argues, can satisfy at best only one of these conditions. It cannot feel pain from the body, because pain is a time-bound experience. It cannot look out from the body's location, because looking is something that unfolds in sequence: you perceive one thing, then another, then another. A timeless mind has no sequence. It cannot be affected by the body's condition, because it is changeless. If the human body of Jesus grows tired, the timeless divine mind has no knowledge of what it is like to feel tired.²⁶

Mullins presses this further. Christians believe the Incarnation is non-negotiable. It is the heart of the faith. Timelessness, by contrast, is a philosophical commitment. If the two collide, timelessness must give way. And Mullins has shown, with care, that they do collide. As he puts it in chapter 1: an atemporal God cannot experience time, and yet God has created a universe that He can interact with.²⁸ Interaction requires sequence. Sequence requires time.

Mullins also presses the point through what philosophers call de se knowledge. This is knowledge from a first-person perspective. Consider a man named Bill who has heard that something is enjoyable. He has the belief at the level of information. But after he experiences the thing himself, he has a new kind of knowledge. He can now say "I know what that is like." That de se belief is unique to him. No one else can hold that exact belief, because it is about him.

Now apply this to Christ. In the Incarnation, there is supposed to be one person with two natures. One "I." Not two. The divine mind must be able to think "I am tired." It must be able to think "I am in pain" and "I am dying." If it cannot hold these de se beliefs, then God the Son is not the same person as Jesus. And if the Son is not the same person as Jesus, we do not have an Incarnation. We have two persons sharing a body. That is Nestorianism, and the church rejected it long ago.

A timeless mind cannot hold de se beliefs about temporal experiences. It cannot think "I am now suffering on the cross." It has no "now." So a timeless God cannot be the same person as Jesus. And that means a timeless God cannot be incarnate.

The early church felt this tension too. The idea that the immutable God could change was an offense against His perfection. The suggestion that the timeless God could enter time was seen as an assault on the most exalted being. Many of the early Christological heresies were driven by exactly this tension. They tried to protect God's timelessness at the expense of the Incarnation.²⁹ Mullins argues that today, we should run the argument in the other direction. The Incarnation should force us to reconsider what God is like. Not the other way around.³⁰

Holland and the Incarnation's Temporal Sequence

Richard A. Holland Jr. develops the Incarnation argument from a complementary angle in God, Time, and the Incarnation. Where Mullins focuses on embodiment, Holland focuses on sequence.³¹

Holland identifies three elements in the Incarnation that point to real temporal succession in God's life.

First, the Incarnation was an event. The Son existed before it. Then, around 4 BC, He took on human flesh. There was a state of affairs before the event (the Son without a human nature) and a state of affairs after it (the Son with a human nature). That is sequence. And the Incarnation was not temporary. Christ did not shed His humanity at the ascension. He is still the God-Man, seated at the right hand of the Father. Gregory of Nazianzus insisted: deny that Christ still has His body, and you deny the glory of His coming.³²

Second, the earthly life of Christ was a life lived in time. Jesus grew. He learned. He suffered. He died and rose. These were events in the life of God the Son. If they were not, then the Incarnation means less than the creeds say it does.

Third, the saving work of Christ required sequence. Christ had to live, die, and rise again. The death had to come before the resurrection. The resurrection had to come before the ascension. These events were not interchangeable. Their order mattered. And their order was temporal.³⁵

Put these three elements together and the picture is clear. The event of becoming incarnate was a change. The life of Christ was a series of changes. The saving work depended on a particular order. Each of these points to a God who experiences temporal sequence. A God who goes from one state to another. A God who lives in time.

Holland makes an important clarification that I want to underline. The argument is not that the divine nature became human. It is that the divine person became human.³⁶ The temporal events in the life of Christ are events in the life of God the Son. And events that come in sequence point to a God who lives in time. Holland suggests that time may even owe its existence to God's own nature, the way the moral law does. God experiences temporal sequence not because He is trapped in time but because that is the way His own life unfolds.³⁷

Craig's Hybrid View in Detail

Not every temporalist says the same thing about God's past. William Lane Craig charts a middle course that has become one of the most discussed proposals in the field.

