Chapter 6

The Decisive Arguments Against Divine Timelessness

Introduction: Why Timelessness Must Be Abandoned

In the previous chapter, we gave divine timelessness its best day in court. We laid out the strongest arguments that defenders of the atemporalist position have ever produced — the argument from divine simplicity, the argument from immutability, the appeal to Einstein's relativity theory, the argument from the incompleteness of temporal life, the sophisticated ET-simultaneity model of Stump and Kretzmann, and Katherin Rogers's creative "fifth dimension" proposal. Each of those arguments carries real intellectual weight, and anyone who takes theology seriously should feel their pull. These are not silly arguments. They were developed by brilliant minds — Aquinas, Boethius, Anselm, Helm, Leftow, Stump, Kretzmann, and Rogers — and they deserve the careful hearing we gave them.

But careful hearing is not the same as final agreement. Now it is time to respond.

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: despite the apparent strengths of the case for divine timelessness, the position ultimately fails because it cannot account for divine personhood, God's real relation to creation, God's knowledge of tensed facts, the Incarnation, or God's genuine emotional life — and the supporting arguments from simplicity, immutability, and relativity theory are not as strong as they first appear. The cumulative case against timelessness is, I believe, devastating. It comes from so many different directions — philosophy, theology, biblical testimony, and the inner logic of core Christian doctrines — that patching one leak simply opens another. As R. T. Mullins has argued with great force, the divine timelessness research program has reached a dead end.¹

We will proceed in two stages. First, we will respond to each of the six arguments for timelessness presented in Chapter 5, showing that none of them succeeds in establishing its conclusion. Then, we will turn to six positive arguments against timelessness — arguments that show not merely that timelessness is unproven, but that it is positively incompatible with essential Christian commitments. By the end of this chapter, I hope the reader will agree that divine timelessness should be abandoned as a viable theological option — not grudgingly or tentatively, but with clear-eyed confidence that a better alternative exists.

That better alternative — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — is the subject of Chapter 7. But before we can build the new house, we need to show why the old one cannot stand.

Let me offer a brief roadmap for what follows. In Part One, we will take each of the six arguments for timelessness from Chapter 5 and show why they fail. The argument from simplicity depends on a doctrine that should be rejected. The argument from immutability rests on an extreme version of changelessness that goes beyond what Scripture teaches. The argument from relativity relies on a contested interpretation of physics. The argument from the incompleteness of temporal life smuggles in an assumption that begs the very question at issue. The ET-simultaneity model of Stump and Kretzmann is either vacuous or circular. And Rogers's fifth dimension is a creative metaphor that does not actually solve the problem it was designed to address.

In Part Two, we will turn to six positive arguments that show timelessness is not merely unproven but positively false — that it conflicts with things we know to be true about God. A timeless being cannot be a person in any robust sense. A timeless God cannot be genuinely related to His creation. A timeless God cannot know what time it is and therefore cannot be omniscient. A timeless God cannot become incarnate. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond emotionally to His creatures. And a timeless, changeless God cannot be the cause of creation. These arguments come from different directions, but they converge on the same conclusion: divine timelessness is a theological dead end.

Part One: Responding to the Arguments for Timelessness

Against the Argument from Divine Simplicity

Recall the argument from Chapter 5: a strictly simple being has no composition, no parts, and no real distinctions. Temporal succession would introduce composition — God at one time would be different from God at another time, and the sum of God's temporal states would form a "composite" of temporal parts. Since God is absolutely simple, He has no temporal parts and therefore must be timeless. This argument goes all the way back to Thomas Aquinas, who argued that God is pure act (actus purus) with no potentiality, and that temporal change involves the actualization of potentials.²

The argument is logically valid — if the premise of strict simplicity is true, then timelessness does follow. But that is a very large "if." I believe strict classical divine simplicity should be rejected, for reasons that Chapter 30 develops at length. Here I will offer only a summary of the key problems.

The central difficulty with strict simplicity is what it claims: that all of God's attributes are identical to each other and identical to His essence. On this view, God's love just is God's wrath. God's justice just is God's mercy. God's knowledge just is God's will. But this is deeply problematic. Love and wrath are not the same thing — not in our experience, not in Scripture, and not in any coherent theology. When God grieves over Israel's sin (Genesis 6:6) and when God rejoices over His people (Zephaniah 3:17), these are not identical divine responses. They are distinguishable attributes flowing from the same holy nature, but they are not the same attribute.

As Mullins has shown in meticulous detail, strict simplicity also generates what he calls a "modal collapse."³ If God is strictly simple, then God's act of creation is identical to His essence. But God's essence exists necessarily — it cannot fail to exist. So God's act of creation also exists necessarily. This means God had to create. He was not free to refrain from creating. But the Christian tradition has always insisted that creation is a free act of God — God did not have to create anything. He chose to create out of love. If simplicity destroys divine freedom in creation, then simplicity is too high a price to pay.⁴

Furthermore, simplicity makes genuine relations between God and creation impossible. If God cannot have any real distinctions or complexity in His being, then He cannot stand in a real relation to creatures — because a real relation would introduce a distinction between God-in-Himself and God-as-related-to-creation. Classical atemporalists like Aquinas recognized this and insisted that God's relation to creation is only a "relation of reason" — real from creation's side, but not from God's. But this leads to the troubling conclusion that God does not genuinely love, know, or interact with His creatures. That is a conclusion no faithful reading of Scripture can support.

To be clear, rejecting strict simplicity does not mean rejecting everything in the simplicity tradition. I believe God is not composed of separable parts. He is not made up of components that could be taken apart. His attributes are genuine aspects of His unified nature — they cannot be separated from who He is. But they are distinguishable from each other. God's love is not identical to God's wrath, even though both flow from the same holy character. This "weak" or "modified" simplicity preserves what is theologically valuable in the tradition without the devastating problems of the strict version. And once we abandon strict simplicity, the argument from simplicity to timelessness no longer has any force.

