ABSTRACT

In The Christian Faith, Frederich Schleiermacher says that God is eternal in the sense of 'timeless' ('zeitlos'). He says, too, that God is 'spaceless'. Further, Schleiermacher says that timelessness and spacelessness are directly parallel concepts. On Schleiermacher's account, the claim that God is spaceless involves two closely related ideas. First, God is not, as he says, 'space-filling'. This is to say that God has no spatial extension. Secondly, Schleiermacher says that there are no 'spatial contrasts' between God and other things. As regards Boethius's position on the question of God's location in time, the matter is a little less clear than it is in the case of Anselm and St. Thomas. It might be that what Boethius had in mind when he said that God exists in the 'eternal-present' is that given a position at any one moment in time, one could correctly assert that God exists now.