Chapter 1

Introduction — Why God's Relationship to Time Matters

PART I: FOUNDATIONS — WHAT IS TIME AND WHY DOES GOD'S RELATIONSHIP TO IT MATTER?

Two Hospital Rooms

Picture two hospital rooms on the same floor of the same building, late at night. In each room, a father sits beside the bed of a critically ill child. Each father has called his pastor. Each pastor arrives, sits down, and offers words of comfort. But what they say could not be more different.

In the first room, the pastor takes the father's hand and says, "God is with you right now. He is here in this room, in this very moment. He feels your pain. He hears your prayers as you speak them. He is acting on your behalf at this very instant. You are not alone — not for a single second."

In the second room, the other pastor — equally sincere, equally compassionate — says something quite different. "Take comfort," he says. "God sees your suffering from His eternal vantage point. From where He stands, your past, your present, and your future are all equally visible. He does not 'enter' your moment, because He is beyond all moments. He dwells in timeless, unchanging, undisturbed perfection. Your suffering, along with every other event in history, is present to Him in a single, eternal act of awareness."

Both pastors are Christians. Both love God. Both believe they are faithfully representing what the Bible teaches about the God they worship. But the comfort they offer is radically different. One describes a God who meets us in time, who shares our present moment, who responds to our cries as we utter them. The other describes a God who surveys all of time from a position outside of it, who never enters any particular moment because He is beyond moments altogether.

Which pastor is right? Is God in time — experiencing it, acting within it, meeting us in our present — or is He outside of time, looking at the whole of history the way we might look at a painting on a wall? This is not a technicality. This is not an obscure philosophical puzzle that only professors need to worry about. This is about what God is really like. It is about whether the God of the Bible is personally, relationally, and emotionally present with us in our moments of deepest need — or whether He observes those moments from a state of timeless, unchanging detachment.

Everything depends on the answer.

The Question Most Christians Have Never Asked

Most Christians have never thought carefully about God's relationship to time. Ask the average churchgoer whether God is "eternal," and you will get an immediate and confident answer: "Of course He is!" But ask a follow-up question — "What exactly do you mean by 'eternal'?" — and you will usually get a long pause. Most believers simply assume that God is eternal without stopping to ask what "eternal" actually means.

This is completely understandable. We sing hymns about God's eternity. We read Bible verses about God being "from everlasting to everlasting" (Psalm 90:2). We confess in the creeds that God exists without beginning or end. And all of this is absolutely right. Every Christian — whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant — agrees that God is eternal in the sense that He has no beginning and no end. He never came into existence, and He will never go out of existence. His life stretches back before any created thing and forward beyond any horizon we can imagine.¹

But here is where the agreement ends and the real question begins. When we say God is "eternal," do we mean that God exists outside of time altogether, in a timeless state where there is no before and after, no past and future, no sequence of any kind? Or do we mean that God endures through all of time, without beginning or end, experiencing a genuine succession of moments — acting, responding, creating, loving, and interacting with His creatures in real time?

These are two radically different claims. And the difference between them matters enormously — for our understanding of prayer, the Incarnation, God's emotions, providence, foreknowledge, and the very character of the God we worship.

R. T. Mullins puts the point sharply. The divine timelessness position and the divine temporality position are not two slightly different versions of the same idea. They are logically contradictory. Either God exists with succession in His life, or He does not. Either God has a before and after in His experience, or He does not. There is no third way — no clever philosophical trick that can split the difference. As Mullins writes, "Trying to find a third way is like hunting for snipe and haggis: it is a futile hunt because it is nothing more than a trick perpetrated on the uninformed. When it comes to whether God is temporal or atemporal, there simply is no third way. The two positions are logically contradictory."²

Let me put it in terms of a simple analogy. Think of a movie — a story that unfolds from beginning to end, scene by scene. Now imagine two ways of watching that movie.

In the first way, imagine someone who watches the movie from outside the screen. This viewer can see every frame at once — the opening scene, the climax, and the final credits are all equally visible, spread out before the viewer like a painting. The viewer never "enters" any scene. There is no suspense, no waiting, no before-and-after. Everything is just there, all at once. This is roughly what divine timelessness looks like. God sees all of time — past, present, future — in a single, eternal "now." He never enters a particular moment. He never waits for anything. From His perspective, everything has already happened (or rather, is eternally happening, all at once).

In the second way, imagine someone who is a character in the movie — someone who experiences the story as it unfolds, scene by scene, in sequence. But this character also has a remarkable ability: he can rewind and fast-forward. He can access any scene in the story at any time. He lives within the flow of the narrative, experiencing it in order, but he is not trapped in any single moment the way the other characters are. He can see what is coming. He can revisit what has passed. He experiences the story genuinely — but with a freedom and access that no one else in the story possesses. This is closer to what I believe about God — and what I will argue for in this book.

Let me define the basic options more precisely, because these terms will appear throughout every chapter that follows.

Divine timelessness (or atemporality) is the view that God exists entirely outside of time. He has no past, no present, no future. He does not experience one thing before another. His entire life — if we can even call it that — is contained in a single, changeless, eternal instant. The great medieval theologian Boethius gave the classic definition of this view: eternity is "the complete, simultaneous possession of boundless life" — what he called tota simul, meaning "all at once."³ On this view, God does not live through time. He possesses His entire life in a single, timeless act. This has been the dominant view in the Christian theological tradition for most of its history, championed by figures like Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas.

