Yesterday, Sharon and I drove across Mississippi, taking US82 instead of our accustomed I-20. We missed Jackson, but enjoyed making our way through Indianola and Starkville, the latter giving us our first look at Mississippi State University, a handsome place to take a two-mile walk in the midst of a nine-hour day in the car. As we worked our way around the campus, we popped into the visitor’s center across from the gargantuan football stadium, and there we found the most amazing, donated collection of timekeeping devices in the Cullis & Gladys Wade Clock Museum—four hundred of them dating back to the early 1700s. 

I have a sound app on my phone for when I need help concentrating on my writing in a noisy place. (My current favorite is the clickety-clack of a train, this having displaced the roar of heavy rainfall.) I wish I’d recorded the gentle tick-tock of a hundred clocks for future earphone blessing, but I didn’t think of it till later. What a comforting sound it was.

As I walked from room to room, I remembered a Boyce College seminar I led with SBTS colleague Doug Blount, a first rate philosopher with a PhD from Notre Dame. The topic was the nature of time itself. Some Christians say that God is outside of time, and, therefore, all of time is immediately present to him at every moment (though God’s experiencing something in a moment is nonsense if he’s not a being “subject” to moments). On this model, he was “before time” and we will join with him in heaven when “time will be no more.” Furthermore, it takes the ‘pre’ out of ‘predestination,’ since he’s not a part of the in-advance economy. Rather, he’s “atemporal,” i.e., not one to whom time-talk applies.

The other view is that time boils down to sequence or movement. This was Aristotle’s view and has been the understanding of a number of Christian philosophers, including Nicholas Wolterstorff, who taught at Calvin and Yale (two different schools, not like William and Mary). By his lights, it’s better to talk of God as being “everlasting.” He was doing things before Creation, and he and we will be doing things in the Beyond. This doesn’t limit him. He does whatever he pleases. And he can predestine events by simply choosing to insure that they work out a certain way. 

There’s no knock-down proof text on this matter in the Bible. That being said, Blount favored the “atemporal” or “timelessness” view, while I was more impressed with the “everlasting” one. You can see us square off, amiably, in the inaugural issue of the Augustine Collegiate Review, the publication of the Augustine Honors Collegium, here. 

So what about clocks in heaven? I don’t have any problem with them, though I’m sure the timekeeping mechanisms (perhaps internal to the saints) would be different. But they would nicely serve what I imagine to be a good heavenly activity. I have in mind our dividing up into float-building shops, each one celebrating a feature or deed of God, the lot of them lined up at a designated time to parade joyfully before the throne. 

Whatever we might be doing in heaven, sequencing and coordination seem neither nonsensical nor impious. And, of course, there will be plenty of time for it all.