Appendix A

Glossary of Key Terms

This appendix gathers, in one place, the philosophical and theological vocabulary that runs through this book. I have tried to write each entry as I would explain it to a friend over coffee — plainly, patiently, and with an eye to why the term actually matters for thinking about God and time. Some of these words are old (tota simul, perichoresis, sempiternity), some are fairly new (four-dimensionalism, transcendent temporal access), and a few belong to physics rather than philosophy proper (Minkowski spacetime, time dilation). But every one of them shows up somewhere in the conversation about whether God is "outside time," "inside time," or some subtler combination of the two.

A word on how to use this glossary. I did not arrange the entries as a dictionary of neutral definitions. Each entry has three jobs: (1) to state clearly what the term means, (2) to locate it within the larger debate, and (3) to indicate, where appropriate, how the author's own position — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — relates to it. Where terms interlock (and they nearly all do), I have included cross-references so the reader can follow a concept through the network of ideas that surrounds it. The entries run slightly longer than the minimum the master prompt calls for because the usefulness of a glossary, in a book like this, depends on whether the entries actually do theological work. A glossary that merely repeats textbook definitions is of little help to someone trying to figure out why Boethius's tota simul matters for how we read Genesis 6:6.¹

A second word on the choice of terms. The list of entries below is not exhaustive — a truly exhaustive glossary of philosophical theology would fill a volume by itself. What I have included is every term the master prompt specifies, plus a few unavoidable additions that came up as I was drafting. A glossary like this has to make decisions about which debates to privilege. I have privileged the analytic philosophy-of-religion debate about divine eternity (Craig, Mullins, Helm, Leftow, Stump, Padgett, Wolterstorff, Rogers, Deng, DeWeese, Rea, Scott), the biblical-theological debate about what "eternity" means in Scripture (Cullmann, Barr, standard commentaries), and the physics-and-philosophy debate about the nature of time (McTaggart, Einstein, Minkowski, the neo-Lorentzians, the contemporary presentists). Where I have had to choose between philosophical precision and accessibility, I have chosen accessibility. A reader who wants the full philosophical apparatus should consult the works in the bibliography at the end.

One final word before we begin. A glossary can easily become a list of lifeless definitions, each term hermetically sealed from the others. I have tried to resist that. The terms below are all pieces of a larger argument about God's life, God's relation to His creation, and God's engagement with His creatures. My hope is that reading through the entries in order — or dipping in where interest leads — will leave the reader not only with a clearer vocabulary but also with a clearer sense of what is at stake in the debate. A great deal is at stake. How we think about God's relation to time shapes how we pray, how we understand providence, how we read the Bible's stories of divine response and divine emotion, how we think about Christ's Incarnation, and how we hope for what lies beyond the grave. The vocabulary is not merely academic. It is the vocabulary in which Christian theology has wrestled, for two thousand years, with one of the deepest mysteries about the living God.

A

A-Theory of Time

The A-theory (sometimes called the dynamic or tensed theory) holds that the distinction between past, present, and future is an objective, mind-independent feature of reality. On this view, the present moment is metaphysically privileged: it is "what is really happening now," and time genuinely flows from future to present to past. Past events are no longer real in the same sense as present events; future events are not yet real at all. The A-theory takes tense seriously — it thinks that "the meeting begins now" and "the meeting begins at 3:00 p.m." say genuinely different things, and that the first kind of claim cannot be translated without loss into the second kind.²

The A-theory contrasts sharply with the B-theory of time, on which tense is a feature of our perspective rather than of reality itself, and all moments are equally real. The distinction goes back to the British philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, who coined the labels "A-series" (earlier, present, later as a moving set of properties) and "B-series" (earlier-than / later-than as fixed relations). William Lane Craig and R. T. Mullins both defend the A-theory as more philosophically defensible and more theologically congenial, and the author of this book follows them in that judgment.³ Why does it matter? Because if the A-theory is true, the future is not already "out there" to be seen the way distant mountains are; and that reshapes what divine foreknowledge can mean (see Simple Foreknowledge and Transcendent Temporal Access).

Aseity

Aseity (from the Latin a se, "from himself") is the doctrine that God exists entirely from Himself and depends on nothing outside Himself for His existence, His knowledge, His power, or His life. God is not caused, not sustained by something else, and not contingent on anything that might have failed to exist. Creatures, by contrast, are ab alio — "from another." Aseity has been a nearly universal confession of classical Christian theology and is usually associated with divine independence, necessity, and self-sufficiency.

Aseity matters in the God-and-time debate because defenders of divine timelessness often argue that a temporal God would somehow depend on time — or worse, would have time as a kind of container in which He exists — and that this would compromise His aseity. R. T. Mullins has argued at length that this worry is misplaced: if time is grounded in God's own life rather than in something external, then a temporal God is not dependent on anything outside Himself.⁴ The author's view in this book is similar. God's temporality is not imposed on Him from without; it arises from the perichoretic life of the Trinity (see Perichoresis). Aseity is preserved, not threatened, by a properly Trinitarian account of divine time.

Atemporality

Atemporality is the doctrine that God exists entirely outside of time. On this view, God has no past, no present (in the tensed sense), and no future. He does not experience succession, sequence, or "before and after." Everything God knows, He knows in a single, simultaneous act; everything He does, He does in a single, timeless willing. The term is often used interchangeably with divine timelessness, and it stands in direct contrast to divine temporality and sempiternity.

Defenders of atemporality include Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, and, more recently, Paul Helm, Brian Leftow, and Eleonore Stump. Their arguments typically turn on divine immutability, simplicity, perfection, and the conviction that time is a created thing from which God must be independent.⁵ The critics of atemporality — among whom I count myself — argue that the doctrine cannot make sense of creation ex nihilo, genuine divine action, the Incarnation, prayer, or the emotional life of God as it is portrayed in Scripture (see The End of the Timeless God arguments summarized in chapters 4–6 of this book).

