What Outside of Time Actually Means

For the soul that dies in Christ, the intermediate state is not a long wait measured in years. It is not a waiting room with a clock on the wall ticking through the centuries until the resurrection. The question "how long has he been there?" is a question with a malformed premise. It assumes that the soul outside the body is inside the same time-container that the living are inside, just not conscious of it passing.

The structure of time as Augustine describes it — the distension of the soul across memory and expectation — is the structure of the finite soul embedded in its biological and historical conditions. When the soul departs those conditions, the structure of time as we experience it departs with them. What the soul enters is not more of the same time, running on in absence. It is the mode of existence that the NDE testimony and the Augustine analysis both point toward: the eternal present, the condition in which the knife-edge of the now is no longer squeezed between guilt and anxiety but expanded to its full dimensions, which are the dimensions of the divine eternity.

For those in Christ, this means the intermediate state is not a period of diminished experience. Paul's "far better" is the description of a mode of existence that is not waiting for the resurrection in the way a person waits for a bus. It is the mode of existence in which the relational knowing of John 17:3 operates without the fog of mortality, without the fractured time-distension of fallen consciousness, without the anxious sequence that squeezes out the present moment. The soul is in the presence. The presence is what the soul was made for. What it experiences in that presence is not duration. It is depth.

This is sometimes called the "subliminal eternal present" in the philosophical theology of eternity — the idea that what we experience as sequence is the shadow, cast by our temporal limitations, of a reality that is present all at once to the one for whom time is not a container but a creation. The soul that enters that reality does not wait through its own resurrection. From the inside, if inside is even the right word, the resurrection may be the immediate next thing — not because no time passes in the external world, but because the external world's time is not the soul's primary architecture anymore.