Does 'Time" exist in heaven?

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nickpeter

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I know God exists outside of time. But those saved ( I hope I am one ) and will eventually unite with their glorified bodies. I assume these will be used and if so change occurs and Time involves change. If we use our bodies(say move a leg) this involves Time.Presuming we will be doing different things and different events would develop into an unending series.I am a bit uncertain about this except to say thinking about it is awesome. Can you clarify?
Thank you ,
nickpeter
 
I don’t think anybody knows. My own guess is that time will be “available” to us even though we will be living in eternity. We will be able to fully possess our consciousness at any point in our timeline. If I want to be a teenager again for awhile, I’ll just revisit those years!

But, to repeat. Nobody knows.
 
Good answer.

On the one hand, you want to say no, since eternity is outside of time.

On the other hand, a resurrected body would seem to participate in time, so you want to say yes.

So your proposal seems plausible. 🤷
 
nickpeter said:
I know God exists outside of time. But those saved ( I hope I am one ) and will eventually unite with their glorified bodies. I assume these will be used and if so change occurs and Time involves change. If we use our bodies(say move a leg) this involves Time.Presuming we will be doing different things and different events would develop into an unending series.I am a bit uncertain about this except to say thinking about it is awesome. Can you clarify?
Thank you ,
nickpeter
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No.

I’ve heard that heaven has National Geograhpic and CCN magazines though.
 
There is certainly no time for God. But at the same time, it is in our nature to participate in time; to experience God from a stand point of events. It is apart of our very being as persons; and since we are reunited with our bodies at the resurrection, it seems unreasonable to assert that there will be no kind of time for us. On the other had what we might see is some kind of perfection of time which may very well mean the completion of it. All in all, we can never be sure until we get there. I just hope that you get there.
 
This is a great topic, some decent philosophers have written well on this, Peter Kreeft springs to mind as someone worth reading on it and he is very accessible.

There are 2 things in play, God’s omnipotence, His Eternal Transcendence and also the progression of creation.

God created heaven and events have taken place there, one thinks of the fall of the Angels, the assumption of the Blessed Virgin, then we hopefully will be there, then at a later ‘time’ we then will receive our bodies back. Revelation speaks of there being ‘silence’ in heaven for ‘a space of half an hour’. There is therefore some kind of progressive quality. I think its best to try and fathom time itself as being divinised, changed, renewed, it too let us not forget is a creation of The Most Blessed One. Things will be different in heaven, eye has not seen, ear has not heard. Things will also be different in another sense in hell.
 
It seems to me that there are two concepts of time: A qualitative concept of sequence - this happens before that - and a quantitative concept of rate of change - the sand runs from one ball to the other.

In Heaven there will be no change so the rate of change concept won’t work. However, I doubt that everything happens simultaneously; so there must be a sense of sequence.

I suspect that our current concept of four dimensional space-time is a simplified form of what is to come. As has been said “Eye has not seen and Ear has not heard …” It will be different from anything we can imagine.
 
The original poster has a very good understanding.

Yes. There is time in Heaven. We speak of time in two different ways, however. Properly speaking, time is defined as “a measure of change”. We also speak of time as “our time” (i.e. the manner in which we in particular measure time. Needless to say, days and months will not mean the same thing in Heaven, however, there is still change in Heaven (things like our state of blessedness cannot change, nor the orientation of our will, but we can increase in knowledge, and with glorified bodies, there will even be physical movement.)

Only God, properly speaking, is eternal. We say that Heaven is eternal, but that is because we speak of eternity in two ways. Properly speaking, eternity means being outside of time, hence it also means being immutable (unchangeable). Only God has this attribute. We also say saying is eternal when we mean that it will continue for an infinite length of time. Hence, Heaven is an eternity within time. While in the Beatific Vision we might have a sense of God’s eterenity, it would be incorrect to say that we become eternal properly. Such a thing is not logically possible.

Now, what will time be like in Heaven? This we do not exactly know, but we do know with certainty that there will be some form of time.

To deny that there is some form of time in Heaven implicitly denies the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.
 
Rather than an absence of time, i think it might be something more than time. We live in four dimensions–height, width, depth and time. Perhaps eternity has five or seven or more?

It’s fun to guess, but who knows?
 
Socrates4Jesus said:
Rather than an absence of time, i think it might be something more than time. We live in four dimensions–height, width, depth and time. Perhaps eternity has five or seven or more?

It’s fun to guess, but who knows?
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I’ve often laid in bed at night wondering what it would be like living in a five dimensional universe. Needless to say, I don’t get vary far. It’s an exciting thought though isn’t it, the idea that Heaven is beyond everything we’ve ever witnessed and anything we could ever imagine.
 
mvh18 said:
I’ve often laid in bed at night wondering what it would be like living in a five dimensional universe. Needless to say, I don’t get vary far. It’s an exciting thought though isn’t it, the idea that Heaven is beyond everything we’ve ever witnessed and anything we could ever imagine.
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Some proponents of M-theory think that we live in an 11-dimensional universe right now.
 
Yes, and those eleven dimensions don’t include, as far as I understand, the observer or witness’s awareness. They are, ergo, contents, not the container.

First I agree that eternality has no attribute of duration. Yet there may be altered senses of duration that may be components of a post Earth experience. There are as well two chief states of “timelessness” experiencable as part of the Earth experience. One may loosely be called “zoning,” and the other by several names, but let’s call it “raport.”