Craig agrees that, given a dynamic view of time, God must be temporal if a temporal world exists. God has real relations with a changing world. He knows tensed facts. He acts in sequence. All of this requires time.³⁸

But Craig asks: What about before creation? If there were no events, no changes, no ticking clock, what would God's existence look like? His answer: it would be timeless. Not in the classical Boethian sense of seeing all of time at a glance, but in the sense of a single, changeless state with no before or after. God existing alone, utterly still, perfectly self-sufficient. There is no "before" creation, because "before" is a time word, and there is no time yet. There is just God, changeless and solitary.

Then God creates. And with that first event, time begins. God enters into time, not because He is forced to, but because He freely chooses to create and to relate. By the time of the Incarnation, Craig says, God was already temporal.³⁹ The Incarnation confirmed what creation had already begun.

Craig draws an analogy that I find helpful. Just as the Incarnation was an act of divine humility (the infinite God taking on finite human nature), so creation itself was an act of humility. God chose to enter into relationship with a world that changes, a world that ticks along from moment to moment. He did not have to. He chose to. And that choice brought Him into time. It was not a loss. It was a gift. God gave Himself to us by entering our kind of existence.

This helps us understand why divine temporality is not a demotion. It is not as though God was better off as timeless and somehow fell from that state. He was self-sufficient before creation. He lacked nothing. But He freely chose to create, to relate, to love. And love that relates takes time. It requires a "you" and a "now" and a real meeting between the two.

Not everyone is satisfied with Craig's proposal. Garrett DeWeese, in God and the Nature of Time, finds the transition between the two phases puzzling. How does a changeless being become a changing one? What connects the timeless phase to the temporal one?⁴⁰ DeWeese does not think Craig has answered these questions well enough. But he agrees with Craig's conclusion about God's current state: since creation, God has been temporal.

Natalja Deng, in her even-handed survey God and Time, presents both sides fairly. She notes that the timeless view holds that God is outside time and does not experience things in succession.⁴¹ The temporalist's response is that God is not in our "measured" time but does experience real succession in His own life.⁴² Deng does not pick a winner. But the very fact that such a careful and balanced survey gives the temporalist view full standing shows how far the conversation has moved.

The Wider Conversation

I have focused on the voices most important to this book's argument. But a few more deserve mention, because they show that the temporalist position is not a fringe view. It is a broad and growing movement within Christian philosophy.

DeWeese defends what he calls the "omnitemporal" model. On this view, God is present at every moment of physical time. He genuinely experiences the succession of His own mental states and His relations with creation. DeWeese argues that this model provides the most plausible account of God's temporal mode of being.⁴³ He also gives a brief but pointed argument from the Incarnation: the fact that God became incarnate, he says, does make atemporality look suspect.⁴⁴

Michael L. Rea, in God Inside Time, builds on Craig's omnitemporal framework and states his thesis from the opening pages: God is, in fact, not outside of time. God is inside time.⁴⁵ (I should note: this is Michael L. Rea, an independent author, not the Notre Dame philosopher Michael C. Rea.)

Luis R. Scott Sr., in The God of Time, comes at the question from a different direction. He is a critic of open theism, not a proponent. Yet even Scott's engagement shows how alive the debate remains and how many Christian thinkers are wrestling with these questions.⁴⁶

The direction of the field is clear. The majority of contemporary analytic philosophers of religion who work on God and time have moved toward some form of divine temporality. The timeless view still has able defenders, and I do not want to overstate the case. But the burden of proof has shifted. As Wolterstorff insisted, it falls on those who deny that God has a real history to explain why the plain reading of Scripture should be set aside.⁴⁷

For the purposes of this book, I do not need the question to be settled beyond all debate. I need three things. First, that there are strong reasons to believe God is temporal. Second, that these reasons come from core Christian commitments: the Incarnation, scriptural authority, and divine emotion. Third, that the temporalist picture makes better sense of a God who pursues, responds, and meets the soul in real time. I believe all three of these claims are true. And they give this book the foundation it needs for its picture of the deathbed encounter, the intermediate-state pursuit, and the judgment-day confrontation.