B

B-Theory of Time

The B-theory (also called the static, tenseless, or "block" theory) holds that all moments of time are equally real. Past, present, and future are not objective features of reality but indexical descriptions — like "here" and "there" — that depend on the observer's location in time. On this view, the year 1066 is just as real as the year 2026; the only difference is that one is earlier than the other in the fixed "B-series" of earlier-than / later-than relations. Temporal passage, on the B-theory, is an illusion produced by consciousness moving (or seeming to move) through an already-existing four-dimensional structure.

The B-theory is often associated with Einsteinian relativity, because the relativity of simultaneity seems to suggest that there is no single, privileged "now" across the universe. Many contemporary philosophers of physics (Huw Price, D. H. Mellor, Steven Savitt) defend the B-theory. Craig and Mullins, by contrast, argue that the B-theory collapses the distinction between creator and creature, rules out genuine temporal becoming, and makes a mockery of claims like "Christ has died" or "Christ will come again."⁶ I treat this debate at length in chapter 24. For purposes of the glossary, it is enough to note that the B-theory tends to make divine timelessness more natural, while the A-theory makes divine temporality more natural.

Block Universe

The "block universe" is a metaphor associated with the B-theory of time and with the relativistic spacetime of Einstein and Minkowski. The idea is that reality is a single four-dimensional "block" in which all events — past, present, and future — coexist on equal ontological footing. Nothing "comes into being" or "passes away" in any fundamental sense. What we call the passage of time is simply the sequential experience of a conscious observer traveling along a worldline through the block.

The block universe has obvious attractions for a certain kind of theology. If all events are equally real and timelessly "there," then a timeless God's knowledge of all events is not mysterious; He simply sees the block. But the author rejects the block universe on both philosophical grounds (it cannot account for temporal becoming, tensed truth, or the phenomenology of time) and theological grounds (it threatens creation ex nihilo and makes the fall, the Incarnation, and the last judgment equally eternal features of reality).⁷ See chapter 24 for the full argument and Minkowski Spacetime below for the physics side of the question.

C

Cambridge Change

A "Cambridge change" is a change in what can be truly said about a thing without any intrinsic change in the thing itself. The standard example: when Socrates grows taller than Theaetetus, Theaetetus "changes" from being taller than Socrates to being shorter — but nothing intrinsic to Theaetetus has altered. The change is purely relational, produced by an intrinsic change in something else. The term comes from Peter Geach, who named it after the early twentieth-century Cambridge philosophers (Russell, McTaggart) who analyzed change in this relational way.⁸

The concept is enormously important in the God-and-time debate. Defenders of divine timelessness often argue that God's apparent "changes" in Scripture — becoming angry, repenting, responding to prayer — are merely Cambridge changes. God Himself does not change intrinsically; rather, the creature's relation to the unchanging God changes. Critics respond that this maneuver cannot bear the exegetical weight it is asked to bear. When Genesis 6:6 says God grieved, or when Exodus 32:14 says God "repented" of the evil He had thought to do, the biblical authors seem to mean something more than a Cambridge change in human beings. R. T. Mullins has argued forcefully that the Cambridge-change strategy reduces God's relational life to something less than what Scripture portrays.⁹ I develop this line of argument in chapters 6 and 30.

Causal Theory of Time

The causal theory of time holds that temporal relations are grounded in — or identical to — causal relations. On this view, "A is earlier than B" just means, or is reducible to, "A is (or could be) a cause of B" (or some similar causal relation). The theory was developed in various forms by Hans Reichenbach, Adolf Grünbaum, and, more recently, Bas van Fraassen and John Earman. It has obvious attractions in a post-Einstein world where the metric structure of spacetime is tied to the causal structure of light cones.

For theology, the causal theory matters because it offers a way to think about time that does not require absolute simultaneity across the universe. If time is just causal structure, then God's temporal relations to creatures can be understood as causal relations (God acts, creatures respond; creatures act, God responds) without requiring a cosmic "now" that stretches across the universe. DeWeese and Craig both engage with causal theories of time in their work, and Craig's neo-Lorentzian alternative (see Neo-Lorentzian Interpretation) is partly a response to the worry that relativity has rendered absolute simultaneity impossible.¹⁰

D

Determinism (Theological)

Theological determinism is the view that every event — including every human choice — is ultimately determined by God. In its strongest form (sometimes called "hard determinism" or "exhaustive divine determinism"), every thought, desire, and action of every creature is the direct result of a divine decree. In softer forms (compatibilist Calvinism), creatures are said to act "freely" in the sense that they do what they want, but what they want is itself determined by God. The classic Reformed tradition — Calvin, Edwards, and their heirs — is usually classified as theologically determinist in one form or another.

Theological determinism is relevant to the God-and-time question in two ways. First, it offers a tidy account of divine foreknowledge: God knows the future because He has determined it. Second, it tends to sit comfortably with divine timelessness, because a timeless, determining God does not need to "wait and see" what creatures will do. The author of this book rejects theological determinism. Human beings have libertarian free will, and God's foreknowledge is grounded not in His decrees but in His transcendent temporal access to the whole of creaturely history. The fullest treatment is in chapters 25 and 29.

Divine Simplicity (Classical)

Classical divine simplicity (often abbreviated DDS, for "doctrine of divine simplicity") is the claim that God has no parts — no physical parts, no temporal parts, no metaphysical parts, and no real distinctions among His attributes. On the strongest version, associated with Aquinas and defended today by James Dolezal, Steven Duby, and others, God's essence is identical to His existence; His love is identical to His justice; His knowledge is identical to His will; and every divine attribute is identical to every other and to God Himself. The doctrine is meant to protect divine aseity, independence, and ultimacy.

Classical simplicity is one of the strongest internal pressures pushing historic Christian theology toward divine timelessness. If God has no parts, He can have no temporal parts, which means He cannot have successive states, which means He cannot be temporal. Mullins has argued at length in The End of the Timeless God that strict simplicity is both philosophically incoherent and incompatible with Trinitarian orthodoxy.¹¹ The author of this book follows Mullins in rejecting strict classical simplicity (see chapter 30), while affirming a modified or "generic" simplicity: God's attributes are all genuinely His, essential to Him, and inseparable from His being, but they are distinguishable from one another in ways that strict DDS denies.

