The universe is dominated and informed by intelligent purpose, so we call it spiritual. That purpose moves toward its fulfillment, a fulfillment that was shown forth in Jesus Christ our Lord. It was not only shown forth in him-he himself was that purpose who entered fully into creation so that it might be guided from within as well as drawn upward from without. God is transcendent and immanent. He is over "against" and above. He is "other than" his creation. It is his creature. But he also entered into his own works and in Jesus Christ invested with his own life the creatures he had made, because it seemed good to him to do so. The transcendent is immanent and the immanent is transcendent. God, in other words, is above all, and through all, and in all.

With creation appeared time. To creation a law was given. Time had a beginning; it will have an end. Law governs in every sphere of creation-but the Creator is superior to his law. He is Almighty-which means he is free to do all he purposes. Only that which is like God lasts and escapes the thralldom of time. Time and eternity belong in different dimensions. We may illustrate this by drawing upon a piece of paper twelve inches square, a straight line one inch long. The straight line represents times-it begins and ends on the paper. The paper represents "eternity" which encompasses time, wholly contains it, and is capable of containing an infinite number of such straight lines without a mark appearing on its surface. The surface on which it is drawn is two dimensional and has properties not comprehended in the simple dimension. So with time and eternity. Time is in eternity. Any theory of history which does not relate it to eternity is false. Conversely, any idea of the nature of the eternal God which leaves him unconcerned about time and what happens in it is, at best, pitifully inadequate.

 Plato and History

The Platonists held that time is the moving image of the Eternal. Divine reason acts upon the primeval formless substance and coerces it according to its own forms and ideas, but the Divine does not create the "formless stuff" which is as timeless as the Eternal itself. There is no essential relation, then, between time and eternity, although meaning for time is derived from the Eternal, who, or which, remains in the last resort unaffected by what is done in time. But how did the tablet come into existence, on which the "moving finger of the Eternal" writes? In what reality is both the formless given "substance" and the eternal forms and ideas grounded? While Plato's view conserves the notion that God is other than time, and that the Eternal is independent of the temporal, it leaves no basis for believing that what happens to men in time and to the temporal order has any ultimate meaning for God. God is transcendent-complete in himself, it is true, but he is not immanent. He is independent. Plato's God may say to us, "I am that I am," but not, "You are what you are, because I am what I am, and what you do means everything to me!"

We in the church cannot accept any view which makes history meaningless to God. We base this rejection on our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

"Lo, our hope abideth only
On the travail He hath done."

If history is meaningless to God, Jesus was sham. If he actually came into history from beyond history, as our faith teaches, then what men do costs God agony and bloody sweat and the death of the cross. The Buddhist may use history to deepen and broaden reverence and faith in the eightfold path, but beyond this, time has no meaning. For the Mohammedan history is important only as far as the authority of the revelation given in the Koran actually came to Mohammed in time. It has for him no further meaning. But to us history provides the arena for the self-revelation of God, so that all of time and every jot and tittle of every man's experience has value either negative or positive for the infinite. Our faith is not, as we have said, primarily a system of ideas; neither does it rest in a certain "path" like the way of Buddha; nor is it at root a system of worship or a mode of thought. Primarily our faith consists in a revelation of God by himself in the birth, life, death and resurrection of a person in history, Jesus Christ, and as that self-revelation has been reaffirmed and restored in the latter days. That is why we are open to attack on the historical plane as is no other faith. This is illustrated by the question Dr. Trueblood asks: "What about the supposed revelation to Joseph Smith? Was he right? Were the gold plates really there?" Trueblood asks the question, recognizing its relevance. He attempts no answer.

When one considers the history of men's ethical consciousness, he is confirmed in the view that what men do matters to God. Morality consists in adherence to principles which persist in and through the changing scenes of life. These principles lodge themselves in the soul of men and enlighten his conscience. The Greeks were aware of this-for these principles are

"Not of today nor yesterday
But ever living-none knows whence they sprang."

And the Hebrew people affirmed that these moral principles were the will of God. This moral will was explicated in the life of Jesus-the true conscience of mankind. Men who have received the testimony of Jesus and adhered to it have discovered it to be the spirit of prophecy. As they have persisted in themselves, remaining true to their calling through sacrifice and persecution, they have found intimate fellowship with the Eternal. None of these prophets has ever claimed he was fashioning a new temporal good in a changing flux of circumstances, but all asserted that they were conforming to eternal values which alone gave meaning to those circumstances. So we must reject Plato's idea of the "moving finger" as an incomplete explanation of history.

