Appendix B

Historical Survey Chart

Major Thinkers on God and Time from the Church Fathers to Today

A Comprehensive Map of the Conversation Across 2,400 Years

Introduction: How to Use This Appendix

One of the hardest things about studying the question of God and time is that the conversation stretches across more than two thousand years. The debate did not begin with the early church. It began with the Greeks — with Plato and Aristotle — and it has continued, in one form or another, through every major period of Western philosophy and Christian theology.¹ Anyone who wants to understand where the debate is today has to know, at least in outline, where it has been.

This appendix is designed as a kind of map. It surveys the major thinkers who have contributed to the God-and-time question, lists their basic positions, names their key works, and offers a brief assessment from the standpoint of the position defended in this book — namely, dynamic divine temporality with transcendent temporal access. My goal is not to settle every interpretive question about every thinker. Some of these figures (Augustine, Aquinas, Barth) have generated enormous secondary literatures, and scholars continue to debate what they actually taught. My goal is more modest. I want to give the reader a working sense of the landscape, so that when I cite Boethius or Pannenberg or Mullins in the main chapters, the reader has some frame of reference.²

The appendix is organized chronologically and falls into four broad sections: (1) the ancient Greek background, (2) the patristic and medieval period, (3) the Reformation through the early modern period, and (4) the contemporary discussion. Within each section, I provide a summary chart followed by a brief narrative entry on each thinker. Readers who want only the bird's-eye view can read the charts alone. Readers who want a little more context can read the narrative entries. And readers who want the full argument will find it in the main chapters of the book, to which I cross-reference throughout.

Before we begin, a word about categories. Throughout this appendix I classify thinkers as holding one of four main positions: timelessness, temporality, hybrid, or other. A timelessness view holds that God exists entirely outside of time — no succession, no before and after, no duration. A temporality view holds that God experiences real sequence and succession; whether that temporality is beginningless or generated by creation varies among thinkers. A hybrid view holds that God is timeless in one respect (say, without creation) and temporal in another (say, with creation). And "other" covers positions that do not fit cleanly into these three — process theology, for example, or views that reconstruct the concept of eternity in ways that resist simple classification.³

One more preliminary point is worth making. Some readers may be surprised to find that I include figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus in a chart on Christian thinkers on God and time. Why include pagans? The answer is simple: the Christian conversation about divine eternity did not happen in a vacuum. The vocabulary and conceptual framework that the church fathers inherited came largely from the Greek philosophical tradition, and we cannot understand what the fathers were doing without understanding what they were reacting to and what they were adapting. Plato's Timaeus shaped Augustine whether Augustine realized it or not. Aristotle's Physics shaped Aquinas explicitly. Plotinus's Enneads shaped Boethius almost word for word. If we want to understand the Christian tradition on God and time, we have to know the Greek background that the Christian tradition was working with, working from, and sometimes working against.

A related clarification: my goal in this appendix is not to evaluate the overall Christian faithfulness of any of these thinkers. Some of the figures I list here (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Whitehead, Hartshorne) are not Christians at all. Others (Kant, Schleiermacher) are Christians whose broader theology I would not endorse. My interest in this appendix is narrowly focused on what each thinker contributed to the specific question of God's relationship to time. A thinker can make a genuine contribution to a particular question without my endorsing everything else they believed.

Part One: The Ancient Greek Background

The first thing to notice about the Christian debate over God and time is that it did not begin with Christians. It began with Greeks. The categories of "eternity" and "time" that the church fathers inherited were forged in Athens, not in Jerusalem.⁴ This is not, by itself, a problem. Christians have always used the best philosophical tools available to them in order to articulate the faith. But it does mean that when we read an early Christian thinker saying that God is "eternal," we need to ask: eternal in which sense? The Platonic sense of timeless, changeless being? The Aristotelian sense of everlasting duration? Or the biblical sense of olam and aiōn, which we examined in Chapter 3?

This section surveys the three Greek thinkers whose influence on the Christian tradition has been deepest and most lasting: Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus.

Plato (c. 428–348 BC)

Plato gave the Western world its classical definition of eternity. In the Timaeus, he distinguished sharply between the realm of unchanging being — the world of the Forms, which is eternal in the sense of being utterly outside time — and the realm of becoming, which is the temporal world of change and succession. Time itself, Plato famously said, is "a moving image of eternity." Eternity is the real thing; time is its imitation, a kind of second-best reflection of the changeless perfection of the Forms.⁵

This distinction proved enormously influential. When later Christian thinkers wanted to say that God was unchanging, perfect, and not bound by time, they reached for the Platonic vocabulary. The problem, as we will see, is that the Platonic vision of eternity is not exactly the biblical vision. The God of Israel does not dwell in a static realm of Forms. He acts, speaks, repents, judges, and delivers His people in history. As Craig observes, the Platonic framework sets up a tension between changeless divine being and the God of Scripture that the Christian tradition has never entirely resolved.⁶

Assessment: Plato's timeless eternity is the philosophical seedbed from which the doctrine of divine timelessness grew. Whatever we make of that doctrine theologically, we should recognize that its deepest roots are Greek, not Hebrew. In my view, the Platonic framework is not an adequate vehicle for expressing the biblical portrait of God. It should be treated as one philosophical option among others, not as the default Christian position.

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

Aristotle's view of time is more complicated — and, in some ways, more congenial to the biblical portrait than Plato's. For Aristotle, time is not a separate reality but a feature of change: it is "the number of motion in respect of before and after." Where there is no change, there is no time.⁷ This is the seed of what philosophers today call the relational theory of time, which we examined in Chapter 24.

