Mark Brumley, responding to a question about the temporal nature of the New Heaven and the New Earth, gives a summary of C.S. Lewis’ “book analogy” that helps us understand God’s relation to time and eternity.
Transcript:
Host: Dianna in Salem, Massachusetts, listening on the EWTN app, you are on with Mark Brumley, what’s your question?
Caller: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I’m a longtime listener, first-time caller.
Host: Well, very happy to have you. Welcome.
Caller: Thank you very much. I do have an interesting question, I think. If God exists in eternity, there’s no past, no future, everything exists, does that mean that the New Heaven and the New Earth also currently exist and are already joined as Heaven on Earth and are the faithfully departed already living there?
Mark: Wow, what a deep question. This is Thursday afternoon.
Host: I know, right out of the box there, that’s a tough one. All right, so just explain time and history to us. That’s all. And you’ve got two minutes.
Mark: Nothing to that. Yeah. Well Diana, that was a great question, and it’s difficult to explain in a short period of time. Time itself is mysterious, Agustine says, “If you don’t ask me what it is, I know what it is, but if you ask me, I can’t explain it to you,” and I think there are probably a lot of modern physicists who would agree with that. Let me back up and ask you a question: do you have a favorite novel?
Caller: Hmm, I do have a favorite novel, actually. It’s “Out of Africa.”
Mark: “Out of Africa.” Okay. I’m trying to remember who the author of that is. Is that Rumer Godden?
Caller: It is Isak Dinesen. Karen Blixen, I think Isak was her nickname.
Mark: Okay, right, so the author of that book is not in the book, right? The author is not a character in the book, right?
Caller: Well actually it’s a–I’m sorry….
Mark: Somewhat autobiographical, right?
Caller: Yeah.
Host: Not a good choice of a novel, Diana. Come on.
Mark: Somewhat autobiographical, so–but let’s make a distinction between what happens in the life of the author, as she’s writing a novel, you know, she’s–we can imagine her writing the novel, and getting up and answering the door, and spending some time talking with someone at the door and then going and fixing yourself something to eat, and then she comes back to the novel and she continues the story of the novel. So we can distinguish what we could say is the author’s timeline from the timeline of the events in the novel. You following me?
Caller: I am.
Mark: Okay. And when the author has written the whole novel and it’s all done, the novel has its beginning, its middle, and its ending, its characters, and their lives are unfolding in the novel, and the unfolding of their lives in the novel, and its storyline is, in a certain sense, even if the novel’s somewhat autobiographical, in a certain sense separate from the life of the author. The author has her own existence, her own timeline, as it were; and yet there’s a certain sense in which she’s present in the story of the the novel. Even if she’s not so much a character, she’s certainly not a character as the author of the story, she’s present in all of her characters, in the plot and the way she tells the story, but she’s got her own separate way of existing.
That’s an analogy that C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer and apologist, used to think about how we might understand God in relation to time. God is like the author of history, the story of history. He’s such a great author that he creates characters that have freedom and can, in a certain sense, write their own stories, but he’s present and operative and sustaining them in being as they–and providentially at work in the working out of the story. So He’s there in history in that sense, but He’s got His own way of existing outside of the story of history.
Now, when you say, “the New Heavens and the New Earth,” and the Bible talks about a transformation of the whole of Creation to be transformed and taken up in God, does that exist? Well, if we go back to our analogy of a novel, when a novel is written, there’s a certain sense in which all of the events that are part of the novel have happened. They’re all there, all right? But the characters in the novel are moving along the storyline or the plot of that novel, and so not everything has happened to them yet. There are still some things yet to occur for some of the characters in the novel. Only when the characters get to the end of the novel is the story complete.
In history, time, as we experience it, is like that storyline in the novel. From God’s vantage point, as the author of the story, each part of the novel is a reality for Him. He knows it, there’s a certain sense that He relates to it, and so on; but we characters in the novel, those things that are going to happen next haven’t happened yet for us. That’s probably as close as we can come to understanding this mysterious relationship between the eternal God and space and time in history, which is unfolding.
And certain things have happened in the past, aren’t happening now in the present; other things will yet happen in the future from our vantage point. With God who is the author of this story outside of time, He relates to these elements of the story in a transcendent way, unlike us who relate to the elements of the story as characters in the story as the story unfolds.
Host: Okay Diane?
Mark: Does that help?
Caller: That does, that makes perfect sense. Thank you so much for taking my call and answering that question.
Mark: You are most welcome, thank you.