Appendix F
The philosophical and theological case for a God who acts in real time
A woman named Mei once told me about the night her mother died. She held her mother's hand for six minutes of silence between the last breath and the moment the monitors went flat. Six minutes on the clock. But here is what stopped me: Mei said she felt as if the whole room paused. Those six minutes were thick and strange and full. Something was happening in that silence that the clock could not hold.
I want to talk about what makes that possible. Not just the subjective feel of time slowing down, though we will get to that. I want to talk about God and time itself. Because the entire argument of this book rests on a claim about what God is doing in those hidden moments. He is pursuing. He is meeting the dying person. He is offering Christ. And that pursuit does not end at the last heartbeat; it continues through the conscious waiting place of Hades and all the way to the final judgment.
But here is the question most people never think to ask: Can God actually do that? Can God pursue someone in real time? Can He respond to a cry the moment it is cried? Can He wait for an answer?
The answer depends on what kind of God we are talking about. And that is what this appendix is about.
For most of Western church history, the dominant view was that God exists outside of time entirely. Theologians call this divine timelessness. On this view, God does not experience one moment after another. He has no "before" and no "after." He sees all of history at once in what Boethius called an "eternal now." Augustine held this view. So did Anselm, Aquinas, and Calvin. In the twentieth century, Paul Helm gave it its most careful modern defense in Eternal God.1 It is a venerable tradition, and I do not want to dismiss it lightly.
The alternative is divine temporality. On this view, God does experience a genuine "before" and "after." He remembers. He anticipates. He acts, and then He responds to what His creatures do next. God is not trapped in time the way we are; He created it and transcends its limits. But He really does experience events in sequence.2
The version I hold, and the one this book relies on, is what I call dynamic divine temporality. God experiences real succession in His life. He is not bound by creaturely clocks. But He genuinely acts, waits, responds, and pursues across real moments. I will make the case for this view shortly. First, a piece of background that shapes the whole debate.
Underneath the God-and-time debate sits a deeper question: What is time itself? Philosophers have split into two camps.3
The A-theory says that time flows. The present moment is objectively real. The past is gone; the future is not yet. Events truly happen, and the "now" keeps moving forward. This is close to ordinary experience. You feel the present moment as different from a memory. The A-theory says that feeling tracks something real.
The B-theory says that all moments are equally real. Past, present, and future are just labels we attach to our position in the series. The year 1776 is just as real as today; we just happen to be located "here" in the timeline. On this view, nothing truly "flows." The feeling of passage is a feature of our minds, not of the world.
Why does this matter for our question? Because if the B-theory is true, divine timelessness gets much easier to defend. A God who sees all of history "at once" fits nicely with a world where all moments already coexist. But if the A-theory is true, a timeless God runs into serious trouble. A God who has no "now" cannot know what is happening now.4
William Lane Craig puts the point sharply. If time is dynamic and the A-theory is correct, then a timeless God who is truly related to the world seems incoherent.5 Craig himself holds the A-theory and argues that God must therefore be temporal, at least since creation.
I believe God experiences real succession. He has a genuine "now." He acts in time. Here are the strongest reasons.
