The Dance

 

Time at the Schwarzschild Radius (A cinematic depiction of a black hole - Fair Use)

 “At the still point of the turning world…At the still point, there the dance is, where past and future are gathered…Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”   - T.S. Eliott from his poem “Burnt Norton”

The Dance

By Scout

God is not a neat package.  At least to human reason.  If he were, the lives of theologians would not be blighted with so much controversy.  I hold to the Nicene view of God, as interpreted in classical theology, but I must admit that the Nicene view has both strong points and weak points.  By “weak” I mean concepts that seem a little theoretical and exploratory rather than unassailable. I have also been a sharp critic of the Armstrongist view of God which strikes me as an alarming excursus into all-out anthropomorphism.  

How much can we, as created beings, know about the uncreated God in his essence?  Not much, really.  God meets us in metaphor.  Usually, he presents himself in scripture using anthropomorphic terms.  We, on the other hand, use what we know from the created realm to try to describe him.  Our efforts can result in nothing more than unintended poetry. 

There is the school of thought that we should read what God has provided as a description of himself in the Bible and ask no further questions.  Then there is the view of analytic theology that advances the idea that if the Bible leaves a topic unstated then we should put on our finest philosophical dressage and develop the topic ourselves.  While I am a proponent of the latter view, I know it to be fraught with uncertainty.  Analytic theology is midrash in discussion of the gray zones rather than the inspiration of incontrovertible truth.  And at this point we must join with faith.  What I am trying to ease into saying is that there are now neo-classical theologians on the land who are starting to sound like they have had a passing tryst with the Armstrongist Doctrine of God.  I will cite an example. 

God as Temporal, For Instance

There are now some theologians, followers of neo-classical theology, with reputable backgrounds that believe that God exists in time.  They don’t go the complex route to establish this.  They simply say that if God did this, and then this and then that, he had to be following a chronological sequence.  He is temporal just as we are, they assert. If God creates then he begins to do the activity of creation.  And this occasions both intrinsic and extrinsic changes to God.  That is because to create something is to act and then after the creation God is different.  He is now someone who owns and interacts with a Cosmos, for instance.  This means God is not immutable as in classical theology.  

Neo-classicists also point out that there is a time constraint on cause and effect.  Cause must come before effect.  The word “before” is one of those troublesome prepositions that comes out of the created realm.  It has a spatial meaning.  What it actually means in this context is that on the continuum of time, first the cause happens and then the effect happens.  God causes things to happen; therefore, he must be “in” time.  Then there is logic.  “If it is a horse, then it is an animal.”  The proposition does not make sense unless it is ordered in time sequence.  Ordered thought for us humans happens in a succession of moments.  The neo-classicists have a talking point.  And if they have a talking point, so do the Armstrongists. 

God as Atemporal

I believe that God is timeless.  Note that this is an apophatic statement.  It tells us what God is not.  God is not in time.   My statement does not do much to define positively what God actually is.  What drives me towards atemporality is that time is a part of the created Cosmos.  It responds, for instance, to gravity.  As gravity increases, time slows.  At the Schwarzschild horizon of a black hole, time almost stops.  If spaghettification of your body did not happen, you could live there almost forever although it would seem like to you to be a normal lifespan.  Your feet are younger than you head because they are closer to the earth’s gravity-generating mass. God would not be dependent on something that he created.  (God, of course, is not dependent on anything.) If he created time, then time had a beginning but God has no beginning so God existed prior to time.  I am not sure how neo-classicists or Armstrongists handle this issue.  I heard a neo-classicist talk about it but I cannot say that I understood what he said.  Something like the statement that time does not run slower under intense gravity, just the mechanical clock runs slower.  Physicists don’t seem to believe that.  

Logic may seem to require chronological flow of propositions but it can be static.  It does not have to be represented as an argument flowing in time.  It can be represented by Venn diagrams.  As for cause and effect happening in chronological sequence, that is a conundrum.  I keep coming up with the idea that God knows all causes and all effects already and the act of creation means that he exposes something already known to him forever to our purview.  He doesn’t really innovate at all in the act of creation.  For the software engineers among you, God instantiates classes, methods, data types and parameters that are already known to him.  But then the neo-classicists can argue that instantiation itself is done in the succession of moments – in time.  I would have to look beyond these arguments for a resolution. Later in this essay I will look to Jesus. 

There is also a mathematic problem.   If the eternal God experiences reality as a series of moments, that means his past is infinite. If we represent the present moment as p then the next moment is p+1 and the previous moment was p-1.  The subtraction of moments moves us backwards in time mathematically.  For an eternal being who lives in a succession of moments, time goes backwards forever.  We would never, ever quit subtracting moments. No matter how much subtraction we do the p-1 term would always exist. If God is locked in an infinite past, how does he ever reach the present or the future (The Infinite Delay Argument.)  In brief, an infinite series of moments in time as required by temporality is not a meaningful description of God’s eternity.  The arithmetic of infinity does not serve us well here. 

