Time for a change? Time & eternity II

My new-found Scandinavian friend Patrik has responded at length to my first post on time and eternity, which in turn was a response to some of his earlier posts (he's already done a good job of cataloging the history).

My own grip on patristics being somewhat slim, I nonetheless realise that the idea that God is somehow outside of time has a long and noble history reaching back into the first few centuries of the church. Yet I just don't buy it. Let me fly a kite and see what happens. Happy for it to be shot down...

Can God change? A fascinating question. The early fathers argued that change either means God's getting worse (and so is no longer perfect), or better (and so wasn't perfect before). However, I guess I find problematic the notion of perfection that lies behind the Greek fear of transience. I'm not sure that mathematical perfection is the most fruitful model for conceptualising divine perfections. And there's the key: perfections. God's perfections remain open-ended and so capable of growth and multiplication. For instance, although he was Father (and Son, and Spirit) without the world, he is now Creator, a new perfection. In a similar manner, the Incarnation brings about a new state of affairs for divine identity. There is more that can be said of him now. Not because he was deficient prior to the Incarnation, nor because he was already incarnate and we just didn't know it yet. But his perfections have been multiplied.

Does this threaten divine faithfulness? No, in fact, I sometimes wonder whether temporality is a condition of faithfulness. If God is outside time, then does his ability to stay true to himself constitute a virtue? Do we praise a triangle for its faithfulness - always, no matter what, having three sides?

Paul Ricoeur makes a very useful distinction between ipse and idem identity. Both are Latin words translated 'same', but with a slightly different spin. Am I the same person I was yesterday? Yes, and no. No, many of my atoms have changed, millions of cells have died, I have different memories, a slightly different outlook on life, a little less hair, a little more weight, a little more wisdom (I hope). But yes, it's still me - I'm still the same character in the story of my life. The former kind of identity (mathematically exactly totally the same) is idem identity - the same what-ness (unchanging substance). In this sense, I am not the same as yesterday. But the second, ipse identity, is the same who-ness. Self-same versus same self. I believe that God's faithfulness, his constancy, consists of ispe, rather than idem identity.