Aristotle's Prime Mover — the unmoved mover who is the cause of all motion — is not timeless in the strict Platonic sense. The Prime Mover exists everlastingly, in the sense that he has no beginning and no end, and his intellectual activity (thinking on thinking) goes on forever. But Aristotle does not say the Prime Mover is outside time in a Platonic sense. The Prime Mover is closer to what we would today call sempiternal than to what we would call timeless.⁸

Assessment: Aristotle's influence on the debate is double-edged. His relational theory of time provides philosophical resources for holding that God's pre-creation existence was either non-temporal (if there was no change) or temporal (if there was intra-Trinitarian activity). And his Prime Mover, while deeply different from the God of Scripture, is at least a temporal being rather than a strictly timeless one. Craig draws heavily on relational theories of time in defending his hybrid view, and I think this is one of Aristotle's more enduring philosophical contributions.⁹

Plotinus (c. 204–270 AD)

Plotinus is the great systematizer of Neoplatonism and, arguably, the figure who did the most to bequeath divine timelessness to the Christian tradition. In Enneads III.7, Plotinus offers an extended meditation on eternity and time. Eternity, for Plotinus, is the life of the Intellect (Nous) and ultimately of the One — a life without succession, without parts, without before and after. Time is the image of that eternal life as it unfolds in the realm of Soul. Time is thus a kind of falling away from eternity.¹⁰

Plotinus's definition of eternity as "the life which belongs to that which exists and is in being, all together and full, completely without extension or interval" would become, almost word for word, the basis for Boethius's famous definition many centuries later. When we hear Boethius say that eternity is "the complete possession all at once of illimitable life," we are hearing Plotinus in a Christian accent.¹¹

Assessment: Plotinus is the hidden giant of the divine timelessness tradition. His framework shaped Augustine, Boethius, and through them the entire medieval synthesis. Any serious critique of divine timelessness, therefore, eventually has to reckon with Plotinus. I agree with Mullins that the Plotinian vision is philosophically impressive but theologically deficient: it cannot accommodate the living, acting, responding God of Scripture without significant strain.¹²

Part Two: The Patristic and Medieval Period

The church fathers did not come to the God-and-time question as philosophical innocents. They came trained in Greek thought, and they brought those categories with them when they tried to articulate the Christian faith.¹³ As we move through this section, watch for two patterns. First, the earliest fathers (Irenaeus especially) tend to emphasize the God who acts in history — the God of narrative, of salvation, of real engagement with creation. Second, as we move into the fourth and fifth centuries, the Platonic framework tightens its grip, and the emphasis shifts from the God who acts to the God who eternally is.

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202)

Irenaeus stands near the beginning of sustained Christian theological reflection, and his engagement with the God-and-time question is driven not by Greek metaphysics but by the need to refute Gnosticism. The Gnostics tended to posit a hierarchy of aeons stretching between the true God and the material world — a kind of timeless spiritual realm from which time and matter had fallen. Irenaeus rejected this scheme. For Irenaeus, the one true God is the God who acts in history, who creates, who calls Abraham, who sends His Son, who will consummate all things in the end.¹⁴

Irenaeus does not develop a formal doctrine of divine eternity. But his entire theological orientation is toward what contemporary scholars call the economic life of God — the God who unfolds His purposes in and through history. As Mullins notes, the earliest fathers were generally less captive to Platonic timelessness than their later successors.¹⁵

Assessment: Irenaeus is a helpful reminder that the earliest Christian thinkers did not automatically identify the God of Scripture with the timeless One of Greek philosophy. His focus on the God who acts in history is closer, I think, to the biblical portrait than the later Platonizing synthesis.

Clement of Alexandria and Origen

Clement and Origen are the twin fathers of the Alexandrian theological tradition, and both are deeply Platonic in their philosophical sympathies. Clement explicitly identifies God as beyond time and change, drawing on Platonic categories to explain the divine transcendence. Origen, perhaps the most philosophically ambitious of the early fathers, develops a systematic theology in which God's eternity is understood as timeless and changeless, and creation is viewed as an eternal act of the divine will.¹⁶

Origen's picture is complicated by his controversial views about the pre-existence of souls and the eternity of creation itself, but for our purposes the key point is that with Origen, we see the Platonic timelessness framework becoming firmly established within Christian theology.

Assessment: Clement and Origen mark the decisive turn toward Platonic timelessness in Christian thought. This turn would be completed by Augustine.

The Cappadocians: Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa

The three great Cappadocian fathers — Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa — are primarily remembered for their contributions to Trinitarian theology. But their handling of divine eternity is important as well. All three accept some version of divine timelessness, but they handle the doctrine with considerable sophistication and often in ways that resist a purely Platonic reading.¹⁷

Gregory of Nyssa is especially interesting. His doctrine of epektasis — the endless progress of the soul into God — suggests that even the eternal life of the blessed involves a kind of dynamic movement rather than static repose. Some contemporary scholars have argued that this opens the door to a more dynamic conception of divine eternity as well. Whether Gregory himself would have drawn that conclusion is disputed.¹⁸

Assessment: The Cappadocians affirm divine timelessness but with a sensitivity to the dynamic character of the divine life that is often missing from later formulations. They are worth attention from anyone interested in whether there are resources within the patristic tradition for a more dynamic doctrine of eternity.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430)

Augustine is the great watershed in the Christian doctrine of eternity. In Confessions XI and City of God XI, he offers what becomes the classical Western account of divine timelessness. God does not exist in time; rather, time exists within (or is created by) God. God sees all times — past, present, and future — in a single, undivided act of knowledge. God is without succession, without parts, without change.¹⁹

Augustine is also the author of the most famous single line ever written about time: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know." His psychological account of time — time as a distension of the mind — has been enormously influential on both philosophy and theology.²⁰

Augustine's account has many virtues. It preserves divine transcendence. It protects divine knowledge from the vagaries of temporal change. It offers a powerful response to the Manichaean and pagan critics who puzzled over the idea of God creating "in time." But, as Mullins argues at length, it also generates serious problems when set against core Christian doctrines: How can a timeless God truly create? How can a timeless God become incarnate? How can a timeless God truly respond to prayer?²¹

Assessment: Augustine is the architect of classical divine timelessness in the West, and any serious engagement with the tradition has to engage with him. I have deep respect for Augustine as a theologian and pastor. But on the question of God and time, I believe his Platonic commitments led him to adopt a framework that cannot finally accommodate the biblical portrait of God.