Imagine it is three o'clock. A timeless God could know the tenseless fact: "It is three o'clock on June 15, 2026." But could He know the tensed fact: "It is three o'clock right now"? Craig argues that He could not. A being with no "now" cannot know which moment is present.6
Craig's argument can be summarized in a few steps. If God is all-knowing, He knows every fact about reality. There are two kinds of time-related facts: tenseless facts (which tell you when things happen relative to each other) and tensed facts (which tell you what is happening now). An all-knowing God must know both kinds. But knowing what is happening right now requires being in time. So God must be in time.7
R. T. Mullins notes that this argument has gained wide acceptance. Even many defenders of divine timelessness agree that a timeless God cannot know tensed facts; they respond by denying that tensed facts exist. But that move, Mullins argues, costs them far too much. Our emotions, actions, and reasons for acting all depend on tensed facts. If there are no tensed facts, our daily experience becomes deeply mysterious.8
Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a case that is as much pastoral as it is philosophical. The Bible presents a God who acts in history. He speaks to Moses, then later He speaks to the prophets, then later still He sends His Son. These are not timeless events arranged to look sequential. They are genuinely ordered: God did one thing before He did another.9
Wolterstorff's most powerful move is a simple test. The Scriptures say that God responds to the cries of His people. But you can respond to a cry only while it is being cried. You cannot respond to a cry before it happens. You cannot respond timelessly, because responding means hearing, and then acting, in that order. If God hears and then responds, then there is a "before" and an "after" in God's life. And that means God is in time.10
Wolterstorff adds a second layer. The defender of timelessness must treat all of the Bible's language about God acting in sequence as figurative. God does not really respond. God does not really change from wrath to mercy. All of those narratives must be reread as timeless decrees that only appear to unfold. But that, Wolterstorff argues, puts the burden of proof in the wrong place. The plain reading of Scripture describes a God with a history. The person who wants to call that language merely poetic owes us an explanation.11
This is the argument I find most compelling. Richard Holland argues that the Incarnation should function as the "control belief" for the whole God-and-time debate. The Incarnation is not optional for Christian faith; it is the center. And the Incarnation is inherently temporal.12
Think about what the Incarnation requires. Before the Incarnation, God the Son existed without a human nature. At a specific moment in history, the Son took on human flesh in the womb of Mary. After the resurrection, the Son retained His glorified human nature forever. There was a state of affairs that changed: God the Son went from not-incarnate to incarnate. That change implies a "before" and an "after" in the divine life.13
Mullins presses the same point. The traditional doctrine of the Incarnation, rooted in the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, assumed that the Son truly became human. The two natures remain distinct, without confusion or division. But the person of the Son underwent a genuine transition. A timeless being, Mullins argues, cannot undergo any transition at all. So the Incarnation and divine timelessness are at odds.14
Holland insists that defenders of timelessness have handled this problem poorly. Some, like Richard Swinburne in his earlier work, simply appeal to mystery. Others, like Brian Leftow, try to show that the church fathers held both timelessness and the Incarnation, so there must be no real conflict. Helm admits that the Incarnation is an exception to his model. But Holland counters: if the most central doctrine of Christian faith is an exception to your model of God, perhaps the model needs to change.15
Craig offers a distinctive proposal. He holds that God was timeless "without creation" and became temporal "since creation." Before God made the world, there were no events, no change, and therefore no time. God simply existed, changeless and alone. But when God created, the first event occurred, and time began. From that point forward, God has been temporal.17
This is creative. It tries to honor both intuitions: the changelessness of God "before" creation and the genuine interaction God has with the world He made. Garrett DeWeese, however, finds this view puzzling. If the timeless phase has no "before" or "after," then how is it related to the temporal phase? DeWeese argues that a being who was truly timeless could not undergo any change, including the change of becoming temporal.18
I share DeWeese's worry. But Craig's view at least gets the conclusion right: the God who interacts with creation is a temporal God. For the purposes of this book, that is the point that matters. Whether God was also timeless "before" creation is a fascinating question, but it does not affect the central claim. From the creation of the world to the final judgment, God acts in real time.
The philosophical arguments do not stand alone. Scripture paints a picture of a God who acts in time, responds to His creatures, and even changes His expressed intentions in light of human choices.
