The mystery of time ...

... Watches and the Watchmaker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For Barbour, kenosis shows that the Platonic notion of God was simply wrong. God is not an “imperial ruler,” he writes, but “the fellow sufferer who understands.” God persuades by love rather than coerces by power. For Polkinghorne, there’s a danger here of overly reducing God, so that his aid to humankind is reduced to mere pleading. Where, then, his power to save? Instead, Polkinghorne adopts a dipolar notion of the divine. An “eternal” pole is permanent and consistent. A temporal pole suffers with us.