What God Knows: Time and the Question of Divine Knowledge

by Harry Lee Poe, J. Stanley Mattson

Overview

When Einstein destroyed the old view of the universe, he destroyed the old notion of time with it. His new theory explained that time is a dimension of the physical cosmos like space, and like space it is relative. This collection of essays by theologians, physicists, and philosophers explores the theoretical aspects of the problem of time and its implications for faith and the understanding of God.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932792126
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	225
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Harry Lee Poe is a Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University.

J. Stanley Mattson is the President of the C. S. Lewis Foundation, Managing Director of the C. S. Lewis Foundation (UK), and Director of the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute at Oxford and Cambridge.

Read an Excerpt

WHAT GOD KNOWS
TIME, ETERNITY, AND DIVINE KNOWLEDGE

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Baylor University Press
Copyright © 2005 C. S. Lewis Foundation
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932792-12-6

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Chapter One
The Problem of Time in Biblical Perspective

Harry Lee Poe

The Bible forms the background for any discussion of science and religion in the West. Whether one accepts its authority as revelation by God or regards it as a collection of culturally framed, disconnected beliefs collected over a period of centuries, the Bible forms the context for faith or skepticism. The dominant religious view in the West for the last fifteen hundred years has been Christianity. In this context, modern science as it is practiced all over the world developed. Each religious tradition that engages modern science has its own points of conflict with science that arise from each religion's understanding of the world as people experience it. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, to name a few, have their own issues with science, and science likewise has issues of difference with each religion. In the West, however, one of the greatest areas of misunderstanding, but also of fruitful discussion, concerns time.

For centuries, the Bible served as the foundational source for the Western understanding of reality. People of learning saw no conflict between what the Bible could teach us as the revealed word of God and what the physical world could teach us as the handiwork of God. It seemed reasonable to suppose that God would be consistent in what he said and did. This situation continued for several centuries after the emergence of modern science from Copernicus onward. In conceiving the scientific method, Francis Bacon (d. 1625) observed that the obstacle to the discovery of new knowledge lay in the philosophical prejudices and presuppositions about the nature of reality through which people of learning viewed their data. Though Aristotle's philosophy had sparked an interest in the examination of the physical world during the high Middle Ages, it also provided a doctrinaire explanation for what one found in the physical world. Bacon developed the scientific method precisely to liberate the study of the physical world from tradition and the speculative metaphysics of philosophical systems, and of Aristotle's system in particular. The arrest of Galileo (d. 1642) illustrates Bacon's concern. The academic community could not tolerate his rejection of Aristotle's cosmology. The fact that his experimentation, by means of the telescope he had invented, demonstrated that the moon is not the perfect sphere Aristotle's philosophy had demanded held little weight against the ingrained philosophical view of the academy.

While the revolution in knowledge of the physical world received a great push by Bacon and Galileo, another of their contemporary scholars contributed to the revolution in biblical studies. James Ussher (d. 1656) made great strides in the critical study of the Hebrew texts of the Bible, as well as in the study of documents of the Patristic period in the early church. His study proceeded without reliance on tradition, but depended upon examination of the texts themselves. Most people know Ussher today, however, as the man who calculated the creation of the world at 4004 B.C. based on his study of the Hebrew texts. For 150 years, no one had any reason to question the calculations of such an eminent and "scientific" scholar, for Ussher embodied Bacon's scientific method. As the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh in the predominantly Catholic country of Ireland, Ussher had no difficulty dispensing with Rome's traditional understandings of patristic texts. The author of particularly pointed assaults on the Church of Rome and a well-known sympathizer with the Puritans, Ussher maintained an objective view when distinguishing genuine from spurious epistles by St. Ignatius of Antioch.

In the early nineteenth century, geologists and paleontologists made discoveries that challenged the long-established dating of the age of the world. Rather than a six thousand year old planet, the new sciences proposed that the earth must be millions of years old. Not only did the earth appear to be older than Ussher had said, but the forms of life preserved in the fossil record suggested that the creation itself had taken more than six days. Men of science rose to the occasion. In 1813 Robert Jameson, a Scottish geologist, proposed the "Age-Day Theory" of creation whereby the days of Genesis 1 should be understood as extended periods of time or ages. In 1823 William Buckland, the great Oxford geologist, proposed his famous "Gap Theory" to explain the discrepancy between the most recent discoveries of science and Ussher dating. The Gap Theory proposed a gap of extended time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 to account for the missing ages. Buckland argued that the geological catastrophes occurred during this gap. Though Jameson and Buckland believed that some interpretations of the Bible conflicted with the science of the day, they did not repudiate the Bible. The popular imagination, however, is not so subtle.

Once the popular imagination conceived of a discrepancy between the Bible and the new knowledge obtained through scientific investigation, Darwin's concept of natural selection as an explanation for the variety of life forms found fertile ground to grow. In the face of the nineteenth-century understanding of the certainty of scientific knowledge, the Bible began to be seen in some quarters as unreliable. In the eighteenth century, the intellectual conversation between science and religion had largely focused on making a case for the validity of general revelation (nature) in comparison with the certainty of specific revelation (the Bible). By the end of the nineteenth century the very notion of revelation from God was under serious attack.

