T. Justin Comer

God, Time, and Divine Transcendence

In the beginning, God… 

Genesis 1:1

Christian theology commonly wants to affirm God is eternal, God is infinite, God is transcending, God is omnipresent, and God is not controlled by creation. Simultaneously, God acts in history, speaks, enters covenant, performs signs and wonders, and even became flesh. While many hold to these without ever batting an eye, there is hidden underneath a philosophical contradiction. It gets asked, “How can God be present in time if He is not bound by, or within, time?” This issue isn’t in the attributes of God. The issue is within God’s relationship to time. Some theologians have suggested that God is “outside of time,” or that He sees all time(s) like an aerial photo. This merely repeats the contradiction using theological vocabulary around it. 

Something outside of time, in any sense, cannot also be within time. The fact that God acted at all puts Him within time, which then makes His transcendence of time confusing. There are some who have even suggested splitting the Godhead to accommodate this. Once you have acted, you have formed an event. Once there is an event, there is duration of time after that event. Regardless of whether there is another event or not, the mere fact that something happened results in a specific moment where something happened. God cannot be within time while also being outside of time. 

This raises a few questions immediately. 

Is this contradiction enough to disbelieve in God? 

If not, what are the premises that are being contended against? 

In order to examine the question, we must ask the premises to hold. What is time? If we say that God is “within” time, what exactly does that mean? What does it mean for God to be “within” time? What is transcendence? What is infinitude? What does it mean to “not be controlled” by time? What does it mean that God “sees into the future”? How many of these attributes that get scrutinized are being defined incorrectly, or possibly even not true? These are the questions to examine before assuming the assertion is valid. 

We typically think of time as a linear trajectory: past, present, future. Yet, humans have experienced time in more than just one way. Physics even has more modernly reformed our understanding of time within General and Special Relativity. I therefore think of time in three ways: 

Local time: Historic succession – past, present, future. 

Liturgical time: Rhythm, recurrence, seasons, “history repeats itself,” days and nights, months, years, etc. 

Cosmological time: Time as part of the physical architecture of spacetime itself. 

These are three different ways that temporal existence manifests in time simultaneously. All places everywhere in the universe experience time at these three different levels and engagements in one way or another. 

Let us examine each briefly. 

Local time is the easiest to understand. This happened, then this, then that. Genesis itself is narrated this way. Creation, then Adam, then Cain/Abel, then Seth, then Noah, etc. Local time is what allows history, memory, development, promise, anticipation, cause and consequence. Scripture portrays God as within this, not outside of this. Christianity cannot solve the problem of divine eternity by denying that God’s relation to historical succession is genuine. 

Liturgical time is time that moves forward by returning. You have “evening and morning,” the heavenly lights are for “signs and seasons, days and years.” You have Sabbath, new moons, annual feasts, Jubilee, etc. Passover happens every year, but the exile and escape from Egypt doesn’t continue to happen over and over again. Recapitulation is inherently within the comprehension of time. Liturgical time is not merely another form of linear time through repetition, but like a spiral that continues to get closer and closer to a center. It combines recurrence and progression. Genesis itself refuses to reduce temporality to simple chronological sequence, even if repetition of language to describe the same type of event, whether architecturally or genuine repetition with different characters. 

Cosmological time is the one that is not obvious. The ordinary view, which is certainly a logical view, is that there is one gigantic invisible clock and everything, everywhere, shares the same universal “now.” Relativity says that view is wrong. Special relativity shows that observers in different states of motion need not agree about whether distant events occurred simultaneously. General relativity goes further: spacetime is not a rigid background, but has geometry affected by matter and energy. Different trajectories through spacetime can accumulate different amounts of elapsed proper time. It even suggests gravity affects the progression of time. It suggests that spacetime can flex and curve, some considering that this is even posing the possibility of time travel. Regardless of the viability of that claim, it just shows that time itself does not cosmologically function the same as we see locally. 

Space and time are not wholly independent stages upon which patter happens to perform. It belongs to the structure of the created material cosmos. If God enters the created physical order, God enters a reality that is intrinsically temporal. Relativity doesn’t prove anything about God. It simply tells us that “time” is far stranger than our intuitive picture of a single celestial stopwatch. 