Against the Argument from Divine Immutability

The argument from immutability, as presented in Chapter 5, runs like this: a being who exists in time must change — at minimum, acquiring new temporal properties like "it is now Tuesday" or "the year is now 2025." If God cannot change, then God must be outside of time entirely. Even so-called "Cambridge changes" — changes in relational properties rather than intrinsic nature — are still changes, and a truly immutable God cannot undergo any change whatsoever.

My response is that the premise of strict, absolute immutability is itself mistaken. God's essential character, nature, moral attributes, and purposes never change. He is "the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8, ESV). His faithfulness endures through all generations (Psalm 119:90). He is not fickle or unreliable. But God's relational states, emotional responses, and interactions with creatures can and do genuinely change. When God sees Israel's sin and grieves (Genesis 6:6), that grief is a genuine change in God's relational and emotional state. When God hears the cry of the oppressed and acts to deliver them (Exodus 3:7–8), that action is a genuine response to a new situation. These are real changes — not changes in God's essential nature, but changes in His relational and responsive life.

This position is what theologians call "qualified immutability." God is unchanging in His nature but dynamic in His relational and emotional life. It is the position I defend at length in Chapter 30, and it is also the position argued for in the companion book, The Heart of God. The key insight is simple: if God genuinely interacts with a temporal world — creating, sustaining, redeeming, responding — then He must undergo some form of relational change. A God who creates at one moment and does not create at another moment has genuinely changed in at least that respect. Something is different about God-with-creation versus God-without-creation.⁵

William Lane Craig has helpfully distinguished between what he calls "real" changes (changes in a being's intrinsic properties) and "merely Cambridge" changes (changes in relational or extrinsic properties). Craig suggests that God may undergo Cambridge changes without undergoing real intrinsic changes.⁶ I think Craig is right that some changes are more fundamental than others. But I would go further: even Cambridge changes are genuine changes. If the relational state "God is now sustaining Abraham" was not true before Abraham existed and is true after Abraham exists, then something about reality — including God's relation to reality — has changed. And that change requires temporality.

Once we embrace qualified immutability — God is unchanging in His essential nature but genuinely responsive and relational in His dealings with creatures — the argument from immutability to timelessness loses its force. A God who is qualified-immutable can be temporal. In fact, He must be temporal, because genuine responsiveness and interaction require a "before" and an "after."

Against the Argument from Relativity Theory

The argument from relativity, as presented in Chapter 5, appeals to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity to undermine the A-theory of time and support the B-theory "block universe." If there is no privileged "now" that is the same for all observers — if simultaneity is relative to reference frames — then the notion of a cosmic present is an illusion. Time does not "flow." All moments are equally real. And if that is the case, divine timelessness becomes the natural view: God simply sees the entire space-time block from "outside," timelessly and completely.

This is a powerful argument, and it deserves a full treatment — which we provide in Chapter 31. But here I want to note several key points that undermine its force as an argument for divine timelessness.

First, the mathematical formalism of Special Relativity is compatible with more than one philosophical interpretation. Craig has argued persuasively that a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of relativity preserves absolute simultaneity and a privileged reference frame while being empirically equivalent to the standard Einsteinian interpretation.⁷ On the Lorentzian view, there really is a cosmic "now" — we just cannot detect it with physical instruments because our measuring devices are affected by motion. The physics does not change; only the philosophical interpretation of what the physics means changes. If the neo-Lorentzian interpretation is even possible, then relativity theory cannot be used to rule out the A-theory of time. And if the A-theory is not ruled out, the argument from relativity to timelessness collapses.

Second, even if we grant the standard Einsteinian interpretation of relativity, it does not follow that God must be timeless. A temporal God who transcends the physical universe is not bound by the physics of the physical universe. God is not a physical object subject to time dilation and length contraction. He is the Creator of the physical universe, and His temporal experience could involve a privileged "now" — a divine present — even if no physical instrument within creation can detect it. Physics describes how matter, energy, and light behave within the created order. It does not describe the Creator's own experience.

Third, many philosophers of physics have noted that the "block universe" interpretation of relativity is just that — an interpretation. It is not an empirical finding. The question of whether time genuinely flows or whether all moments are equally real is a metaphysical question, not a physical one. As DeWeese puts it, physics cannot settle the dispute between the A-theory and the B-theory because the debate is about the ontological status of temporal becoming — and that is a philosophical question, not a question that can be resolved by experiment.⁸

For these reasons, the argument from relativity is not nearly as strong as it first appears. At most, it shows that the standard interpretation of relativity is more naturally compatible with the B-theory and the block universe. But alternative interpretations are available, and even the standard interpretation does not require us to deny a privileged divine present. The full treatment of this issue, including Craig's neo-Lorentzian arguments, appears in Chapter 31.

Against the Argument from the Incompleteness of Temporal Life

Boethius's famous argument, presented in Chapter 5, claims that a temporal being's life is always incomplete — some of it is past (no longer possessed) and some is future (not yet possessed). But God's life must be complete and perfect — wholly and fully possessed at every moment. Therefore, God must possess His entire life at once (tota simul), which is timelessness.

This argument has genuine force, and I want to take it seriously. But ultimately, I believe it fails because it assumes what it needs to prove.

The argument assumes that temporal life is inherently deficient compared to timeless life — that a being whose life unfolds in sequence is somehow "less" than a being whose life exists all at once. But why should we think this? Craig raises this very question: an omniscient God who could bring to mind past and future experiences with a vividness comparable to that of present experiences need not find temporal passage "so melancholy an affair."⁹ God's perfect memory means His past is never lost. God's exhaustive foreknowledge means His future is never uncertain. His temporal life is always fully actualized in the present — He is never "lacking" anything He once had or will have.