Conflicting notions of the meaning of time played a major role in the fracture between science and religion that grew acute after Darwin published On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). What was not apparent in the seventeenth century, the nineteenth century, or the present day is that the discrepancy lies between the interpretation of the physical evidence and Ussher's interpretation of the biblical texts. Ussher was a modern man. He helped to create the modern mindset. He was a product of the age of moveable type and, more importantly for our purposes, the mechanical clock.

Since "the dawn of time" (notice the modern way of thinking about the world), people had marked its passage through their experience of the world (the movement of the sun, moon, and stars, the crowing of the cock, the migration of birds, the color of plants). In the world of Ussher, few individuals owned a clock, but every town of any size had its public clock on a prominent tower to regulate the affairs of people. Elegant people of the modern world dine at eight o'clock. Premodern people eat when they are hungry. Modern industry performs its functions under exacting schedules and timetables for production and delivery. Traditional agriculture, however, operates under a different understanding of time. Farmers do not harvest crops on September 1, but when the crop is ripe.

The measurement of time goes back thousands of years as many cultures tracked the motion of the sun, moon, and stars; but the consciousness of measured time belonged to the elite of a culture and to the sacred ceremonies. The sundial, the hour glass, candles, water clocks, and other elaborate schemes for measuring time were tools of the elite of classical and Chinese culture, but the measurement of time did not belong to the cultures at large in the same way until the mechanical clock appeared. The Roman army used hours to divide the day, but the ancient Hebrews knew nothing of hours and minutes. The Hebrews and people like them needed no more precision than vague terms like "morning," "evening," and "the third watch of the night." Even though the watch in the night suggests a division of time, it actually involves a human activity or quality of how the time was spent.

The Greeks introduced the Western world to a concept of time that can be quantified and measured out like space. This concept of time is known by its Greek name, chronos, from which we derive the term chronology. Chronos time is the time of science, for it allows measurement. Without chronos time, scientific measurement would be difficult to conceive or develop. Chemistry and physics depend upon measurements that take place within prescribed periods of time. The Hebrew concept of time, on the other hand, has an entirely different orientation. Instead of quantity, it is concerned with quality. It is referred to as kairos time. Kairos does not concern itself so much with when or for how long something happened. The modern world has little use for this concept, though it is preserved in expressions like "A good time was had by all."

The distinction between chronos and kairos can be seen in the Bible in descriptions of the birth of Jesus. From the Jewish perspective, Jesus was born when "the days were accomplished" (Luke 2:6 AV), but from the Greek perspective, he was born during the reign of Augustus Caesar when Quirinius was first governor of Syria (Luke 2:1-2). From the Jewish perspective, the incarnation and atonement of Christ came in "the fullness of time" (Gal 4:4), but from the Greek perspective it began with his birth during the reign of Herod the Great and finished with his crucifixion under Roman governor Pontius Pilate when Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee and Caiaphas was high priest (Matt 2:1; Luke 23:1, 7; John 18:13). From the kairos perspective, Paul could say that "at the right time Christ died for the ungodly" (Rom 5:6), but from a chronos perspective, Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate (Acts 13:28). The Hebrew concept of time allowed for the same sort of dating of events in terms of the reigns of kings, such as Isaiah's vision which took place in the year that King Uzziah died (Isa 6:1), but the orientation is to mark time by significant events in the course of life. People in the modern world will still date events in this way as do the people of Louisville, Kentucky, who remember the great Ohio River flood or the tornado of 1974. The reign of a decadent king has a general dating: "Now in the eighteenth year of King Jeroboam son of Nebat, Abijam began to reign over Judah. He reigned for three years in Jerusalem" (1 Kgs 15:1-2). Ezekiel dated his call meticulously down to the day from the catastrophe of the fall of Jerusalem: "In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God" (Ezek 1:1).

The contrast between chronos and kairos also appears in the Passion narratives of the gospels. Both Greek and Hebrew culture met in first-century Palestine. Greek culture had conquered Rome even though the Roman army had conquered Greece. The gospels mix the Hebrew concept of time with the Greek concept of time that had come into common usage in the Roman Empire in which Jesus lived and through which the Christian faith spread. The Romans divided the day into hours; Hebrew saw each day as a whole and only spoke of the quality of different aspects of the day, such as, the cool of the day or the heat of the day. By Roman reckoning, the day began at dawn, thus, Jesus was crucified at the sixth hour (noon) and remained on the cross until the ninth hour (Luke 23:44). By Jewish reckoning, however, the day began at sunset, and the day after the crucifixion was the Sabbath. So as not to defile the Sabbath with crucified bodies, those being crucified had to be killed rather than drawing out the slow death of crucifixion (John 19:31-42). It was a simple difference in understanding of the nature of a day. The Hebrews understood that the day began in darkness but was overpowered by the light. The Greeks, on the other hand, believed that the day began with light and slowly died. For the Hebrews, each day was new, but for the Greeks there was an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Different understandings of the meaning of time also appear imbedded in the languages people use. Language reflects the thought processes and understandings of people. The Hebrew language has no tenses to its verbs. Hebrew verbs do not express past, present, or future tense. Instead, Hebrew verbs describe the quality of the action. The verbs describe completed action or incomplete action. The Hebrew language expresses its strong sense of the linear movement of time through other words or phrases; such as, the days are coming, at that time, now, then, once, and when. What does a translator do when they translate a language without tenses into a language that has tenses? Translation involves more than merely finding the word in another language that has the equivalent meaning. Language involves more than naming objects. Some two hundred or so years before the birth of Christ, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek for the Hellenistic Jewish community that had grown in Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem. This translation, known as the Septuagint, began a tradition of rendering the language of the Bible into a language that had a different concept of time. Modern translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into English continue this tradition.

