God and Time: Four Views

The eternal God has created the universe. And that universe is time-bound. How can we best understand God's relationship with our time-bound universe? For example, does God experience each moment of time in succession or are all times present to God?

How we think of God and time has implications for our understanding of the nature of time, the creation of the universe, God's knowledge of the future, God's interaction with his creation and the fullness of God's life.

In this book, four notable philosophers skillfully take on this difficult topic—all writing from within a Christian framework yet contending for different views. Paul Helm argues that divine eternity should be construed as a state of absolute timelessness. Alan G. Padgett maintains that God's eternity is more plausibly to be understood as relative timelessness. William Lane Craig presents a hybrid view that combines timelessness with omnitemporality. And Nicholas Wolterstorff advocates a doctrine of unqualified divine temporality.

Each essay is followed by responses from the other three contributors and a final counter-response from the original essayist, making for a lively exchange of ideas. Editor Gregory E. Ganssle provides a helpful introduction to the debate and its significance. Together these five scholars conduct readers on a stimulating and mind-stretching journey into one of the most controversial and challenging areas of theology today.

The Eternal God has Created the Universe. That universe is time-bound. How then should we best understand God's relationship with our time-bound universe? Does God experience each moment of time in succession or are all times present to God? How we think of God and time has implications for our understanding of the nature of time, the creation of the universe, God's knowledge of the future, God's interaction with his creation and the fullness of God's life.

Four notable philosophers skillfully take on this difficult topic, all from within a Christian framework yet contending for different views. Paul Helm argues that divine eternity should be construed as a state of absolute timelessness. Alan G. Padgett maintains that God's eternity is more plausibly to be understood as relative timelessness. William Lane Craig presents a hybrid view that combines timelessness with omnitemporality, while Nicholas Wolterstorff advocates a doctrine of unqualified divine temporality.

Each essay is followed by responses from the other three contributors and a final counter-response from the essayist, making for a lively exchange of ideas. The editor provides a helpful introduction to the debate and its significance. Together these five scholars conduct the reader on a stimulating and mind-stretching journey into one of the most controversial and challenging areas of theology today.

Publishers Weekly

In a related issue, four theologians address the degree to which God is bound by finite time in God & Time: Four Views, from InterVarsity Press, edited by Gregory E. Ganssle, which has been putting out some highly provocative books on perplexing theological questions. While the essays by Paul Helm, Alan G. Padgett, William Lane Craig and Nicholas Wolterstoff deliberate the question on a plane too high for total newcomers (who may need clarifications of terms such as "omnitemporality"), theology students will not want to miss this. Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Ganssle serves with the Rivendell Institute for Christian Thought and Learning, a special project of the Campus Crusade for Christ student ministry at Yale University. He has taught philosophy at Syracuse University and has worked as a teaching fellow and part-time lecturer in the philosophy department at Yale University.

He has published academic papers on God's relation to time, free will, and St. Augustine. He has also coedited an anthology of philosophical essays for Oxford University Press called God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature.

Paul Helm is a teaching fellow in theology and philosophy at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. From 1993 to 2000 he taught as professor of the history and philosophy of religion at King's College, University of London. He has published numerous books and articles, including Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time (Oxford University Press, 1988), Belief Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Faith and Understanding (Eerdmans, 1997).

Padgett is professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. Formerly he taught theology and philosophy at Azusa Pacific University. He is the author of God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (Wipf & Stock, 2000) and the editor of Reason and the Christian Religion (Oxford University Press, 1994). He has published several papers on topics in philosophy and theology.

William Lane Craig (Ph.D., philosophy, University of Birmingham; D.Theol., systematic theology, University of Munich) is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, in La Mirada, California. He is also president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

He has published articles in philosophical and theological journals such as The Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Modern Theology and Religious Studies. He has written or cowritten more than twenty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology and God, Time and Eternity.

Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophy at the Yale Divinity School. He has published many books and articles, including When Justice and Peace Embrace (Eerdmans, 1983), Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 1996) as well as the seminal paper "God Everlasting" (first published in 1975). Wolterstorff's latest book is Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge University Press, 2001).