E

Eternalism

Eternalism is the ontological thesis most closely associated with the B-theory of time: all moments of time are equally real. The past, the present, and the future are all "there" in the four-dimensional manifold; they differ only in their position relative to any given observer. Eternalism is sometimes distinguished from the B-theory proper: the B-theory is strictly about the nature of tense and temporal passage, while eternalism is about the ontological status of past, present, and future. In practice the two views travel together: nearly everyone who denies that tense is objective also denies that only the present is real.

Natalja Deng's helpful primer distinguishes eternalism from presentism (only the present is real) and the growing block (the past and present are real, but not the future), and she traces the theological implications of each for classical divine timelessness.¹² The author's position in this book is closest to presentism, with the crucial addition that God has unique access to past and future events that transcends the limits of creaturely presentism. This is not eternalism, but it is also not a flat-footed presentism; see Presentism and Transcendent Temporal Access.

Eternity (Timeless vs. Everlasting)

The word "eternity" is unfortunately ambiguous in both theology and common usage. In the classical tradition, "eternal" often means timeless — existing outside of time altogether, in a single simultaneous "now." This is the sense Boethius gave the word in his famous definition: "the complete possession all at once of illimitable life" (interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio).¹³ In this sense, "eternal" is more or less a synonym for atemporal.

In contemporary theology and in much biblical usage, however, "eternal" often means everlasting — existing through all time, without beginning or end, but genuinely temporal. This is the sense that best captures the Hebrew olam (עוֹלָם) and the Greek aiōn (αἰών) in their ordinary biblical usage. Oscar Cullmann argued at length in Christ and Time that the biblical concept of eternity is far closer to everlasting time than to timelessness.¹⁴ The author of this book follows Cullmann's lead, with the refinement that God's everlastingness is a divine mode of temporality that transcends the creaturely limitations of clock-time. See Sempiternity and chapter 3 for the biblical-philological case.

ET-Simultaneity

"ET-simultaneity" (short for "eternity-time simultaneity") is a technical notion introduced by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann in a 1981 paper to help make sense of how a timeless God can be "simultaneous" with temporal events. They argued that simultaneity within time (T-simultaneity) and simultaneity within eternity (E-simultaneity) are familiar; but we also need a third relation — ET-simultaneity — to describe how the timeless eternity of God and the temporal succession of creatures can be copresent without either being reduced to the other.¹⁵

Critics — including Brian Leftow, Paul Fitzgerald, and R. T. Mullins — have argued that ET-simultaneity is either incoherent (because simultaneity is by definition a temporal relation) or else it smuggles temporality back into the divine nature under another name.¹⁶ The concept is important to know about because it represents one of the most sophisticated attempts in recent analytic theology to salvage the classical view. The author's judgment, argued in chapters 5 and 6, is that the attempt does not succeed — but the reader should know why people take it seriously.

F

Four-Dimensionalism

Four-dimensionalism is the metaphysical thesis that ordinary objects — trees, tables, human beings — are extended in time as well as in space. Just as a tree has spatial parts (roots, trunk, branches), it has temporal parts (the tree at age 10, the tree at age 50). On this view, a persisting object is a four-dimensional "worm" that occupies a region of spacetime, and its temporal parts at different moments are as distinct as its spatial parts at different locations. Four-dimensionalism is the standard metaphysics of persistence in a B-theoretic block universe.

The rival view is three-dimensionalism or "endurantism": objects are wholly present at each moment at which they exist, and they persist by being numerically identical across time rather than by having temporal parts. Most defenders of divine temporality — Craig, Mullins, DeWeese — are endurantists, and they argue that endurantism is required for a robust A-theory. The theological stakes are real: if God is four-dimensional, then God has temporal parts, and a God with temporal parts is not the simple, unified agent of classical theism. If God is three-dimensional — wholly present at each moment — then the endurantist view fits more naturally with the biblical portrait of a God who acts, responds, and relates.¹⁷

G

Growing Block

The growing block theory (sometimes associated with C. D. Broad and, in our day, with Michael Tooley and Peter Forrest) is a mediating position between presentism and eternalism. It holds that the past and the present are real, but the future is not. Reality, on this view, is a four-dimensional block that is genuinely growing at its leading edge: as time passes, new slices of reality are added, and what was future becomes present and then past. The past does not cease to exist; it remains real, but fixed. The future has no reality at all until it becomes present.

The growing block has a certain theological appeal. It preserves the objectivity of temporal passage (which presentism and the A-theory both demand), while also allowing God to "see" the past as really existing (which might help explain certain features of divine omniscience). R. T. Mullins engages with the view in The End of the Timeless God, and the author gives it serious consideration in chapter 24.¹⁸ In the end, however, the author's position is closer to presentism-with-transcendent-access than to the growing block, because the growing block still faces the question of how an A-theoretic future that is not yet real can be foreknown with certainty.

H

Hybrid View (Craig's)

William Lane Craig's "hybrid view" is the proposal that God is timeless without creation and temporal with creation. Before the act of creation, God exists in a state of timeless eternity, in perfect and undifferentiated self-contemplation. At the moment of creation, God enters time — time begins, and God begins to experience temporal succession. From the moment of creation onward, God is genuinely temporal: He acts in history, responds to creatures, and experiences real sequence.¹⁹

Craig's view is ingenious. It preserves the aseity intuitions of the classical tradition (God does not depend on creation for His existence in any way) while also preserving the biblical portrait of a temporally engaged God. But it has also attracted vigorous criticism. R. T. Mullins has argued in The End of the Timeless God and From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker that the transition from timelessness to temporality is philosophically incoherent: a truly timeless being cannot undergo a transition of any kind, since transitions are themselves temporal events.²⁰ The author of this book sides with Mullins on this point. Chapter 8 of this book is devoted to Craig's view, its attractions, and the reasons it ultimately does not succeed.