Boethius (c. 477–524)

Boethius, writing in prison while awaiting execution, gave us the definition of eternity that would dominate Western theology for the next thousand years: "Eternity is the complete possession all at once of illimitable life" (interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio). In Book V of the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius uses this definition to solve what he takes to be the puzzle of divine foreknowledge and human freedom: God does not foresee future events as future; rather, God sees all events in a single timeless present.²²

Boethius's definition is essentially Plotinus in Latin dress, and its influence on subsequent theology — especially on Aquinas — is enormous. But its philosophical coherence is contested. How can something be "all at once" and also be "life" in any meaningful sense? Does not life require some kind of successive experience? These are questions that Mullins, Craig, and others have pressed against the Boethian tradition.²³

Assessment: Boethius's definition of eternity is elegant and philosophically ambitious. It is also, I think, ultimately incoherent. The idea of "life" without sequence or succession is, on inspection, empty. Boethius gave us a beautiful formula, but the formula cannot be cashed out in concrete terms without reducing God's life to something that is not really a life at all.

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109)

Anselm inherits the Augustinian-Boethian framework and refines it with characteristic precision. In the Monologion and Proslogion, Anselm argues that God exists in no place and no time, yet in a sense is present to every place and every time. His formulation of the no-place, no-time doctrine of divine transcendence is carefully qualified: God is not excluded from temporal events, but rather transcends them in a way that makes Him present to all of them at once.²⁴

Anselm's account is recognizably Augustinian but with greater attention to modal logic and to what we would today call the logic of transcendence. His famous "greatest conceivable being" argument (the ontological argument) is closely tied to his doctrine of eternity: a being whose existence is timelessly necessary is greater than one whose existence is merely temporal.

Assessment: Anselm is the most philosophically careful medieval defender of timelessness before Aquinas. I disagree with his conclusion but respect his rigor. His argument that timeless existence is a "greater" form of existence than temporal existence assumes a Platonic evaluation that the biblical portrait of God does not obviously support.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

Aquinas is, for many, the paradigmatic defender of divine timelessness in the Christian tradition. In Summa Theologiae I.10, he develops an extended account of divine eternity that draws on Boethius's definition while refining it through an Aristotelian metaphysical framework. God's eternity is the nunc stans — the "standing now" — in contrast to the nunc fluens of created time.²⁵

Aquinas's picture has several distinctive features. First, he insists that eternity is a single, simple act — God's entire life "all at once." Second, he argues that God's knowledge of temporal events is not of them as past, present, or future, but as simultaneously present to God's eternal gaze. Third, he uses his doctrine of divine simplicity to reinforce the claim that God cannot have temporal parts. God is purely actual, and purely actual being is not subject to the succession that characterizes temporal existence.

Aquinas's account is brilliant, but it is also at the root of many of the most serious problems in the divine timelessness tradition. How can a purely actual, simple, timeless God freely create a temporal world? How can such a God become incarnate? How can such a God genuinely respond to prayer? These questions, pressed sharply by Mullins and others, have driven much of the contemporary rejection of divine timelessness.²⁶

Assessment: Aquinas is the high-water mark of the Western timelessness tradition. I find his account philosophically impressive and theologically inadequate in equal measure. The pressure points that Aquinas manages with extraordinary skill are nonetheless pressure points that, in my judgment, the tradition cannot finally bear.

John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308)

Scotus accepts divine timelessness but modifies the Thomistic framework in several important ways. Most notably, he develops a more robust doctrine of divine freedom, rejecting what he saw as the Aristotelian necessitarianism of some Thomistic formulations. God is timelessly free; His eternal act is not determined by anything outside Himself. Scotus's doctrine of the synchronic contingency of divine willing — the idea that God's eternal will could have been otherwise — became influential in later medieval and early modern theology.²⁷

Assessment: Scotus is a reminder that the medieval timelessness tradition was not monolithic. His emphasis on divine freedom and contingency pushes against some of the more rigidly necessitarian tendencies in Aquinas. But his basic framework remains within the Platonic-Augustinian inheritance.

Part Three: Reformation Through the Modern Era

The Reformation did not, initially, disrupt the medieval consensus on divine timelessness. Luther and Calvin both inherited and largely accepted the Augustinian-Thomistic framework, even as they revised much else in medieval theology. The real disruption came from another direction: the scientific revolution. Newton's absolute time, Leibniz's relational time, and Kant's transcendental idealism each posed, in different ways, fresh challenges to the classical doctrine. By the nineteenth century, thinkers like Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard were beginning to rethink divine eternity in ways that would flower into the temporalist theologies of the twentieth century.²⁸

Martin Luther and John Calvin

Luther and Calvin are often treated as revolutionaries, and in many ways they were. But on the question of God and time, both largely follow the medieval consensus. Luther accepts divine timelessness as the framework within which to make sense of divine foreknowledge — a topic he treats at length in The Bondage of the Will, where he defends divine determinism in part on the grounds that God's timeless knowledge of future events is absolutely certain. Calvin, in the Institutes, similarly presupposes divine timelessness while emphasizing God's sovereign ordination of all events.²⁹

Assessment: The Reformers are important for our purposes mainly as data points showing how deeply entrenched the timelessness tradition had become by the sixteenth century. They did not set out to rethink divine eternity, and they did not do so.

Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

Newton is, in some ways, the most theologically consequential figure of the early modern period. In the General Scholium to the Principia, Newton famously argued that space is God's sensorium and that absolute time is the medium of divine existence. God is not timeless; rather, God exists eternally in the sense of enduring through all of absolute time. This is a frankly temporal doctrine, and it marks one of the first major departures from the medieval consensus within mainstream Christian thought.³⁰

Newton's picture has been criticized from many directions. Leibniz, in his famous correspondence with Clarke, attacked Newtonian absolute space and time as theologically inadequate. And the rise of Einsteinian relativity in the twentieth century eventually undermined the physical basis of Newton's doctrine. But as a theological move, Newton's affirmation of divine temporality opened a door that had been largely closed for a millennium.