Divine temporality (or omnitemporality) is the view that God genuinely exists in time — that He has a real past, present, and future, that He experiences succession (one thing after another), and that He acts, responds, and relates to His creatures in genuine temporal sequence. God is not trapped in time the way we are — He has no beginning and no end, and His experience of time may be qualitatively different from ours — but He genuinely experiences time. William Lane Craig defines divine temporality this way: "God is temporal if and only if He exists in time, that is to say, if and only if His life has phases which are related to each other as earlier and later."⁴ On this view, "God exists now" is literally true at every moment of time — not in some metaphorical or timeless sense, but as a straightforward statement about God's presence in the present.

Mullins offers a helpful way to understand the contrast. The divine temporalist agrees with the timelessness advocate that God exists without beginning and without end. The difference is on the question of succession. The atemporalist says God necessarily exists without succession — no before and after in God's life whatsoever. The temporalist says God genuinely has succession — distinct moments in the divine life, new events even for God. As T. F. Torrance put it, "the creation of the world out of nothing is something new even for God."⁵

There are also hybrid views that try to combine elements of both. The most important of these is Craig's own position, which holds that God was timeless before creation (when there was no universe and thus no created time) but became temporal at creation (when He entered into real relations with a temporal world).⁶ We will examine this hybrid view carefully in Chapter 8.

And there are mediating positions, like Alan Padgett's "relative timelessness," which holds that God transcends our measurable, physical time but is not absolutely atemporal — He exists in a kind of "metaphysical time" that is different from our clock-time.⁷

Each of these views has serious defenders. Each claims to do justice to the Bible, to Christian theology, and to philosophy. But they cannot all be right. And the stakes of getting the answer wrong are higher than most Christians realize.

Why This Question Matters: Six Areas Where Everything Changes

I want to walk through six areas of the Christian life and Christian theology where our answer to the God-and-time question makes an enormous practical difference. These are not abstract philosophical puzzles. They are questions about how we pray, what we believe about Jesus, whether God feels our pain, how God acts in the world, how God knows the future, and whether we can have genuine hope. In each case, what we believe about God's relationship to time shapes our answer in ways that most people have never considered.

1. Prayer: Can God Hear Us "Right Now"?

When we bow our heads and pray — when we cry out to God in pain, or thank Him with joy, or beg Him for help — does God hear us in that moment? Does He listen to our words as we speak them? Does He respond in real time?

If God is temporal — if He genuinely exists in the present moment — then the answer is a clear and comforting yes. God hears our prayers as we utter them. He responds to our requests after we make them. Prayer is a genuine conversation, a real back-and-forth between a temporal creature and a temporal God. When the psalmist cries, "Hear my prayer, O LORD; let my cry come to you!" (Psalm 102:1, ESV), he means it in the most straightforward sense possible: God, listen to me right now.

But if God is timeless, things become much more complicated. A timeless God does not have a "now." He does not hear our prayers at the moment we pray them, because He does not exist at any moment. All prayers — past, present, and future — are simultaneously present to Him in a single eternal instant. In one eternal act, He is aware of every prayer ever uttered and wills the responses to all of them at once.⁸ Gregory Ganssle explains the atemporalist view by noting that a timeless God could answer prayer if "he hears all our prayers in his one eternal Now and in that same eternal Now he wills the answers to our various requests."⁹

Now, defenders of divine timelessness insist that God can still "answer" prayer even timelessly — that the relationship between a request and its answer does not require temporal sequence but only a causal or intentional connection.¹⁰ I will engage this argument fairly in later chapters. But I want to be honest with you, the reader, right from the start: I find this account deeply unsatisfying. When I pray, I believe I am talking to a God who is here, who is listening, who hears me now and responds now. That is the picture Scripture gives us, and I believe it is the truth about God. Prayer is a temporal act, and I believe it is answered by a temporal God.

Ganssle himself, though writing as a balanced editor introducing all four views, notices that the question of interaction cuts deep. As he frames it, "If it is not possible to answer a prayer request unless the answer is given after the request, then the fact that God answers prayer will guarantee that he is temporal."¹¹ That conditional — if genuine answering requires temporal sequence — is exactly the conditional I believe is true. And if it is true, then a timeless God cannot genuinely answer prayer in the way Scripture describes.

2. The Incarnation: Can a Timeless God Become Human?

The Incarnation is the central event of the Christian faith. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14, ESV). God the Son — the eternal Second Person of the Trinity — entered human history. He was conceived in a virgin's womb. He was born in Bethlehem. He grew up in Nazareth. He "increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52, ESV). He was baptized, tempted, hungry, tired, grieved, and joyful. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, was buried, rose on the third day, and ascended to the Father.

Every one of these events is deeply, irreducibly temporal. Being born happens at a particular moment. Growing up takes time. Suffering and dying are processes that unfold in sequence. The Incarnation is not a timeless truth contemplated from eternity — it is a series of events that happened in a particular order, at particular times, in a particular place.