Think of it this way. A human being's temporal life genuinely is incomplete in a deficient sense: we forget the past, we cannot know the future, and our present is fleeting. But God's temporal life is nothing like ours. God remembers every past moment with perfect clarity. He knows every future moment with absolute certainty. His present experience is never diminished by the passage of time. In what sense, then, is His temporal life "incomplete"? It is only incomplete if we define completeness as "having all of one's life at once" — but that is simply a restatement of the timelessness thesis, not an argument for it. The argument is circular: it defines perfection in terms of timelessness and then concludes that God must be timeless in order to be perfect.

A temporal God with perfect memory, perfect foreknowledge, and an unending life from everlasting to everlasting possesses His life in a manner that is every bit as "complete" as a timeless God — just in a different mode. The Boethian argument mistakes one mode of possessing life (the timeless mode) for the only mode compatible with perfection. But there is no good reason to think that temporal succession, in and of itself, is a deficiency rather than a perfection. After all, temporal experience gives God something that timelessness cannot: the capacity to genuinely act, respond, create, and relate in sequence — which, as we will see, is essential to personhood, love, and relationship.

Against the Stump-Kretzmann Model of ET-Simultaneity

The ET-simultaneity model, developed by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, was an ambitious attempt to solve one of the most pressing problems for divine timelessness: how can a timeless God be related to a temporal world? Their solution was to propose a new kind of simultaneity — "ET-simultaneity" (for "eternal-temporal simultaneity") — that could relate eternal and temporal entities without making them temporally simultaneous. Every temporal moment is ET-simultaneous with God's eternal present, but temporal moments are not ET-simultaneous with each other.¹⁰

This was an ingenious proposal, but it faces devastating objections from multiple directions. Let me walk through the most important ones.

First, the definition is explanatorily vacuous. As Craig has pointed out, the language of "observation" employed in Stump and Kretzmann's original definition is wholly obscure. What does it mean for a temporal being to "observe" something as "eternally present"? What does it mean for an eternal being to "observe" something as "temporally present"? Stump and Kretzmann appealed to the analogy of reference frames in Special Relativity, but in relativity theory, the notion of observation is given specific physical content through Einstein's operational definitions of distant simultaneity. In the ET-simultaneity model, no such content is provided. In the absence of any procedure for determining ET-simultaneity, the definition reduces to a mere restatement of the problem: it just says that relative to eternity, God is eternally present and temporal events are temporally present, and relative to time, temporal events are temporally present and God is eternally present. But that is precisely the problem we were trying to solve!¹¹

Worse, if a temporal event is "temporally present" to God, then God and that event are not ET-simultaneous at all — they are temporally simultaneous. And if God is temporally simultaneous with every temporal event, then God is in time, not outside of it. ET-simultaneity, pressed to its logical conclusion, either says nothing or collapses into ordinary temporal simultaneity — which is exactly what timelessness was supposed to avoid.

Paul Helm, himself a committed defender of divine timelessness, was not being uncharitable when he complained that Stump and Kretzmann's "solution to the problem is found simply by rewording the problem with the help of the device of ET-simultaneity. ET-simultaneity has no independent merit or use, nothing is illuminated or explained by it."¹² When even the strongest defender of your position says your proposed solution is merely a restatement of the problem, that is a telling admission.

Second, the revised definition is viciously circular. To their credit, Stump and Kretzmann recognized the problems with their original definition and offered a revised version that replaced the obscure observation language with causal language. On the new definition, x and y are ET-simultaneous just in case a timeless being can enter into direct causal relations with both of them.¹³ But this is viciously circular. ET-simultaneity was originally invoked to explain how a timeless God could be causally active in time. Now ET-simultaneity is defined in terms of a timeless being's ability to be causally active in time. Our original problem was to explain how God could be both timeless and yet creatively active in the world. That is hardly explained by saying that God can be causally active in time because He can be causally active in time! As Brian Leftow concluded, "any definition of ET-simultaneity which invokes any form of ET-causality ... is implicitly circular."¹⁴

Third, the model secretly presupposes the B-theory of time. As DeWeese has argued, the Stump-Kretzmann model only works if all temporal moments exist at once — that is, if the B-theory block universe is true. On a dynamic, A-theoretic view of time, only the present moment exists. Future events have not yet come into being. But the ET-simultaneity model requires that all temporal moments be simultaneously present to God's eternal now. If only the present moment exists, then past and future moments cannot be ET-simultaneous with anything, because they do not exist. This means the model presupposes exactly the controversial metaphysical thesis (the B-theory) that it would need to defend.¹⁵

For all of these reasons — explanatory vacuity, circularity, and dependence on the B-theory — the ET-simultaneity model must be judged a failure. It does not explain how a timeless God can be related to a temporal world. It merely restates the problem in fancier language.

Against Rogers's "Fifth Dimension" Proposal

Katherin Rogers proposed that God exists in an atemporal "dimension" that is simultaneous with every moment of time — somewhat like an extra spatial dimension that touches every point in our timeline. The idea is creative and worth considering. But it creates more problems than it solves.

The most basic problem is that the proposal uses a spatial metaphor to address a non-spatial question. Talking about God existing in a "fifth dimension" sounds intriguing, but what does it actually mean? A spatial dimension is a direction in which objects can extend. An "extra" dimension would be a direction that is orthogonal (at right angles) to all the spatial and temporal dimensions we know. But God is not a spatial being. He does not have extension. He does not occupy a location in the way physical objects do. So what does it mean for Him to exist "in" a dimension?