I

Immutability (Strict and Qualified)

Divine immutability is the doctrine that God does not change. The question is what "change" means. In the strict form (associated with Aquinas, Anselm, and much of the classical tradition), immutability means that God cannot undergo any intrinsic change whatsoever — no change in knowledge, no change in emotion, no change in relation, no change in will. God is absolutely, metaphysically immutable. In the qualified or moral form (defended by Wolterstorff, Padgett, Mullins, and the author of this book), immutability means that God's essential character, His moral perfections, His faithfulness, and His ultimate purposes do not change. But God's relational states, His emotional responses, and His interactions with creatures genuinely do change over time.

Qualified immutability is the view that fits best with the biblical data — God grieving in Genesis 6:6, repenting in Exodus 32:14, rejoicing in Zephaniah 3:17, weeping through Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus — while still preserving the key biblical affirmations that God does not change in His essential nature (Malachi 3:6; James 1:17; Hebrews 13:8).²¹ I treat the full argument for qualified immutability in chapters 6, 28, and 30.

Impassibility

Impassibility (from the Latin impassibilis, "unable to suffer") is the classical doctrine that God cannot be affected by anything outside Himself and therefore does not have emotions in any ordinary sense. Divine impassibility is closely linked to divine immutability: if God cannot change, He cannot be moved; if He cannot be moved, He cannot feel. On the classical view, the biblical language of divine emotion — God's grief, anger, joy, compassion — is anthropopathic accommodation: God speaks of Himself in human emotional terms to make Himself intelligible to us, but the language does not describe anything real in God.

The alternative view, passibilism, holds that God genuinely has emotions and is genuinely moved by what happens in the world. R. T. Mullins has made an extensive philosophical case for divine passibility in God and Emotion, and David Lamb has made a complementary biblical case in The Emotions of God.²² The author affirms passibility, and this book argues that passibility requires temporality: a genuinely emotional, responsive God cannot be a timeless God. The connection is developed fully in chapter 28.

K

Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Kalam cosmological argument (from the Arabic kalām, "speech" or "theological discourse") argues that (1) whatever begins to exist has a cause, (2) the universe began to exist, and (3) therefore the universe has a cause. The argument was developed by medieval Islamic theologians (al-Ghazali, al-Kindi) and has been vigorously defended in recent decades by William Lane Craig. Craig's case for the second premise draws on philosophical arguments against the possibility of an actual infinite and on the Big Bang cosmology of contemporary physics.²³

The Kalam is relevant to this book because Craig uses it to motivate his hybrid view of God and time. If the universe began to exist, then time (as Craig understands it) also began to exist; and if time began to exist, God must be considered apart from time before creation. The author accepts the main structure of the Kalam but resists Craig's inference that God was timeless before creation. A dynamically temporal God whose time is grounded in the Trinitarian life (see Perichoresis) can be the cause of the beginning of the universe without being timeless in the classical sense.

L

Libertarian Free Will

Libertarian free will (the "libertarian" here has nothing to do with political libertarianism) is the view that free choices are genuinely "up to" the agent in a way that is incompatible with determinism. A libertarian free choice is one where the agent, at the moment of choice, could have chosen otherwise — and nothing prior to the choice (not God's decree, not prior physical states, not the agent's character) determined which way the choice would go. Libertarian free will is the dominant view in the Wesleyan, Arminian, and Eastern Orthodox traditions, and it is the view of most open theists, Molinists, and many proponents of divine temporality.

The author affirms libertarian free will. The reason this matters for the God-and-time debate is that simple foreknowledge (as the author defends it) requires libertarian free will to avoid collapsing into theological determinism. If creatures are libertarianly free, then God's foreknowledge of what they will do must be grounded in something other than His decree that they will do it — and the author's proposal is that it is grounded in God's transcendent temporal access to their actual future choices.²⁴ The alternatives — Calvinist determinism, Molinist middle knowledge, open theism — are discussed in chapters 25 and 32.

M

McTaggart's Paradox

In his 1908 paper "The Unreality of Time," J. M. E. McTaggart argued that time is unreal. His argument proceeds in two stages. First, he distinguishes the A-series (events as past, present, or future) from the B-series (events as earlier than or later than one another). Second, he argues that the A-series is incoherent — because every event must be all three (past, present, and future) at different times, and that generates a regress — while the B-series, by itself, cannot capture what we mean by change. Since both series are needed for real time and the A-series is incoherent, time itself must be unreal.²⁵

Few philosophers have ever accepted McTaggart's full conclusion. But his paper framed the philosophy of time for the entire twentieth century. B-theorists typically accept McTaggart's critique of the A-series and argue that only the B-series is real. A-theorists typically respond that McTaggart has smuggled in assumptions that beg the question against tense (for example, that "past," "present," and "future" must be understood as properties rather than as tensed operators). The author follows the A-theoretic response in chapter 24. The important thing for the glossary is that anyone reading contemporary analytic philosophy of time will encounter McTaggart almost immediately, and the paradox is the gateway to the whole field.

Middle Knowledge (Molinism)

Molinism, named after the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina, is the view that God has three logical "moments" of knowledge. First, natural knowledge: God knows all necessary truths and all logical possibilities. Third, free knowledge: God knows what He has actually decreed. Between these two lies middle knowledge (scientia media): God knows what every possible creature would freely do in every possible circumstance. Armed with middle knowledge, God then decrees the actual world, knowing in advance exactly which free choices each creature will make. Middle knowledge is supposed to reconcile libertarian free will with exhaustive divine foreknowledge and meticulous providence.

Molinism has distinguished contemporary defenders — Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Thomas Flint — and equally distinguished critics. The classic objection is the "grounding objection": what makes it true that a particular creature would freely do X in circumstances Y, when that creature and those circumstances may never actually exist? Counterfactuals of creaturely freedom seem to lack truthmakers.²⁶ The author rejects Molinism on these grounds and defends simple foreknowledge instead (chapter 25).