Can a timeless God do all of this? Can a being who exists outside of time — who has no before and after, no sequence, no process — become a human being who lives, grows, suffers, and dies within time? This is one of the most serious philosophical challenges to the doctrine of divine timelessness, and it has been pressed with great force by R. T. Mullins in two landmark works.¹²

Mullins argues that the Incarnation is simply incompatible with strict divine timelessness. To "become" flesh requires a change — a transition from one state (not being incarnate) to another state (being incarnate). But a timeless being cannot undergo change, because change requires temporal sequence (a before and an after). The various strategies used to reconcile timelessness with the Incarnation — the "reduplicative" strategy (where contradictory properties are assigned to different natures), the "two-minds" approach, and others — all face devastating objections, which we will examine in detail in Chapter 27.¹³

I agree with Mullins on this point. The Incarnation provides powerful evidence that God is temporal. The eternal Son of God entered time, lived a human life, and experienced genuine temporal succession. If we take the Incarnation seriously — and I believe we must, since it is the heart of our faith — then we have strong reason to believe that God is not frozen in a timeless eternity but is genuinely capable of acting, living, and experiencing events within time. This argument is developed at length in my companion book, The Word Made Flesh: The Incarnation, the Human Soul, and the Case Against Physicalist Christology.¹⁴

Consider the sheer weight of temporal language in the New Testament's descriptions of the Incarnation. Paul writes that "when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law" (Galatians 4:4, ESV). The author of Hebrews tells us that "in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears" and that "he learned obedience through what he suffered" (Hebrews 5:7–8, ESV). He learned. He offered prayers. He suffered. Every one of these verbs demands temporal sequence. Learning takes time. Offering prayers takes time. Suffering takes time. A timeless God cannot learn, because learning involves moving from not-knowing to knowing — which is a temporal process. The Incarnation is, among many other things, a powerful demonstration that God can and does act within time.

3. Divine Emotion: Can a Timeless God Genuinely Grieve or Rejoice?

The Bible is filled with descriptions of God's emotional life. God loves (John 3:16). God grieves (Genesis 6:6). God rejoices (Zephaniah 3:17). God is angry (Psalm 7:11). God feels compassion (Psalm 103:13). God delights (Psalm 147:11). These are not minor themes tucked away in obscure corners of Scripture — they are central to the biblical portrait of who God is.

But can a timeless God genuinely feel these emotions? I believe the answer is no — and the reason has to do with the very nature of what it means to respond emotionally.

Genuine emotional response requires a temporal sequence. First, something happens — an event occurs, a creature acts, a prayer is offered. Then, God responds — He feels joy, or grief, or compassion, or anger. The event comes first; the response comes after. There is a "before" (the event) and an "after" (the emotional response). This is what it means to respond. Without this temporal order, there is no genuine response — only a static, unchanging state that never varies regardless of what happens in the world.

R. T. Mullins has pressed this point with particular sharpness. If God is timeless and immutable, then God's wrath toward sinners is not a response to their sin — it is an eternal, unchanging feature of God's being. But this means God has wrath toward sinners before they have sinned. Indeed, "before" does not even apply, since God's wrath is timeless — it exists regardless of whether the sinner has sinned yet. This seems deeply unjust. How can God be wrathful toward someone who has not yet done anything wrong?¹⁵ The only way to avoid this problem is to affirm that God's emotional responses are genuinely temporal — that God responds to events as they occur, in a real sequence of before and after.

This is a theme I have developed at great length in my companion book, The Heart of God: Does God Feel? A Biblical and Theological Case for the Emotional Life of God. That book makes the case that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures — that divine passibility (the view that God can be affected by and respond emotionally to what happens in the world) is the clear teaching of Scripture and a requirement of genuine personal relationship. One of the key conclusions of that book is that genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond, because response requires temporal sequence.¹⁶

David Lamb's study of divine emotion in the Old Testament reinforces this point. When God "relents" from judgment on Nineveh after the city repents (Jonah 3:10), or when God is "sorry that he had made man on the earth" after seeing the extent of human wickedness (Genesis 6:6), the biblical text presents these as genuine responses to events that occur in time. The Hebrew word nacham (נָחַם), which can mean "to relent" or "to be grieved," presupposes a temporal sequence: the event occurs, then God responds. This is the language of a temporal God — not a timeless one.¹⁷

4. Providence: Can a Timeless God Intervene in History?

Christians believe that God acts in the world. He is not a distant watchmaker who wound up the universe and walked away. He is a God who intervenes — who parts seas, who raises the dead, who answers prayers, who guides history toward His purposes. The entire storyline of the Bible is a narrative of divine action: God creates, God calls Abraham, God delivers Israel from Egypt, God sends the prophets, God sends His Son, God raises Jesus from the dead, God pours out His Spirit, and God will one day bring history to its appointed climax.

But what does "intervention" even mean if God is timeless? If all of history is equally present to God in a single eternal act — if there is no before and after in God's experience — then God does not "intervene" in any recognizable sense. He does not step into history at a particular moment to do something new. Instead, He timelessly wills everything that happens, from the Big Bang to the final judgment, in one changeless act. The effects of that act unfold in temporal sequence from our perspective, but from God's perspective, nothing new ever happens. There is no moment of decision, no turning point, no "now I will act."¹⁸

Defenders of timelessness have sophisticated responses to this worry, and we will engage them carefully in later chapters. Paul Helm, for example, argues that God can eternally will the sequential effects of His acts without Himself being in sequence — just as a person might program a thermostat to respond to different temperatures without the programmer himself needing to act at each moment the temperature changes.¹⁹ Nicholas Wolterstorff, however, has responded powerfully to this kind of analogy. When a person programs a thermostat, the person does not respond to the temperature — the thermostat does. And Scripture does not portray God as a divine thermostat. It portrays Him as a personal agent who genuinely responds to what His creatures do.²⁰

I find Wolterstorff's point deeply compelling. The God of the Bible is not a programmer who sets up a system and walks away. He is a God who sees the suffering of His people in Egypt and says, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people... I have heard their cry... I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them" (Exodus 3:7–8, ESV). That language — "I have seen... I have heard... I have come down" — is the language of a God who acts in response to events, in real time, in genuine temporal sequence.

