In his Gifford Lectures, published as The Faith of a Physicist, John Polkinghorne considers the relation of God to time, calling it one of the “most puzzling, and most pressing, of general questions about God” (p. 59):

It is clear that there must be an eternal pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot be subject to fluctuation if he is worthy of being called divine. Emphasis on this alone would lead us to a static picture of God, but could that be true if the nature of love is relatedness and that to which God relates, namely his creation, is itself subject to radical change? (p. 59)

Polkinghorne considers the traditional response that all moments of time are eternally present to God and this explains how God can be related to each of them. This response, Polkinghorne says, is motivated by a belief that saying God is affected by time would imply change in God and would, under a particular understanding of divine perfection, jeopardize the divine excellence. However, Polkinghorne replies that we can coherently develop a “dynamic” idea of perfection “which resides, not in the absence of change, but in perfect appropriateness in relation to each successive moment. It is the perfection of music rather than the perfection of a statue” (p. 59).

Another argument sometimes offered for taking an eternal, “static” view of God is that, only if creation is “eternally present” to God can God exercise providential care for creation:

Only if in his eternity he knows simultaneously that tomorrow I shall pray for a particular outcome and that today my friend is making a decision relevant to that outcome, can he really be a God capable of responding to prayer in influencing that decision. […] Only a God who sees all that was, and is, and is to come, “at once,” is able to produce the best for his creation. (p. 60)

Polkinghorne responds that this rests on a false picture both of God’s providential care and of time. First, he denies that God is the all-determining force that seems implied by some traditional views of God. Instead, he approvingly cites Arthur Peacocke’s phrase that God is an “Improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity” who is capable of responding to any contingent event that occurs. Second, Polkinghorne wonders if the “block universe” (as William James called it) is even a coherent understanding of time. It seems to presuppose a deterministic “Laplacian” view of time and causality, but this is neither the world humans experience nor, Polkinghorne contends, the view revealed by modern science.

If temporality is genuine feature of the world, rather than just appearance, Polkinghorne suggests, God’s knowing temporal events “in eternity” would not be knowing them as they really are. This would imply a deficit in God’s knowledge, which would mean that God is not omniscient. The processes of reality are a real aspect of the created order, and knowing them truly means knowing them as processes. If God is unrelated to time, it seems, God’s knowledge of us and our world would be like our knowledge of historical figures, not the relatedness we have to existing flesh-and-blood people.

Polkinghorne concludes: “I am pesuaded that in addition to God’s eternal nature we shall have to take seriously that he has a relation to time which makes him immanent within it, as well as eternally transcendent of it” (p. 61). This is similar to the position I tentatively endorsed in the last post. To me, the most compelling consideration is that, if God is truly related to the creation and to the creatures in it, there must be some aspect of God that is temporal, or involved in time.

I realize there’s always a great deal of speculation any time you start talking about God’s nature, so I’m not claiming to have reached any definitive conclusion here. Here’s a post I wrote a while back discussing Keith Ward’s incorporation of certain “Hegelian” insights into his theology. Here’s an interesting lecture from Wolfhart Pannenberg. Here’s an article from philosopher William Lane Craig.