Minkowski Spacetime

Minkowski spacetime is the four-dimensional mathematical structure introduced by Hermann Minkowski in 1908 to give Einstein's special theory of relativity an elegant geometric formulation. In Minkowski spacetime, time and space are unified into a single four-dimensional manifold, and the fundamental invariant is not spatial distance or temporal duration but the "spacetime interval," which different observers calculate in the same way. Minkowski famously said that "space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

Minkowski spacetime is often invoked as a piece of scientific evidence for the B-theory and for the block universe. If there is no absolute simultaneity, there is no privileged "now"; and if there is no privileged now, the A-theory seems to be in trouble. Craig has devoted substantial work to arguing that the Minkowski formalism is philosophically neutral between A-theoretic and B-theoretic interpretations, and that a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of relativity — in which simultaneity is relative to an unobservable privileged frame — preserves the A-theory without contradicting the empirical data.²⁷ See Neo-Lorentzian Interpretation below, and chapter 31 for the full discussion.

N

Neo-Lorentzian Interpretation

The neo-Lorentzian interpretation of special relativity (sometimes just "Lorentzian") holds that there is a privileged reference frame in the universe — a cosmic "now" — even though the frame is empirically inaccessible to observers within the universe. The effects predicted by special relativity (time dilation, length contraction, the relativity of simultaneity) are all explained, but they are treated as effects of motion relative to the privileged frame rather than as features of an ontologically primary four-dimensional spacetime. Different observers disagree about simultaneity not because there is no fact of the matter but because no observer is in a position to detect the privileged frame directly.

The neo-Lorentzian interpretation is named after Hendrik Lorentz, whose 1895 theory of the electron developed many of the equations later used by Einstein. Craig has defended the neo-Lorentzian interpretation in Time and Eternity and elsewhere, partly because it preserves the A-theory of time in the face of relativity.²⁸ Critics — especially philosophers of physics — have argued that the neo-Lorentzian interpretation is empirically equivalent to the standard Einsteinian interpretation but ontologically more extravagant, and that Occam's razor should favor the standard view. The author treats the debate in chapter 31 and sides with Craig that the theological payoff of the neo-Lorentzian interpretation is worth the cost.

O

Omnitemporality

Omnitemporality is the thesis that God is present to, and experiences, all of time. The term is sometimes used loosely as a synonym for divine temporality, but it carries the additional connotation that God's temporality spans all of time — He is not "in" any one time in the way creatures are, but is equally present to every temporal moment. The term is used by Alan Padgett and, in a different key, by William Lane Craig (who uses it to describe God's temporal mode from the moment of creation onward).²⁹

The author of this book uses "dynamic omnitemporality" as a shorthand for the book's central thesis: God is genuinely temporal (He experiences real succession), but He is not bound to the creaturely present (He has transcendent access to all of time). This is meant to distinguish the author's view from (a) strict timelessness, which denies temporality altogether, (b) pure sempiternity, which affirms divine temporality but may leave God "locked into" the present in the way creatures are, and (c) open theism, which denies exhaustive foreknowledge.

Open Theism

Open theism (sometimes "open view of God," or "openness theology") is the view that God is genuinely temporal, that the future is in some genuine sense "open" or indeterminate, and that God therefore does not — indeed cannot — know the future exhaustively. On the open view, God knows everything that is logically knowable: all necessary truths, all settled features of the future, all the possibilities creatures might actualize. But He does not know with certainty the free choices creatures have not yet made, because those choices do not yet exist as facts to be known. The most prominent contemporary open theists are Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, William Hasker, and John Sanders.³⁰

Open theism is relevant to this book in a very particular way. The author affirms one of the two main planks of open theism — divine temporality — but emphatically rejects the other: the denial of exhaustive foreknowledge. The whole burden of chapters 9, 25, and 32 is to show that a temporalist need not be an open theist. God can be temporal and still know the future exhaustively, because His temporality is not identical to ours. The bridge is the concept of transcendent temporal access (see below).

P

Passibility

Passibility (the opposite of impassibility) is the view that God can be affected by what happens outside Himself and therefore has genuine emotional responses to His creatures. A passible God is not unmoved by suffering, not indifferent to love, not unaffected by rebellion or repentance. The biblical portrayal is relentlessly passible: God grieves (Gen 6:6), burns with anger (Exod 32:10), rejoices with singing (Zeph 3:17), is moved with compassion (Hos 11:8), and, in Jesus, weeps at a friend's tomb (John 11:35). David Lamb's survey of the biblical data concludes that passibility is simply what Scripture presents us with when it talks about God.³¹

The philosophical case for passibility has been made carefully by R. T. Mullins in God and Emotion, where he argues that the traditional worries about passibility (that it makes God dependent on creatures, or moody, or manipulable) rest on confusions about what emotions are.³² Passibility matters for the God-and-time question because genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality. You cannot be moved by an event if you are not temporally situated to receive it. A timeless God, on the classical view, cannot literally be grieved by the fall or literally rejoice at the return of the prodigal. The author treats the connection between passibility and temporality in chapter 28.

Perichoresis

Perichoresis (from the Greek perichōrēsis, περιχώρησις, "going around," "mutual indwelling") is the patristic term for the mutual interpenetration of the three Persons of the Trinity. Father, Son, and Spirit dwell in and through one another without any loss of personal distinction and without any division of the one divine essence. Jesus' claim, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:10-11), is the locus classicus. John of Damascus developed the concept systematically in the eighth century, and it has been central to Trinitarian reflection ever since.

Perichoresis is crucial to the author's position on divine temporality. The dynamic mutual indwelling of the Persons — the Father eternally loving the Son, the Son eternally loving the Father, the Spirit eternally proceeding as the bond of love — is an intrinsically dynamic reality. It is not static, frozen, or undifferentiated. The author agrees with R. T. Mullins that the perichoretic life of the Trinity itself grounds a kind of "divine time" that pre-exists the creation of the physical universe. This is not the measurable clock-time of creatures, but it is genuine sequence, genuine dynamism, genuine life.³³ Chapter 26 develops the argument in detail.