Wolterstorff presses the point further in his response to Helm in God and Time: Four Views. He insists that the sequence in Scripture is not merely a sequence of the effects of God's acts — it is a sequence of God's own acts. God speaks to Moses before He speaks to Jesus. And this is not merely a matter of the effects being arranged sequentially while God's acting remains timeless. It is God Himself who acts first to Moses, then later to Jesus. The history recorded in Scripture is God's own history — not merely the temporal shadow of a timeless divine act.²¹

5. Foreknowledge: How Does God Know the Future?

One of the thorniest questions in all of Christian theology is how God knows the future. Christians have always affirmed that God has exhaustive knowledge of everything that will happen. "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9–10, ESV). God knows the future completely and infallibly.

But how does He know it? And what does His way of knowing the future tell us about His relationship to time?

If God is timeless, one answer presents itself naturally: the future is already "there" for God to see. All moments of time — past, present, and future — are equally present to God in His eternal vantage point. God does not foreknow anything, strictly speaking, because "fore" implies a temporal position before the event. Instead, God simply knows — eternally, timelessly, all at once. This is essentially the solution offered by Boethius, Aquinas, and in modern times by Helm.²²

This view has an elegant simplicity. But it comes at a cost. If all moments of time are equally present to God — if the future is just as "there" as the past — then we seem to be committed to what philosophers call a "block universe," where all of time exists as a single, unchanging four-dimensional block. Past, present, and future are all equally real. Nothing genuinely "becomes." Nothing truly "happens." The appearance of time flowing is an illusion — a trick of our limited perspective. Craig notes that Einstein himself adopted this view, writing to comfort the family of his deceased friend: "For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one."²³ This is the B-theory of time, which we will explore in detail in Chapter 2 and engage philosophically in Chapter 24.

I believe a different account of foreknowledge is available — one that preserves God's exhaustive knowledge of the future without requiring either a timeless God or a block universe. I call it simple foreknowledge with transcendent access. On this view, God is genuinely temporal — He experiences succession and lives in the present — but He is not trapped in the present the way we are. He has a unique divine capacity to access all of temporal reality, including the future. He knows tomorrow as surely as He knows today — not because the future is already "there" in a block universe, but because God has a transcendent ability to see what has not yet happened from the creaturely perspective. This is not the B-theory. It is a unique divine capacity that transcends our temporal limitations while still involving genuine sequence and genuine temporal experience.²⁴ We will develop this model fully in Chapter 25.

6. Hope: Does God Have a Plan That Unfolds Over Time?

Finally, consider the question of hope. Christians are a people of hope. We look forward to the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the renewal of all things. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4, ESV).

But what does hope look like if God is timeless? If everything — including the new creation, the final judgment, and the marriage supper of the Lamb — is already eternally present to God in a single changeless act, then in what sense is God "working toward" anything? In what sense is He "bringing about" the consummation of His plan? From a timeless perspective, the plan is not unfolding. It is not moving toward a goal. It simply is — eternally, changelessly, all at once.

From a temporalist perspective, by contrast, God's plan genuinely unfolds over time. God is working in history. He is moving creation toward its appointed goal. The second coming of Christ is genuinely future — not just from our perspective, but in a real sense from God's as well (even though God already knows what will happen). This gives Christian hope a depth and richness that timelessness struggles to match. When Paul says that "the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God" (Romans 8:19, ESV), this waiting is not an illusion. It is part of the genuine temporal unfolding of God's purposes.

Craig observes that biblical prophecy is laden with temporal markers — God announces things "beforehand," He declares "the end from the beginning," He makes promises that He will fulfill "in the fullness of time" (Galatians 4:4). This language assumes a genuine temporal framework in which events unfold in sequence and God's purposes are worked out over time. Paul's magnificent summary in Ephesians 1 speaks of God's "plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Ephesians 1:10, ESV). The word "plan" implies intention directed toward a future goal. The word "fullness of time" implies that history is moving toward a climax — not frozen in an eternal instant.²⁵

I do not claim that defenders of timelessness cannot speak of hope. Of course they can, and they do, with great eloquence. But I do claim that a temporal God — a God who acts in history, who responds to His creatures, who moves creation toward its glorious future — provides a more natural and more biblical foundation for the Christian hope than a timeless God who eternally possesses all of history in a single changeless instant.

Connecting the Threads: This Book and Its Companions

Before I preview the argument of this book, let me explain how it connects to the other studies I have been working on. This book is the third in a series of interconnected theological investigations, and readers who have encountered the other two will recognize familiar themes appearing here from a new angle.