Assessment: Newton is a figure of enormous importance for the God-and-time debate. He showed that a major Christian thinker could reject divine timelessness while still holding a high doctrine of God. I disagree with Newton's identification of time as an absolute "container" independent of events, but I agree with his basic conviction that God is genuinely temporal.³¹

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)

Leibniz, famously a rival of Newton, defended a thoroughly relational theory of time against Newton's substantival absolutism. For Leibniz, time is not a container but the order of succession among events. On Leibniz's framework, time is a feature of the created order; God, as the necessary being, exists in a way that transcends temporal succession.³²

Leibniz's relational theory has been enormously influential on subsequent philosophy of time. Craig, among others, adopts a broadly Leibnizian relational framework in defending his hybrid view that God was timeless "sans creation" (before creation) and becomes temporal with creation.³³

Assessment: Leibniz's relational theory of time is philosophically attractive and continues to be defended today. My disagreement with the purely relational account is that it appears to leave no room for divine temporality prior to creation — which, as DeWeese and Mullins both argue, is a problem once we take seriously the Trinitarian character of the divine life.³⁴

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Kant's contribution to the God-and-time question is indirect but profound. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that time is not a feature of reality in itself but a form of human intuition — one of the structures through which we experience the world. God, on Kant's account, cannot be known to be timeless or temporal, because the very categories of time do not apply to things in themselves.³⁵

Kant's transcendental idealism decisively reshaped the nineteenth-century conversation about God. On the one hand, it seemed to support divine timelessness, since time was now seen as a merely human category. On the other hand, it raised serious questions about whether we could meaningfully say anything about God's relation to time.

Assessment: Kant's framework has not aged well. Contemporary philosophy of time has largely moved past transcendental idealism. Still, the Kantian legacy of treating time as a subjective form of experience rather than an objective feature of reality continues to influence some contemporary defenses of divine timelessness.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)

Schleiermacher, the father of modern liberal theology, maintained a doctrine of divine timelessness grounded in his broader account of God as the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence. For Schleiermacher, God's eternity is not an abstract metaphysical property but a corollary of God's absolute dependence-grounding role: because God is the ultimate ground of all finite reality, He cannot be subject to the temporal limitations of that reality.³⁶

Assessment: Schleiermacher's account of divine eternity is more nuanced than traditional timelessness, but it ultimately remains within the classical framework. His real contribution to the debate is methodological: by grounding theological claims in religious experience, Schleiermacher opened the door for later temporalists (like Barth and Moltmann) to argue that the God we actually encounter in Scripture and in Christian experience is a God who acts in time.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Kierkegaard's treatment of time and eternity is famously complex and often elliptical. In Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard develops an account of "the Moment" (Øjeblikket) — the point at which eternity breaks into time. The Incarnation, for Kierkegaard, is the decisive Moment: the eternal God entering time, becoming temporal without ceasing to be eternal.³⁷

Kierkegaard does not resolve the metaphysical puzzle of how a timeless God can become temporal; rather, he insists that the Incarnation is precisely the paradox that breaks our conceptual categories. His account has deeply influenced twentieth-century Christology, especially the theologies of Barth, Brunner, and Moltmann.

Assessment: Kierkegaard is a bridge figure. He still operates within the classical timelessness tradition, but his emphasis on the Moment as the point where eternity enters time opens the conceptual space for a more dynamic doctrine of divine eternity. Whether his account is finally coherent — whether the "paradox" is a real illumination or simply a contradiction — is a matter of ongoing debate.

Part Four: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

The twentieth century saw the most dramatic reconfiguration of the God-and-time debate since the patristic era. Einstein's relativity theory (1905, 1915) upended the Newtonian picture of absolute time. Process theology, developed by Whitehead and Hartshorne, offered a radical reconstruction of divine eternity in which God Himself is in process with the world. Dialectical theology, especially in Barth, rethought eternity as the divine fullness of time rather than as timelessness. And in the last third of the century, analytic philosophy of religion took up the God-and-time question with renewed rigor, producing an extensive literature that continues to shape the debate today.³⁸

This section surveys the major twentieth- and twenty-first-century contributors. It is the longest section of this appendix, because the contemporary conversation is where most readers of this book will encounter the debate most directly.

Karl Barth (1886–1968)

Barth's treatment of divine eternity in Church Dogmatics II/1 is one of the most original developments in twentieth-century theology. Barth rejects both the classical Augustinian timelessness tradition and a straightforward temporalism. Instead, he argues that God's eternity is the "fullness of time" — eternity as the full, undivided possession of pre-time, present time, and post-time. God's eternity is neither timelessness nor mere duration, but the living unity of all times in the divine life itself.³⁹

Barth's account is deliberately dialectical. He wants to affirm both God's transcendence of time (God is not bound by creaturely temporality) and God's genuine engagement with time (God really acts in history, supremely in the Incarnation). The resulting doctrine is difficult to classify in the standard categories. Some contemporary scholars read Barth as a crypto-temporalist; others read him as defending a sophisticated version of timelessness.⁴⁰

Assessment: Barth is a major figure in the twentieth-century reconfiguration of the debate. His emphasis on the dynamic, living character of divine eternity — eternity as the fullness of time rather than as its negation — resonates with the position defended in this book. Where I differ from Barth is in seeking a more analytically precise account of what dynamic divine eternity involves.

Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne

Process theology, developed by the mathematician-philosopher Whitehead and extended by Hartshorne, offers the most radical temporalist reconstruction of the doctrine of God in the twentieth century. On the process account, God has two poles: a "primordial" pole (the abstract possibilities) and a "consequent" pole (God's ongoing experience of the actual world). God is genuinely in process with the world, growing in experience and responsiveness as history unfolds.⁴¹

Process theology makes several moves that set it apart from classical theism. God is not the creator of the world ex nihilo; rather, God and the world are mutually constitutive. God does not have exhaustive knowledge of the future, because the future is genuinely open. And God's power is persuasive rather than coercive: God lures the world toward greater complexity and love but does not unilaterally determine outcomes.

Assessment: Process theology gets some things right — especially its emphasis on divine responsiveness and the reality of temporal becoming. But its rejection of creation ex nihilo, its denial of exhaustive foreknowledge, and its diminution of divine sovereignty put it well outside the bounds of historic Christian orthodoxy. Chapter 10 engages process theology in detail and concludes, with Craig and Mullins, that it is a bridge too far.

Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014)

Pannenberg develops a distinctively future-oriented doctrine of God. For Pannenberg, God's reality is most fully disclosed not in the past or the present but in the future — in the eschatological consummation of all things. This future-orientation reshapes the doctrine of divine eternity: God's eternity is not the static timelessness of Augustine but the dynamic fullness of the future breaking in upon the present.⁴²

Pannenberg's account has affinities with both Barth (the fullness of time) and process theology (the future-orientation), but remains within the bounds of classical Christian orthodoxy by affirming creation ex nihilo and God's essential aseity.

Assessment: Pannenberg is an important twentieth-century temporalist who deserves more attention in the analytic literature than he has typically received. His future-oriented eschatology coheres well with the dynamic temporality I defend in this book.

Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024)

Moltmann develops a thoroughly Trinitarian temporalism. For Moltmann, the doctrine of the Trinity requires that we understand God's eternity as a living, dynamic communion of persons — not as the static simplicity of classical theism. Moltmann's doctrine of the "crucified God" emphasizes God's genuine engagement with temporal suffering, and his eschatology sees the coming of God as the consummation of a genuinely temporal divine history.⁴³

Assessment: Moltmann is one of the most influential advocates of divine temporality in twentieth-century continental theology. His Trinitarian grounding of divine temporality anticipates the argument developed more rigorously by Mullins in the analytic tradition. Chapter 26 of this book takes up the Trinitarian grounding of divine temporality in detail, drawing on both Moltmann and Mullins.

Robert Jenson (1930–2017)

Jenson's Systematic Theology develops a narrative doctrine of God in which God's eternity is identified with the biblical narrative itself. God is the God who is identified by the story of Israel and Jesus — not a timeless substrate behind the story, but the living protagonist of the story. Jenson draws heavily on patristic, Lutheran, and Barthian sources.⁴⁴

Assessment: Jenson's narrative approach offers important theological resources for a temporalist doctrine of God, though his identification of God's being with the biblical narrative raises questions about divine aseity that I do not think he fully answers. Still, his emphasis on the God who is identified by temporal narrative is theologically powerful.

Oscar Cullmann (1902–1999)

Cullmann's Christ and Time (1946) argued that the biblical view of time is linear rather than cyclical (the Greek view) and that the Christian doctrine of eternity should be understood as unlimited time rather than timelessness. Cullmann drew heavily on the Hebrew word olam and the Greek word aiōn to argue that the biblical writers did not think of God's eternity as outside time but as stretching endlessly through time.⁴⁵

Assessment: Cullmann's linguistic argument has been sharply criticized (most notably by Barr — see below), but his broader thesis that the biblical portrait of God is that of a God who acts in time, not one who exists outside it, remains important. Chapter 3 of this book engages with Cullmann and Barr extensively on the exegetical question.

James Barr (1924–2006)

Barr's Biblical Words for Time (1962) offered a sharp methodological critique of Cullmann and others who had argued from word-studies of olam and aiōn to the theological conclusion that the biblical God is temporal. Barr's famous warning against the "illegitimate totality transfer" — the fallacy of reading every possible meaning of a word into every instance of its use — reshaped the field of biblical lexical semantics.⁴⁶

Assessment: Barr's methodological cautions are well-taken and have been widely accepted. They do not, however, overturn the broader claim that the Bible portrays God as acting in time. That claim can be defended on exegetical grounds that do not rely on illegitimate word-studies — as I argue at length in Chapters 16–23.

Nelson Pike (1930–2010)

Pike's God and Timelessness (1970) is a watershed in the analytic philosophy of religion. Pike subjected the classical doctrine of divine timelessness to sustained analytic scrutiny and concluded that the doctrine faces serious philosophical difficulties — particularly in relation to the problem of foreknowledge and human freedom, and in relation to God's ability to act in the world. Pike's book catalyzed the contemporary debate and set the terms within which most subsequent analytic discussion has proceeded.⁴⁷

Assessment: Pike is, in many ways, the analytic father of contemporary temporalism. His arguments are not always decisive, but he demonstrated conclusively that the classical doctrine cannot be maintained without careful philosophical defense against serious objections.

Richard Swinburne (b. 1934)

Swinburne is one of the most prominent defenders of divine temporality in analytic philosophy of religion. In The Coherence of Theism and elsewhere, Swinburne argues that God must be temporal because genuine agency, knowledge, and response require temporal existence. A timeless God could not create freely, could not respond to prayer, and could not engage in genuine give-and-take with creatures. Swinburne's position is "unqualified temporality" — God has always existed in time, and time has no beginning.⁴⁸

Assessment: Swinburne's arguments are essentially the arguments I defend in Chapter 7 of this book. My position differs from Swinburne's mainly in the addition of what I call "transcendent temporal access" — the thesis that while God is genuinely temporal, He is not limited to experiencing only the present moment as creatures are.

Nicholas Wolterstorff (b. 1932)

Wolterstorff's essay "God Everlasting" (1975) is one of the foundational texts of contemporary temporalism. Wolterstorff argues that the biblical God is a God of history — a God who acts, responds, and enters into real relationship with His creatures — and that a timeless God cannot be such a God. His contribution to God and Time: Four Views (2001) extends and refines this argument.⁴⁹

Assessment: Wolterstorff's position is the closest among major contemporary thinkers to the position I defend in this book. Where I differ is, again, in the addition of transcendent temporal access — the claim that God's temporal experience is not limited in the way creaturely temporal experience is.

Paul Helm (b. 1940)

Helm is the most prominent contemporary defender of divine timelessness. In Eternal God (1st ed. 1988; 2nd ed. 2010) and in his contribution to God and Time: Four Views, Helm argues that the classical doctrine of divine timelessness, properly understood, is both philosophically coherent and theologically necessary. He defends the doctrine against the major temporalist objections — the objections from creation, from divine action, from the Incarnation, and from the problem of foreknowledge.⁵⁰

Assessment: Helm is the most formidable contemporary opponent of the position I defend. His arguments are careful, nuanced, and theologically serious. I engage with Helm extensively in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book. While I ultimately find his defense of divine timelessness unsuccessful, I take his arguments with the utmost seriousness.