Presentism

Presentism is the ontological thesis that only the present is real. The past no longer exists; the future does not yet exist. All that is, is what is now. Presentism is the ontological partner of the A-theory and stands opposed to eternalism. Presentism is defended today by Dean Zimmerman, Craig Bourne, Ned Markosian, and (in a theological register) William Lane Craig.³⁴

Presentism faces two notorious difficulties: the "grounding problem" (what makes past-tensed truths true, if the past no longer exists?) and the challenge from special relativity (which seems to deny a privileged "now"). Defenders have responded to both. For present purposes, the important thing is the theological upshot. If presentism is true, then future events do not yet exist. If they do not exist, how can they be known? The author's answer is not to abandon presentism for eternalism (as timeless views tend to do) but to argue that God has a unique capacity — transcendent temporal access — to know events even when they do not yet exist in creaturely time. This is a strong metaphysical claim, and the author defends it in chapters 24 and 25.

Process Theology

Process theology is the theological movement that draws on the "process philosophy" of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. On the process view, reality is fundamentally a flux of events (rather than a collection of substances), and God is Himself caught up in the flux. God has two "poles" or natures: a primordial nature (His eternal character and the set of possibilities) and a consequent nature (His actual experience, which grows as the world unfolds). God influences the world by "luring" creatures toward greater value, but He does not coerce, does not create ex nihilo, and does not exercise the sovereign providence of classical theism.³⁵

Process theology is included in this glossary because it is sometimes confused with divine temporality tout court. The two are very different. Process theology is metaphysically dipolar, soteriologically finite, and Christologically anemic. It cannot affirm creation ex nihilo, the full deity of Christ, or the future bodily resurrection. The author firmly rejects process theology, and chapter 10 is devoted to explaining why divine temporality does not in any way require the process package. Process theology is "another bridge too far" — a bridge the author emphatically refuses to cross.

R

Relational Theory of Time

The relational theory of time (sometimes called "reductive" or "relationist") holds that time is not a substance or a container but a feature of the relations between events. Time exists only insofar as there are things that change and events that stand in temporal relations to one another. The classic proponent of relationism is Leibniz, whose famous correspondence with the Newtonian Samuel Clarke pitted relational time against the substantival view (see Substantival Theory of Time).

The relational theory has obvious attractions for theology. If time is just the relations between events, then God is not "in" a container called time that exists independently of Him. Time is simply what emerges when there are temporal beings — including God Himself — who stand in temporal relations. DeWeese defends a form of relational theory in God and the Nature of Time, and Mullins develops a related position in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker.³⁶ The author's own view is that divine time is grounded in the relational life of the Trinity, which is a kind of theological relationism at its deepest level.

Relativity of Simultaneity

The relativity of simultaneity is one of the central results of Einstein's special theory of relativity. Two events that are simultaneous in one inertial reference frame may not be simultaneous in another; and there is no privileged frame that settles the matter. If two lightning strikes are simultaneous according to an observer standing on the ground, they may be successive according to an observer moving past on a train. Both observers are (empirically) equally correct.

The relativity of simultaneity has been used to argue against the A-theory (there is no absolute "now") and therefore against divine temporality (God could not be present to a single moment if there is no such single moment). Craig's neo-Lorentzian response is that there is a privileged frame; it is just empirically inaccessible. God, Craig argues, is the observer in the privileged frame, and His "now" is the absolute now that other observers cannot directly detect.³⁷ The author adopts this response in chapter 31. The alternative — that relativity has decisively disproved the A-theory — is a significant overreach from the physics.

S

Sempiternity

Sempiternity (from the Latin semper, "always," and aeternus, "eternal") is the doctrine that God exists through all time, without beginning or end. Sempiternity is sometimes called "everlasting duration" or "omnitemporality," and it stands in contrast to atemporality. On the sempiternal view, God has always existed, will always exist, and experiences the passage of time along with His creatures — though He is not temporal in the limited, finite sense that creatures are.

Sempiternity is the preferred term in much of the recent analytic literature on divine temporality. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, and Alan Padgett have all defended versions of the sempiternal view. The author's position is essentially a form of qualified sempiternity: God is everlasting, experiences real temporal succession, and has never failed to exist — but His temporality is grounded in His own Trinitarian life (so pre-creation divine time is different in kind from created clock-time), and His temporal experience includes transcendent access to all of time.³⁸

Simple Foreknowledge

Simple foreknowledge is the view that God knows the future directly — not by decreeing it, not by deducing it from middle knowledge of counterfactuals, but by a kind of direct "seeing" of what will actually occur. On this view, God knows that Peter will deny Christ three times because Peter will, in fact, deny Christ three times, and God's omniscience extends to all actual events, including those future to us. Simple foreknowledge affirms both the reality of libertarian free will (creatures choose what they choose) and the exhaustive scope of divine knowledge (God knows what they will choose).³⁹

The standard objection to simple foreknowledge is the "explanatory uselessness" objection: if God's knowledge of the future is simply a "readout" of what will in fact occur, it seems useless for providential purposes, since God cannot use foreknowledge to change the future He foreknows. The author's response, developed in chapter 25, is that the explanatory uselessness objection underestimates what a God with transcendent temporal access can do. Because God sees the actual future and the actual past and the actual present as a single integrated reality, He can providentially arrange the present in light of the future He foresees — not because He determines the future, but because His present action is responsive to the full shape of creaturely history.

Substance Dualism

Substance dualism is the metaphysical view that human beings are composed of two distinct substances: a physical body and an immaterial soul or mind. The soul and body are deeply and intimately united in this life, but they are not identical; the soul can, in principle, survive the death of the body. Substance dualism is the anthropology of Plato, Augustine, Descartes, and much of the Christian tradition. It stands opposed to physicalism (the view that human beings are purely physical) and to various forms of monism.