The first book in the series is The Heart of God: Does God Feel? A Biblical and Theological Case for the Emotional Life of God. That book argues that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures — that He truly loves, grieves, rejoices, and feels compassion — and that the classical doctrine of strict divine impassibility (the view that God cannot be affected by anything outside Himself) is not what the Bible teaches. Near the end of that book, I noted that genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality — that you cannot genuinely respond to an event unless there is a temporal "before" (the event) and "after" (the response). I promised a fuller treatment of the God-and-time question. This book is that fuller treatment.²⁶

The second book is Beyond the Grave: A Biblical and Theological Case for Postmortem Salvation. That book makes the case for substance dualism (the view that human beings have both a material body and an immaterial soul), the conscious intermediate state (the soul survives death and is conscious between death and resurrection), and the possibility of postmortem salvation. It also engages extensively with near-death experience (NDE) research. One of the most fascinating findings in NDE research is that people who have near-death experiences consistently report that time works differently during their experience — events can be compressed, stretched, simultaneous, or qualitatively altered in ways that defy ordinary clock-time, while still involving genuine sequence and experience.²⁷ These temporal anomalies in NDEs provide a suggestive analogy — not a proof, but an illustration — for understanding how God might experience time in ways that transcend our ordinary temporal limitations. We will explore this fascinating topic in Chapter 33.

The third companion volume is The Word Made Flesh: The Incarnation, the Human Soul, and the Case Against Physicalist Christology. That book argues that physicalism about human nature is incompatible with orthodox Christology and that substance dualism is required by the biblical and creedal portrait of Christ. Its Chapter 27 addresses the Incarnation and time specifically, presupposing the argument made in this book that divine timelessness is incompatible with the hypostatic union. This book provides the full philosophical and biblical case for that claim.

These four books form a unified theological vision. They share a commitment to evangelical orthodoxy, to the authority of Scripture, to substance dualism, to divine passibility, and — as this book will argue — to divine temporality. They reinforce and support one another at every point.

The Position I Will Defend: Dynamic Divine Temporality with Transcendent Access

Let me now state as clearly as I can the position that this book will argue for. I will spend the rest of the book making the case. But the reader deserves to know from the very beginning where I am headed and what I believe.

Let me unpack this in six key claims.

First, God is genuinely temporal. God experiences real sequence and succession — one thought or event after another. He is not frozen in a timeless, static "eternal now." When the Bible portrays God as acting, responding, creating, speaking, grieving, rejoicing, and intervening in history, this is not merely metaphorical language or divine "accommodation" to our limited understanding. It reflects the genuine reality of God's temporal experience. God's temporality is grounded in who He is as a living, personal, relational Being. The divine temporalist position, as Mullins explains, holds that God exists without beginning and without end but genuinely has succession in His life — distinct moments, new events, real before-and-after.²⁸

Second, God is not bound by creaturely time. While God genuinely experiences temporal succession, He is not locked into the "now" of created, physical, measurable time the way we are. God can access, see, and interact with all moments of created time — past, present, and future. He is not limited to experiencing only the present moment and then "waiting" for the future to arrive. God can experience events in sequence and access all of time at once, as the situation requires. DeWeese's concept of omnitemporality captures part of what I mean: an omnitemporal being is present at every moment of time, just as an omnispatial being has access to every point in space.²⁹ But I add to this concept the notion of transcendent access — the idea that God can access not only every present moment but also the future and the past in ways that go beyond ordinary temporal experience.

Third, before creation, God existed in a form of "divine time" generated by the intra-Trinitarian relations. I agree with R. T. Mullins that time is not merely a feature of the created order — it is an attribute of who God is. The dynamic relations of the Trinity — the perichoretic (mutually indwelling) life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — generate a form of temporality even apart from creation.³⁰ Perichoresis — from the Greek perichōrēsis (περιχώρησις), meaning "mutual interpenetration" or "going around" — is the theological term for the dynamic, interpersonal life of the three Persons of the Trinity. The Father loves the Son; the Son responds to the Father; the Spirit glorifies the Son; the Son sends the Spirit. This is not a static picture. It is a dynamic, living, relational reality — and dynamic relationship implies some form of sequence, of before-and-after, of temporality. However, this pre-creation "divine time" was qualitatively different from created time: there was no physical universe, no clock-time, nothing external to measure it against. Mullins calls this pre-creation time "metaphysical time," distinguishing it from the "physical time" that began with the created universe.³¹ I am cautious about speculating too far into the nature of this pre-creation divine time, recognizing the limits of human understanding. But I believe some form of sequence existed — God deliberated, decided to create, decided that Christ would die for sinners — and these decisions imply a before and an after. This is developed more fully in Chapter 26.

Fourth, God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge through simple foreknowledge. God knows every event, thought, and choice that will ever occur — past, present, and future — with absolute certainty. This foreknowledge does not arise from God determining or causing every event (as in Calvinism), nor from middle knowledge of counterfactuals (as in Molinism), but from God's unique ability to access all of time. Because God is not locked into the present, He can see and know future events without causing them. I reject open theism, Molinism, and theological determinism. God's foreknowledge of an event does not mean God caused or determined that event. Human beings have genuine libertarian free will. This model is developed fully in Chapter 25 and defended against open theism in Chapter 32.