A God Who Grieves: The Emotion Thread

There is one more line of evidence I want to draw into the picture. It comes not from the philosophy of time but from the pages of Scripture itself. It is the testimony that God feels.

Genesis 6:6 says that God was grieved in His heart that He had made human beings on the earth. Exodus 32:14 says that the Lord relented from the disaster He had spoken of bringing on His people. These are not throwaway lines. They are among the most striking statements about God in the entire Old Testament.⁴⁸

The classical tradition handled these verses by calling them anthropopathisms. That is, human-like descriptions of emotions that God does not literally feel. On this reading, God does not really grieve. The word is a concession to our limited understanding.⁵⁰

I am not persuaded. If God does not really grieve over human sin, then Genesis 6 is not telling us something true about God's inner life. It is telling us something true about how we imagine God. And that is a very different thing.

A God who truly grieves is a God whose inner life responds to what happens in the world. And a God whose inner life responds to events is a God in time. That does not make Him weak. It makes Him alive. It means He truly cares about what His creatures do. Their choices affect Him. Their suffering moves Him. Their rebellion wounds Him. That is the God of the Bible. And it is a God who lives in time.

The same logic applies to God's joy. If God truly delights in a sinner who repents (Luke 15:7), then something happens in God when repentance occurs. There is a before (the sinner is lost) and an after (the sinner is found, and God rejoices). That joy is a temporal response. It has a moment when it begins. A timeless being has no such moments. So if God's joy is real, God is in time.

This matters for the dying person. If God truly grieves when a soul is lost and truly rejoices when a soul is found, then the encounter at the threshold of death is not a formality. It is a moment that matters to God. He is not indifferent to the outcome. He cares. And His caring unfolds in real time, moment by moment, as the encounter progresses.

What This Means for the Book

Why does all of this matter for Grace After Death? Because the entire argument of this book depends on a God who acts in real sequence.

Think about what this book claims. God meets the dying person at the threshold. If the person turns away, God does not give up. He pursues the soul through the intermediate state. And at the final judgment, He confronts every last holdout with the full force of His presence. That is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It requires a God who can do one thing and then another. It requires a God who responds to what the soul does.⁵¹

A timeless God could, on paper, decree the same outcomes. He could timelessly will that a certain person receives a certain encounter at a certain moment. But that is not the picture this book paints. This book paints a God who truly meets the dying person in an encounter that unfolds, in real time, between two persons. The encounter is shaped by what the soul brings to it. God responds to the soul's response. He adjusts. He presses. He waits. He draws close again. That is pursuit, and pursuit takes time.

Think of the staged approach that Chapter 23 develops. God may let a soul taste felt separation before the meeting. He may open the encounter in darkness, and then bring the light. He may vary the order and the intensity of His appeal based on what each soul needs. That is not a timeless decree. That is a responsive, creative, moment-by-moment engagement. It requires a God who is in the story, not above it.

Consider the divine-presence theology of the lake of fire that Chapter 26 develops. The fire is God's love. The same flame that warms the willing heart burns the unwilling one. That burning is a real, felt, experienced encounter. It unfolds. It progresses. For some, it leads to repentance. For others, it does not. Either way, it happens in time. A timeless God cannot unfold anything. He can only decree outcomes. A temporal God can unfold, engage, persuade, and wait.

Or consider the case studies that run through this book. Think of Frank, the hard skeptic, pursued from the deathbed through Hades to the judgment. Think of Mei, the unevangelized villager, meeting Christ for the first time. Think of Anna, the infant, given full capacity to choose. In each case, the encounter is personal. God meets the person. He speaks. He listens. He responds to what the person brings. That is not the behavior of a timeless decree. It is the behavior of a living person who shares a moment with another living person.

Think also about Chapter 22 and the rationality of refusal. Can someone truly say no to God? The book says yes. But a real "no" requires a real moment of choice. The person must stand before God, understand the offer, and choose. God must be present for that choice, not as a timeless abstraction, but as a living person offering Himself. A real offer and a real refusal both require real time.