Genesis 6:6 says that God "regretted" making human beings, and it "grieved him to his heart" (ESV). Exodus 32:14 says the Lord "relented" from the disaster He had spoken against Israel after Moses interceded. Genesis 18 records a conversation in which Abraham bargains with God over Sodom, and God agrees to spare the city if ten righteous people can be found. These texts show a God who feels, listens, responds, and adjusts His actions in light of what His creatures do.19
Of course, the defender of timelessness reads these passages as anthropomorphic. God does not really grieve or relent, they say; the texts use human language to describe changeless divine decrees. But Wolterstorff's challenge still stands. If we must treat every passage about God acting in sequence as figurative, then the burden of proof falls on the one who insists the Bible means the opposite of what it appears to say.20
Other passages show God's relationship to time from a different angle. Isaiah 46:9–10 declares that God announces "the end from the beginning." Second Peter 3:8 reminds us that "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." These texts affirm God's mastery over time, not His absence from it. God is not subject to time the way we are. He governs it. But governing time and being outside time are very different things.21
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God has set "eternity" (‘olam) in the human heart. We carry within us a sense that time opens onto something larger. That longing does not point to a God frozen outside of time. It points to a God whose life is richer and fuller than any clock can measure, yet who genuinely meets us in the flow of our days.22
The case for divine temporality is strong. But the objections are real, and they deserve a fair hearing.
The most common worry is that a temporal God would be a changing God, and a changing God is not the immutable God of the creeds. If God experiences one moment after another, does He not change? And if He changes, is He not unreliable?
I think this confuses two different kinds of change. God's character, His nature, His love, and His purposes do not change. "I the Lord do not change," says Malachi 3:6. But that is entirely compatible with God having new experiences and new responses to what His creatures do. A mother's love for her child does not change, even as she responds differently to different situations. Her love is stable precisely because it meets each new moment as it comes.23
Holland makes a similar point. The classical model says God is immutable because He is timeless. If He has no "before" and "after," He cannot change. But Holland argues this makes God only trivially immutable. God happens not to change because there is no time in which change could occur. That drains the doctrine of its religious meaning. It is far more powerful to say that God could change, that He lives through real moments, and yet His character remains the same.24
Some worry that a temporal God would be limited by time, subject to its constraints, waiting helplessly for the future to arrive. But this misunderstands the claim. A God who experiences temporal succession is not "trapped" in time any more than a musician is "trapped" by rhythm. The musician creates the rhythm and moves through it freely. God created time, sustains it, and moves through it on His own terms.25
Holland suggests a helpful parallel. The moral law comes from God's nature. God cannot violate the moral law, but we would not say He is "subject" to it. He is its source. Time may be similar. If temporal succession flows from God's own life and being, then time is not a cage around God. It is an expression of who He is.26
A third worry is simply that the great tradition of Christian theology has favored timelessness. Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and most of the church fathers assumed it. Does setting it aside mean abandoning the tradition?
Not necessarily. Mullins, Holland, and DeWeese all respect the tradition while arguing that it absorbed Greek philosophical assumptions about perfection and changelessness that the biblical authors did not share.27 The tradition is a guide, not a cage. And the tradition itself has room for development. Many thinkers within the Reformed and evangelical mainstream now hold divine temporality without abandoning any central doctrine.28
All of that philosophy serves a pastoral and theological purpose. If God is truly timeless, then the picture at the heart of this book does not work. A timeless God cannot pursue a dying person across the moments of the deathbed encounter. A timeless God cannot wait for a soul's answer in Hades. A timeless God cannot make a final appeal at the Great White Throne. Pursuit, persuasion, waiting, and response are all temporal activities. They require a "before" and an "after." They require a God who has a real "now."
That is why Chapter 9 summarizes this argument and points here for the full treatment. Time is not the spine of this book; the spine is God's relentless love. But time is the architecture that holds the spine up.
Now we come to the second half of this appendix: the strange behavior of time at the edge of death.
