Is God like us?

Here's a highly intelligent discussion of a recondite topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQyEO7cOExc&t=5174s

1. I agree with classical theism that God is timeless and impassable. Mullins has a nice definition of timelessness, but I'll quote his definition of impassibility, which makes three related claims bundled into one:

(i) Impossible for God to suffer.

(ii) Impossible for God to be caused or influenced by anything external to God.

(iii) Impossible for God to have an emotion that is inconsistent with his perfect happiness, his perfect rationality, and his perfect moral goodness.

Among other things, they define Thomstic simplicity to mean all God's attributes are identical to each other. All divine acts are identical to each other and to God's essence. God has no potentialities. God can't react.

2. I'm a classical theist but not a Thomist. I have almost no use for the Thomistic metaphysical categories. I concede that Classical theism is a combination of revelation and reason, special and general revelation. 

3. A big problem with Thomism is that it superimposes onto scripture an interpretive grid or philosophical hermeneutic that's imported entirely from the outside. It has no footing in scripture, and often overrides what the text says. 

4. Another problem with Thomism is that it leads to a very skeptical view of what we can know about God.

5. A basic appeal of non-classical theism is that it looks more biblical, more Protestant, than classical theism. 

6. On the issue of God-talk, I think Nemesh makes a good point that when God is "angry" in scripture, that's not a depiction of his mental state but an expression of his punitive actions. God's anger takes place in the world, not in himself. 

7. Because Thomistic simplicity is a bundle of distinct claims, it's not an all-or-nothing package. I agree with Aquinas that God is not an exemplification of properties over and above himself, but the exemplar. God is simple in the sense that he has no spatiotemporal parts or subdivisions. 

8. A problem with non-classical theism is that if in fact God is timeless and impassable, then how else can God relate to us except in ways that operate within what we are able to experience?

9. Scripture isn't uniform in how it depicts God. So it's not as though the non-classical theist consistently has scripture on his side while the classical theism must go outside of scripture. For instance, the predestinarian passages are much more consistent with classical theism than non-classical theism. God has an antemudane plan for the world. 

And that in itself suggests which set of passages we should use to interpret the other set of passages. The predestinarian passages go behind-the-scenes, showing us that the descriptions of God's activity in history are the outworking of his antemundane plan. So those enjoy interpretive priority. And it's not coincidental that the predestinarian passages of Scripture occur in the didactic genres (e.g. NT letters). 

10. It's not coincidental that the prooftexts for non-classical theism cluster around the narrative and poetic genres of scripture. But we'd expect the language of poetry to be more performative than propositional. 

11. Then there's God's relation to time. The world comes into being but God does not. Indeed, God brings the world into being. That raises the question of whether God subsists outside of time. Although it doesn't quite answer the question, I'd say that it's not only consistent with God subsisting outside of time but a more natural implication of the claim than the view that God was always temporal. Some non-classical theists split the difference by saying God entered time when he made the world. But the texts about creation don't say that.

12. Likewise, the predestinarian passages raise questions about God's relation to time. If time is an artifact of creation, and if time is part of God's plan for the world, then that suggests that his plan is timeless, in which case he is timeless. 

13. Among other things, biblical theism is supposed to be a corrective to pagan conceptions of God. But if we just went with certain poetic and narrative descriptions, Yahweh sometimes acts like the very humanoid heathen deities that scripture is designed to oppose. It blurs a critical point of contrast. 

All told, I think classical theism has a varied footing in text of scripture, unlike Thomism. 

14. When scripture records a conversation between Moses or Abraham and God, I don't think that's just a representation of God, where the narrator writes a story that doesn't correspond to what really happened. This is God's accommodation to our human limitations, but it's not a literary accommodation. 

As a matter of fact, Abraham hears God say something, then Abraham says something, then he hears God say something, then he says something. So the record of the conversation is true to Abraham's experience. 