The God of this book hears Frank's defiance and does not walk away. He presses again. He lets Frank see the consequences. He opens another door. That kind of patient, creative, responsive pursuit only makes sense if God is in the story with Frank, sharing the same moments, responding to each new twist in the conversation. Timeless decrees do not converse. They execute. And what this book describes is a conversation, not an execution.

Time in the Dying Moment

All of this bears on one of the most striking features of near-death reports: the way time behaves during the dying process.

As Chapter 9 showed, the NDE literature on this point is remarkable. Jeffrey Long's NDERF study found that 60.5 percent of respondents reported altered experiences of space or time. A full 33 percent said that everything seemed to be happening all at once. Some described what they called perfect, infinite timelessness.⁵³

Pam Reynolds, whose veridical near-death experience during a standstill operation remains one of the most documented cases in the literature, described her experience as compressed. It was like watching a movie on fast-forward.⁵⁴

What do we make of this? If time is simply clock time, then these reports are puzzles. A few minutes on the operating table cannot contain what feels like a lifetime of experience. But if time has a subjective dimension, if felt time and clock time are not the same measurement, then the puzzle dissolves. A dying moment by the monitor can hold a vast inner experience.

Everyone knows this at a small scale. Think of the last time you were in danger. A near-miss on the highway. A fall from a height. In that moment, time seemed to slow down. You noticed details you would normally miss. Your mind raced. You lived more in those few seconds than in the previous hour. That is time dilation at the everyday level. The NDE reports take it much further. But the principle is the same: the clock is not the only measure of experience.

And if God is Lord of time, He can fill that moment with whatever the soul needs. He can stretch it, compress it, or reshape it entirely. He is not outside time, watching from above. He is in it, meeting the soul where it is, in a time He shapes for the occasion.

This is not a speculative claim. It follows from the temporalist position. If God is in time, He is present at the moment of death. If He is present, He can shape that moment. If He can shape it, then the brevity of dying (by the clock) is no objection to a rich and full encounter. God can make a second hold a lifetime. He can make the dying moment deep enough for a whole conversation, a whole life review, a whole decision.

Wolterstorff touches on exactly this point. Commenting on 2 Peter 3:8, he notes that with God, experiential duration does not match up with clock time.⁵⁵ God's "now" is real, but it is not measured by our clocks. A moment in God's time can hold what we would call centuries. And a dying moment, by the clock barely long enough to count, can hold a meeting with God that is deep and unhurried and full.

This is where the divine-temporality argument and the NDE time-reports meet. A God who lives in real time can stretch that time for the dying person. He can create space for an encounter that is unhurried and deep, even if the clock says only seconds have passed. He is in the moment with the dying person, not hovering above it.

Notice how different this is from the timeless picture. On the timeless view, there is no "moment" for God at all. There is just one eternal act, in which everything that will ever happen is already determined. There is no stretching of time, because there is no time to stretch. The dying person's experience of expanded time would be, on that view, just a feature of the human brain shutting down. It would have no theological meaning.

On the temporalist view, the time dilation has meaning. It is a window that God opens. He enters that window. He fills it. He uses it to show the dying person whatever the person needs to see, to hear, to feel. The experience is not a brain trick. It is a real encounter with a real God in a real moment that God has shaped for the occasion.

Does God Not Transcend Time?

DeWeese's omnitemporal model captures this well. God is present at every moment. He is not dragged along by the current. He knows the end from the beginning. But He knows it from within time, not from outside it. He is all-knowing and sovereign while also being genuinely temporal. These things do not conflict. They combine in a God who is both Lord of history and a real actor within it.⁵⁷

Holland puts the point well. Time may be grounded in God's own being, the way the moral law is. We would never say that God is "subject to" the moral law, as though it were an external constraint. The moral law flows from His character. Time may work the same way. God experiences temporal sequence by virtue of His own nature, not because anything outside Him forces Him to.⁵⁸

This distinction between being in time and being subject to time is the key to the whole discussion. A fish is in the water. But the water was there before the fish. A king is in his castle. But the castle was built by someone else. God is in time. But time is His. He made it. He sustains it. He governs it. He is not subject to it in the way we are. We are carried along by time like leaves on a stream. God is the stream itself.

