Chapter 7

Divine Temporality

The Case for a God Who Experiences Time

Introduction: The Heart of the Matter

We have arrived at the heart of this book. In the chapters leading up to this one, we surveyed the landscape. We asked what time is (Chapter 2). We examined what the Bible means when it uses words like olam and aiōn (Chapter 3). We took a long and careful look at divine timelessness — the classical view that God exists entirely outside of time in an "eternal now" (Chapter 4). We gave that view its strongest possible defense, presenting every major argument in its favor as fairly and forcefully as we could (Chapter 5). And then we showed, argument by argument, that divine timelessness faces devastating, perhaps insurmountable problems — from personhood, from God's real relations with the world, from His knowledge of tensed facts, from the Incarnation, from His emotional life, and from the very act of creation itself (Chapter 6).

If the reader has followed the argument this far, the natural question is: what now? If timelessness fails, what do we put in its place? That is the question this chapter answers.

The answer is divine temporality — the view that God genuinely experiences time. But I want to be careful right from the start. When I say God is temporal, I do not mean that God is a prisoner of the clock. I do not mean that He sits around waiting for things to happen, or that He is trapped in the present moment the way we are, unable to see what is coming next. I do not mean that time is some force greater than God, a cage He cannot escape. That would be a caricature of the position, and it is a caricature that atemporalists sometimes use to make divine temporality seem foolish.

What I mean is something far richer and more beautiful. I believe that God experiences real succession — genuine before and after, real sequence in His thoughts, decisions, and actions. He is not frozen in a timeless, static "eternal now." The biblical portrait of God acting, responding, creating, speaking, grieving, rejoicing, and intervening in history is not merely metaphorical or accommodative language. It reflects the genuine reality of God's inner life and His engagement with His creatures.¹ But — and this is crucial — God's temporal experience is qualitatively different from ours. He is not limited to the present moment the way we are. He can access, see, and interact with all moments of created time — past, present, and future. He is the Lord of time, not its subject.

I call this position dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access, or more simply, dynamic omnitemporality. It is the thesis of this entire book, and this chapter lays it out in full.

What Is Omnitemporality?

Before we survey the scholars who have built the case for divine temporality, we need a clear working definition of what we are talking about. The word omnitemporality was introduced into the discussion in a careful and philosophically precise way by Garrett DeWeese in his important book God and the Nature of Time.² DeWeese developed the concept by drawing a parallel with a more familiar attribute of God: omnipresence.

Most Christians believe that God is omnipresent — present at every point in space without being confined to any spatial location. God is not "in" space the way a chair is in a room. He transcends space. Yet He is genuinely, personally present at every point in space. He is not absent from any place. DeWeese suggested that we think about God's relationship to time in a similar way. Just as God is present to every point of space without being a physical object located in space, so God is present to every moment of time without being locked into any particular moment the way creatures are.³

Here is how I would define omnitemporality in accessible terms: An omnitemporal being is one that is present to every actual moment of time, experiences genuine temporal succession (real before and after), and is not confined to any single temporal framework — whether physical clock-time, biological time, or any created measure of duration.⁴

This means several things at once. First, God genuinely experiences succession in His mental states. He thinks one thought, then another. He decides, then acts. He observes an event, then responds. This is what we mean when we say God is "temporal" — His inner life has real sequence, real process, real before-and-after. As DeWeese puts it in his conclusion, an omnitemporal God "would experience succession in his mental states, thus being much more in line with what we understand by 'person.'"⁵

Second, God is not limited to physical time. Physical time — the time measured by clocks and calendars, the time governed by the laws of physics — began at creation. It is a feature of the created order, not a prison that contains God. God's temporality is more fundamental than physical time. It is what DeWeese calls "metaphysical time" — a form of temporal succession that exists because of who God is, not because of what He has created.⁶

Third, God uses temporal language truthfully about Himself. He can truly say, "I am doing this now," "I did that in the past," and "I will do this in the future." These are not accommodative metaphors. They are accurate descriptions of God's own experience. He knows what time it is. He knows the temporal location of every event. He stands in genuine temporal relations with His creatures.⁷

Finally, omnitemporality is not the same as sempiternity — the view that God simply endures through time from the infinite past to the infinite future, like a very long-lived creature. Omnitemporality involves a qualitative transcendence of creaturely time. God is "above" physical time in the way that He is "above" physical space, while still being genuinely present to every moment of it. This distinction will become very important when we discuss the question of God's life before creation later in this chapter.

