We live in a world where things happen.
Which is the same as to say that, 1) we are, and, 2) the world is.
We are and it is. Existence is. And it's a perpetual unfolding of experience, of "things" happening, which includes our feelings, motivations, choices, acts and their consequences.
The opposite of a world where things happen would be no world, no experience. It wouldn't be. You wouldn't be reading this because this wouldn't be and you wouldn't be.
So there's no escape from, 1) things happening, and, 2) once they've happened, the immutability of their having happened and being therefore precedent to everything else that follows after.
We can never change the fact that WWII took place or that WWII took place before everything that happened after it. In a manner of speaking, WWII now has no option, no "choice," to not have happened, nor has anything else that happened after it an option not to be in a world where WWII happened before it. You might say that we are forever doomed to live in a post-WWII world.
But then we are forever doomed to live in a post-the-pancake-breakfast-I-had-yesterday-morning world. We live in a post-EVERYTHING-that-happened-before world.
Which is, again, nothing more than saying we live in a world where things happen. There could be no other world. A world is itself a happening.
The only alternative to a world where things happen is, no world at all. To be is to have a past that cannot be altered by later choices, acts or wishes on our part. The only alternative is to not be.
Again, all of this simply means the world IS. And we, being in and of it, ARE. Not an iota of which in any way negates or obviates the reality of our volition, freedom and responsibility. There's no necessity in the least that to be in a world that IS means to have no actual prerogative to choose one thing over another, to do one thing instead of the other, to go one way or the other.
That we cannot change what was does not even remotely indicate that we are void of the potential to actualize any of countless different options, scenarios and trains of events at every moment. And every time we actualize any one of them it means, naturally (because we live in a world where things happen), that the things we didn't actualize... didn't HAPPEN. They...weren't.
For the things that happen to have happened, what would have erased/negated their reality necessarily did not happen. WWII happened. Hitler wasn't assassinated in 1934. Because there's such a thing as the past, it's an immutable reality that Hitler wasn't assassinated in 1934. For anything to be, its non-existence must not be. Otherwise there is no past and no world at all. I was born in 1957, and so it's a non-reality, a "non-thing," that I wasn't born in 1957.
Which, again and for the last time, simply means that we live in a world where things happen. Which is the opposite of their not happening. Without things happening, no world happens either.
All of which is perfectly consistent with a world where, at every moment, we exercise real choice, freedom, will and responsibility, where indeed we create the "happenings" and live with their consequences.
But what about God?
We see the things people around us are doing at the moment they happen (if we're looking; even if we're not looking at them, we're all the same looking at SOMETHING happening--yes, even if the something is the darkness behind our eyelids because our eyes are closed).
So does God see what's happening now? Yes. That part's not hard. It's easy for us to conceive of God seeing now what we see now.
But how about the past? Do we see what happened in the past? No. Not with our eyes. We have memories but we don't "see" it like you're seeing this text right now. Even a video recording isn't the thing happening in the past but a mechanical process taking place right now as we watch it. So, no, we don't see the past (though we witness its outcomes all around us all the time: the past is, in more ways than one, always before us!).
And God? Does God see what happened in the past? I would say yes. In a way that transcends our physical vision, I believe God "sees" (though not with mere human eyes) everything that happened in the past, that it is just as "present" to Him as the present is.
But what about the future? Do we "see" what will happen in the future? No, of course we don't--again, not with our eyes. We don't see it any more than we see the past. Yes, we might imagine or "envision" it, but we certainly don't see it as an accomplished fact for the very simple reason that it's not yet, it still hasn't happened.
The major difference from the past, though, is that while we don't know as an accomplished fact what the future will be, we can at least invest our intellect and creative energies towards shaping it.
This is something we can no longer do with the past. There's no "shaping" left when it comes to the past, despite all our efforts (aka "spin," denial, delusion, propaganda, disinformation). The most honest, nearest thing to "creating" the past would be, I suppose, the act of interpretation and assessment, always a challenge to both the scope of our perceptions and the force of our prejudices.
But the future is a whole different ballgame, isn't it. We can indeed invest our intellect and creative energies, hopes and aspirations, preferences, whims and obsessions, loves and hates into shaping the future. The returns are generally not commensurate with the investment; if anything they tend to be exponentially better or worse but not precisely what we in our fallibility and finitude projected. Reality always exceeds our powers.
How about God? Does He see what will happen in the future? I believe He does. Now do I know what that means? No. And I don't reduce it, again, to some function that we understand as human sight, certainly not to anything as petty as what we call clairvoyance. Relating to God all terms are inescapably metaphorical, including "see." We are talking about a kind of knowing beyond human comprehension. I don't understand it but, yes, I believe it. God sees/knows the future, including our future choices.