Furthermore, Rogers's proposal does not actually resolve the fundamental tension between timeless existence and temporal interaction. Even if we grant that God exists in some "extra dimension" that touches every point in our timeline, the question remains: does God experience events in our timeline sequentially or all at once? If sequentially, He is temporal (and the "extra dimension" is just a fancy way of saying He transcends physical time while still being temporal). If all at once, then we are back to the same problems that plague classical timelessness: How can God know tensed facts? How can He genuinely respond to prayers? How can the Son "become" flesh?

As Mullins has pointed out, the Rogers model — like the Stump-Kretzmann model — ultimately does not do the philosophical work it promises. It offers a suggestive metaphor but not a rigorous account of how timelessness and temporal interaction are compatible.¹⁶ The metaphor of a dimension that "touches" every temporal point either reduces to ordinary temporal presence at each moment (in which case God is temporal) or remains so vague as to be philosophically empty.

We have now responded to all six arguments for divine timelessness presented in Chapter 5. None of them succeeds. The argument from simplicity depends on a doctrine (strict classical simplicity) that should be rejected. The argument from immutability depends on a version of immutability (strict, absolute immutability) that is both biblically unsupported and theologically problematic. The argument from relativity depends on a particular philosophical interpretation of physics that is not the only option. The argument from incompleteness begs the question by defining perfection in terms of timelessness. The ET-simultaneity model is either vacuous or circular. And Rogers's fifth dimension is a suggestive metaphor that does not resolve the underlying problems.

But we are not yet done. The fact that the arguments for timelessness fail does not, by itself, prove that timelessness is false. Perhaps there are other reasons to believe it. Or perhaps timelessness is simply the default position, and it should stand unless positively refuted. So now we turn to the positive arguments against timelessness — arguments that show the doctrine is not merely unproven, but positively incompatible with core Christian commitments.

Part Two: The Positive Arguments Against Divine Timelessness

The Impossibility of Atemporal Personhood

This is one of the most powerful arguments against divine timelessness, and it deserves careful attention. The argument is simple to state but difficult to refute: personhood requires temporal succession, and a timeless God cannot be a person.

What does it mean to be a person? While the criteria of personhood are debated in contemporary philosophy, there are certain features that virtually everyone agrees are necessary for personhood: consciousness, self-consciousness, intentionality (the capacity to think about things), the ability to make decisions, the capacity for communication, and the ability to act. These are the features that distinguish persons from mere objects. A rock is not a person because it cannot think, decide, communicate, or act. God is a person (indeed, three Persons) because He thinks, decides, communicates, and acts.

But here is the problem: every one of these activities requires temporal duration. You cannot think a thought without temporal duration — thinking involves moving from one mental state to another, considering premises and reaching conclusions. You cannot make a decision without a "before" (the deliberation, the weighing of options) and an "after" (the choosing, the settling on one course of action). You cannot communicate without a sequence of ideas being expressed and received. You cannot act without bringing about a change — moving from a state of affairs in which the act has not yet occurred to a state of affairs in which it has.¹⁷

Craig develops this argument in his Time and Eternity: if personhood requires properties like thinking, deciding, responding, and communicating — all of which involve temporal succession — then a personal God must be temporal.¹⁸ A timeless God could not think sequentially, could not decide after deliberation, could not respond to events, and could not communicate through a sequence of words or ideas. Such a God would not be a person in any recognizable sense of the word.

Now, defenders of timelessness have attempted to respond. Some have argued that a timeless God could possess all of the qualities of personhood — consciousness, knowledge, will — in a single, undifferentiated, timeless act. God does not need to think sequentially; He could possess all knowledge in a single, eternal intuition. He does not need to decide after deliberation; He could will everything in a single, eternal act of will.

Craig considers this response and offers a nuanced assessment. He acknowledges that it is not logically impossible for a timeless being to possess properties sufficient for personhood — consciousness, self-awareness, and intentionality could perhaps exist in a timeless state.¹⁹ The question is not whether timeless personhood is logically possible in the abstract, but whether it is compatible with the kind of personhood the Bible attributes to God. The God of the Bible does not merely possess knowledge in a static, undifferentiated way. He speaks, commands, promises, warns, responds, acts, and interacts. He enters into covenants that unfold over time. He gives prophecies about the future and then fulfills them at specific moments in history. He hears prayers and answers them. All of this is inherently sequential, inherently temporal activity.

As DeWeese frames the issue, the problem is not just about abstract personhood but about agency. An agent is a being who brings about changes in the world through intentional action. But bringing about a change requires a transition — from a state where the change has not occurred to a state where it has. That transition is inherently temporal. A changeless, timeless being cannot bring about changes because bringing about a change just is undergoing a temporal process.²⁰ If God is an agent — and every Christian believes He is — then God is temporal.

Let me push this point a little further with a concrete illustration. Think about what happens when God makes a promise. God promised Abraham that He would make his descendants as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5). Making a promise involves a situation before the promise (when it has not yet been made), the act of making the promise, and a situation after the promise (when it is now "on the books" and awaiting fulfillment). This is an inherently temporal sequence. A timeless God, who has no before or after, cannot make a promise — because promising is the kind of thing that unfolds in sequence. You cannot promise something that has already happened. You cannot promise something that is simultaneously being promised and fulfilled. A promise, by its very nature, looks forward from the present to a future fulfillment.

The same applies to divine commands. When God said "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3), this was a command that produced an effect. Before the command, there was no light. After the command, there was light. If God is timeless, there is no "before" and "after" in His experience. So in what sense did He actually command? A command that does not precede its effect is not really a command at all. But the God of the Bible does not merely describe reality; He commands reality into existence through His Word. Commanding requires temporal sequence.

