I recently worked on Article XVII of the Church of England's official statement of doctrine, the Thirty-Nine Articles, in preparation for a lecture I gave at a seminary in the United States at the end of last month. As I worked on this Article, I was struck by how its opening words raise the issue of God's relationship with time.
The words in question run as follows:
'Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby, before the foundations of the world were laid, He hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation as vessels made to honour.'
The sentence tells us two things about God's relationship with time. First, God's purpose is 'everlasting,' more precisely as the word aeternum used in the Latin version of the Article tells us, it is 'eternal,' not just lasting throughout time, but transcending time. Secondly, on the basis of that eternal purpose, God has 'constantly decreed' something 'before the foundation of the world.'
All this could be read as meaning that when we talk about 'predestination' what we mean is that God has an eternal purpose on the basis of which he issues a permanent decree before a fixed point in time, namely the foundation of the world. Now, from our point of view, as creatures who live in time as fish live in water, all this is perfectly true. However, it is only a partial truth because, although we live in time, God does not.
Time is part of the created order and God dwells outside it, just as he lives outside the temporal restrictions which his creatures inhabit. In the words of the early Christian philosopher Boethius: 'God abides for ever in an eternal present' and as a result:
'...His knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present, and embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and the future contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place.'
This point, which has traditionally been accepted by Christian theologians, is developed by the Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock in his lectures on The Existence and Attributes of God. Charnock writes that:
'God knows all things from eternity, and, therefore, perpetually knows them: the reason is because the Divine knowledge is infinite, and therefore comprehends all knowable truths at once. An eternal knowledge comprehends in itself all time, and beholds past and present in the same manner, and therefore his knowledge is immutable: by one simple knowledge he considers the infinite spaces of past and future.'
A further aspect of God's eternal existence noted by Charnock is that there is no succession in the decrees of God, his decisions concerning what will be either because he directly makes them happen or because he allows them to be as the result of the action of his creatures. God does not decree first this and then that but everything eternally. As this is true of things in general, so also it is true of God's decree that he will save his human creatures from the power of the Devil and of sin. In Charnock's words:
'There is no succession in the decrees of God. He does not decree this now, which he decreed not before; for as his works were known from the beginning of the world, so his works were decreed from the beginning of the world; as they are known at once, so they are decreed at once; there is a succession in the execution of them; first grace, then glory; but the purpose of God for the bestowing of both, was in one and the same moment of eternity. 'He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy' (Eph 1;4). The choice of Christ, and the choice of some in him to be holy and to be happy, were before the foundation of the world; they appear in their order according to the council and will of God from eternity. The redemption of the world is after the creation of the world; but the decree whereby the world was created, and whereby it was redeemed, was from eternity.'
What all this means in relation to the first sentence of Article XVII, is that God has known and decreed from all eternity, that there will be a world, that it will Fall into sin, and that a certain body of people will be brought through Christ to everlasting salvation.
Once one says this people generally start to become uneasy because they think it means that the Fall and sin were inevitable, and that those who are saved have no choice but to be saved and in consequence the lost have no choice but to be lost. How can it be right, they ask for God to cause the Fall and sin to occur, to then punish people for sin, and finally to save some while rejecting others?
The problem with this objection is that it confuses God's eternal knowledge and decrees with some form of absolute determinism. God's knowledge of things to come is because they will be, and they will be because he decrees that they should be, but this does not preclude God decreeing, and therefore knowing, that certain things will occur as a result of the exercise of free will by his rational creatures. To quote Boethius again:
'...without doubt, all things will come to pass which God foreknows as about to happen, but of these certain proceed of free will; and though these happen, yet by the fact of their existence they do not lose their proper nature, in virtue of which before they happened it was really possible that they might not have come to pass.'
If we ask how this can be possible, how something can be foreknown by God if it might not happen, the answer is that the language of foreknowledge employed by Boethius is an example of what is known as analogous language, language which speaks of God by analogy with creaturely existence. The point is that to us God's knowledge of what has yet to occur in this world is like a human looking forward to something that will happen in the future. However, as we have said, God transcends time.
To quote C S Lewis in his book Mere Christianity.
'God is outside and above the timeline... 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. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your to-morrow'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.'
Seeing things in this light means, for example, that God eternally knew that Judas Iscariot would betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver and therefore Jesus, sharing the divine knowledge, correctly predicted it would happen (Matthew 26:14-16, John 13:21-30). However, this did not mean that Judas had to betray Jesus or that it was God's will that he should do so. What God eternally knew and allowed was a free decision by Judas to do so in the knowledge that this decision would form part of the process by which the world would then be saved.
What is true in the case of Judas is also true in the case of the Fall of Adam and Eve and the existence of sin in general. If we ask whether God knew that the Devil would turn from God and other fallen angels with him, that the Devil would cause Adam and Eve to turn from God and that the result would be, as Article XVII puts, 'curse and damnation,' then the answer is 'Yes.' If we asked whether he decreed that these things should be allowed to happen, then the answer is also 'Yes.' However, if we ask if he forced or willed them to happen then the answer is 'No.'
What God knew, because it was real, but which he did not determine, was that some angels and all human beings would misuse their free will. As Lewis explains, such misuse of free will was not inevitable ('curse and damnation' did not have to happen) but the nature of free will made it possible (and therefore when it happened real and therefore eternally known to God). To quote Lewis:
'God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata - a world of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily, united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.'
Some people might argue, of course, that the creation of a world in which the misuse of free will could occur was a mistake given the state of conflict in the universe that has resulted, and which we see today in examples such as the wars taking place in Ukraine and the Middle East. However, as Lewis comments:
'If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will – that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when he pulls the strings – then we may take it it is worth paying.'
If we ask what all this means in practical terms, the answer is twofold.
First, if God knows the future in his eternal present it means we can trust his promises of a good outcome for our own lives and for creation as a whole. God has seen the future, and it is good.
Secondly, because God has given us free will and has said that he will judge us on how we use it, this means that we need to take seriously the responsibility to act rightly since, to quote Boethius one last time:
'... rewards and punishments are held forth to wills unbound by any necessity...Therefore, withstand vice, practise virtue, lift up yourselves to right hopes, offer humble prayers to Heaven. Great is the necessity of righteousness laid up on you if ye will not hide it from yourselves, seeing that all your actions are done before the eyes of a judge who seeth all things.'
