11/26/2005—
More thoughts on free will and predestination:
If God is infinite, he has existed into the infinite past and will exist into the infinite future. Does he exist in time? He may, but I don’t think he has to. Does he have to exist outside time in order to see the beginning from the end? No, but God and time would have to be co-eternal. Here, he’d see every moment as the present or the past, never the future.
But doesn’t setting a limit on what God can and cannot see turn God into a finite being, even though the limitation may not mean much. Here, perhaps, is another example of “trinitarian” structure.
If God is strictly in time and not outside or beyond it, then time must be infinite, with no beginning or end, because God has no beginning or end. From every specific moment in time, he would have perfect knowledge of the past and present, but does not know from that point in time what the future holds. He can base his intentions for the future on his knowledge of the present.
Maybe the three different perspectives are analogous, even a model, of the Trinity’s function in time. Maybe the Father is the one looks back to the past, thereby knowing the future beyond any given moment. Then the Son would be the one who looks forward to the future, who plans it and creates the world in which things will happen, but doesn’t have total control (or doesn’t exercise it) over the creation. He creates change, but is himself unchanged. Then, there’s the Spirit, possibly in the weakest position of all, the present, where all he can do is choose to change in response to stimuli from the past, basing his choice on guesswork about the future.