The Beginning

The first example of the clash between the Hebrew understanding of time and the Greek understanding appears with the first word in the Bible. English translations render it "in the beginning." A casual survey of the seemingly endless stream of new translations of the Bible illustrates how deeply rooted the Greek understanding of time affects our reading of the Scriptures. This traditional way of translating the word is followed by the Authorized Version of 1611 (King James), the New American Standard Version, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, the Jerusalem Bible, and the New Living Translation, to name but a few. Several translations add a footnote and give an alternative translation there: "When God began to create. ..." These translations include the New English Bible, the New American Bible, the New Jewish Publication Society Version, the Revised Standard Version, and the Anchor Bible. While these translations vary greatly on how they treat texts throughout the Bible, they march together on this word. The word bereshith includes the prefix preposition (be) that is rendered in English as "in." What is missing from the word is the Hebrew definite article (ha).

What is the difference between "in the beginning" and "in beginning"? When the Hebrew scholars in Alexandria translated the Scriptures into Greek, they kept the Hebrew emphasis. Though Greek has a definite article just as Hebrew and English do, the Septuagint retained the Hebrew form with en arche (in beginning). Some three hundred years later, John used the same phrase as it is found in the Septuagint to begin his gospel. When Jews translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek two thousand years ago, they carried over the Hebrew concept of time, but when Gentiles under the influence of twenty-five-hundred years of Greek philosophy translate Hebrew, they tended to read the Greek understanding of time into the text.

The first translation of the Hebrew text by a Gentile took place when St. Jerome produced the Vulgate (c. 405), the Latin version of the Bible that served as the standard version in the West until the vernacular translations began to appear a thousand years later. The Vulgate begins in principio (in beginning), but the second lesson in standard Latin grammars explains that Latin has no word for "the." It does not express the indefinite or the definite article. In the late middle ages when vernacular translations of Latin texts began to appear for popular consumption, scholars had grown used to adjusting the Latin by inserting "a" or "the" where they saw fit. By the time the Bible was being translated into European languages, the translators were adjusting the text to fit the way they saw the world.

While the Greek concept of time focuses on when something happened and the measurement of the duration of action, the Hebrew concept of time focuses on the quality of the time, and therefore on the verbs. It is not incidental that all words in the Hebrew language are derived from verbs. The focal point of Genesis 1:1 is the word bara (create). It is a "perfect" verb, which means that it denotes completed action. The action of a perfect verb may be completed in the past, present or future. It is not unusual for the prophets of Israel to describe a future event as a past event or a completed action because it is something that God will do; therefore, it is as good as completed. The first verse of Genesis describes creation as a completed action before it has even taken place! The fact that God began creation means that God completes creation. It is an accomplished fact, regardless of the quantity of time involved. In the face of alternative explanations for the physical world, ranging from the nature religions of the ancient world to the philosophical explanations of the Greeks, the Hebrews affirmed that everything came from God.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
—J. Stanley Mattson
Introduction

1 The Problem of Time
—Harry Lee Poe
2 St. Augustine and the Mystery of Time
—Timothy George
3 On the Developing Scientific Understanding of Time
—Russell Stannard
4 Time in Physics and Theology
—John Polkinghorne
5 God, Time, and Eternity
—William Lane Craig
6 Eschatology and Scientific Cosmology: From Conflict to Interaction
—Robert John Russell
7 Time and the Physics of Sin
—Hugh Ross
8 Meeting the Cosmic God in the Existential Now
—Tony Campolo

Conclusion
—Harry Lee Poe
Notes
List of Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

What God Knows is a helpful way to enter the discussion concerning God's relation to time. These essays, written by theologians, scientists and philosophers, represent the range of views about the nature of time and of God's eternal nature, yet they are uniformly accessible. The reader will gain a secure handle on the nuances of the debate about what and when God knows what God knows.

Gregory E. Ganssle

What God Knows is a helpful way to enter the discussion concerning God's relation to time. These essays, written by theologians, scientists and philosophers, represent the range of views about the nature of time and of God's eternal nature, yet they are uniformly accessible. The reader will gain a secure handle on the nuances of the debate about what and when God knows what God knows.