Some philosophers have suggested that a timeless God could possess all of His personal properties in a single, undivided, timeless act. Everything God knows, wills, commands, and loves is eternally present to Him in a single "eternal now." There is no sequence of thoughts, no succession of decisions, no temporal ordering of divine acts. Everything is simply "all at once." But this response faces a serious challenge: the Bible never portrays God's mental life as a single, undifferentiated act. God deliberates ("Let us make man in our image," Genesis 1:26). God changes His approach in response to new situations. God asks questions, announces plans, and then carries them out. God gives prophecies and then fulfills them. All of this paints a picture of a mind that operates in sequence, not a mind frozen in a timeless instant. As Mullins argues, even the logical ordering within God's life — premises leading to conclusions, intentions leading to actions — constitutes a form of succession that is incompatible with strict timelessness.⁴⁰

God's Real Relations with the World

The second positive argument against timelessness concerns God's relation to His creation. The argument runs as follows:

God is genuinely related to the temporal world — He sustains it, knows it, loves it, and acts within it. But if God is timeless and creation is temporal, then the relation between them is either (a) a real relation in God, or (b) merely a "Cambridge relation" — real from creation's side but not from God's. Option (a) introduces change and complexity into God, undermining timelessness and simplicity. Option (b) means God is not genuinely related to His creation — He does not genuinely love, know, or care for particular creatures. Neither option is acceptable. Therefore, God must be temporal.

Mullins develops this argument extensively. He points out that the classical tradition (especially Aquinas) chose option (b): God's relation to creation is not a real relation in God.²¹ The world is really related to God (the way creation depends on its Creator), but God is not really related to the world (God would be exactly the same even if the world did not exist). This is the doctrine of "no real relation" — and it has staggering implications. If God is not really related to you, then in what sense does He really love you? In what sense does He really know you? In what sense is He really present to you?

Craig, in his essay in God and Time: Four Views, drives this point home with characteristic clarity. He notes that denying God's real relation to the world is "fantastic" — it is simply unbelievable to most Christians that God is not genuinely related to His own creation.²² If God sustains every creature in existence from moment to moment, knows every sparrow that falls, and numbers every hair on our heads (Matthew 10:29–30), then He is really related to those creatures. The pastoral implications are devastating: a God who is not really related to you cannot really be your Father, your Shepherd, your Comforter, or your Friend.

But if we grant that God is really related to His temporal creation, then He is involved in temporal relations. He sustains Abraham at one time and Moses at another. He is related to David's sin at one moment and David's repentance at another. These relations change over time as new events occur and new creatures come into being. And a being whose relations change over time is temporal — by definition.

The argument can be stated formally in the way Craig presents it. If God is really related to the temporal world, and if the temporal world involves objective temporal becoming (as the A-theory holds), then God's relations to the world genuinely change over time — creatures come into being and pass away, events occur and become past. God goes from not sustaining Abraham (before Abraham exists) to sustaining Abraham (when Abraham exists) to no longer sustaining Abraham's earthly body (after Abraham dies). These are real changes in God's relational life. And real changes require temporality.²³

Some defenders of timelessness have tried to escape this argument by embracing the B-theory of time (the static, tenseless, "block universe" view), on which there is no objective temporal becoming. If all moments are equally real and nothing genuinely comes into or passes out of existence, then God's relations to the world do not genuinely change — He is just timelessly related to different parts of the space-time block. But this escape route requires embracing a highly controversial and, I believe, deeply problematic view of time. As Craig observes, virtually no defender of divine timelessness has taken this route except Paul Helm.²⁴ And the B-theory faces its own formidable philosophical and theological objections, which we examine in Chapter 24. The A-theory — the dynamic, tensed view of time in which temporal becoming is real — is both more philosophically defensible and more theologically congenial to the biblical portrait of a God who genuinely acts in history.

God's Knowledge of Tensed Facts

This argument, powerfully developed by Craig and widely discussed in the philosophical literature, is one of the most formidable objections to divine timelessness. It goes like this:

If a dynamic theory of time is correct (the A-theory), then there are tensed facts — facts about what is happening now, what has happened, and what will happen. For example, "It is now 3:00 PM on Tuesday" is a tensed fact. "Abraham Lincoln's assassination is in the past" is a tensed fact. "The sun will rise tomorrow" is a tensed fact. These facts are real, objective features of the world — they are not merely reflections of our subjective perspective.

Now, God is omniscient — He knows all facts. If there are tensed facts, then an omniscient God must know them. But a timeless being has no "now." A timeless being does not experience any moment as present. Therefore, a timeless being cannot know what time it is now. He cannot know that Abraham Lincoln's assassination is in the past (rather than the present or the future). He cannot know that the sun will rise tomorrow (rather than that it rose yesterday). In other words, a timeless being cannot know tensed facts. But if God cannot know tensed facts, He is not omniscient. And if God is omniscient — as every Christian affirms — then He must know tensed facts. And if He knows tensed facts, He is temporal.²⁵

Mullins presents a clear version of this argument in his From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. He distinguishes between tensed facts and tenseless facts. Tensed facts make reference to what was the case in the past, what is the case now, and what will be the case in the future. Tenseless facts only make reference to "earlier-than," "later-than," and "simultaneous-with" relations — they describe the world without any reference to past, present, or future. On the A-theory, both kinds of facts are real, and neither can be reduced to the other. A complete description of reality must include tensed facts. And an omniscient God must know all of reality — including the tensed facts.²⁶