None of this says anything to God’s attributes, what trancendence means, biblical theology or narrative, nor any sort of theological claim. It is simply an observation that contributes to our whole understanding. It prevents us from confidently assuming that “being in time” must mean being carried along by one universal, chronological, current exactly as finite human observers experience it. 

We typically discuss omnipresence spatially, that God is everywhere. Yet, if physical reality is spacetime rather than space with an independent clock attached to it, then God’s relation to creation cannot be purely spacial. If God genuinely sustains and inhabits the whole creation, His presence is related to a spatiotemporal creation. God is genuinely present throughout the temporal creation He has made, without being carried or governed by its temporal conditions as creatures are.

If “outside time” means temporal existence cannot control God, fine. That statement just cannot suggest metaphysically that external to time while somehow reaching into it. This simply creates unnecessary incoherence. If God creates time and then genuinely enters it, why must we insist that some portion of God’s existence remains outside it? Jesus truly did experience aging, occupation, walking, days, and other forms of a progression of time. God is not embarrassed to enter creaturely conditions. Perhaps, then, transcendence shouldn’t be defined as God’s inability to accept those conditions. In His freedom, He intentionally bound Himself to those constraints without that meaning that He has become “less.” 

To transcend something need not mean to remain outside it. It can mean that one is not mastered by it. God transcends creation, because creation cannot determine what God is. God transcends space, because spacial location cannot imprison Him. God transcends time, because temporal conditions do not become sovereign over Him. He may freely submit Himself to them, but submission is different from subjugation. 

The biblical God repeatedly binds Himself. He binds Himself to promises, covenants, a people, a land, His Name, sanctuary, and ultimately to flesh. This is not weakness imposed upon God. It is divine freedom taking the form of self giving limitation, or maybe better stated as self giving binding. God does not cease being infinite simply because He binds Himself faithfully to something. That would contradict Scripture. 

Christ does not cling to equality with God as something to exploit. He empties Himself by taking servant form. He even says that He does nothing, but what He sees from His Father. Divine transcendence is not contradicted by self limitation, because self limitation can itself be an act of divine freedom. God’s entrance into temporality need not diminish Him any more than Christ’s entrance into flesh makes Him less divine. 

Scripture’s language of everlasting covenant, everlasting possession, everlasting ordinances, eternal kingdom, and eternal life does not naturally mean absence of temporal succession. This distinguishes everlastingness and timelessness. “Eternal” cannot simply be used as though it lexically settles that philosophical question. Even the heavenly throne room observations contain sequence. It certainly means Scripture does not habitually portray the heavenly realm as a static sequence less instant. 

God is in time, because He genuinely inhabits the temporal creation He has made. He acts in history, participates in succession, binds Himself to promises that unfold through time, and ultimately enters embodied human history in Jesus Christ. Yet God is not controlled by time, because time is neither prior to Him nor sovereign over Him. It is a created condition He freely accepts and inhabits. And cosmological time itself is not the simplistic universal river we usually imagine. It is part of a dynamic spacetime order whose durations and simultaneities are relational. God’s presence within such a creation therefore cannot simply be modeled by imagining an immortal being riding one infinitely long timeline. 

Genesis 1:1 does something philosophically remarkable. It introduces a beginning and a God already acting within it. Perhaps the mistake has been assuming that God’s greatness requires remaining metaphysically aloof from the beginning He makes. The biblical trajectory repeatedly moves the other direction. God creates. God speaks. God descends. God covenants. God dwells. God becomes flesh. He is Immanuel. 

Perhaps divine transcendence should not mean God cannot enter the limits of creation. Perhaps it means no created limit can become lord over God, even when God freely submits Himself to it for the sake of dwelling with what He has made. God transcends time, not because He remains outside it, but because time can never become greater than the God who freely entered it. God entering time fully, without being “outside” and “inside,” but only “inside” time, and that does not limit His sovereignty, transcendence, nor predestination.