Clock time and felt time are not the same thing. We all know this from ordinary life. A few seconds of sudden danger can stretch until they feel like minutes. An hour lost in a good book can vanish in what feels like moments. Psychologists call this "subjective time dilation." It happens because the brain's processing speed changes under extreme conditions, especially fear and shock.30
Near-death-experience research takes this observation and pushes it much further. Patients who were clinically dead for minutes of clock time report experiences that felt like hours, or even longer. Kenneth Ring's early studies found that experiencers consistently described a sense of time ceasing to apply in the usual way. Pim van Lommel's Dutch study noted the same pattern. Bruce Greyson's decades of research confirm it. Over and over, the testimony is the same: "Time did not exist there." Or: "Everything happened all at once, and yet one thing after another."31
The implication is straightforward. If felt time can diverge dramatically from clock time at the point of death, then the brevity of the dying interval is no objection to the claim that it can hold an extended encounter. A passage that lasts only seconds by the monitors may feel like a long, unhurried meeting to the one who is dying. That is exactly what this book's Chapter 11 explores through Ladislaus Boros's "final decision" hypothesis, and what the deathbed encounter of Chapter 13 develops in full.32 James Beilby has pressed a converging philosophical argument: the concept of "hypertime," in which multiple experienced moments can be contained within a single slice of clock time, so that the dying moment could encompass what feels like an extended encounter even if the clock registers only seconds.39
I want to be careful here. I am not building the whole weight of the book's argument on NDE time reports. The central argument of Grace After Death does not require time dilation at the deathbed, because the offer extends well beyond the dying moment into the intermediate state and the final judgment. The time data is supporting evidence, not load-bearing structure. But it helps answer the skeptic who says, "There isn't time for all that in a few dying seconds." There may well be.33
What about Hades? If the soul persists after death in a conscious intermediate state, as I have argued in Chapter 8, does it experience the passage of time?
I think the honest answer is: we do not know exactly how. And I think that is all right. The key point is that the question "How long does a soul wait in Hades?" may be the wrong kind of question. If time in the spiritual realm does not track earthly clocks, then measuring the intermediate state in our years makes no more sense than measuring love in inches.34
Think about what we do know. The soul is not a body. It does not have neurons that fire at measurable rates. It does not have a circadian rhythm. Whatever "time" means for a disembodied soul, it is not the ticking of biological clocks. It is something else: perhaps a succession of experiences, perhaps a felt progression from one state to another, but not the seconds and minutes we count by watches.
What matters is not the duration but the reality. The soul is conscious. The pursuit is real. God is present. And the deadline is real too: the final judgment is the true endpoint (see Chapter 27). Between the deathbed and that judgment, God continues to draw the soul toward Himself. How that interval "feels" to the departed we cannot say with confidence. But we can say that it is not nothing. It is an arena for God's continued work.35
Second Peter 3:8 is relevant here, though I want to use it modestly. Peter's point is not a formula for converting divine years into human ones. His point is that God is not in a hurry, and He is not late. He is patient, and His patience has a purpose: He does not want any to perish (2 Pet 3:9). The intermediate state is one more theater for that patient pursuit.36
Here is what ties the whole argument together. If God is genuinely temporal, then the threefold offer described in this book is not three separate events tacked end to end. It is one continuous pursuit by one personal God who acts in real time.
The encounter opens at the deathbed. If the dying person does not yield, God does not give up. The pursuit continues in the intermediate state, where the soul is conscious and God is present. And it reaches its climax at the final judgment, where every remaining soul stands in the full, unveiled presence of divine love. At any point across that span, the person may freely say yes. The deadline falls at the end of the judgment, not a moment sooner.
Dynamic divine temporality holds this picture together. It ensures that God's pursuit is not a fixed decree that merely appears to unfold. It is genuine interaction. God really meets, really waits, really responds. He knows the end from the beginning, yes. But He does not skip to the end. He walks with each soul through every moment of the journey.37
I do not pretend to have solved every puzzle in the God-and-time debate. Brilliant people have worked on these questions for centuries, and they will go on working. The relationship between divine foreknowledge and genuine temporal experience, the precise nature of time before creation, the metaphysics of a spiritual realm that does not tick to earthly clocks: all of these remain open. I am comfortable with that. Not every question needs a final answer before we can act on what we know.
And what we know is enough for the argument of this book. God acts in real time. He pursues in real time. And His love, operating across real moments, gives every person the best possible approach to a free "yes." That love begins at the first breath of the dying moment. It continues through the conscious waiting place. It reaches its climax at the last word of the final judgment.