 H. G. Wells

While we cannot accept all of Plato's philosophy, he has helped us at many points. We must begin at the other end and ask, Is eternity merely the sum total of time? Is history in God in such fashion as to constitute his essential being? H. G. Wells seemed to hold the idea that God was an invisible King, but that he was constituted by, for want of a better term what we may call, the collective spirit of man. He gave great value to a process of adjustment to the ideal of universal brotherhood and said that to this we must adapt or perish. He affirmed that history was meaningless apart from such adaptation. For him Jesus Christ was a unique man whose immortality consisted solely in the way his ideals were transmitted to his followers, but who suffered most from the misconceptions of those followers about his nature and place. Wells almost scoffed at the idea of the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ, and certainly did not believe him to be the ultimate revelation in individual mode of the eternal God. Wells died in despair, and indeed this theory of history does not make for hope. For if it is true that the Eternal is constituted solely by the integrated totality of man's action in time, what sure hold have we on the eternity of those moral principles men hold dear? Such a view gives no assurance of anything which may be hoped for, and if no assurance be born-that time is the creature of the Eternal-why strive for moral righteousness? While man may have some satisfaction in the pursuit of an ideal, without assurance of the ultimate significance of such ideal, where are the springs of moral effort? If God or the Eternal is constituted alone by the moral victories and achievement of men who in such achievement make history what it is, then is not he, on this showing, man made? To say that the Eternal is the sum total of the temporal is to make a god in the image of man-it is idolatry.

 God in as well as above History

Plato's dictum renders history, in the last resort, meaningless to God. Wells's theory-that the Eternal is constituted in the time series-is idolatry. Neither view is satisfactory, although each contains certain elements which have value. The first rightly affirms the complete transcendence of God, the latter the importance of history in itself, with its moral values. There is a third idea which involves God and time related in such a way as to picture him bringing time and history to a climax. This so saves all that is of value from the wreckage of history and translates it into a new world order which is outside time. What happens to those who are left after righteous people have been thus created and translated is not clear. But this view also is rather incomplete, because it makes of the universe itself an episode bearing only a contingent relation to the Creator. It is out of harmony with the Scripture which, speaking of the divine consummation of history affirms:

And the end shall come, and the heaven and the earth shall be consumed, and pass away, and there shall be a new heaven and a new earth; for all old things shall pass away, and all things shall become new, even the heaven and the earth, and all the fullness thereof, both men and beasts, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea; and not one hair, neither mote, shall be lost, for it is the workmanship of mine hand-Doctrine and Covenants 28: 6b, c, d.

There are no "left overs" after the work of God is completed. What analogies can explicate the true vision of the course of time? While each of the foregoing is helpful, none of them is wholly satisfying. If we are to arrive at a correct point of view, we must recognize that our vision is necessarily limited. Any view we may adopt will be incomplete-but let the difficulties occur where they ought to occur. Let our view of history account intelligibly for as much of our experience as it can. Manifestly, that view is to be desired which covers and explicates most of our experience. Some things we shall not know until we "are glorified in light and truth," but let us be certain where we can.

To understand history we must go behind history to creation. To understand human nature we must go beyond it to the divine. It is only as we recognize that all is grounded and sustained in the Divine Will that the world can be understood as existing at all. God is personal-and he is creator. These two are intimately correlated. Being personal he communicates himself-he speaks. His word "bodies forth" the world in which men may create and hold their own "universe of discourse." The created order is the actualization of the never ceasing creativity of the eternal God. We must suppose he finds delight in every creature he has created as that creature conforms to his will. As the universe obeys him-the earth abideth the celestial law-he finds himself reflected, and to him this seems good. Every creative mind seeks itself in what it has made. Beethoven wrote his last quartets to please himself, not to please the public. When he was told the public did not like them, he smiled and said, "Some day they will." He was sure that what pleased him would one day please them, too, and as it did, they would enter into his experience with him. So it has proved. God made the universe to please him, and it is a form of his own life. It is his creature-precious to him because in it he seeks himself. He made it in the eternal expectation that what pleased him would eventually please his creatures also. Only thus could he find himself in them.

Contingencies Based on Agency

Into this arena God has placed man, made "in his own image." Why? The answer cannot but be the one given to Moses when he asked the question:

Tell me, I pray thee, why these things are so, and by what thou madest them? And behold the glory of God was upon Moses, so that Moses stood in the presence of God, and he talked with him face to face. And the Lord God said unto Moses, For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom, and it remaineth in me. And by the word of my power have I created them, which is mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth. And worlds without number have I created, and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten. And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many. -Doctrine and Covenants 22: 20, 21 a, b, c.

Man is rooted in nature, yet he is transcendent to some extent and superior to the process which gave him his body. He is able to act as God acts, being in God's image in harmony with what appears good to him. The Eternal can control the temporal only because the temporal is dependent on the Eternal-much the same as a drama is dependent on the dramatist, who determines whether or not there shall be a play at all. God sustains in being the universe. But he can control men only as they are obedient to the law of man's own existence, which he himself has imposed on the creature. He can have his own way with us only by what appears good to us. He cannot force our will and attention. Free will is his ordinance. We must be won to his way by and through our own willing consent, and that consent may be indefinitely withheld. God manifests himself through his creation to man, the highest order (so far as we know) of that creation. So far as God is immanent in the course of time he cannot know beforehand precisely how and when men will respond to him. At times Jesus evinced doubt and apparent uncertainty, not knowing precisely how and when his disciples would respond to his teaching and understand his person. And Jesus was a revelation of the fact that God is in history. Even so, although the precise mode of the future may not fully be known to him, nothing issues from such future but what is secured by his purpose. How else can one account for the following language in Doctrine and Covenants 6: 6?