Moreover, reality does not exceed His powers.
So does that last assertion short-circuit and blow all the wiring out of everything I wrote before about our exercising real choice, freedom, prerogative, will? Not for a nanosecond. There's precisely zero necessity of the one cancelling out the other.
For two reasons. A fairly shallow but all the same legitimate one, and then another that goes so deep I do not pretend to fathom it, yet I know it's there.
The "shallow" or simply formulated reason goes like this: if I see you get up from a chair and walk out the door, it means I saw it; it doesn't in the least mean I made you do that. My seeing is not my causing. What I was witness to, I didn't do, and didn't determine. I only saw it, but you chose to do it. (Someone might argue back: "Yes, but on the basis of what you said about things happening excluding the possibility of their not happening, doesn't the fact of your seeing someone walk out a door forever exclude the possibilty of its not happening?" To which the answer is, "Yes, but that is to say nothing more than that it happened. And that it happened was the outcome of the walker's choice; my seeing was an outcome of my choice to look, and without the walker's choice to walk then walking isn't what I'd have seen, so we need to turn the tables and say, not that my seeing it excluded the possibility of its never happening, but rather that the walker's choice excluded the possibility of my seeing him do anything other than what he did at just that moment.")
Likewise God's seeing is of no necessity God's doing or determining. God sees me making a choice, it's still my choice, even when His seeing is timeless, even when the choice He sees me making is in the future as much as in the past or in the ineffably fleeting moment we call "the present" (a moment that is "past" virtually instantly it ceases to be "future").
God's seeing me choose X tomorrow no more negates the authenticity of my volition and prerogative than does your seeing me get up and walk through a door right now.
That's the simple part of it.
The perceivable yet unfathomable, apprehensible yet incomprehensible part is the very fact of this will and prerogative, of the indeterminateness presented by human choice, and how it goes to the heart of the the miracle called "the image of God."
Needless to say, human beings aren't the only creatures with the potential to do one thing as opposed to another. A threatened bear might choose to flee or to stand and fight. A bear doesn't have the freedom not to be a bear, and its choices may issue from a set of cognitive functions radically different from Man's, yet all the same there's some system of assessment and consequent reaction at work there. Which brings me to a marvel and wonder prior to even the appearance of "the image of God."
I wrote above, "Likewise God's seeing is of no necessity God's doing or determining." But consider a moment where God's seeing was indeed the outcome of His doing. On each day of creation, God looked at what He had made and "saw that it was good." God acted, and the outcome was good, was a good.
There is something of terrifyingly vast mystery contained in these preposterously simple words. God created, looked, said it was good. To be precise, saw that it was good. Before the appearance of sentient beings, or of even the merest bacterium that might in the most rudimentary way "choose" to go one way rather than another, God saw that some thing He had created, like light, was possessed of a goodness that...was not God. From God, of God, appointed and sustained by God, but...not God.
He saw this, as the Primordial Observer of that which was not He.
When God created what was not He, He thereby "created" (I use the word in the sense that the British king "creates" one of His children a duke) Himself not the thing He had created; that is, by His very act of seeing and recognizing He ordained Himself "Observer."
There was nothing good except God (since after all there WAS nothing but God), until God deigned to make what was not He and was good. This is an intense, terrible (in the word's old sense) prelude and build-up to the climax of creation's supreme good: the Imago Dei in the creature who is not God.
This is the, I'll use the word again, terrible unfathomability of the Self-Existent Personhood of Primordial Beneficence (i.e., "God is Love") willing that, not a cheap knock-off of personhood, not a wind-up pull-string pre-recorded personhood-doll, not a personhood-android or personhood silhouette, but that a fully authentic, good, God-observed, God-known, God-ordained, volitional, creative, prerogative-bearing personhood that is not God should live and move and have its being at the pinnacle of the rest of the creation that is likewise not God, which God likewise recognized as a good distinct from Himself.
There is no personhood without choice, prerogative, will, volition, indeed of sovereignty, whether supreme or relative. If the sovereignty of God is intrinsic to His personhood, then sovereignty cannot be divorced from the Imago Dei, if "imago" is truly what it is and not a parody, in which the supreme divine audacity deigned to loose personhood upon the created order. If there is not that choice, that freedom, there is no personhood, and so there is no Imago.
Indeed, if there is not that choice, then no Man, including Jesus, ever possessed it. Which would make a mockery of "...who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame."
We would have to re-write it, "...who endured the cross because he never chose it."
And if He never chose it, what then does love mean?