That is the architecture. The love is the substance.38
↑ 1. Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time, 1st ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). For Boethius's classic definition of eternity as "the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of unbounded life," see Consolation of Philosophy, V, prose 6. Augustine's treatment in Confessions 11 remains foundational; Aquinas develops the doctrine in Summa Theologiae I, q. 10.
↑ 2. For a comprehensive survey of the options, see Gregory E. Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001); and Natalja Deng, God and Time, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Deng provides a careful map of the contemporary landscape.
↑ 3. The A-theory/B-theory terminology traces to J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927). For a clear recent introduction, see Deng, God and Time, ch. 1.
↑ 4. William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), pp. 97–103. Craig frames the issue precisely: on the A-theory, a timeless God who is really related to the temporal world becomes incoherent. See also Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (Aldershot: Routledge, 2004), ch. 8, for a parallel treatment.
↑ 5. Craig states: "I am convinced that the decision between an A- or a B-theory of time constitutes a fundamental watershed for our conception of divine eternity. For if we adopt a B-theory of time, most of the typical arguments against divine timelessness . . . are doomed to failure. . . . By contrast, on the A-theory of time, the concept of a timeless God who is really related to the world does seem incoherent." Craig, quoted in DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 8.
↑ 6. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 98–104. Craig develops the five-premise argument: (1) God is omniscient; (2) if the A-theory is correct, there are tensed facts; (3) an omniscient being must know all facts, including tensed facts; (4) a timeless being cannot know tensed facts; (5) therefore, if the A-theory is correct, God is not timeless.
↑ 7. Craig, Time and Eternity, p. 100. See also Craig's response to Helm in Ganssle, God and Time: Four Views, pp. 175–79, where he argues that Helm's B-theoretic move drains divine knowledge of its richness.
↑ 8. R. T. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology (London: Routledge, 2024), ch. 5. Mullins draws on Ollie Pearson's work to show that our emotions, free actions, and reasons for acting all depend on tensed facts. If tensed facts do not exist, our daily experience becomes inexplicable.
↑ 9. Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," in Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views, pp. 187–225. Wolterstorff's earlier essay, "God Everlasting," in God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob, ed. Clifton Orlebeke and Lewis Smedes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 69–98, remains foundational.
↑ 10. Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," pp. 209–10. The cry test appears in the context of Wolterstorff's argument that the temporality of creaturely events "infects" God's own action with temporality: God can know that an event is occurring only while it is occurring. See also DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 7, for a careful analysis of this argument's strengths.
↑ 11. Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," pp. 191–93, 203–4. Holland notes that Helm, for example, admits the temporal language of Scripture must be interpreted symbolically. Richard A. Holland Jr., God, Time, and the Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), p. 143. Holland argues that the atemporalist bears the burden of proof in explaining why the text says the opposite of what is being concluded.
↑ 12. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 6–8. Holland borrows Wolterstorff's concept of "control beliefs" and applies it to the God-and-time debate: the doctrine of the Incarnation should function as the primary control belief governing which models of God's relation to time are acceptable.
↑ 13. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 163–65. Holland develops what he calls a "three-fold paradigm" for the Incarnation's temporal implications: (1) the event of the Incarnation itself (the Son's transition from un-incarnate to incarnate); (2) the temporal life of God the Son incarnate in Jesus; and (3) the permanence of the Incarnation, including the completed atonement.
↑ 14. R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 7, "The Incarnation of the Timeless God." Mullins examines Christological models arising from the ecumenical councils and argues that none of them can be reconciled with divine timelessness in a satisfying way.
↑ 15. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 93–94, 162–63. For Swinburne's appeal to mystery, see his "Timelessness of God, I," Church Quarterly Review (1965): 323–37. For Leftow's appeal to the fathers, see Brian Leftow, "Timeless God Incarnate," in The Incarnation, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O'Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Helm's admission that the Incarnation is an exception to his "two standpoints" model is noted in Holland, p. 163.