Brian Leftow (b. 1956)

Leftow's Time and Eternity (1991) offers the most philosophically sophisticated defense of divine timelessness in the analytic tradition. Leftow develops an intricate account of God's eternity in relation to the various moments of created time, drawing on the Thomistic tradition but elaborating it with the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics.⁵¹

Assessment: Leftow is probably the most technically impressive defender of divine timelessness in contemporary philosophy of religion. Mullins engages Leftow extensively in The End of the Timeless God, and I follow Mullins in concluding that the Leftovian defense, for all its technical brilliance, ultimately fails to solve the core problems that have always faced the timelessness tradition.⁵²

Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann

Stump and Kretzmann's 1981 essay "Eternity" developed the influential concept of "ET-simultaneity" — an analogical notion of simultaneity between eternity and temporal events that is meant to allow a timeless God to be genuinely present to every temporal moment. The account has been enormously influential and extensively debated.⁵³

Assessment: The Stump-Kretzmann proposal is one of the most ambitious defenses of divine timelessness in recent decades. Mullins offers a sustained critique in The End of the Timeless God, arguing that ET-simultaneity is either incoherent or reduces to a form of temporalism. I find that critique persuasive.⁵⁴

Katherin Rogers (b. 1955)

Rogers defends an Anselmian version of divine timelessness, drawing heavily on her historical and systematic work on Anselm. Her position is similar to Leftow's in its broad outlines but more self-consciously rooted in the Anselmian tradition.⁵⁵

Assessment: Rogers is a careful and historically informed defender of timelessness. I engage with her arguments alongside those of Helm and Leftow in Chapter 5.

Alan Padgett (b. 1955)

Padgett's contribution to the debate is his doctrine of "relative timelessness" — the view that God is "timeless" in the sense of being lord over time but "temporal" in the sense of being genuinely in time. Padgett's position, developed in God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (1992) and in his contribution to God and Time: Four Views, is sometimes classified as a hybrid view.⁵⁶

Assessment: Padgett's "lordship over time" motif is suggestive and resonates with the notion of transcendent temporal access I defend. Where I differ is in my unwillingness to use the word "timeless" for any aspect of God's relationship to time. I think the word invites confusion, and I prefer to speak of God as temporal with a unique mode of temporal transcendence.

William Lane Craig (b. 1949)

Craig is one of the most influential contemporary figures in the debate. His position — timeless sans creation, temporal with creation — is a genuinely novel hybrid that has been widely discussed. Craig's work is notable for its engagement with contemporary physics (especially relativity theory) and for its integration of philosophy of time, philosophy of religion, and biblical theology.⁵⁷

Craig's position has several distinctive features. First, he defends a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of relativity that preserves absolute simultaneity and therefore a form of the A-theory. Second, he argues that prior to creation, God existed timelessly because there was no change or succession to measure. Third, he argues that with the act of creation, God "enters" time and becomes temporal.⁵⁸

Assessment: Craig has done more than almost anyone to keep the God-and-time debate alive in evangelical circles. I agree with him on divine temporality after creation, on the A-theory, and on many points of biblical interpretation. Where I disagree with him — following Mullins — is on the "timeless sans creation" phase. I think the intra-Trinitarian relations generate temporality even without creation, and I think the transition from a timeless to a temporal state is philosophically problematic. Chapter 8 of this book engages Craig's hybrid view in detail.⁵⁹

Garrett J. DeWeese (b. 1948)

DeWeese's God and the Nature of Time (2004) defends a thoroughgoing divine temporality grounded in a causal theory of time. For DeWeese, time is the order of causal relations, and because the intra-Trinitarian life involves causal relations (the Father begets the Son, etc.), there is temporality in the divine life even apart from creation. DeWeese calls his position omnitemporality.⁶⁰

Assessment: DeWeese's position is highly congenial to the one I defend in this book. His causal theory of time provides philosophical resources for articulating how God's pre-creation existence was genuinely temporal without involving the kind of measured, physical time that characterizes the created order. I engage DeWeese extensively in Chapters 7, 24, and 26.

Natalja Deng

Deng's God and Time (2019) in the Cambridge Elements series offers a concise and balanced survey of the major contemporary positions. Deng surveys the debate, identifies the main arguments on each side, and tentatively leans toward a temporalist conclusion.⁶¹

Assessment: Deng's volume is the best brief introduction to the contemporary analytic debate. I draw on it throughout this book as a touchstone for the state of the question.

R. T. Mullins

Ryan Mullins is, in my judgment, the most important contemporary defender of divine temporality in the analytic tradition. His The End of the Timeless God (2016) offers the most systematic and devastating critique of the divine timelessness tradition in recent philosophy of religion. Mullins argues that the classical doctrine fails on its own terms when tested against core Christian doctrines — creation, omniscience, and the Incarnation. His From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker (2025) extends this project into a comprehensive positive account of divine temporality, addressing the nature of time, God's responsibility for time, the structure of divine time, and the implications for Trinity, creation, providence, and afterlife. His God, Time, and the Incarnation (2021) applies the argument specifically to Christology.⁶²

Assessment: Mullins is the single most important conversation partner for this book. I agree with his overall case for divine temporality, his rejection of divine timelessness, his Trinitarian grounding of divine temporality, his critique of Craig's hybrid view, and his treatment of the Incarnation. Where my position extends beyond Mullins is in what I call "transcendent temporal access" — the thesis that while God is genuinely temporal, He is not limited to the creaturely present moment. Mullins focuses on establishing divine temporality as such; I build on his foundation to articulate how God's temporal experience transcends ordinary clock-time.⁶³

Michael C. Rea

Rea's God Inside Time: Providence and Human Will offers an analytic account of divine temporality focused especially on the doctrine of providence and the compatibility of divine temporality with meaningful human agency. Rea defends divine temporality as essential to a robust account of God's providential engagement with creation.⁶⁴

Assessment: Rea is an important ally in the contemporary defense of divine temporality. His focus on providence and human agency complements Mullins's focus on creation, omniscience, and Incarnation. Chapter 29 of this book draws on Rea extensively.

