Retrocausality concerns a future event producing an effect at an earlier point in time. Prophecy raises an interesting question about whether such a phenomenon might be possible: can a future eschatological event have effects before it occurs?
I have considered four prophetic sources—the Book of Enoch, the Second Book of Enoch, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Book of Revelation. Taken together, these sources contain an apparent allusion to a future millennium of peace associated with the rule of Christ, and they contain indications that this future state somehow bears upon the preceding course of history. At first sight, this could be interpreted as a form of retrocausality: the future millennium produces effects in the period preceding it.
But that need not be the only interpretation.
The Book of Enoch explicitly presents certain future events as predetermined by God. In the Apocalypse of Weeks, the history of the world is divided into ten “weeks,” whose sequence and events are established beforehand in the heavenly realm—as though they have been written upon heavenly tablets. Enoch therefore presents a conception in which God has already determined certain aspects of the future.
This provides an alternative explanation for the apparent influence of the future upon the past or nearer future. It is not necessarily the future event itself that reaches backward through time and produces an earlier effect. Rather, God has predetermined the future event, and that same prior divine determination also determines events occurring before it.
Thus, if the peaceful millennium is predetermined by God, the peace or other conditions appearing before the millennium need not be effects flowing backward from the millennium itself. They may instead be effects of the divine predetermination that establishes both the earlier events and the later millennium. In this model, the causal direction is not from the future event backward into the past, but from God's prior determination of the entire sequence into both the nearer future and the ultimate future.
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