I foresee that if my servant Martin Harris humbleth not himself, and receive a witness from my hand, that he will fall into transgression. And if this be the case . . .

The contingent is contingent, yet God knows it with utter certainty, and even if men rebel in their wrath, yet such rebellion can be made to serve his purpose. God foresaw the weakness of Joseph Smith fourteen hundred years before he was born and made provision for it, showing that He "was able to do his own work."

Perfect Knowledge is Foreknowledge

It is said that dramatists and poets sometimes do not know how their characters will react after the play has been started but apprehend their own thought in the act of expressing it. The writer has had this experience to a limited degree in composing verse. Yet all that is set down and done is accomplished with utter certainty, and the end is absolutely sure in the person who writes or creates the play. So it is with the human history. The contingent based on man's agency is contingent; yet it is known with complete certainty by the Eternal as contingent, and even though an element of indeterminacy remains, the purpose of God remains sure and is so applied as to make all things eventually conform to his will.

God is Father-so Jesus revealed him-and is the source of our existence. We are called to bear his name and represent him before the world. The doings of all men are of vital concern to him. The hairs of their heads are numbered. He cannot coerce men to righteousness but must seek to control them by an appeal to their own appreciation of good. So He, besides whom there is none good, comes into the course of time and shares himself with his creatures, and does this at great cost to himself. Anyone who has the testimony of Jesus can never say that history has no meaning nor matters not to the eternal God. God has a human history in his being. The course of time is in him. That this came to be so in the ministry of Jesus reveals God and his nature. If the incarnation had never happened, then God would be shown to be other than what he is. Creation and history are not so much the "moving finger of the Eternal" as they are the deed of God. "In the beginning was the deed"-the deed of God in which he seeks to discover himself. He knows all his creation, for they are his. God is what He is. Eternally this is so. He is not changed by the fortunes or misfortunes of his creatures. But he must be profoundly affected by all that they do, since his will sustains them in being. God is the ground of history. The relation between them is not episodic, not "convenient," nor is it incidental. It is a necessary relation since God continues to communicate himself to men in the expectation that He will find himself completely in them sooner or later. The exact time when such fullness of revelation will come, "the hour and the day no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor shall they know until he comes."

Eternal Principles in a Temporary Setting

We are in the one dimensional "straight line" of the historical process and only as we are delivered from its inevitability and are somehow translated into the "two dimensional" area of eternity can we apprehend the process and see its meaning. We can never be completely translated from the temporal this side of death, so our understanding will be necessarily limited. But we may experience partial deliverance by possessing and appreciating eternal principles, the "words of eternal life." We may see these eternal principles working in and through the course of time, and so be possessed by the spirit of prophecy. These principles were at work in the life and ministry of Jesus, the Word made flesh, in whom the whole course of time, together with a true focus of appreciation of the created order met in one timeless manifestation.

Calvary Completes Time

As the earthly life of Jesus came to its end, so ends the life of the ages. As he said, "It is finished," so finishes the history of mankind. We face the experience of death, which for each of us is the end of the world in one of three ways. Those ways are revealed on Golgotha. What is true of each is true of all together. History will come to its climax, amid the convulsions of nature-some cursing God, some seeking pardon and peace in repentance, and others leaving the scene of this world only to return after having prepared places of safety and eternal habitation for those not able to do so for themselves. Calvary is an essential symbol wrought in the process of time to give to time an eternal meaning and power.

By the foregoing we do not imply that "Christ has finished his work." He has completed a unique and utterly essential ministry of preparation. Our faith is secure in him, so we trust him for the future because of what he did in the past. But much yet remains to be done. There are "greater works" awaiting dedication of our hearts and hands. His ministry of preparation was wrought in time, conditioned in time, and subject to the limitations of time. But it came from eternity. To know this is to exercise faith in God. To do this means that we say with all the saints, "Even in eternity, whenever and whatever that is, this revelation of God in Christ Jesus will never be superseded." Our faith is confirmed as we exercise it in relation to our own history. In following the dictates of the eternal Spirit there is a peace that passes human understanding. We do know eternal life and one who inhabited eternity, and that is all we really need to know in order to be set free to do as we ought. Our faith is undergirded in time by a revelation which came from beyond time and had its roots in eternity. Working thus in faith we share in a timeless future of eternal quality which we help to create under God. We may look back to the "distant scene" as we view the life of Christ under the revealing power of his Spirit. Thus, still in time, we may enjoy the words of eternal life which are the prophecy of that life in the world to come.