A. Scriptural Doctrine.
The infinitude of God relatively to space, is his immensity or omnipresence; relatively to duration, it is his eternity. As He is free from all the limitations of space, so He is exalted above all the limitations of time. As He is not more in one place than in another, but is everywhere equally present, so He does not exist during one period of duration more than another. With Him there is no distinction between the present, past, and future; but all things are equally and always present to Him. With Him duration is an eternal now. This is the popular and the Scriptural view of God’s eternity. “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.” (Ps. xc. 2.) “Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.” (Ps. cii. 25-27.) He is “The high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.” (Is. lvii. 15.) “I am the first and I am the last; and besides me there is no God.” (Is. xliv. 6.) “A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past.” (Ps. xc. 4.) “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Pet. iii. 8.) He is “the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” (Heb. xiii. 8.) God is He “which is [ever is], and which was, and which is to come.” (Rev. i. 4.) Throughout the Bible He is called the eternal or everlasting God; who only hath immortality. The primal revelation of Himself to his covenant people was as the “I am.”
What is taught in these and similar passages, is, first, that God is without beginning of years or end of days. He is, and always has been, and always will be; and secondly, that to Him there is neither past nor future; that the past and the future are always and equally present to Him.
B. Philosophical View.
These are Scriptural facts, and necessarily follow from the nature of God as self-existent, infinite, and immutable. With these representations the teaching of theologians for the most part agrees. Thus Augustine says: “Fuisse et futurum esse non est in ea [scil. vita divina], sed esse solum, quoniam æterna est: nam fuisse et futurum esse non est æternum.”1 “Nec tu tempore tempora præcedis, alioquin non omnia tempora præcederes sed præcedis omnia præterita celsitudine semper præsentis æternitatis; et superas omnia futura, quia illa futura sunt et cum venerint præterita erunt; tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficiunt.”2 Aquinas, to the same effect says, “Æternitas est tota simul.”3 Or, as the schoolmen generally were accustomed to say, “In æternitate est unicum instans semper præsens et persistens;” or, as they otherwise expressed it, “Eternitas est interminabilis vitæ simul et perfecta possessio.” The same view of this attribute is given by the later theologians. Thus Quenstedt says, “Æternitas Dei est duratio vel permanentia essentiæ divinæ interminabilis, sine principio et fine carens, et indivisibilis, omnem omnino successionem excludens.”4
The only thing open to question in these statements is, the denial of all succession in the divine consciousness. Our idea of eternity is arrived at from our idea of time. We are conscious of existence in space, and we are conscious of protracted or continuous existence. The ideas of space and duration are necessarily given in the consciousness of continuous existence. We see also that events succeed each other, that their occurrence is separated by a longer or shorter period of duration, just as bodies are separated by a greater or less interval in space. We therefore know, from consciousness or from experience, of no kind of duration which is not successive. Instead of saying, as is commonly done, that time is duration measured by succession, which supposes that duration is antecedent to that by which it is measured, and independent of it, it is maintained by some that duration without succession is inconceivable and impossible. As space is defined to be “negation betwixt the boundary-lines of form,” so time is said to be “the negation betwixt the boundary-points of motion.” Or, in other words, time is “the interval which a body in motion marks in its transit from one point of space to another.”5 Hence, if there be no bodies having form, there is no space; and if there is no motion, there is no time. “If all things were annihilated, time as well as space must he annihilated; for time is dependent on space. If all things were annihilated, there could be no transition, no succession of one object with respect to another; for there would be no object in being, — all would be perfect emptiness, nothingness, non-being-ness. Under an entire annihilation, there could be neither space nor time.”6 The same writer7 elsewhere says, “Were the earth, as well as the other globes of space, annihilated, much more would time be annihilated therewith.”8 All this, however, is to be understood, it is said, of “objective time, that is, of time as dependent upon created material conditions.”9 As objective timelessness follows from the annihilation of material existences, so timelessness as regards thinking personalities is conceivable only on the destruction of thought. “We have seen that there can be a state of timelessness for material creation, only by destroying its operation, that is, its attribute of motion: precisely in analogy therewith, there can be a state of timelessness for intellectual creation, only by destroying the laws of intellect, that is, its operation of thinking.”10If, therefore, God be a person, or a thinking Being, He cannot be timeless; there must be succession; one thought or state must follow another. To deny this, it is said, is to deny the personality of God. The dictum, therefore, of the schoolmen, and of the theologians, that eternity precludes succession — that it is a persistent, unmoving Now — is according to this repudiated.