↑ 16. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 164–65, 186–88. Holland concludes: "The simple conclusion being made is that the temporal events in the life of Christ are events in the life of God the Son. Temporally ordered events . . . clearly indicate temporal sequence." See also DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, pp. 232–34, who acknowledges that the Incarnation raises "a serious problem for the atemporalist."
↑ 17. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 217–37. Craig develops the proposal at length, drawing an analogy from the initial singularity in Big Bang cosmology: just as the singularity is at the boundary of space-time rather than "in" it, so God's timeless state is at the boundary of time, causally but not temporally prior to creation.
↑ 18. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 10. DeWeese argues that if a timeless being is necessarily changeless (a claim he defends in ch. 9), then it is difficult to see how such a being could "become" temporal. The burden is on Craig to explain a kind of change that is not temporal. See also Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, ch. 5, for a parallel critique.
↑ 19. Genesis 6:6 (ESV): "And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart." Exodus 32:14 (ESV): "And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people." Genesis 18:22–33 records Abraham's intercession for Sodom. On God's emotional life and temporal engagement, see also R. T. Mullins, God and Emotion, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), which argues that the God of Scripture is genuinely affected by creaturely events.
↑ 20. Wolterstorff, "Unqualified Divine Temporality," pp. 203–4. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, p. 143: the atemporalist must explain why "important passages of Scripture describing God's relation to time require a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation."
↑ 21. Isaiah 46:9–10 (ESV): "I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done." 2 Peter 3:8 (ESV): "With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." These texts affirm God's sovereignty over time and His freedom from creaturely limitations, but they do not require timelessness. A temporal God who transcends creaturely clock-time can declare the end from the beginning because He knows it, not because He sees all moments "at once."
↑ 22. Ecclesiastes 3:11 (ESV): "He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." The Hebrew 'olam carries the sense of "long duration," "the distant horizon," or "the ages." It suggests that the human heart is built for more than the present moment, without specifying the precise metaphysics of divine eternity.
↑ 23. On the distinction between "strong" immutability (no change of any kind, entailed by timelessness) and "weak" immutability (no change in character, nature, or purposes, compatible with temporality), see DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 9. The mother analogy is mine, but the underlying distinction is widely shared among temporalist philosophers.
↑ 24. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 186–87. Holland writes that a God who is "trivially" immutable (immutable only because He is timeless and has no moments in which to change) lacks the religious significance of a God who could change but does not, remaining faithful through every moment.
↑ 25. Luis R. Scott Sr., The God of Time (2018), offers a sustained critique of open theism while affirming that God experiences temporal succession. Even critics of certain temporalist positions generally grant that a temporal God is not thereby "limited" in the way creatures are. See also Michael L. Rea, God Inside Time: Providence and Human Will (independently published, 2019), who argues that divine temporality is consistent with robust divine providence.
↑ 26. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, pp. 187–88. Holland's analogy: "It is likewise possible that the flow of time owes similar dependence on God's life and being." If time is ontologically grounded in God rather than externally imposed on Him, then experiencing temporal succession is not a limitation but an expression of the divine nature.
↑ 27. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, chs. 1–3, surveys the classical tradition and shows its dependence on Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions about perfection and changelessness. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, ch. 2, traces the same influence through Augustine's Confessions 11 and Boethius's Consolation. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chs. 4–5, notes that the Hebrew Bible's own language about time is far more dynamic than the Greek philosophical tradition that shaped the fathers' interpretation of it.
↑ 28. Among contemporary evangelical and analytic theologians who affirm divine temporality in some form: Craig, Wolterstorff, Alan Padgett (God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time, 1992), Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Senor, Garrett DeWeese, and William Hasker. The range of positions shows that divine temporality is not a fringe view but a live and growing option within orthodox Christian thought.