The defender of timelessness has two options. She can deny premise (2) by adopting the B-theory of time and claiming that there are no tensed facts — that "now" is merely a subjective feature of human experience. This is the route Helm takes.²⁷ But as we noted above, the B-theory is controversial and faces powerful objections. Or she can deny premise (3) or its implications by arguing that God does not need to know tensed facts in order to be omniscient. Some have suggested that tensed facts are like "first-person" facts (knowing what it feels like to be me) — a timeless God could be omniscient even without knowing them, just as He could be omniscient without knowing what it feels like to be a sinner.²⁸

But this comparison fails. As Craig argues in God and Time: Four Views, knowing that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated is not at all a case of "knowing how" — it is a straightforward case of "knowing that," which is propositional knowledge. Knowing that it is now 3:00 PM is not a private, first-person experience; it is an objective fact about the world. An omniscient being who did not know what time it is would be ignorant of something — and ignorance is incompatible with omniscience. As Craig puts it, "it seems to me a poor bargain, indeed, to auction off omniscience in order to purchase timelessness."²⁹

This argument is devastating for timelessness. A temporal deity could know everything a timeless deity knows (all tenseless facts) plus an additional infinity of tensed facts — making the temporal deity more knowledgeable than the timeless one. Timelessness does not enhance divine knowledge; it compromises it. And since omniscience is a nonnegotiable divine attribute — far more firmly rooted in Scripture and tradition than timelessness — it is timelessness that should be given up.

It is worth noting that the argument from tensed facts and the argument from God's real relations with the world are distinct but complementary. The argument from relations shows that God undergoes extrinsic change (His relations to the changing world change). The argument from tensed facts shows that God undergoes intrinsic change (the content of His knowledge changes as tensed facts change). Together, they form a powerful two-pronged case for divine temporality.³⁰

The Incarnation

The Incarnation — the central event of the Christian faith, when the eternal Son of God "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14, ESV) — poses one of the most serious challenges to divine timelessness. If God the Son is timelessly eternal, how can He "become" anything? "Becoming" is an inherently temporal concept. It involves a transition from one state to another: from not-incarnate to incarnate, from not-having-a-human-nature to having-a-human-nature. A being who exists in an unchanging, timeless "eternal now" cannot undergo such a transition.

This argument is developed at length in Chapter 27, drawing especially on Mullins's important work God, Time, and the Incarnation. Here I will offer only a summary of the key points.

The Chalcedonian Definition (AD 451) affirms that Jesus Christ is one Person with two natures — fully divine and fully human — united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." The Person of the Son — who is fully God — took on a human nature. He did not always have that human nature. Before approximately 4 BC, the Son existed without a human nature. After the Incarnation, He exists with a human nature — and will continue to do so forever. This is a genuine change in the life of God the Son. There is a "before" (the pre-incarnate state) and an "after" (the incarnate state). The Incarnation event itself is a temporal marker — a dividing line between two consecutive states of affairs in the life of the Son.³¹

Defenders of timelessness have tried various strategies to reconcile timelessness with the Incarnation. Some use the "reduplicative strategy," saying that the Son is timeless qua divine nature and temporal qua human nature. But as Mullins has argued, this strategy fails because it is the Person — not just one of the natures — who is either timeless or temporal. The Person of the Son either experiences temporal succession or He does not. If He does, He is temporal. If He does not, He cannot undergo genuine human experiences like learning, growing, suffering, and dying.³²

Others have tried to say that God the Son is eternally incarnate — that the Incarnation is a timeless act with temporal effects. But this conflicts with the clear biblical witness that the Son existed before the Incarnation (John 1:1–3; Colossians 1:15–17) and then, "in the fullness of time," God sent forth His Son (Galatians 4:4). The Incarnation is an event — something that happened at a specific moment in history. An event is inherently temporal.

For a full treatment of the Incarnation argument, including a detailed examination of the reduplicative strategy, two-minds Christology, four-dimensionalist approaches, and Leftow's and Helm's models, see Chapter 27. The conclusion of that chapter reinforces the argument made here: the Incarnation is strong evidence that God the Son is temporal, and divine timelessness is incompatible with orthodox Christology.

It is worth pausing to note just how central the Incarnation is to the Christian faith. This is not a minor doctrine that can be adjusted or set aside when it conflicts with a philosophical theory. The Incarnation is the beating heart of Christianity — "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14) — and any doctrine of God that cannot accommodate it is, for that reason alone, fatally flawed. As Mullins argues in God, Time, and the Incarnation, the Incarnation should serve as the "control belief" in the debate over God and time. We should not ask, "Given that God is timeless, how can we make the Incarnation fit?" We should ask, "Given the Incarnation, what must be true about God's relationship to time?"⁴¹ And the answer is clear: God must be temporal, because the Incarnation involves genuine temporal sequence in the life of God the Son.

Even Helm, the strongest defender of timelessness in the contemporary literature, recognizes the force of this problem. His response is to argue that from God's perspective, the created order — including the Incarnation itself — is "eternal" in the sense that all of history exists timelessly before God.⁴² But this only pushes the problem back a step. If the Incarnation is a timeless act, then the Son was never truly "pre-incarnate." He was always incarnate — timelessly, eternally incarnate. But this conflicts with the New Testament's clear portrayal of the Son existing "before" the Incarnation (John 17:5: "And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed," ESV). The language of "before" is not merely metaphorical here. It reflects a genuine temporal sequence in the life of the Son.

Divine Emotions and Temporal Responsiveness

Closely related to the arguments from personhood and real relations is the argument from divine emotions. I believe that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures — He truly loves, grieves, rejoices, and is moved by compassion. This position, which theologians call "divine passibility," is developed at length in the companion book, The Heart of God. The relevance for the God-and-time question is straightforward: genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality.