However, the purpose of the conversation is not to peel back the curtain to show the metaphysical machinery behind the conversation. The fact that Abraham hears God in a temporal sequence doesn't entail that God is speaking to him directly. That God himself must enter time to have this conversation. Rather, God can use natural means to effect a script. 

15. Mullins objects that classical theism must explain away too much scripture. I agree with him in the case of Thomism. There is, however, nothing inherently wrong with having a unified hermeneutic which interprets the same kinds of passages the same way. 

16. Regarding the question of whether divine love is reducible to self-love, I say God can love us the way a fiction writer loves one of his characters. 

Does God have desires?

This may seem like an odd question. For instance, does God desire the lost? Does God desire our obedience? 

The question is how the concept of divine desire relates to a timeless God. On the assumption that God is timeless, then we need to modify the concept of desire.

In the case of temporal agents, we begin with a desire or form a desire. Then there's a gap or interval between having the desire and having what we desire. A waiting period. Having a desire, we may take steps to achieve what we desire.

If, however, God is timeless, then there's a sense in which he has no desires because he was never in a state of unrealized desire. The object of his desire was always in his possession. It was always achieved.

In terms of world history, there may be a process by which that's achieved. But one the plane of God's existence, there is no interval between first having a desire (much less forming a desire) and then obtaining what he desired, later on. 

In another sense, there was never a time when he didn't have the desire in question. It's not like there was a point prior to his having a desire, then forming a desire, then taking actions to achieve the desired goal. 

Timeless cause/effect relation

I was asked a question about a timeless God's creative relation to the world.

i) It's  not so much that God exists before time but  that he exists apart from or outside of time.

ii) There's an asymmetrical relation. The world has a first moment. So on the mundane side of things, there was something new. 

But from the divine side of things, it's a timeless relation because God is timeless, so there was never time when God was not the Creator. There was no shift in God from when God was the sole existent to God and the world. No change in God. It's a one-sided change.

Here's another potential way to model the issue. Causation normally involves both an interval and a medium. A stock objection to Cartesian dualism is that there's nothing to mediate the cause/effect relation, since mind and matter are categorically distinct substances. 

However, a counter to that objection is that if effects are necessarily mediated effects, then that generates an infinite regress. 

So it seems inevitable that effects bottom out with direction causation. Nothing mediates the transaction. 

If, however, we eliminate the medium, then don't we also eliminate the interval? But if there's no medium, then it's a timeless cause/effect. There's nothing in-between the cause and effect, either substantially or temporally.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

i) One objection to a timeless Creator is that causes precede effects. But is that necessarily the case? For instance, when I stand in front of a mirror, I cause my reflection to move. But is there a temporal delay between my action and the corresponding image in the mirror? It appears to be simultaneous or instantaneous. 

Perhaps, from the standpoint of physics, there's an indetectable delay in the transmission of light from my body to the reflection. However, I'm not sure if that's the case. Given the speed of light compared to the distance between my body and the mirror, is there a measurable delay?

That raises the question of whether a light beam is a continuously dense stream. Is the transmission of light infinitely divisible into ever smaller intervals? By contrast, what if is light granular, so that below a certain scale or threshold, there are no intervals? This goes to the famous particle/wave duality in physics. Admittedly, in this example, cause and effect both take place in time, so it's not strictly analogous to a timeless Creator, but I'm just addressing the specific objection that causes necessarily precede their effects. 

ii) Parenthetically, this example illustrates the limitations of empiricism. Does the reflection cause me to move or do I cause the reflection to move? Does my shadow cause me to move or do I cause my shadow to move? We intuitively understand that there's a relation of asymmetrical dependence, but that's not given in the phenomenon of reflected motion. To judge by appearances, it might be symmetrical or it might be the case that my shadow causes me to move! 

Imagine a science fiction story in which the motion of the shadow or reflection is primary while your corresponding motion is secondary! You move because the image in the mirror made you move in his direction! The shadow makes you move in tandem with the shadow! 

iii) Although that's backwards in physical reality, there's a sense in which, in relation to predestination, I'm the man in the mirror. What I do is a direct reflection of God's plan. I'm the shadow cast by God's light. 

