While that is a popular view
Prove that is the popular viewpoint.
"Ipse dixit, an arbitrary and unsupported assertion. Bare assertions are fallacious insofar as they summarily deny that an issue is even debatable."
Exactly!
{edited for violation of rules 2.1 and 2.2}.
, it is not the only possible one.
Who says it is?
I like the view that eternity is hyper-temporal, such that God exists in multiple dimensions of time (out of which emerges our single temporal dimension).
If time is finite, then God cannot exist solely within time - no matter how many dimensions of time may or may not exist. If time is infinite, then God is not the only infinite thing existing. Scripture tells us that all things that were made were made by God. If time is a created then that immediately conflicts with the pre-existence and aseity of God. Logic dictates the Creator exists external to that which He creates. God cannot, therefore, exist solely within time, multiple dimensions or not.
Just as a person in three spatial dimensions can fully observe a two-dimensional landscape at once, so a hyper-temporal being can witness the entirety of our timeline simultaneously (transcendent) while also truly interacting with it (immanent).
That is incorrect. It's also a poor analogy.
First, it is very difficult to view the picture from within the frame and the op asserts God exists
in time, not external to it. Second, there are two problems with the analogy because, 1) from the Reformed pov God did NOT look down the timeline when He ordained all things from eternity, 2) the implication of the analogy is that God exists in a dimension, or even that God
is a dimension. In addition, eternity has no beginning or end and the conditions of causality (if they exist at all) are much different than that which occurs in creation, in time and space.
Many times have I used the analogy of a three--dimensional object intersecting a two-dimensional surface. I have described how people living on a plane observe the intersection of a sphere passing through the plane as a point or a circle.
HERE is an example. As the sphere first contacts the plane all that is visible to those living on the plane is a dot, a point. As the sphere passes through the plane the dot becomes a circle, and the circle grows until the widest part of the sphere passes through the plane and then the circle is observed to decrease in size. It's a useful analogy for understanding how little of God we know and understand. It's not a very good analogy for explaining God.
What that comment does get correct is that God exists external to all that He created AND is able to enter and exist His creation as He pleases.
"He knows time as a whole as well as the succession of all its moments," as Bavinck so aptly stated it.
Bavinck, ironically, was not convinced of supralapsarianism.
In
applying lapsarianism to predestination he wrote,
"Accordingly, neither the supra- nor the infralapsarian view of predestination is able to do full justice to the truth of Scripture, and to satisfy our theological thinking. The true element in supralapsarianism is: that it emphasizes the unity of the divine decree and the fact that God had one final aim in view, that sin's entrance into the universe was not something unexpected and unlooked for by God but that he willed sin in a certain sense, and that the work of creation was immediately adapted to God's redemptive activity so that even before the fall, i.e., in the creation of Adam, Christ's coming was definitely fixed. And the true element in infralapsarianism is: that the decrees manifest not only a unity but also a diversity (with a view to their several objects), that these decrees reveal not only a teleological but also a causal order, that creation and fall cannot merely be regarded as means to an end, and that sin should be regarded not as an element of progress but rather as an element of disturbance in the universe so that in and by itself it cannot have been willed by God. In general, the formulation of the final goal of all things in such a manner that God reveals his justice in the reprobate and his mercy in the elect is too simple and incomplete......... Briefly stated, God's decree together with the history of the universe which answers to it should not be exclusively described after the manner of infra- and supralapsarianism as a straight line indicating a relation merely of before and after, cause and effect, means and goal; but it should also be viewed as a system the several elements of which are coordinately related to one another and cooperate with one another toward that goal which always was and is and will be the deepest ground of all existence, namely, the glorification of God."
Which is one of the reasons why I mentioned Bavinck in the thread describing
Objections to Supralapsarianism. The reason God knows time as a whole is because He created time. Time is created, not self-existent.
This view suggests a richer mode of eternity than mere timelessness.
That has yet to be proven.
It also has the benefit of avoiding the trinitarian conflict that inheres with a timeless view, where one person of the Trinity experiences time in a real sense (incarnation).
Relevance? Just because a position avoids a problem does not prove it correct. I avoided running over a dog this morning. That does not mean I know how to build a particle accelerator. If the observation something is avoided is intended to assert some form or degree of validity, then that is a false cause error. Whether Trinity or not, logic dictates a Creator necessarily exists prior to and external to that which He creates. If time is created by the Creator then that Creator exists prior to and external to time. Of course that Creator is able to "
transcend" all that He created! That is axiomatic.
It does not prove the veracity of "hyper-temporal," or the superiority of hyper-temporal over extra-temporal.