Luis R. Scott

Scott's The God of Time focuses on the question of divine foreknowledge and its compatibility with human freedom. Scott defends a temporalist position while rejecting open theism, arguing that God's unique ability to access all of time allows for exhaustive foreknowledge without the determination of future events.⁶⁵

Assessment: Scott's position on foreknowledge resonates closely with the position I defend in Chapter 25. We both want a robust doctrine of exhaustive divine foreknowledge that does not entail theological determinism and does not require the Molinist appeal to middle knowledge.

Open Theists: Pinnock, Boyd, Hasker, Sanders

Open theism is a view that emerged in evangelical theology in the 1980s and 1990s, primarily through the work of Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, William Hasker, John Sanders, and Richard Rice. Open theists share with divine temporalists the conviction that God is genuinely in time. But they go further, arguing that God does not know the future free choices of His creatures — because the future does not yet exist and is therefore not an object of knowledge.⁶⁶

Pinnock's Most Moved Mover is a theological defense of openness. Boyd's God of the Possible offers an accessible biblical defense. Hasker's God, Time, and Knowledge is the most philosophically rigorous defense. Sanders's The God Who Risks is the most extended systematic treatment.

Assessment: Open theism is a bridge too far. While I agree with the open theists on the basic claim that God is genuinely temporal and genuinely responsive to creatures, I cannot accept their denial of exhaustive divine foreknowledge. The biblical evidence for God's knowledge of future free choices is, in my judgment, too strong to be explained away. Chapter 9 of this book offers a detailed critique of open theism while also appreciating its insights.

James E. Dolezal

Dolezal's All That Is in God (2017) is a robust recent defense of classical theism, including classical divine simplicity, immutability, and timelessness. Dolezal argues that much contemporary evangelical theology has drifted from the classical tradition and needs to be recalled to it.⁶⁷

Assessment: Dolezal is an articulate contemporary voice for classical theism. I disagree with his position but appreciate his consistency: he recognizes, correctly, that classical simplicity and classical timelessness stand or fall together. Where I differ from Dolezal is in thinking that both should fall. Chapter 30 engages the classical theism revival in detail.

Part Five: A Closer Look at Related Debates

Before closing this appendix, I want to briefly note several related conversations that intersect with the God-and-time question. These conversations are treated at length elsewhere in the book, but a brief summary here helps situate the debate in its wider context.

The Passibility Debate

The question of whether God has genuine emotional responses is closely linked to the God-and-time question. A timeless God cannot, in any straightforward sense, genuinely respond to temporal events — because "response" implies that something happens, then God reacts. The classical tradition generally combined divine timelessness with divine impassibility, and Mullins has argued at length that the two doctrines stand or fall together.⁶⁸

Key contemporary voices on the passibility debate include Mullins (God and Emotion), David T. Lamb (The Emotions of God), Rob Lister, Eunsoo Kim, Paul Gavrilyuk (defending a qualified form of impassibility), and Thomas Weinandy (defending a more robust impassibilism). I treat this debate in depth in the companion volume The Heart of God and in Chapter 28 of the present book.

The Divine Simplicity Debate

Classical divine simplicity — the doctrine that God has no parts and no distinctions among His attributes — has enjoyed a significant revival in recent decades, especially through the work of Dolezal, Steven Duby, and others. Mullins, by contrast, has mounted a sustained critique of classical simplicity, arguing that it is incompatible with the Trinity, with creation, and with a range of other Christian doctrines.⁶⁹

The simplicity debate matters for the God-and-time question because classical simplicity typically entails timelessness: a being without any parts or internal distinctions cannot have temporal parts or successive states. I reject classical simplicity for reasons developed in Chapter 30, and this rejection is closely tied to my defense of divine temporality.

The NDE Literature and Temporal Experience

One distinctive feature of this book — a feature not shared with most of the other works surveyed in this appendix — is its engagement with the near-death experience literature as a source of suggestive analogies for understanding how temporal experience can differ qualitatively from ordinary clock-time. Key figures in the NDE research include Raymond Moody, Bruce Greyson, Pim van Lommel, and Jeffrey Long. While I do not claim that NDEs prove any particular theory of divine time, they illustrate something important: temporal experience is not a fixed, uniform thing. It can be stretched, compressed, experienced sequentially and simultaneously.⁷⁰

Chapter 33 develops this argument at length. For our purposes here, the point is simply that the God-and-time question cannot be understood in isolation from related questions about substance dualism, the intermediate state, and the nature of temporal experience itself.

The Foreknowledge Debate

A closely related debate concerns the nature of divine foreknowledge and its compatibility with human freedom. The main contemporary positions are: (1) simple foreknowledge, on which God knows future free choices directly but does not use this knowledge in providential deliberation; (2) Molinism, on which God knows not only what will happen but what would happen in every possible circumstance (middle knowledge); (3) Calvinism / theological determinism, on which God's foreknowledge is grounded in His decree to cause every event; and (4) open theism, on which God does not foreknow future free choices because the future does not exist.

Key contemporary voices on this debate include Hasker (open theism), Linda Zagzebski (simple foreknowledge and Molinism), John Martin Fischer (various positions), Craig (Molinism combined with his hybrid view), and — for the position I defend in Chapter 25 — Scott, whose The God of Time articulates a form of simple foreknowledge grounded in divine temporal transcendence. I am persuaded that the temporalist framework, combined with transcendent temporal access, allows for a robust doctrine of exhaustive simple foreknowledge that does not entail either theological determinism or the Molinist appeal to counterfactuals of creaturely freedom.

The Incarnation and Time

Finally, the Incarnation stands as perhaps the single most decisive consideration in favor of divine temporality. Whatever one thinks about the philosophical arguments, the brute fact of the Incarnation — God the Son becoming human, being born, growing, suffering, dying, and rising — presupposes a God who can and does enter temporal existence. Mullins has developed this argument at book length in God, Time, and the Incarnation, and I draw on his work extensively in Chapter 27 of this book.