Consider what it means to "respond" emotionally to an event. When God sees the suffering of His people in Egypt, He is "moved by compassion" (the language used throughout the Old Testament). When God sees the wickedness of humanity before the Flood, He is "grieved" (Genesis 6:6). When God sees His people repent and turn back to Him, He "relents" and "rejoices" (Jonah 3:10; Zephaniah 3:17). In each case, there is a temporal sequence: first the event occurs, then God responds to it. The event comes before the response. The response comes after the event. This before-and-after sequence is the very definition of temporality.

A timeless God cannot genuinely respond to events because genuine response requires temporal sequence. If God is timeless, then His "grief" over human sin is not a response to sin — it is simply an eternal, unchanging feature of His timeless existence. His "joy" over human repentance is not a response to repentance — it is an eternal, unchanging feature that exists whether or not anyone ever repents. But this drains divine emotions of all their meaning. A grief that is not a response to anything is not really grief. A joy that does not arise from anything is not really joy. It is just a static emotional state — unchanging, unresponsive, and ultimately impersonal.

Mullins develops a particularly powerful version of this argument in his work on divine emotion. He presents what we might call the "wrath argument": if God timelessly and immutably has wrath toward sinners, then God is wrathful toward them before they sin — because in a timeless existence, there is no "before" and "after." God's wrath toward the sinner is eternally present, regardless of whether the sinner has actually sinned yet. But this is deeply unjust. How can a righteous God be wrathful toward someone who has not yet done anything wrong?³³

The temporalist alternative makes far more sense: God's wrath is a genuine response to sin that occurs after the sin occurs. God is not wrathful toward the sinner before the sin. He becomes wrathful when the sin is committed. This requires temporality — a real "before" and "after" in God's emotional life. And this is exactly what the biblical portrait of God shows us: a God who responds to events with genuine emotion, whose emotional states change as the situations of His creatures change.

For a full treatment of this argument, including the relationship between divine passibility and divine temporality, see Chapter 28. The companion book, The Heart of God, provides the comprehensive biblical and theological case for divine passibility and its implications for God's temporal nature.

The Oppy Causal Principle

The final positive argument against timelessness that I want to present is based on what Mullins calls the Oppy Causal Principle, named after philosopher Graham Oppy. The principle is intuitive and can be stated simply: there can be no case in which one thing causes a change in another thing without the first thing itself undergoing a change.³⁴

Think about this for a moment. Whenever we see causation in the real world, the cause changes when it produces its effect. A fire causes water to boil — but the fire itself is burning (changing) in the process. A person throws a ball — but the person's arm moves (changes) in the process. A carpenter builds a house — but the carpenter's body moves, energy is expended, and the carpenter's situation changes. Oppy argues that this principle can be defended by empirical generalization: in every case of causation we observe, the cause undergoes change when producing its effect.

Now apply this to God and creation. God caused the universe to come into being. Before creation, there was no universe. After creation, there was a universe. That is a change — a massive change — in reality. The Oppy Causal Principle says that the cause of this change (God) must also have undergone a change. But if God is timeless and immutable, He cannot undergo change. Therefore, a timeless and immutable God cannot cause creation.

This is a powerful argument because the creation of the universe is the most fundamental act attributed to God in the Bible. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1, ESV). If divine timelessness makes it impossible for God to be the Creator, then timelessness must go — because the doctrine of creation is non-negotiable for Christianity.

The classical atemporalist response, going back to Aquinas, is to deny that God's causal relation to creation involves any change in God. God timelessly wills creation into being. The effect (creation) is temporal, but the cause (God's eternal will) is changeless. Mullins counters that this response simply denies the Oppy Causal Principle without providing any reason to think it is false. The classical theist asks us to accept an exception to the principle — a case of causation without change in the cause — but offers no model of how this could work. It is simply asserted.³⁵

Furthermore, the classical response runs into the problem of why creation happened "when" it did. If God's will to create is eternal and changeless, then why did creation begin at a particular moment? Why not sooner? Why not later? Why not always? If the cause (God's will) never changes, it is hard to see how it can produce a new effect at a particular moment in time. A changeless cause should produce a changeless effect — or no effect at all. The fact that creation began — that something genuinely new came into existence — strongly suggests that the cause (God) underwent a change: from not-creating to creating.

Craig, to his credit, recognizes this problem and embraces the consequence: God does change when He creates, and this change marks His transition from timelessness (before creation) to temporality (after creation).³⁶ Craig can therefore affirm the Oppy Causal Principle. But his solution — the "two-phase" model in which God is timeless before creation and temporal after — has its own problems, which we examine in Chapter 8. The simpler and more satisfying solution is the one advocated in this book: God was always temporal, and creation was a new temporal act within God's ongoing temporal life.

The Cumulative Case: A Dead End

We have now examined twelve arguments — six in defense of timelessness, and six against it. The results are clear.

On the defensive side, none of the six arguments for divine timelessness succeeds in establishing its conclusion. The argument from simplicity depends on a doctrine that should be rejected. The argument from immutability depends on a version of immutability that is too strong. The argument from relativity depends on a contested philosophical interpretation of physics. The argument from incompleteness begs the question. The ET-simultaneity model is vacuous or circular. And Rogers's fifth dimension is a suggestive but ultimately empty metaphor.

On the offensive side, six powerful arguments show that divine timelessness is positively incompatible with core Christian commitments. A timeless God cannot be a person in the rich, dynamic, relational sense that the Bible portrays. A timeless God cannot be really related to His temporal creation. A timeless God cannot know tensed facts and therefore cannot be omniscient. A timeless God cannot become incarnate without contradiction. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond to His creatures with real emotion. And a timeless, immutable God cannot cause creation.

