Proof of Christ in existence beyond time

As a youngster, I was once convinced that imagining God’s existence as an explanation for the universe was silly, as it made the already unexplainable phenomenon of existence even more complex.  But in retrospect, I had already made one assumption that flowed concurrently with proper theology: that there must be an existence beyond time and space itself.

For instance, no reasonable person has ever read anything about physics and time and determined that the flow of time isn’t malleable, or that it has always existed. Einstein’s theory of relativity showed us that time could be slowed, and good old-fashioned logic showed us that the flow of linear time necessitates a beginning, or we could not have arrived at the present point.  Those ideas being clear, we must all be in agreement that if these statements about time and space are true, then something must exist beyond time and space, mostly because matter and space don’t create themselves, they don’t come from nothing, they aren’t universally constant, and time cannot exist without space.  These are logical conclusions of our existence, and the basis for any reasonable hypothesizing about reality.

But since all can agree that there must be some sort of existence beyond the realm of time in order for the realm of time to exist, the thinker is then forced to examine what that existence would be like, and if it would be possible to have more than one intelligent being occupy that existence.  After all, a being beyond time and space couldn’t be completely separate from the other beings occupying that realm, as there simply wasn’t the time and space to separate oneself.  So if these beings beyond time could exist, we would have to ask ourselves what those beings would be like.

C.S. Lewis once stated that within time, we as humans have the appearance of being completely separated organic beings.  While you and I can look at each other and determine we have different bodies and independent minds, if we were to step outside of time (as though looking at a line on a page), we would find that we’re not so separate as we thought.  What we would see is that although conception appears to the time-entrapped being as a creation of new life, it would actually be more a continuation of a life that began at a much earlier point: the continual human life force.  Thus, stepping outside the realm of time, what we would see of the human race would resemble a living tree rather than a series of individual specks.  Our impression of separation from each other is really much less realistic than we think.

Lewis then argues that Christ’s threefold existence is the only religious statement of personality that mirrors personality outside of time, as His being is intertwined with the Father’s while maintaining some sort of unexplainable independence.  He explains this personality phenomenon as follows: “You know that in space you can move in three ways to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three dimensions. Now notice this. If you’re using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you’re using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body: say, a cube a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.

“Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a world of straight lines. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you don’t leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels; you still have them, but combined in new ways in ways you couldn’t imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.

“The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who don’t live on that level, can’t imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we can’t fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.”

Thus, what Lewis suggests is that if more than one being were to truly exist outside of time and space, it would be interrelated with the other beings in different dimensions and combinations of personality–very much like the human race already is on some basic level with itself, as the tree example suggests. Of course, the Bible asserts many times that a being beyond one personality exists, as even the first book of the Bible repeatedly attests that plural personalities interacted with each other (although Jews falsely claim the plural form is a statement of royalty).  By the time Jesus arrives on the scene, what we find is that He makes claims to not only be God, but also claims to be completely dependent on information and power from God.  This combination of statements seems bizarre and contradictory for those of us existing within time’s grasp, but makes far more sense when time is removed from the equation.

And this is what makes Trinitarian philosophy of essential importance to the Christian religion and a radical contrast to the others: without a second coexisting eternal personality, there could not be a personal, moral, or loving God.  He would be something less than personality could offer, as His being could not have shown itself in or behaved in consistent moral law.  It is impossible for you to understand anything relational without having someone with whom to relate.  Contrasting the other religions, Christ preaches true love, making Himself a human and giving His life to bring our race into divinity–beyond the clutches of sorrow, meaningless existence, and eventually death. Only a being who understood total unity and dependence upon another being could behave this way.  To those of us entrapped within the appearance of survivalistic separation, self-sacrifice for sinners would have simply been a bad choice.

So how could this have been fabricated?  There is simply no way that tribal shepherds could have concocted a God whose personality accurately fit modern theories of time and space.  To those accepting Christ as their Lord and Savior, the answer is all too obvious: it wasn’t concocted.  It came from the God who made time itself.

This entry was posted on 15. October 2009 at 16:32 and is filed under philosophy, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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