nobody said:
1 When a person dies, and their soul goes to heaven, it is with God.
2 God is outside of time.
3 Then the soul is also outside of time, including it’s earthly birth and death.
How do 1 & 3 work together?
At the “End of Time” all souls will be reuinted with their earthly bodies in the ressurection. Will time start again? How can our bodies, with their movements, exist outside of time?
Hey nobody, I struggled with this one for a while as well. I used to wonder, so, if we’re outside of time when we’re with God … does that mean that my soul in Heaven (presuming I end up there) is right now capable of watching itself while still on Earth??? Of course, the answer would be no, but I didn’t understand why. Here’s a paragraph from Peter Kreeft in the Summa of the Summa, where Aquinas is writing about eternity:
“We think of eternity as negative, as excluding time (for “e-ternal” means, after all, “not-temporal”); but in objective fact, God’s eternity is positive and includes all times, for it can lack nothing actual, positive, and perfect that time contains. A remote parallel: the mind of an author contains, at once, all his characters and the events of his plot.”
It isn’t that God isn’t part of time, but rather that he is in every part of time simultaneously. Both Aquinas and Kreeft, in his analysis, write about how we must understand the difference between eternity and time. God is eternal - he has always existed and always will, but this doesn’t mean that there isn’t some chronology at work. For instance, God, in the person of Jesus, did not exist with a human nature until after his conception. So, will there be “time” after death - I don’t think there will be time in the way we understand it now, where we look at our watches and say, “wow, another year just went by”, because years and days and months are ways of marking our progress toward or away from an event. In heaven, there might certainly be a sequence of events - for instance, if I say “Holy, holy, holy” in heaven, there is a definite order, in that one holy came before another and after a different one, but we will no longer use this sequence as any time of measurement. Furthermore, at the culmination of “time”, there will be no further progression or regression as we are in our most perfect states and cannot deteriorate (as nothing in Heaven will) …
Okay, I’m rambling, probably made no sense, and need to move on. I’m sure I didn’t help, but it was fun writing about, and I’m curious to see what others say (and correct me on). I also just picked up “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Heaven” by Kreeft, and am looking forward to seeing him write about some of these topics. He just blows me away.