Substance dualism belongs in this glossary because it is essential for a coherent Christian doctrine of the intermediate state and because it connects to the near-death experience data treated in chapters 33 and 34. John Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting remains the best single biblical and theological defense of a "holistic" substance dualism that does justice to both the unity of the person and the survival of the soul at death.⁴⁰ The NDE literature — van Lommel, Greyson, Long — provides striking empirical data consistent with substance dualism, including veridical perceptions reported during cardiac arrest when brain function is absent or severely compromised.⁴¹ The relevance for the God-and-time question is that the intermediate state involves conscious disembodied existence in a temporal mode — which suggests that time, at some level, is not reducible to physical processes.

Substantival Theory of Time

The substantival theory of time (sometimes called "absolute" or "container" theory) holds that time exists in its own right, independently of any events that might take place within it. Time is a kind of substance — a container — in which events happen. The classic proponent is Isaac Newton, whose Principia famously distinguishes "absolute, true, and mathematical time" (which "flows equably without relation to anything external") from "relative, apparent, and common time" (which is measured by motions and clocks). The rival view is the relational theory (see above), associated with Leibniz.

Substantival time poses a theological difficulty: if time is a container in which even God exists, then God is dependent on time, which threatens aseity. For this reason, many theologically motivated defenders of divine temporality prefer a relational theory. The author of this book takes an intermediate position: the sense in which God is "in" time is not the substantival container sense. Divine time is grounded in God's own being, not in a container external to Him. But God's temporal relations to creatures do involve measurable clock-time at the creaturely level, and at that level the substantival vs. relational debate becomes empirically and theologically live.⁴²

T

Temporal Becoming

Temporal becoming is the process by which events that were future become present and then pass into the past. On the A-theory, temporal becoming is an objective, mind-independent feature of reality — things really do come into being and pass away. On the B-theory, temporal becoming is an illusion generated by consciousness; reality is a static four-dimensional block, and "becoming" is just the way the block appears from within. The reality or unreality of temporal becoming is thus one of the central questions in the philosophy of time.

Temporal becoming is crucial for Christian theology. Creation is a becoming — the world comes into being from nothing. The Incarnation is a becoming — the eternal Word becomes flesh (John 1:14). The resurrection, the new creation, the final consummation — all are becomings, and all involve a real before-and-after structure. R. T. Mullins has argued that a view of time that denies real temporal becoming cannot do justice to these central Christian doctrines.⁴³ The author agrees, and the full argument is developed in chapters 17, 21, 24, and 27.

Time Dilation

Time dilation is the empirically confirmed phenomenon in Einstein's special and general theories of relativity whereby clocks moving relative to an observer, or clocks in stronger gravitational fields, run more slowly than clocks at rest or in weaker fields. A classic thought experiment: two twins are separated; one remains on Earth while the other travels at near-light speed to a distant star and returns. When they reunite, the traveling twin has aged much less than the one who stayed home. Time dilation is not an illusion; it has been confirmed by atomic clocks on aircraft and by the operation of the Global Positioning System, which must correct for both special-relativistic and general-relativistic effects.

Time dilation is sometimes invoked in the God-and-time debate as evidence that time is "relative" in a deeper metaphysical sense — that there is no absolute time, and therefore no coherent notion of divine temporal experience. The response, which the author endorses (see chapter 31 and Neo-Lorentzian Interpretation), is that time dilation is a feature of measurement and of physical processes within the universe, and does not decide the deeper metaphysical question of whether there is an absolute now. Time dilation also offers a helpful analogy (not an argument) for how temporal experience can be qualitatively different for different observers, a theme that recurs in the discussion of near-death experiences in chapter 33.

Tota Simul

"Tota simul" (Latin for "all at once") is a phrase from Boethius's celebrated definition of eternity in the Consolation of Philosophy: aeternitas igitur est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio — "eternity, therefore, is the complete possession all at once of illimitable life."⁴⁴ The phrase is meant to capture what distinguishes divine eternity from mere everlasting duration. God does not have His life piecemeal, bit by bit, as creatures do; He possesses it entirely and simultaneously, in a single, eternal "now." The tota simul became the standard characterization of divine eternity in the medieval West, taken up by Anselm, Aquinas, and many others.

Everything turns, theologically, on whether the tota simul is coherent. Critics — including Mullins, Craig, Wolterstorff, and the author — argue that it is not. How can a single, partless, timeless "now" contain the whole of illimitable life? Is not "life" itself an inherently temporal notion, involving succession of thought, decision, and relation? And if the tota simul is really atemporal, how can it "contain" the creation of the world, the Incarnation of the Son, and the last judgment — events that the biblical authors clearly treat as real temporal occurrences?⁴⁵ The tota simul is the crown jewel of classical timelessness, and the author's case for dynamic divine temporality is, at its heart, a case against the coherence of the tota simul.

Transcendent Temporal Access

"Transcendent temporal access" is the term the author uses to name the distinctive capacity that God has, as a temporal being, to access and know all moments of time — past, present, and future — in a way that creatures cannot. Creatures, being finite and temporally situated, experience only the present and remember only the past; the future is genuinely unknown to them. God, being infinite and sovereign over His creation, is not limited in this way. He experiences His own temporal life sequentially (as the perichoretic Trinitarian life unfolds) but He has access to the whole of creaturely time — every event, every thought, every choice — with perfect comprehensiveness.

Transcendent temporal access is the conceptual bridge between divine temporality and exhaustive foreknowledge. It allows the author to affirm both (a) the A-theory of time, on which the future is not yet ontologically on par with the present, and (b) exhaustive divine foreknowledge, on which God knows every future event with absolute certainty. The capacity is unique to God and flows from His nature as creator and as the ground of temporal reality. The concept is developed most fully in chapter 25, but it runs through the whole of Parts V and VI. A helpful (if imperfect) analogy: God's relation to creaturely time is something like a reader's relation to a novel — the reader can turn to any page at will, read the middle or the end first, re-read earlier pages in light of later ones — without in any way authoring the choices of the characters within the story. The analogy breaks down at several points (God is not a mere reader; He is the creator; the characters really are free), but it captures the core idea that God's temporal access transcends the creaturely limitation of being locked into the present.