Someone told me once that Herman Hoeh believed that time is motion – an Aristotelian idea.  I have never seen this view in writing in WCG literature.  I don’t think time is motion directly.  I believe in the “A Theory” of time (there is also a B Theory).  Solely because it most closely matches my experience and intuition.  You will have to look the A Theory up. There isn’t enough time for it in this little essay.  In brief, I believe God creates the present. The present is all that we know.  The past is gone and the future has not come into existence yet. Theory A says that reality is only the present.  Like T.S. Elliott wrote.  So, my view is that God creates reality in sequence, moment by moment.  Time is not motion but motion is the real product of God’s action of moment-by-moment creation.  Time is smoothly continuous because God’s creation of reality is smoothly continuous.  If God decided not to create the next moment, reality would simply disappear.  We would not die.  We would just vanish. 

Armstrongism and Neo-classical Theology

Armstrongism lacks a well-developed theology.  Armstrongists have done a little to organize the ideas that HWA left them.  Armstrongism could use the help of the neo-classicists.  The neo-classicists believe that God is temporal.  They also believe that God is not a simple being, that is, lacking subordinate parts.  This resonates with Armstrongism. I recall an Armstrongist minister stating that God had a heart.  But one pulpit statement from someone trained at Ambassador College doesn’t make an integrated doctrine.  A neo-classicist that is prominent in the media is Dr. Ryan T. Mullins trained at St. Andrews University in Scotland.  It might be a good idea for some Armstrongists to look into his ideas rather than simply deal in the pontifications of HWA or spend their time churning prophecy.  I have read some of Mullin’s material but I am still trying to figure out what he believes.  I think it would be good if Armstrongists were to leave the bunker and study some of these things and thereby gain depth in their theology.  

Jesus is the Key

The data that Jesus left with us points to a different way of engaging with the Cosmos.  He did not define that modality fully but gave us an event that points us in the right direction.  The event is the Ascension.   Jesus ascended bodily in the view of many witnesses.  The witnesses were early church members.  They saw him rise up into the sky.  But that kind of bodily locomotion doesn’t cut it for moving around the Cosmos of the size that Jesus himself created.  I think the visible ascension into the sky was done for dramatic effect.  It wasn’t technically the way the resurrected Jesus travelled.  

If Jesus were “in time” and moving at a speed where he was visible to the human eye, where would he be right now in his ascension progress – maybe somewhere between earth and Alpha Centauri which is only 4.357 light years away?  And if he were moving near or at the speed of light he would undergo time dilation.  Time would pass much faster for us than him. This would result in a mismatch between our experience of time and his experience of time. If Jesus were bound by time and space, a day trip to the Third Heaven at divine speed might mean the passage of trillions of years for us earthlings.  

The simple fact is that the speed of light is not fast enough for someone who needs to move around the Cosmos.  The Cosmos is way too large.  And, even so, an object with mass moving near the speed of light experiences infinite time dilation so that time effectively stops compared to an earthbound observer.  Did the body of the resurrected Jesus have mass?  That is an interesting question.  Doubting Thomas felt Jesus and whatever Jesus was made of it gave resistance to Thomas’ hand. 

Living and moving in time and space is clearly not useful for a resurrected human being like Jesus.  It is too constraining for the mode in which Jesus, as God, operates.  Jesus could not have ascended to heaven in such an environment in any reasonable time.  The neo-classicists can say that God experiences another kind of time and not our constraining form of time – something else that gives him a succession of moments.  But why not just say that he isn’t in time.  And what we know as time is just an analog of how God chooses to order events.  We already understand that he knows the future or predictive prophecy would not exist.  God may organize time anyway he wants whenever he wants to do it.  He is not bound by time.  We also know that he does not have a one-track mind.  Our minds are pretty much one-track.  God can listen to millions of people pray and follow each prayer perfectly while also sustaining the Cosmos. While that still requires a succession of moments, the point is, God may think in very different ways than we can imagine, including in a non-linear, timeless way.  It is not God who is constrained but our imaginations.

So, if you, like me, believe that you must consult the Book of God’s Works as well as the Book of God’s Words to gain an understanding of anything, then the idea of a temporal God collapses. And the Nicene brothers were right. But I will read about it more.

Surprised by God – a Probable Conclusion

I believe there is much about God that we will never understand.  Maybe God in simplicity is time rather than existing in time.  Maybe what we know as time in the Cosmos is an imitation of his personal essence somehow.  I am at peace with the idea that I do not know what God’s actual relationship to time is. And I may never know no matter how smart God may make me one day.  God told Moses, “I am that I am.”  God has ultimate and unrestricted free will. Perhaps, when the truth outs, it will be a big surprise.  It will not be about time but some other alternative we never considered. God is what he is.  Moses just had to get over it.  Some conjectures make more sense than others.  But they are still conjectures.  Maybe we will just have to get over it.