Escape from time

I think Buddhism makes a certain amount of sense in its original setting. It arose in a pre-Christian culture, so the available options were awful. From a pre-Christian standpoint, life is characterized by irredeemable suffering. For some people, it's suffering from the get-go. Others get off to a better start, but incrementally, sometimes dramatically, and inevitably, lose more and more of what little makes life worthwhile. In Buddhism, time is your enemy, so the only solution is a radical solution: to escape time by ceasing to be. 

The outlook of Buddhism reflects existential nihilism. Logically speaking, consistent Buddhists ought to be antinatalists. In practice, that's what celibate Buddhist monks are–although I'm sure that behind-the-scenes, many Buddhist monks are sexually active. 

In a sense, both Buddhism and Christianity are future-oriented, but they have radically different views of the future. Christianity has a more positive view of the present, but acknowledges that for many people, this life is grim. Even in a fallen world, there are many natural goods, but these aren't evenly distributed. 

From a Christian standpoint, time is your friend–at least in reference to the afterlife (assuming you die in the faith). The best is yet to come. In Christianity, you escape suffering, not by oblivion, not by escaping time, but by escaping into a better time. A bit like those time-travel scenarios where the present is hellacious, but with your time-machine you can go backward or forward to a time of your choosing, when things were better (or got better). 

Time's passage

We just see time passing in front us, in the movement of a second hand around a clock, or the falling of sand through an hourglass, or indeed any motion or change at all.

We are indirectly aware of the passage of time when we reflect on our memories, which present the world as it was, and so a contrast with how things are now. But much more immediate than this is seeing the second hand move around the clock, or hearing a succession of notes in a piece of music, or feeling a raindrop run down your neck. There is nothing inferential, it seems, about the perception of change and motion: it is simply given in experience. (Robin Le Poidevin, The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation (Oxford 2007), 76, 87.

I demure. Strictly speaking, we don't observe change. We see and hear things in the present. We remember the position of the second hand. We remember where it used to be. We remember that the clock struck four times. The apprehension of time's passage is a combination of sensory perception and recollection. We perceive moments as they happen. We don't directly perceive change. That's a necessary but insufficient ingredient. 

God and music

Suppose you think that God is the most perfect, or the greatest possible being. Then you might wonder: Isn’t timeless existence a more perfect mode of existence than being in time? Isn’t it greater for a being to be outside of time? If so, then it follows from God’s being the most perfect being that God is timeless. But why should you think timelessness a “more perfect” mode of existence than temporal existence? Consider, for instance, the enjoyment of music, which seems to be open only to temporal beings. Natalja Deng, God and Time (Cambridge 2019), 34. 

That's an appealing counter to the perfect being argument for divine timelessness. However, there's something ultimately unsatisfying about temporal experience–however enjoyable–precisely because it doesn't last. That gives rise to the insatiable desire to repeat a pleasant experience, or regret if a pleasant experience is unrepeatable. You never have enough. There's always an element of discontent. The pleasure peaks, then it's gone. 

So there are tradeoffs to temporal experience. It's good. A creaturely good. But it has distinct limitations. It's the only way creatures can experience anything at all. While it's good for creatures, would it be good for God? Would it be equal good for God? 

Put another way, there are different kinds of goods. What is good for God is distinct from what is good for creatures. And it's good to have a variety of goods. A world in which different kinds of goods are represented. 

God in time

According to classical theism, God is timeless. In Reformed circles, a modern proponent is Paul Helm, who's presented a detailed model of divine timelessness. There are many  permutations to that issue in terms of hermeneutics and theological method:

1. W. L. Craig prooftexts divine timelessness from 1 Cor 2:7, 2 Tim 1:9; Tit 1:2-3, & Jude 25. But that runs the risk of infusing those passages with a more technical sense than they may intend or imply. There's the danger of posing more specialized questions than they were meant to answer. 