↑ 29. This is the central payoff for Grace After Death. The threefold offer—at the deathbed, in Hades, and at the final judgment—requires a God who genuinely acts in time. The Molinist architecture of Chapter 23 presupposes that God can compose a real sequence of appeals across the offer window, not merely decree a static arrangement that mimics sequence. See also Chapter 9 for the summary treatment.
↑ 30. On subjective time dilation in extreme states, see David Eagleman, "Human Time Perception and Its Illusions," Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18 (2008): 131–36. The phenomenon is well documented in accident survivors, combat veterans, and athletes in high-performance states. The brain appears to shift its processing rate under extreme arousal, creating the experience of "slow motion."
↑ 31. Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), pp. 96–101; Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, trans. Laura Vroomen (New York: HarperOne, 2010), ch. 2; Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021), chs. 3–4. Van Lommel's prospective Dutch study published in The Lancet (2001) remains the most rigorous controlled study to date.
↑ 32. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), especially the hypothesis of a "final decision" (III.6). Boros argues that death is the first moment of full self-awareness, the soul's first fully personal act. If this is combined with the time-dilation data, the subjective experience of the dying moment could be far richer and longer than the clock suggests. Boros addressed the time objection directly in I.2 (“A Temporal Process in a Non-Temporal Transition”), distinguishing between “sub-personal time” (the uniform, clock-measured succession of moments) and “personal duration” (the inner sense of time in which decisions of profound significance “compress time and turn it into a kind of thick black line”). In death, Boros argues, the soul attains “a new intensification of its temporal quality” that enables it to “realize in one flash its whole continuity of being.” The moment of death is thus a real moment of time—“real, though altogether sui generis”—sufficient for a whole series of acts (I.6). The parallel with the NDE time-dilation reports is striking: what the researchers document empirically (an interval of seconds experienced as hours), Boros anticipated philosophically. See also Cynthia Bourgeault’s commentary in the 2017 edition of The Mystery of Death (Praxis Publishing).
↑ 33. The book's central argument does not rest on time dilation alone. Because the offer extends through the intermediate state and to the final judgment, the deathbed encounter need not carry the entire weight. But the time-dilation evidence is a helpful subsidiary argument: it answers the "not enough time" objection that many readers instinctively raise.
↑ 34. On the disanalogy between physical time and spiritual experience, see DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 10. DeWeese notes that metaphysical time (the succession of events) need not correspond to physical time (what clocks measure). If the intermediate state involves genuine succession of spiritual events without a physical substrate, the question "How many years does it last?" may be unanswerable in principle.
↑ 35. For the conscious intermediate state, see the treatment in Chapter 8. The biblical texts that support conscious survival—Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:23; Revelation 6:9–10—all depict the departed as aware, relational, and active, not as unconscious sleepers. If the intermediate state is conscious and relational, then it is a genuine arena for God's continued pursuit.
↑ 36. 2 Peter 3:8–9 (ESV): "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." Peter's point is God's patience, not a metaphysical formula about divine clock rates.
↑ 37. The continuity of the pursuit across all three stages is the central structural claim of Grace After Death. See Chapter 23 for the synthesis; Chapter 27 for the judgment as the final opportunity; and Chapter 9 for the summary of the time argument that points here.
↑ 38. For the broader theological argument that God's character—His relentless, pursuing love—is the substance of the whole offer, see Chapter 2 and the synthesis in Chapter 23.
↑ 39. James K. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), pp. 237–38. Beilby introduces the concept of “hypertime”—a philosophical notion in which “multiple moments can be contained within a single moment—or, more precisely, there are multiple hypermoments contained in a single temporal slice of time.” Applied to the moment of death, this means that from the dying person’s perspective, the moment could “encompass . . . years of opportunities to repent,” all contained within the clock-time instant of death. Beilby offers this as speculative but notes its coherence with the broader philosophical case for a temporally rich dying moment. The convergence with Boros’s philosophical argument (fn 32) and the NDE time-dilation data (fn 31) is noteworthy: three independent lines of evidence—phenomenological, philosophical, and empirical—all point to the same conclusion.