Fifth, God genuinely interacts with creatures in the present. God is not a distant observer watching a timeline from outside. He is personally, relationally, and emotionally present in each moment of His creatures' lives. He hears prayers in real time, responds to suffering with genuine emotion, acts providentially in history, and engages in real give-and-take relationship with human beings. God's primary mode of interaction with creatures is temporal and present-tense, even though He also has access to past and future.

Sixth, God has never changed a past event. While God has access to all of time, there is no biblical indication that God has ever altered or intervened in a past event after it occurred. God's temporal transcendence allows Him to see and know the past perfectly, but His interactions and interventions occur in the present and the future. The past is fixed and real, the present is the locus of action, and the future is genuinely open from the creature's perspective — even though God already knows it.

This is the position I call dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — or more simply, dynamic omnitemporality. It is not identical to any single position in the existing literature, though it draws heavily on the work of several important thinkers. It is closest to the unqualified divine temporality defended by Nicholas Wolterstorff, enriched by the robust philosophical framework provided by R. T. Mullins and Garrett DeWeese, and supplemented by the idea of "transcendent temporal access" — God's unique ability to access all of time while genuinely experiencing temporal succession. The rest of this book is devoted to making the case for this view — biblically, philosophically, historically, and pastorally.

The Major Conversation Partners

No book is written in a vacuum. Theology is a conversation — an ongoing dialogue with Scripture, with the great thinkers of the past, and with the best minds of the present. This book engages extensively with a number of scholars who have shaped the contemporary debate about God and time. Let me introduce the most important of them here, so that the reader knows who we will be talking to throughout the chapters ahead.

R. T. Mullins is the single most important conversation partner in this book. In two groundbreaking works — The End of the Timeless God (2016) and From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker (2025) — Mullins has provided the most sustained, rigorous, and devastating case against divine timelessness in the scholarly literature.³² He has also provided the strongest philosophical foundation for divine temporality, arguing that time is an attribute of God's own being, generated by the dynamic perichoretic life of the Trinity. I agree with Mullins on the vast majority of his arguments. Where my position adds something to his is in the concept of "transcendent temporal access" — the idea that God, while genuinely temporal, can access all of created time in a way that gives Him exhaustive foreknowledge. Mullins does not develop this idea, and it is one of my distinctive contributions. We will engage Mullins in virtually every chapter of this book.

Mullins is also the author of God, Time, and the Incarnation (2021), which provides the most thorough treatment of why divine timelessness is incompatible with the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.³³ And his God and Emotion (2020) demonstrates the logical connection between divine passibility and divine temporality — a connection I have explored from a different angle in my companion book on God's emotional life.³⁴

William Lane Craig is another central conversation partner. Craig is one of the most important analytic philosophers of religion alive today, and his book Time and Eternity (2001) remains one of the most sophisticated and carefully argued treatments of God's relationship to time ever written. As Craig notes in his preface, the book is "a popularization of four scholarly works which are themselves the product of over a dozen years of study of the problem of God and time."³⁵ Craig's hybrid view — God is timeless without creation, temporal with creation — is creative and philosophically impressive. I agree with Craig on many points: that God after creation is genuinely temporal, that the A-theory of time is correct, that relativity does not disprove presentism, and that open theism is wrong. My disagreement with Craig is over the "timeless sans creation" phase, which I believe is both unnecessary and philosophically problematic — a point on which I follow Mullins's critique (see Chapter 8). We will engage Craig extensively, especially in Chapters 2, 8, 24, 25, and 31.

Paul Helm is the strongest contemporary defender of divine timelessness. His Eternal God: A Study of God without Time is the most rigorous and philosophically sophisticated case for timelessness available today.³⁶ Ganssle summarizes Helm's central argument: "It is the fullness of God's life that makes timelessness the more appropriate mode of his being. God's experience of his own life and being is too full to be contained in any time or to be experienced part by part or moment by moment."³⁷ I disagree with Helm's conclusion, but I have deep respect for the seriousness and care with which he argues. Intellectual honesty demands that we engage the strongest version of the view we are criticizing — what philosophers call "steel-manning" the opposition — and Helm provides the strongest version of timelessness. We will engage his arguments throughout Part II (Chapters 4–6) and return to them at various points throughout the book.

Garrett DeWeese defends divine omnitemporality through a causal theory of time in his important work God and the Nature of Time (2004).³⁸ DeWeese argues that time is grounded in causation — where there are causal relations, there is time. Since the intra-Trinitarian relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit involve genuine causal relations, there is temporality in the divine life even before creation. I find DeWeese's work highly congenial to my own position, and his concept of omnitemporality — God being present at every moment of time — is very close to what I am defending.

Natalja Deng provides a clear and concise philosophical overview of the major positions in her God and Time (2019).³⁹ Deng's work is valuable for its careful framing of the issues and its even-handed treatment of the arguments on both sides. It is particularly useful for readers who want a compact introduction to the philosophical landscape before diving into the more detailed arguments of Mullins, Craig, and Helm.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is the thinker whose position is closest to my own. In his seminal essay "God Everlasting" (1975) and his contribution to God and Time: Four Views (2001), Wolterstorff defends unqualified divine temporality — the view that God exists through all of time, with no timeless phase, and that the temporal language of Scripture should be taken at face value unless there are strong reasons not to.⁴⁰ Wolterstorff insists that Scripture portrays God as having a genuine history — He speaks to Moses before He speaks to Jesus, and this sequence is not merely a sequence of effects but a sequence of divine acts. My position adds to Wolterstorff's the notion of transcendent temporal access, but the foundation is very much the one he laid.