So when I say "God is temporal," I do not mean "God is limited." I mean "God is alive." His life has a real shape, a real movement, a real "now." And that "now" is the place where He meets us. It is the place where He meets the dying. It is the place where love is real.

The Bounded Role of This Material

I want to close with a word of honesty about what this appendix does and does not do for the book's argument.

This material is supporting architecture. It is not the spine. I have saved it for an appendix rather than giving it a full chapter in the body of the book. I want the book's core argument to rest on firmer ground: on Scripture, on historic Christian teaching, and on the testimony of those who have come near death and returned. The philosophy of time enriches that evidence. But it does not replace it.

The spine of Grace After Death is the biblical and theological case for postmortem opportunity. That case rests on the descent texts (Chapter 15), the intermediate-state texts (Chapter 8), the deadline at the judgment (Chapter 19, Chapter 27), and the divine-presence theology of the lake of fire (Chapter 26). That case stands on its own, whether or not you agree with everything I have said about God and time.⁵⁹

The divine-temporality argument supports the spine. It explains how the pursuit can be genuinely interactive. It makes sense of the NDE time-reports. It helps us picture a God who truly responds in the moment. But if you are not persuaded by the temporalist position, the book's core thesis does not fall.

You can hold a different view of God's relationship to time. You can still accept that God offers Christ to the dying, to the dead in Hades, and to the judged at the throne. The biblical case for postmortem opportunity stands on its own ground.

Let me be specific. A reader who holds the classical timeless view can still affirm postmortem opportunity. She can say that God timelessly decrees an encounter for every dying person. She can affirm a continued offer in the intermediate state and a final confrontation at the judgment. The content of the offer would be the same. The timing would be the same. What would differ is the metaphysics behind it. Where I say "God responds in real time," she might say "God timelessly wills a sequence of encounters." The practical outcome is the same.

So the disagreement about time is real, but it is not the thing this book stands or falls on. I think the temporalist view makes the pursuit more vivid and more personal. I think it fits the biblical picture better. And I think it connects naturally to the NDE evidence. But the argument for postmortem opportunity does not require it. It has its own biblical and theological legs to stand on.

I have made this choice on purpose. Some treatments of the dying moment put all the weight on the philosophy of time. They argue that the whole encounter happens in a single subjective instant, stretched out by time dilation. That is an elegant picture, but it asks too much of the philosophy. Better to let the biblical and theological evidence carry the weight, and let the time material support and enrich it.⁶⁰

Conclusion: A God Who Is in the Story

Let me gather the threads.

The classical doctrine of divine timelessness held that God stands outside time, looking down at all of history at once. It was a noble attempt to protect God's perfection. But it came at a cost. It made God a spectator, not an actor. It made His love a decree, not a pursuit.

The case against timelessness is strong. Craig showed that a timeless God cannot know what time it is "now." Wolterstorff showed that a God who has a history must be in time. Mullins showed that a timeless God cannot be incarnate. Holland showed that the Incarnation points to real temporal sequence in God's life. DeWeese and others have built out models of divine temporality that make sense of all this. And the emotional life of God in Scripture (His grief, His relenting, His responding) confirms the direction of the argument.

None of this makes God less than He is. It makes Him more. A God who truly enters time is a God who truly enters our suffering. A God who truly responds is a God whose love is more than a policy. It is a living thing, shaped by the moment, directed at the person, poured out in real time.

That is the God who pursues the dying. That is the God who follows the dead into Hades. That is the God who stands at the Great White Throne and says, one last time, "Come."

The God of this book is a God who is in the story. He hears the cry and comes. He sees the soul pulling away and draws closer. He waits, and then He acts. He meets the dying person in real time, stretches that time if needed, and fills it with His presence. He continues to pursue through Hades. And at the judgment, He unveils Himself in full glory, one last time, and waits for the answer.

That is a God in time. Not a prisoner of time. The Lord of time. A swimmer, not a drowning man. A father who hears the scream, dives in, and does not stop until He reaches the child.

For the summary of this case and its application to the dying moment, see Chapter 9. For the theological architecture that builds on this foundation, see Chapter 23. For the judgment as the last and most intense encounter, see Chapter 27.