2. It can also be argued that Gen 1 implies the creation of time. 

Time, times, and half a time

I'd like to make a brief observation about the experience of time. The nature of time crops up in some theological conversations. For instance, freewill theists are apt to espouse the A-theory of time rather than the B-theory of time. They say the future is open. Indeterminate. 

According to classical theism, God is timeless. Conversely, some freewill theists say God entered time at the moment of creation or the moment of the Incarnation.

You also have debates about mature creation. For instance, Gosse distinguished between prochronic time and diachronic time. 

Let's take a comparison. Suppose a video gamer designs a dynamic, interactive story. This story involves three different times. To begin with, the virtual characters are dynamic. The plot unfolds in real time. Scenes change from one timeframe to the next. There's a flow of time.

In addition to the actual temporal succession, the plot may unfold according to a calendar. Events happen on particular days or time of day. Events occur in particular years. So the characters operate within a chronological framework. 

Suppose, for instance, the game is set in the middle ages. Suppose the game is a reenactment of the Song of Roland. 

In that case, there are two different times or temporal perspectives or temporal levels. There's the real time flow of events. How long it actually takes for a character to say or do something in the game. Then there's the assigned chronology of their historical period.

Finally, you have the timeframe of the gamer, who exists outside the simulation. For instance, he will design the game in advance. He will then activate the game. 

The internal chronology of the story and the real time succession of events don't strictly map onto each other. There's a distinction between narrative sequence and actual succession.

Suppose the virtual characters are artificially intelligent. From within their experience, from within the simulation, could they distinguish real time from calendar time? 

When are we justified?

This is a follow-up to my previous post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/05/eternal-justification.html

I was reading Oliver Crisp's sympathetic exposition and analysis of eternal justification in Deviant Calvinism, chap. 2. Although I think eternal justification has an element of truth, the way proponents formulate the position is fundamentally flawed, and Crisp is no improvement. 

1. If God is timeless, and justification is a divine act, then there's a straightforward sense in which justification is eternal. That, however, is misleading without further qualification.

2. God doesn't justify the elect in isolation. Rather, justification is contingent on other factors like faith in Christ and the redemptive death of Christ. Although God has eternally decreed to justify the elect, he has decreed that justification is contingent on other decrees. Within God's plan, there's a teleological relationship between different decrees. Some decreed events are a means by which other decreed events are realized. Although God has decreed to justify the elect, God has also decreed justifying faith, as well as the death of Christ–which provides the moral warrant for justification. He decrees justification in conjunction with other decrees. Justification is not independent act or event, which occurs apart from all other considerations. To the contrary, God has decreed that certain conditions must be met for justification to obtain. Faith in Christ, as well as Christ's sacrificial death, are necessary conditions. 

3. God's eternal decrees include his decree to eventuate the world, the Exodus, the Incarnation, and the Crucifixion. But, of course, that doesn't mean creation, Exodus, Incarnation, and Crucifixion are eternal events. They didn't take place in eternity. Strictly speaking, nothing even happens in eternity: that's a timeless state. Jesus was crucified in time, not eternity.

4. Although God eternally decrees every event, he decrees them to happen in time. He decrees some events to happen before or after other events, in a cause/effect relationship. He timelessly decrees a temporal sequence. You might say it's a delayed effect of the decree. 

5. To say God eternally decreed justification, or that justification, as a divine act, is eternal, doesn't mean the elect are justified before they are born; doesn't mean the elect are justified before they exist. Time and eternal don't range along a common continuum. God's timeless acts or timeless decrees aren't earlier events on a timeline. They aren't events at all.

A divine "act" is a mental act. In this case, a plan or resolve to bring something about. It can't be synchronized or coordinated with the historical process. There's no direct linkage. 

6. Crisp says:

Possession of faith makes no material difference to one's elect status, because it is an effect, not a cause of justification. The act of justification must logically precede the act of faith, whether in time or eternity, for a person must be just in the sight of God before they can be given the gift of faith in God (48).