These are not minor difficulties. They are not technical glitches that can be patched with a clever modification here or an auxiliary hypothesis there. They are fundamental, structural failures that strike at the heart of Christian theology. They show that the atemporalist research program — as Mullins calls it — has reached a dead end.³⁷

Mullins's language of a "research program" is helpful here. The divine timelessness research program has a hard core of commitments: timelessness, simplicity, strong immutability, and strong impassibility. These doctrines form an interlocking package — they stand or fall together. If you reject simplicity, the argument from simplicity to timelessness collapses. If you reject strong immutability, the argument from immutability to timelessness collapses. If you reject strong impassibility, God's emotional responses require temporality. And if timelessness itself leads to the problems we have identified — the impossibility of atemporal personhood, the impossibility of real relations, the impossibility of knowing tensed facts, the impossibility of the Incarnation — then the entire research program fails.³⁸

Some theologians have tried to save timelessness by modifying one or more of the other doctrines in the package. They might reject simplicity while keeping timelessness, or modify impassibility while keeping timelessness. But these modifications undermine the very arguments that were used to support timelessness in the first place. If you reject simplicity, you lose the strongest traditional argument for timelessness. If you reject strong immutability, you concede that God can change — and then why not concede that He can change temporally? The modifications that might save timelessness from one problem tend to create new problems or remove the original motivation for believing in timelessness.

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that the great theologians who held divine timelessness — Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas — were foolish or unfaithful. They were brilliant thinkers doing their best to honor God's transcendence and perfection within the philosophical frameworks available to them. I respect their work enormously. I have learned from them, and I continue to learn from them. But I believe they were wrong on this particular point — and I believe the tools of analytic philosophy, combined with careful biblical exegesis, now allow us to see why they were wrong and to articulate a better alternative.

That alternative is divine temporality — the view that God genuinely experiences temporal succession, genuinely acts in the present, and genuinely responds to events as they occur. But not a crude temporality that makes God a prisoner of the clock. Rather, a robust, theologically rich temporality that preserves everything genuine in the classical tradition's concern for divine transcendence while doing justice to the biblical portrait of a living, active, responsive, loving God who enters into real relationship with His creatures in the flow of time.

Before we move on, it is worth reflecting on why the timelessness tradition persisted for so long despite these serious problems. Part of the answer lies in the philosophical frameworks that were available. The great church fathers and medieval theologians inherited from Greek philosophy — especially from Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus — a strong conviction that changelessness is a perfection and change is a deficiency. In the Greek philosophical tradition, the highest reality is unchanging, eternal, and self-sufficient. The world of change and becoming is a lower, derivative reality. When Christian theologians adopted this framework, it was natural for them to conclude that God — the supreme being — must be utterly changeless, utterly timeless, utterly beyond the flux of temporal existence.

But as we argued in Chapter 3, this philosophical framework is not the framework of the Bible. The biblical writers do not begin with a Greek philosophical concept of perfection and then deduce God's attributes from it. They begin with God's self-revelation in history — His acts, His words, His covenant, His promises, His emotional responses — and describe what God is like based on what He has actually said and done. And what He has said and done reveals a God who is deeply, genuinely, actively temporal. He creates over a sequence of days. He calls Abraham and makes a covenant with him. He leads Israel through the wilderness. He sends His Son "in the fullness of time." He hears prayers and answers them. He grieves, rejoices, relents, and acts. Every page of Scripture testifies to a God who is alive, active, and present in the temporal flow of history.

The timelessness tradition is a genuine attempt to honor God's transcendence and greatness. I do not question the motives of those who developed and defended it. But I believe the attempt was misguided, because it confused one particular philosophical model of perfection (Greek changelessness) with perfection itself. True perfection — biblical perfection — is not the static, frozen perfection of an unmoved marble statue. It is the dynamic, living perfection of a God who is so great that He can enter into genuine relationship with His creatures without losing any of His essential nature. It is the perfection of a God who is so sovereign over time that He can experience it fully without being imprisoned by it. It is the perfection of a God who is so loving that He does not remain aloof in a timeless eternity but plunges into the temporal flow of human history — all the way to a manger, a cross, and an empty tomb.

That is the God we encounter in Chapter 7.

Conclusion

We began this chapter by giving divine timelessness a fair hearing in Chapter 5. We have now responded to every major argument in its favor and presented a battery of positive arguments against it. The cumulative case is overwhelming.

The supporting pillars of divine timelessness — strict simplicity and strict immutability — are themselves problematic and should be rejected in their classical forms (as Chapter 30 will argue in detail). The appeal to relativity theory is inconclusive and depends on a contested philosophical interpretation. The Boethian argument from incompleteness begs the question. The ET-simultaneity model and Rogers's fifth dimension fail to solve the interaction problem they were designed to address.

Meanwhile, the positive arguments against timelessness are powerful and mutually reinforcing. A timeless God cannot be a dynamic, relational, responsive person. A timeless God cannot be really related to His temporal creation. A timeless God cannot know what time it is — and therefore cannot be omniscient. A timeless God cannot become incarnate. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond emotionally to His creatures. And a timeless God cannot cause creation. Each of these arguments, taken alone, is a serious problem for timelessness. Taken together, they constitute a cumulative case that I believe is decisive.

As Craig concludes his own assessment of these arguments: given the reality of tense and temporal becoming, there are comparatively weak grounds for affirming divine timelessness but powerful arguments in favor of divine temporality. The most reasonable conclusion is that God is temporal.³⁹

But what does it mean for God to be temporal? Does it mean He is trapped in the present moment like we are? Does it mean He is subject to the passage of time against His will? Does it mean He does not know the future? None of these things. In Chapter 7, we will develop the positive case for dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — a view that affirms God's genuine temporal experience while also affirming that He transcends creaturely clock-time in ways that give Him access to all of temporal reality, past, present, and future. This is a God who is genuinely in time — but who is the Lord of time, not its prisoner.

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