U

Unmoved Mover

The "unmoved mover" is a concept from Aristotle's Metaphysics (Book XII/Lambda). Aristotle argued that the regress of movers in the cosmos must terminate in a first mover that is itself unmoved — a being that causes change without itself changing. The unmoved mover is pure act (actus purus), eternal, immaterial, and entirely self-contemplating; it moves the universe not by pushing it but by being the object of desire toward which the cosmos is drawn. Aquinas took over the unmoved mover and baptized it, making it one of the Five Ways to prove the existence of God.

The unmoved mover is relevant to this book because it is the philosophical ancestor of classical divine timelessness. A being that moves without moving, that causes without changing, cannot have a temporal life in any ordinary sense. The unmoved mover of Aristotle and Aquinas is the paradigmatically timeless deity, and the theological vocabulary of divine immutability, impassibility, simplicity, and eternity is deeply shaped by this Aristotelian inheritance.⁴⁶ The author argues (chapters 4, 11, and 30) that the biblical God is not the unmoved mover of Aristotle. The biblical God moves, responds, grieves, rejoices, and enters into history. That is a different being, with a different relation to time, and the two should not be quietly assimilated.

Coda: Terms and the Shape of the Argument

I hope this glossary is useful as a reference, but I also hope it is useful as a window into the shape of the argument the book is making. The terms defined here are not isolated bits of vocabulary. They form a network — a conceptual web — within which the debate about God and time unfolds. To affirm the A-theory of time is to be pushed toward presentism, which is to be pushed toward qualified immutability, which is to be pushed toward passibility, which is to be pushed toward divine temporality. To affirm classical simplicity is to be pushed toward strict immutability, which is to be pushed toward impassibility, which is to be pushed toward the tota simul, which is to be pushed toward atemporality.

Neither set of commitments is arrived at by inspection of a single biblical verse or a single philosophical argument. Each is a network of interlocking theological and philosophical convictions. The author's argument in this book is that one of these networks — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — fits the biblical data better, handles the philosophical objections better, and produces a more pastorally satisfying picture of God than the alternatives. The glossary you have just worked through is a map of that terrain. I hope it helps you navigate it.

Let me close with a few reflections on how the pieces fit together. The classical view of divine timelessness is a remarkable intellectual achievement. It draws together the Platonic intuition that the truly real is unchanging, the Aristotelian conviction that the first mover must be pure actuality, the Plotinian vision of the One beyond all temporal division, and the Augustinian meditation that eternity is not "time stretched out forever" but a different mode of being altogether. In the hands of Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas, this inheritance was shaped into a doctrine of remarkable elegance. God is pure act, without parts, without succession, without change — the "eternal now" who contains all temporal moments in a single gaze. For nearly a thousand years, this was simply what orthodox Christianity taught about God.

I have not arrived at my rejection of this view lightly. Anyone who studies the classical tradition at length will find it difficult to walk away. There is a grandeur to Aquinas's vision that is not easily replaced. And yet — and here is the crucial point — the classical view was never simply "the biblical view." It was always an attempt to reconcile the biblical portrait of a living, acting, responsive God with a set of philosophical commitments inherited from Hellenistic thought. The reconciliation was never comfortable. The prophets had to be interpreted as speaking accommodatively when they said God grieved. The Incarnation had to be interpreted as leaving the divine nature entirely unchanged. Prayer had to be reconstrued as a means God uses to bring about what He had eternally willed, rather than as a real conversation between creatures and their Creator. At every point, the biblical testimony had to bend to fit the philosophical framework. A good deal of ingenious theology was devoted to the task of bending.

The alternative, which this book defends, begins from the other end. It begins with the biblical portrait of God — a God who creates, who speaks, who acts, who grieves, who rejoices, who repents, who suffers, who becomes flesh, who dies, who rises, who will come again — and asks what philosophical framework best fits that portrait. The answer, I argue, is a form of divine temporality. Not the anemic temporality of process theology, which cannot affirm creation ex nihilo or the full deity of Christ. Not the incomplete temporality of open theism, which denies exhaustive foreknowledge. Not Craig's elegant but unstable hybrid, which asks a timeless God to become temporal. Rather: a genuine, full-blooded divine temporality, grounded in the dynamic Trinitarian life of Father, Son, and Spirit, made possible by the perichoretic communion of the three Persons, and extended to creation in the free act by which God brought the universe into being. A temporality that includes transcendent access to all of creaturely time, so that God's foreknowledge is preserved even as His temporal engagement with creatures is made real.

The vocabulary of this glossary is the vocabulary in which that argument is conducted. Some of the terms are weapons of the classical tradition (tota simul, impassibility, strict immutability). Some are weapons of the temporalist critique (passibility, qualified immutability, A-theory). Some are pieces of conceptual machinery that both sides use (perichoresis, simple foreknowledge, libertarian free will, substance dualism). And one — transcendent temporal access — is the author's own attempt to name the distinctive capacity that allows divine temporality and exhaustive foreknowledge to live together in peace.

If the reader leaves this glossary with nothing else, let them leave with this: the debate about God and time is not a debate about an abstract metaphysical curiosity. It is a debate about what kind of God we are talking about when we say the word "God." Is He the unmoved mover of Aristotle, or the living Father of the Lord Jesus Christ? Is He the tota simul of Boethius, or the "I AM" of the burning bush who tells Moses, "I have seen the affliction of my people... and I have come down to deliver them"? Is He the timeless watchmaker, or the temporal timemaker who walks with His people through their days? The vocabulary matters because the God it describes matters. And that, finally, is why this glossary is not merely a list of terms but a map of the territory in which the book's central argument unfolds.