PWJ: S1E31 – MC B4C3 – “Time and Beyond Time”

Today we’re talking about time. This might seen like an abstract topic, but it helps us understand important questions, such as:

1. If God is all-knowing, how can we really have free will?
2. How can God keep creation going while He was a baby asleep in a manger?
3. How can God be attending to millions of prayers at once?

So put on your thinking cap and let’s ponder the mystery of time…

Please send any objections, comments or questions, either via email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack or message us via Instagram!

Episode 31: “Time and Beyond Time” (Download)

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— Show Notes —

• I began by mentioning The Confessions of St. Augustine. In Book Eleven he speaks at length about time and I found it rather hard to follow.

• Matt and I chat about the Jim Carrey movie, Bruce Almighty, the story of a man who is given the powers of God because he thinks then he’ll be happy.  In the end (spoiler warning) he realizes that all he wants is his girlfriend, appropriately named “Grace”. We referenced a scene in the movie where Bruce tries to handle all the prayers being made to God from across the earth.

• The Quote-of-the-week:

“Where, except in the present, can the eternal be met?”

– Christian Reflections “Historicism”

• I explained that I’m currently reading a really enjoyable book, C.S. Lewis and Narnia for Dummies by Richard Wagner. It gives a really great overview of Lewis’ life and works, particularly focussing on the Christian themes of the Chronicles of Narnia.

• The drink-of-the-week was Ballast Point’s Victory at Sea.

• Jack begins this chapter by saying that if it’s talking about things you’ve never cared about, please feel free to skip it. Matt and I remind the listeners that this permission to skip the material does not apply to this podcast! Matt and I chat a little bit about skipping chapters in books and finishing books we’re not enjoying.

• We begin to start about the subject of prayer. I recommended Lewis’ book Letters to Malcom, which I read for the first time a couple of months ago.

• Lewis asks “How can God hear all the prayers at the same time?”

“A man put it to me by saying ‘I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.’”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

This was never an objection that either Mat or I had, as though something like this was “too hard” for God. However, Lewis resolves this by speaking about God’s relationship to time:

“Most of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one moment of time”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

We easily forget this because we have a different kind of existence:

“Our life comes to us moment by moment One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

But this is not true for God:

“We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do. But many learned men do not agree with that… His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the beginning of the world-is always the Present for Him”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

I mentioned that I had once heard time described as a “parenthetical insertion” in eternity.

• Related to the issue of time, Matt and I acted out a famous scene from the Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs:

HELMET: When does this happen in the movie?

SANDURZ: Now. You’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.

HELMET: What happened to then?

SANDURZ: We passed then?

HELMET: When?

SANDURZ: Just now. We’re at now, now.

HELMET: Go back to then.

SANDURZ: When?

HELMET: Now.

SANDURZ: Now?

HELMET: Now.

SANDURZ: I can’t.

HELMET: Why?

SANDURZ: We missed it.

HELMET: When?

SANDURZ: Just now.

HELMET: When will then be now?

SANDURZ: Soon.

• Lewis offers two analogies to help us understand this idea of God being outside of time and eternally present …

Analogy #1: The Novel

Suppose I am writing a novel. I write “Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!” For Mary who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary’s maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary’s time (the time inside the story) at all.

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

It’s not a perfect analogy because the author leaves one time stream to move into another:

“…the author gets out of one Time-series (that of the novel) only by going into another Time-series (the real one)”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

However, this is not true for God:

“God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

This has a delightful consequence:

“[God] has infinite attention to spare for each one of us…. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

God lives in the “eternal now”:

“His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours: with Him it is, so to speak, still 1920 and already 1960. For His life is Himself”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

In reference to this, Matt encouraged listeners to Bethel Music’s song, We Dance, as well as Lifehouse’s Everything.

Analogy #2: The Line on the page

“If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

All this helps us understand how God can hear millions of prayers “at the same time”.

• I explained how the logic put forth here by Lewis can help explain why Catholic and Orthodox Christians believe that the Saints in Heaven can also hear the thousands of prayers made to them at once.

• Given our understanding of the relationship between God and time, we can now address the opening questions posed by Matt at the beginning:

Problem #1: How could God keep the world going while He was a baby, particularly while He was asleep?

“The Christians said that the eternal God who is everywhere and keeps the whole universe going, once became a human being. Well then, said I, how did the whole universe keep going while He was a baby, or while He was asleep? How could He at the same time be God who knows everything and also a man asking his disciples “Who touched me?”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

Lewis explains that this suggested problem demonstrates a misunderstanding of God’s relationship to time:

“You will notice that the sting lay in the time words: ‘While He was a baby’-‘How could He at the same time?’ In other words I was assuming that Christ’s life as God was in time, and that His life as the man Jesus in Palestine was a shorter period taken out of that time – just as my service in the army was a shorter period taken out of my total life… We picture God living through a period when His human life was still in the future: then coming to a period when it was present: then going on to a period when He could look back on it as something in the past”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

I’ve heard Muslims raise this objection: “When God died, who was running the world?”. Lewis’ comments are instructive here:

“You cannot fit Christ’s earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time. It is really, I suggest, a timeless truth about God that human nature, and the human experience of weakness and sleep and ignorance, are somehow included in His whole divine life. This human life in God is from our point of view a particular period in the history of our world (from the year A.D. one till the Crucifixion). We therefore imagine it is also a period in the history of God’s own existence… But God has no history. He is too completely and utterly real to have one. For, of course, to have a history means losing part of your reality (because it had already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it. God forbid we should think God was like that. Even we may hope not to be always rationed in that way”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

Problem #2: If God knows the future, do we really have free will?

“Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise?”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

I said that I typically explain this by giving the example of a football game which I have seen live, but am then later watching with friends. As we are watching the replay, I can tell my friends exactly what’s going to happen. Despite that, did each of those players have free will? Here’s how Lewis explains it:

“…the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Time-line like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them… But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call ‘today.’ All the days are ‘Now’ for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday. He has not. He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him.

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

If you’re still struggling with this idea, Jack just asks whether or not you think you have free will in this moment:

“You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way-because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)

This discussion about free will poses a problem: if God knows I’m not going to choose Him, wouldn’t He do something to change that? We responded by explaining that the grace is always there to enable you to choose Him, but that love requires free will and free will opens up the possibility, not only to love of God, but also to rejection of Him.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

– John 3:16

• I closed the show by sharing my iTunes review of The Art of Manliness podcast:

In society, the art of manliness is almost dead. Fortunately, Brett McKay’s podcast is here to help bring it back to life and restore it. Brett invites a wide range of guests with diverse backgrounds to speak on different topics relating to manhood and manly virtues. Listen to this podcast and you will be able able to bench-press an additional 200lbs and you will suddenly have a full, majestic beard (results may vary).