I don't know if that simply represents Crisp's exposition of the position, or his agreement. The claim itself is puzzling:

i) The syntax in the first sentence is ambiguous. Presumably, he doesn't mean election is the effect of justification; rather, he means faith is the result of justification. 

ii) The act of justification is a timeless divine act whereas the act of faith is a temporal human act. Given the difference in principle, it's unclear how one can logically precede the other. The act of justification belongs to a different domain than the act of faith, so they can't be arranged like points on a common line.

iii) It's unclear what it even means to say the act of justification must enjoy logical priority, whether in time or eternity. At the very least there seems to be a failure to distinguish teleological order from temporal order. 

If, moreover, the act of justification is timeless, then what does it mean to say it must logically precede the act of faith in time? This seems to confound timeless and temporal relations. We can distinguish between the timeless act of justification and its temporal realization.  

iv) Finally, why must a person be just in God's sight before he can be given the gift of faith in God? In Reformed theology, justification is an "alien" righteousness. It presumes that the object of justification is a sinner. The object of justification is personally unrighteous, both before and after he is justified. The object of justification is actually guilty. So how could his innocence or righteousness be a precondition for the gift of faith? 

Eternal justification

A debate that sometimes crops up in Reformed circles is whether the elect are justified from eternity. That's not a yes or no question. Because justification involves a relation between a divine act and the resultant state, any answer is equivocal unless we distinguish both sides of the transaction.

In one respect, justification is a divine act. If God subsists outside of time, then justification is timeless or eternal in that regard.

Conversely, justification is the result of a divine act. When that takes effect is a separate question. A timeless divine act can be effected in time, at different times. 

So in another respect, justification is the state of being justified. Although God is timeless, humans are timebound. The elect are justified in time, and that's contingent on faith in Christ. God doesn't decree justification in isolation; rather, he decrees justifying faith in tandem with the decreed result.

God and Time

http://www.academia.edu/1180974/review_of_God_and_Time_Four_Views_ed._Gregory_Ganssle

How the mind uses the brain

In this post I'm going to present a model of dualism. I'm not going to spend much time defending it. I've defended aspects of this elsewhere. And I don't want to get bogged down in supporting arguments.

I think it's useful to explain a certain way of looking at issues. Provide a model. 

According to classical theism, God is timeless and spaceless. I agree.

That raises the question of how to interpret statements about God interacting with the world. God coming and going. Having conversations with Abraham or Moses. 

This, of course, is an issue that crops up in open theism. And open theism serves as a warning against naive hermeneutics. 

I think the short answer is analogous to how a novelist relates to the story. A novelist exists outside the story. He doesn't physically interact with the characters, time, or space of the story. 

Rather, a novelist is involved in the story by writing the story. He's responsible for everything that happens. Directly or indirectly, he causes everything that happens. He controls events. He directs the outcome. 

Sometimes a novelist can write himself into the story by making himself a character in his own story. In that respect, he exists at two different levels. He still exists outside the story. But he has a counterpart within the story who represents the novelist. His counterpart speaks like the novelist, thinks like the novelist, believes whatever the novelist believes. Has the same viewpoint as the novelist. His counterpart can even know everything the novelist does. 

In addition, I'm a Cartesian dualist. An interactionist. I think the soul is immaterial. Same thing with angels and demons. But there is some Scriptural evidence that angels have the ability to materialize. 

In popular Christian discourse, we speak of "casting out" demons. An out-of-body experience. The soul "separating" from the body at death. 

I think popular usage is innocuous so long as we don't derive metaphysical conclusions from popular usage. Otherwise, it's misleading. But it's a convenient shorthand.

However, I don't think the soul is literally in the body. Rather, I think the soul uses the body. The mind uses the brain. 

Neuroscientist Wilder Penfield employed the following analogy: the mind is to a programmer as the brain is to a computer. Likewise, neuroscientist John Eccles talks about "how the self controls its brain." My point is not to expound or endorse the details of their respective positions. I'm just sketching a general way of framing the issue. 

