From a Q&A at the Sacraments lectures up at Calvin Seminary. It occurs in the second Q&A (the recordings are found at http://www.calvin.edu/worship/idis/theology/ntwright_sacraments.php) at 25:17. Also, note that the question is based on one of Wright’s earlier statements about time being created (I’m not sure where that quotation happens in the lectures). It doesn’t seem as though Wright is completely sure about where he’s going on this one. But I’ll let y’all bandy that about.

Question:

I’ve got a question again about the nature of time. As you were talking about that earlier, the relationship between, of course, God and time is something that is very intriguing to think about and affects a lot of areas of theology. There are two very major views that I can think of right now. One which we could take back to CS Lewis and then farther back to Boethius or Aristotle or soforth, would be that God is outside of time looking down at an ever present now. And so the concept of foreknowledge, of sacrifice, that God sees everything and therefore knows. On the other end of the coin, and I guess this hearkens back to a statement that you made, that God created time and that he created a lot of it. I find that fascinating because another possible view seems to be, and I’m just looking for your perspective on both of these, seems to be that God’s very consciousness, his very rationale, the fact that he has a plan and accomplishes that plan, results in time being automatically implied…God has a goal and he accomplishes a goal, he thinks of creation and then creates, and so time is implied as a sort of a attribute of God’s, as opposed to something that is created separately.

Wright:

Where I would start with that…I mean, if in doubt, faced, with a question about God, start with Jesus, that’s the New Testament rule. And when you start with Jesus, you say if Jesus really is the incarnation of the second person of the triune God, that means that God has committed himself to a life in time, both a temporal life and a human life that took place at one point within history, and a human life which is now continuing, so that post-Ascension Jesus is not the same as he was pre-Incarnation. There is a real difference, and at that point, I tip my hat just for a little bit, in the direction of process theology, but only just for a moment there, to say yes, God is actually committing to being part of the process, while at the same time remaining transcendent over it. I’m not sure whether to say that at a certain point God decided to create time, then he created…I’m not sure whether that actually makes sense. I can see that what I said could be taken in that way, but I suspect that that results in an anthropomorphism which may just tie us in knots.

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