“Zoning” is a sort of timelessness where one is so intent in the activity participated in that the personal sense of self and sense of time both fade out. This is not uncommon in intense sports, accidents, etc. where it is reported by many that “time seemed to stop.”

“Raport,” on the other hand is a sort of consciousness of being, unqualified by time or objects of attention other than the awareness itself. This is reported as the result of certain kinds of meditation or contemplation.

Very rarely an individual can “entertain” both this “raport” and ordinary waking consciousness. Those who have experienced this report an intuitive kind of understanding of the nature of their being. The particulars of their explanation of this understanding are extraordinarily consistant regardless of historic time, place, culture, religious affiliation, education, etc, etc. It brings with it, from what I have read, a remarkably simple, straightforward and practical understanding of scriptures, Christian or otherwise. The universality of the experience, as it happens often without consultation, contact, or study with other experiencers, seems to corroborate the actuality of the state, which has as its primary referent a timeless, contentless, yet totaly meaningful and full-filling all-containing void.
 
I believe Time (change) does exist in Heaven, but I’m not sure how it is experienced.

God is infinite and you and I are finite. God’s infinite riches will never be exhausted by our finiteness. I don’t think of Heaven as a static stagnant state of being - but rather an active progressive state of being - a communion of persons (with personalities) knowing and loving one another and forever enjoying the riches of God with each other.
 
mvh18 said:
I’ve often laid in bed at night wondering what it would be like living in a five dimensional universe. Needless to say, I don’t get vary far. It’s an exciting thought though isn’t it, the idea that Heaven is beyond everything we’ve ever witnessed and anything we could ever imagine.
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Yes, extremely exciting. I find it interesting that i get more insight into this from science fiction writers, and physicists like Albert Einstein, than from most theologians.

I wonder if the fifth dimension is something that transcends time in a similar way that the third dimension called depth transcends the two dimensions of height and width. If this is the truth, then life in eternity will be as different as a three-dimensional living creature is different from a two-dimensional drawing of that creature. That is, we really will not be fully alive until we live in that new dimension. Maybe this is what eternal life is–not longer life, but fuller and more complete and more real life?
 
As it was pointed out earlier, current M-theory postulates eleven dimensions. Interesting reading material regarding dimensions can be found in Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. Issac Asimov considers it the best work as an introdiction to thinking about dimensions. The Dot and the Line, a romance in lower mathematics, is based on this book. Another fascinating work dealing wtih the time dimention is An Experiment With Time, by J. W. Dunne, a Brittish aircraft engineer. Also, the appendix on etrnality in *Basic Self Knowledge *by Harry Benjamin is extraodinary. And if your intellect is up to it, *Wholeness and the Implicate Order *by David Bohm is a must, as it treats as well of the current fragmentary nature of our thinking, which leads to the misperception and faulty assesment of experience.

There are as well some books on the fifth and higher dimentions from various esoteric writers that will be likely shunned by the pious, which neverthless contain important ideas.

For sheer fun in the form of science fiction, social commentary, and time travel, I recommend R.A. Heinlein’s Number of the Beast, which has an entirely different and intruiging take on the legendary trippple digit.
 
Detales said:
As it was pointed out earlier, current M-theory postulates eleven dimensions. Interesting reading material regarding dimensions can be found in Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. Issac Asimov considers it the best work as an introdiction to thinking about dimensions. The Dot and the Line, a romance in lower mathematics, is based on this book. Another fascinating work dealing wtih the time dimention is An Experiment With Time, by J. W. Dunne, a Brittish aircraft engineer. Also, the appendix on etrnality in *Basic Self Knowledge *by Harry Benjamin is extraodinary. And if your intellect is up to it, *Wholeness and the Implicate Order *by David Bohm is a must, as it treats as well of the current fragmentary nature of our thinking, which leads to the misperception and faulty assesment of experience.

There are as well some books on the fifth and higher dimentions from various esoteric writers that will be likely shunned by the pious, which neverthless contain important ideas.

For sheer fun in the form of science fiction, social commentary, and time travel, I recommend R.A. Heinlein’s Number of the Beast, which has an entirely different and intriguing take on the legendary trippple digit.
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Yes Detales, i’ve heard physicists believe there are far more than five. Odd that they stop at eleven. It would be intriguing if a 12th dimension was thought to exist, as 12 is the Jewish number representing completeness.

Thank you for the books you suggested.
 
My take is that awarenss may be #12, and Consciousness as such #13 which might be the realm of the Unified Field. I’m not a physicist, so don’t know where it all fits, but I feel that it is so, based on such works as Merrell-Wolff’s Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, and other such.

You see, when we read or write, we discount the presence of the paper that allows that to happen. All of our physics speculations are in the quale of contents, not substance, similar to the movie on the screen. No one notices that they are in fact looking at the screen until the lights go up and the image is no longer.
 
Socrates4Jesus said:
Yes Detales, i’ve heard physicists believe there are far more than five. Odd that they stop at eleven. It would be intriguing if a 12th dimension was thought to exist, as 12 is the Jewish number representing completeness.

Thank you for the books you suggested.
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Apparently 11 are what is necessary to make the equations and the symmetry work. That includes 10 dimensions of space and one of time, with the extra spatial dimensions being so tightly curved up that we don’t notice them in ordinary affairs any more than we would notice quarks or even atoms or molecules in our everyday experience.
 
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