There are various ways of illustrating this relation:

i) Telerobotics. Remote-control signaling. We might say the body is to the aerial drone as the mind is to the operator. The operator is "linked" to the drone. He directs the drone. The drone does what he wills it to do. But he is not in the drone. 

Telerobotics involves teleoperation and telepresence. Through wireless communication, it's action at a distance.

ii) Virtual reality. If all your sensory relays are hooked up to VR equipment, the only thing you can perceive is the simulated world. Your sensory perceptual system is patched into the program. That's all you hear, see, and feel. 

That's in spite of the fact that you are not actually a part of that world. You exist outside the program. And if you are disconnected from the equipment, you resume your perceptual awareness of the external world. But it's one or the other at any given time. You can't be simultaneously conscious of both.

That analogous to visionary revelation. In his altered state of consciousness, the seer is only aware of the visionary scenes. But once he emerges from the trance, he resumes his ordinary sensory perception. 

Let's compare these illustrations to a haunted house. Let's view a ghost as a disembodied mind or disembodied consciousness. 

What would it mean for the postmortem soul to go back to the house where the decedent grew up? Two things:

i) It's a matter of what the soul is thinking about. He remembers the house. In his mind, he "goes back" there. That's the object of his mental concentration. That's what he's aware of. 

ii) In addition, he can act at a distance. He has the ability to point his thoughts and intentions in the direction of that location. Project power. Make things happen–within the limits of a finite agent. 

For instance, we might view this as a preliminary punishment during the intermediate state. He is condemned to hang around the scenes of his past, as a passive, frustrated spectator. He laments the past. Laments his loss. Cut off from the life he knew. He can enviously watch others doing what he used to do, but he can't participate. That's before the day of judgment, when there will be a total separation between the living and the dead, the saints and the damned. 

Many miracles are essentially mind over matter. Psychokinetic or telekinetic. Where an agent is able to will a change. He needn't be in physical contact with what he brings out. 

Is heaven a society of solipsistic consciousnesses?

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2015/05/heaven-is-other-people-too.php

In retrospect

A striking feature of Biblical narrative is the omniscient narrator. Unbelievers treat this as evidence that Bible stories are fictional. How could the narrator read their minds? On top of that, how could he read the minds of people who lived and died centuries before he was born?

The orthodox explanation is divine revelation: God shared some of his knowledge with the narrator. 

I'd like to illustrate that principle with some analogies. In fiction, there are two kinds of suspense. One is where the audience doesn't know the outcome in advance. An example would be a whodunit. That's why a murder mystery is the kind of thing you typically watch or read just once. As soon as the mystery is solved, as soon as the suspense is dispelled, it loses interest. 

But another kind of suspense is just the opposite: dramatic irony. That's where the audience knows something a character doesn't. For instance, the audience may be acutely conscious of the fact that a character is in danger, while the character is obvious to the danger. A viewer is tempted to yell at the screen to warn the hapless character. 

Although this is a literary convention, it has real-world analogues. Take The Diary of Anne Frank. What makes this so poignant is the ominous fact that the reader knows something she doesn't. 

This is a coming-of-age story. She's young and hopeful. If they can just wait out the Nazis, she has so much to live for.

But the reader knows that she is doomed. It's as if the reader knows how the story ends before she does, even though we're reading this decades later. And that's because, at the time of writing, she didn't know how her own story was going to end. 

The reader is like a time-traveler from the future who has a conversation with her before her family goes into hiding. We know it's futile. But we smile politely. 

Another example is Becky Lynn Black's "Our Cancer Journey." She's the late wife of David Alan Black. She was a missionary, and the child of missionaries. 

She chronicles her battle with cancer. Her first entry is 9/9/09. Her last entry is 7/4/13. 

In a sense, the reader knows that she's dying long before she does. We know when it ends. We read the earlier entries with the benefit of hindsight. She, of course, didn't have that retrospective outlook at the time of writing. She was looking forward while we are looking back. We know her situation as hopeless from the outset. That casts a shadow over the entire reading experience. 