These six thinkers — Mullins, Craig, Helm, DeWeese, Deng, and Wolterstorff — are the primary conversation partners. But we will also engage many others along the way: Richard Swinburne, Alan Padgett, Brian Leftow, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, Katherin Rogers, Thomas Aquinas, Boethius, Augustine, Oscar Cullmann, James Barr, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jürgen Moltmann, Karl Barth, Nelson Pike, and others. The God-and-time question sits at the intersection of biblical studies, systematic theology, historical theology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, and even physics — and our conversation partners reflect that breadth.

A Preview of the Book's Argument

This book unfolds in six parts, each building on the one before it. Let me walk you through the structure so you know where we are headed.

Part I: Foundations (Chapters 1–3) lays the groundwork. This chapter — Chapter 1 — introduces the question, explains why it matters, and previews the author's position. Chapter 2 provides a philosophical and scientific introduction to the nature of time itself — what time is, how philosophers and scientists think about it, and why the distinction between the A-theory (dynamic, tensed time) and the B-theory (static, tenseless time) is so important for theology. Chapter 3 examines the biblical language of time and eternity — the Hebrew word olam (עוֹלָם), the Greek word aiōn (αἰών), and what "eternal" really means in the original languages of Scripture. Spoiler alert: it almost never means "timeless."

Part II: The Major Views on God and Time (Chapters 4–10) surveys the main positions in the debate. Chapter 4 presents divine timelessness — the classical view — as fairly and charitably as I can, explaining its vision of God and its deep roots in the Christian tradition. Chapter 5 presents the strongest arguments for timelessness, steel-manning the atemporalist case. Chapter 6 presents what I believe are the decisive arguments against timelessness — the arguments that show, as Mullins has put it, that the atemporalist research program has reached a dead end.⁴¹ Chapter 7 then presents the positive case for divine temporality — the heart of the book's argument. Chapters 8 through 10 examine three specific alternatives: Craig's hybrid view (Chapter 8), open theism (Chapter 9), and process theology (Chapter 10). I will argue that Craig's hybrid view is creative but ultimately problematic, and that open theism and process theology — while they get some things right about divine temporality — push beyond the boundaries of biblical orthodoxy in ways I cannot follow.

Part III: A Brief History of the Debate (Chapters 11–15) traces the story of how Christians have thought about God and time from the ancient Greeks through the present day. This is important because the doctrine of divine timelessness is often presented as "the" traditional Christian view. While it is true that timelessness has been dominant since at least the fourth century, the story is more complicated than many people realize. The earliest Christian thinkers — the apostolic fathers and many of the ante-Nicene writers — did not hold to strict timelessness in the way that later medieval theologians did. The influence of Greek philosophy — especially Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus — played a significant role in shaping the classical doctrine. Understanding this history frees us to ask fresh questions without assuming that timelessness is the only option faithful Christians have ever held.

Part IV: The Biblical Evidence (Chapters 16–23) examines what the Bible actually says about God and time. This is the longest and most detailed section of the book, because I believe the Bible must be the ultimate authority for any Christian theology. We will work through the major biblical texts — from Genesis to Revelation — examining what they teach about God's relationship to time. We will look at creation (Chapter 17), God's temporal actions in the Old Testament (Chapter 18), the Psalms and Wisdom Literature (Chapter 19), the prophets and divine foreknowledge (Chapter 20), Jesus and time (Chapter 21), the apostolic witness (Chapter 22), and Revelation and eschatology (Chapter 23). My contention is that the Bible consistently, overwhelmingly, and unmistakably portrays God as a temporal being — a God who acts, responds, creates, speaks, and relates to His creatures in genuine temporal sequence.

Part V: Philosophical and Systematic Arguments (Chapters 24–32) develops the philosophical case in full. This is where we get into the deep metaphysics — the A-theory versus the B-theory (Chapter 24), the model of simple foreknowledge with transcendent access (Chapter 25), the Trinity and time (Chapter 26), the Incarnation and time (Chapter 27), divine emotions and time (Chapter 28), divine action and providence (Chapter 29), the critique of classical divine simplicity and strong immutability (Chapter 30), the relationship between Einstein's relativity and the theology of time (Chapter 31), and the argument against open theism (Chapter 32). These chapters are more philosophically demanding than the earlier ones, but I have tried to keep the writing clear and accessible throughout. If Chapter 7 is the heart of the book, Part V is its backbone — the detailed philosophical argumentation that supports the central thesis.

Part VI: Special Topics and Pastoral Applications (Chapters 33–36) addresses some fascinating and important topics that are often neglected in scholarly treatments of God and time. Chapter 33 explores what near-death experiences teach us about the nature of time — a topic that intersects in surprising ways with the God-and-time question. Chapter 34 examines the intermediate state, substance dualism, and time after death. Chapter 35 turns to pastoral applications — what does divine temporality mean for our prayer life, our experience of suffering, and our worship? And Chapter 36, the final chapter, pulls everything together, presenting a comprehensive model of dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access.

Four appendices round out the book: a glossary of key terms (Appendix A), a historical survey chart showing where major thinkers stand on the question (Appendix B), a topical index of key Scripture passages on God and time (Appendix C), and an annotated bibliography for further study (Appendix D).