The basic argument is simple. A strictly timeless God cannot become incarnate without contradiction. But God the Son did become incarnate. Therefore, God is not strictly timeless. The premise can be resisted in various ways — classical theists have developed sophisticated accounts of how a timeless God can be related to a temporal human nature — but at the end of the day, I do not think any of these accounts ultimately succeed. If the Son is eternally one person with two natures (divine and human), and if the human nature is temporal in a perfectly straightforward sense, then the Son's divine nature must be such that it can coherently be united with a temporal human nature. And that, I believe, rules out strict timelessness.

Part Six: Thinking About the Trajectory

Having surveyed some fifty thinkers across 2,400 years, it may be useful to pause and reflect on a few broader trajectories that the survey reveals.

The Rise and Fall of Timelessness

The classical doctrine of divine timelessness had a long run. From Plotinus (third century) through Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas, to the major Protestant and Catholic theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, timelessness was the default position of mainstream Christian theology. For something like fourteen hundred years — from roughly the fifth century through the nineteenth — most theologians who thought about the question simply assumed that God was timeless and devoted their energy to explaining what that meant and how it fit with other doctrines.

The last century and a half has seen an astonishing reversal. Starting with Newton and accelerating through Schleiermacher, Barth, Cullmann, Pike, Swinburne, Wolterstorff, Craig, DeWeese, and now Mullins, the temporalist alternative has moved from marginal to mainstream. Today, among analytic philosophers of religion and contemporary systematic theologians, some version of divine temporality is arguably the majority view — though it is a view with many variants, and the classical position still has able defenders (Helm, Leftow, Rogers, Dolezal).

Why this reversal? I think several factors have contributed. First, the rise of analytic philosophy of religion has subjected the classical doctrine to a level of logical scrutiny it had not previously faced, and that scrutiny has exposed real tensions. Second, the recovery of biblical theology — the exegetical work of scholars like Cullmann, and more recently the biblical-theological work in the Pentateuch and the prophets — has reminded the church that the God of Scripture is relentlessly portrayed as a God who acts, responds, and engages in history. Third, the retreat of strong classical theism (with its package of timelessness, simplicity, immutability, and impassibility) has opened conceptual space for a doctrine of God that sits more naturally with the biblical narrative. Fourth, the Trinitarian revival of the twentieth century — Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jenson, and more recently the analytic revival in Swinburne and Mullins — has pressed questions about the dynamic character of the divine life that the older framework struggled to answer.⁷²

The Variety Within Temporalism

One of the most striking features of the contemporary temporalist consensus is its internal variety. Pike's negative arguments against timelessness opened the door, but different authors have walked through that door in very different directions. Process theology takes temporalism to the extreme of making God genuinely in process with the world. Open theism stops just short of that, affirming divine temporality while denying exhaustive foreknowledge. Craig's hybrid view tries to preserve something of the classical tradition by affirming timelessness "sans creation." Swinburne and Wolterstorff defend simple, unqualified temporality. DeWeese grounds temporality in a causal theory. Mullins grounds it in the Trinity. Padgett wants to preserve "lordship over time." And the position I defend adds "transcendent temporal access" to the basic Mullins framework.

These are not just verbal differences. They have different implications for creation, providence, foreknowledge, and Christology. Within the broad temporalist camp, real theological and philosophical work remains to be done.

The Continuing Challenge of Classical Theism

Even as the temporalist consensus grows, the classical tradition is not going quietly. Leftow's work in the 1990s, the Stump-Kretzmann ET-simultaneity proposal, Rogers's Anselmian defense, and the classical theism revival represented by Dolezal, Duby, and others all demonstrate that the timelessness tradition has intellectual vitality. And in certain confessional contexts — especially Reformed and Thomistic circles — the classical doctrine retains strong institutional support.

Anyone who defends divine temporality today, as I do, should be careful not to caricature the opposition. The classical tradition was developed by some of the most brilliant minds in Christian history, and it has produced accounts of God of genuine spiritual and theological depth. Our disagreements with it should be offered with appropriate humility.

Conclusion: A Long Conversation, and Where It Stands Today

If we stand back and look at the sweep of the conversation surveyed in this appendix, several patterns emerge.

First, the conversation has been going on for a very long time. From Plato to Mullins is roughly 2,400 years. That is a sobering reminder of the depth of the question and the humility with which any contemporary contribution should be offered. We are not the first to ask these questions. We stand on the shoulders of many thoughtful men and women who have labored with these questions before us.

Second, the broad sweep of the Christian tradition — from the church fathers through the medievals and into the modern period — has tended to favor divine timelessness. Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, and most of their heirs have held some version of the classical doctrine. Anyone who rejects divine timelessness today — as I do — should do so with a deep respect for the tradition that has held it.

Third, however, the trajectory of the last century and a half has been decisively toward some form of divine temporality. Newton, Barth, Pannenberg, Moltmann, Jenson, Pike, Swinburne, Wolterstorff, Padgett, Craig, DeWeese, Rea, Scott, and Mullins — different as their positions are in many respects — all affirm some form of divine engagement with time that the classical Augustinian tradition resisted. And the temporalist side of the debate has generated, in my view, the more compelling arguments.⁷¹

Fourth, the contemporary temporalist consensus is not monolithic. It ranges from process theology (which I reject as incompatible with Christian orthodoxy), to open theism (which I reject as denying exhaustive divine foreknowledge), to Craig's hybrid view (which I reject on Mullins's grounds), to Mullins's own beginningless-temporality view (with which I largely agree), to my own dynamic omnitemporality (which extends Mullins by adding transcendent temporal access). Within the temporalist camp, there is much work still to be done.

Fifth and finally, the position defended in this book — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent temporal access — is, I believe, the most biblically faithful, theologically coherent, and philosophically defensible account available. It preserves the biblical portrait of a God who genuinely acts in history, who genuinely responds to His creatures, and who becomes truly incarnate. It preserves the classical conviction that God is not bound by creaturely limitations. And it does justice to the contemporary scientific, philosophical, and experiential considerations that bear on the question.

The long conversation continues. I hope this appendix has provided a useful map of where it has been and where it stands today.