In situations like this, the reader has a kind of God's-eye view of the proceedings. Almost as if we're above time. 

There's a classic X-Files episode ("Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose") in which a character knows the future. And it makes him miserable. Fatalistic. In a fallen world, it's a terrible thing to see the future. 

That's fiction, but as I've noted, this perspective as real-world counterparts, even apart from inspiration. 

Can Lister keep the balance?

http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2014/08/can-lister-keep-balance.html

From wrath to grace

There's been a public dustup between Scott Oliphint and Paul Helm on classical theism. As a rule, I prefer Helm's understanding of God's relation to time and space. But I think both men are making some mistakes in this particular dispute:

So the truth about atonement, about reconciliation to God, has to be represented to us as if it implied a change in God, and so an inconsistency, an apparent contradiction, in his actions towards us. But in fact there is no change in God; he loves us from eternity. There is however, a change in us, a change that occurs as by faith Christ's work is appropriated. The change is not from wrath to grace, but from our belief that we are under wrath to our belief that we are under grace (Paul Helm, John Calvin's Ideas, 395).

Does Helm mean to say (or does he argue that Calvin says) that when Scripture says that God's people were under wrath prior to their conversion (e.g., Eph. 2:3), that what we're meant to think is only that we believed we were under wrath? And are we then meant to read Scripture so that, at conversion, our belief changed to thinking we are under grace? We are surely not to think, says Helm, that God's disposition toward us has changed from wrath to grace. 

http://www.reformation21.org/articles/tolle-lege-a-brief-response-to-paul-helm.php

i) One source of confusion is equivocation over the nature of God's "wrath." Do we understand God's "wrath" as a particular kind of divine emotion (or attitude)? If so, does God become angry, then cease to be angry?

Speaking for myself, I think Scripture uses divine wrath as a colorful synonym for divine judgment. Take this example:

Behold, the name of the Lord comes from afar, burning with his anger, and in thick rising smoke; his lips are full of fury, and his tongue is like a devouring fire (Isa 30:27).

Here the "wrath" of God represents God visiting judgment on sinners. Divine "wrath" is manifestation of divine judgment. God's impending wrath is equivalent to his impending judgment. It's not that he has an emotional state which comes and goes, within himself; rather, judgment comes and goes, outside himself. Judgment coming or falling upon sinners.

ii) This brings us to the next point. We need to distinguish between "God's disposition toward us" and the objective expression of his disposition. The expression of his disposition can change without a corresponding change in God himself. Judgment takes place in time, in history. 

What does it mean to be "under God's wrath"? What does it mean to be "under God's grace"? 

The "transition from wrath to grace" paraphrases a passage from Ephesians. Paul is writing to converts from raw paganism. And in chaps. 2 & 4, he vividly describes the before and after. Their mindset and lifestyle before God saved them. In that sense, they were living under God's wrath before he saved them. That was an objective experience. And that stands in contrast to their experience of spiritual renewal. Living under God's grace. For instance: 

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph 2:1-6). 

17 Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity (Eph 4:17-19). 

3 For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. 4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit (Tit 3:3-5).

This is perfectly consistent with predestination. A predestined change from unregenerate and vile to regenerate and sanctified. It's not a change to the decree, but a change within the decree. God intended all along to save these heathen Gentiles. But he didn't regenerate or sanctify them from the moment of conception. He didn't raise them in the church. Until adulthood, he left them in a state of internal and external depravity. 

God didn't change his mind or disposition. He had this in mind from all eternity. Rather, God willed a change in their condition. 

God “in” time? A Historical Note

https://philosophyandtheism.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/god-in-time-a-historical-note/

Before the mountains were brought forth

"Before the Mountains Were Brought Forth: A Defense of Divine Timelessness" by Lydia McGrew.

God, time, and space

"John Frame - God, time and space" by Paul Helm.