A Note on Tone and Method

Before we begin, a word about how I intend to argue. I am making a strong case in this book — I genuinely believe that divine temporality is the most biblically faithful, philosophically coherent, and pastorally satisfying view of God's relationship to time. But I also have deep respect for those who disagree with me. The defenders of divine timelessness — Helm, Aquinas, Boethius, Augustine — are among the greatest minds in the history of Christian thought. I am not going to pretend that their arguments are foolish or that the case for timelessness is weak. It is not weak. It has deep roots in Scripture, in philosophy, and in the Christian tradition. I simply believe that it is, in the end, mistaken — and I will try to show why.

I will always try to present the opposing view as fairly and charitably as I can before responding to it. This is not just good scholarship — it is good Christian practice. Paul tells us to "speak the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15, ESV). I want my arguments to be strong, but I also want them to be generous. If a reader who holds to divine timelessness reads this book and says, "I disagree with his conclusion, but he understood my position and treated it fairly," then I will have succeeded in at least one important respect.

I also want to be honest about the limits of my knowledge. There are questions in this book — particularly about the nature of pre-creation divine time, the precise mechanism of God's transcendent temporal access, and the relationship between God's time and the physics of Einstein's relativity — where I am uncertain. I will say so when I am uncertain. Theological humility is not a weakness. It is a recognition that we are finite creatures trying to understand the infinite God, and that our best efforts will always fall short of the reality they attempt to describe. As the apostle Paul reminds us, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12, ESV).

Craig himself, despite being one of the most sophisticated thinkers in the field, acknowledges the breathtaking difficulty of the subject. He writes that "apart from the idea of God, I know of no concept so profound and so baffling as that of time" — and that the attempt to integrate these two concepts "stretches our minds to the very limits of our understanding."⁴² I could not agree more. But stretching our minds is a good thing. It makes us more thoughtful people and deepens our awe and worship of God.

Why I Wrote This Book

I want to close this opening chapter with a personal note. I did not come to this topic through abstract academic curiosity. I came to it through the pastoral questions that pressed themselves on me as I studied God's emotional life and the hope of salvation beyond the grave.

When I was writing The Heart of God, I kept running into the same wall. Every argument I made for God's genuine emotional responsiveness — His real love, His real grief, His real joy — seemed to require that God be temporal. If God cannot respond to events in time, then His emotions are not responses at all. They are static, unchanging features of a timeless existence. And that did not sound like the God of the Bible — the God who "saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth" and "was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (Genesis 6:5–6, ESV). That language is temporal through and through. God saw. He was sorry. It grieved Him. These are responses to events — and responses require time.

When I was writing Beyond the Grave, I encountered another dimension of the question. The near-death experience literature consistently describes temporal anomalies — experiences where time slows, stops, compresses, stretches, or operates in ways that defy ordinary clock-time. People report experiencing their entire lives in what seems like an instant, yet with full and vivid detail. They report events happening simultaneously and in sequence at the same time. They describe time as feeling "different" — qualitatively altered, not abolished. These reports fascinated me because they suggested that temporal experience is not limited to the ticking of clocks. There are modes of temporal experience that transcend our ordinary sense of time while still involving genuine succession and genuine experience. And I began to wonder: could this be an analogy — imperfect but illuminating — for the way God experiences time?⁴³

And when I was working on The Word Made Flesh, the Incarnation pressed the question with unavoidable force. If God the Son "became flesh" — if He entered human history, was born, grew, suffered, and died — then God is capable of acting within time. Indeed, the Incarnation just is God acting within time in the most radical and intimate way possible. And if God can act within time, then the claim that God exists outside of time altogether becomes very hard to sustain.

These three threads — divine emotion, NDE temporal anomalies, and the Incarnation — converged and pointed me toward the conclusion that I will defend in these pages: God is genuinely temporal. He experiences time. He acts within it. He responds to events as they happen. But He is not bound by it. He transcends it. He can access all of it. And His temporal experience, while real, is qualitatively different from ours in ways that our finite minds can only dimly grasp.

This, I believe, is the God of the Bible — the God who created the heavens and the earth, who called Abraham and led Israel through the wilderness, who sent His Son to die and raised Him on the third day, who pours out His Spirit on His church, and who will one day wipe every tear from every eye. He is not a frozen deity trapped in an eternal instant. He is the living God — the God who acts, who responds, who loves, who grieves, who rejoices, and who meets us in every moment of our lives.

He is the God beyond the clock.

And here is one last thought before we move on. The question of God's relationship to time is not just an academic exercise for seminary classrooms. It touches every part of our walk with God. When you sit in a hospital waiting room and cry out to God for help, you are assuming — whether you know it or not — something about God's relationship to time. When you read the story of the Exodus and marvel at God's deliverance of Israel, you are encountering a God who acts in history. When you pray for your children, your spouse, or your friend, you are asking a God who you believe can hear you right now, in this moment, to act on your behalf. The answers we give to the God-and-time question shape the answers we give to the most important questions of our lives: Does God hear me? Does God care? Is God doing something about my situation right now?

I believe the answer to all three questions is yes. And I believe the foundation for that yes is a God who genuinely exists in time — who meets us in our moments, who responds to our cries, and who is working, even now, to bring all things to their appointed end.

Let us begin.