The Major Temporalist Thinkers: Shared Commitments and Distinctive Contributions

The case for divine temporality has been built by a number of brilliant philosophers and theologians over the past half-century. While they share the core conviction that God is genuinely temporal, they differ in important ways on the details. Let me introduce the most important figures and explain what each contributes to the conversation.

Richard Swinburne: The Pioneer of Analytic Temporalism

Richard Swinburne, one of the most important analytic philosophers of religion in the twentieth century, is perhaps the most influential defender of divine temporality in the modern era. In his landmark works The Coherence of Theism (1977) and The Christian God (1994), Swinburne argues that God exists in time and has always existed in time — including before the creation of the physical universe.⁸

What makes Swinburne's contribution distinctive is his treatment of pre-creation divine time. Before God created the physical universe, Swinburne argues, God existed in a form of time that was "amorphous" and "undifferentiated." That means there was no way to measure it. There were no clocks, no regular processes, no physical events to mark off intervals. God simply existed, and His existence had genuine duration, but that duration lacked any internal structure or metric. It was like a vast, smooth expanse with no landmarks — genuinely temporal (involving real duration), but without the kind of measurable, clock-based structure that characterizes physical time after creation.⁹

Swinburne also argues forcefully that divine timelessness is incoherent. He employs a causal theory of time and contends that if God causes the existence of the world and interferes in its operations, then God's actions must be temporally prior to their effects. A timeless God cannot stand in causal relations to temporal events because causation requires temporal priority.¹⁰

Swinburne is the simplest starting point for divine temporality: a temporal God who has always been temporal, who creates a temporal universe, and who interacts with that universe in genuinely temporal ways. His view is elegant in its simplicity and powerful in its directness.

Nicholas Wolterstorff: God Is Everlasting

Nicholas Wolterstorff, the distinguished philosopher from Yale, has been one of the most important defenders of divine temporality since his seminal 1975 essay "God Everlasting."¹¹ His more developed argument appears in his essay "Unqualified Divine Temporality" in the volume God and Time: Four Views.¹²

Wolterstorff's position is refreshingly straightforward. He argues that God is everlasting — He exists through all time, with no beginning and no end. All the temporal language that the Bible uses to describe God should be taken at face value unless we have very strong reasons to read it as figurative. And Wolterstorff argues that we do not have such reasons. The Bible describes a God who acts in history, who responds to prayer, who carries out a plan of redemption that unfolds over centuries. These descriptions imply that God performs certain actions before He performs others. The history of redemption is not God timelessly bringing it about that certain events happen in a certain order. It is God Himself acting — first speaking to Moses, then later speaking through the prophets, and then in the fullness of time sending His Son.¹³

Wolterstorff brings two main arguments for divine temporality. First, he argues that time is dynamic (the A-theory is correct), and that temporal indexicals — words like "now," "today," "yesterday" — are irreducible. They cannot be eliminated or translated into tenseless language. If this is right, then God must be in time to know what is happening now.¹⁴

Second, Wolterstorff argues that God responds to His people's crying out to Him. He can respond to our cries only when it is the case that we are crying out. If God hears a prayer at the moment it is uttered and responds to it, He must be temporally present at that moment. He must, then, be in time.¹⁵

Wolterstorff also systematically dismantles the biblical case for divine timelessness. He examines the three passages most commonly cited by atemporalists — Psalm 90:1–4, 2 Peter 3:8, and John 8:58 — and argues that none of them actually supports timelessness. Instead, they use temporal language and speak of God existing "before" the physical world, experiencing temporal duration (even if differently from us), and existing "before" Abraham. As he puts it, the scriptural passages traditionally cited as supporting divine timelessness provide no such support at all.¹⁶

I find Wolterstorff's position deeply compelling. Of all the temporalist thinkers we will survey, my own position is closest to his. Where I go beyond Wolterstorff is in adding a dimension of "transcendent temporal access" — the idea that God, while genuinely temporal, can also access all moments of created time in ways that go beyond ordinary temporal experience. I will develop this idea later in this chapter.

Alan Padgett: Relative Timelessness and Metaphysical Time

Alan Padgett occupies an important mediating position in this debate. In his book God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time and his essay "Eternity as Relative Timelessness" in God and Time: Four Views, Padgett argues that God transcends measured, physical time but is not absolutely atemporal.¹⁷

Padgett's key insight is the distinction between measured time and metaphysical time. Measured time is the time of clocks, calendars, physical processes — the time governed by the laws of physics. This is the kind of time that Einstein's relativity theory describes. Metaphysical time, on the other hand, is a more fundamental temporal reality that underlies and grounds measured time. God exists in metaphysical time but transcends measured time. He is not subject to the regularities of physical time, but He genuinely experiences temporal succession at a deeper, more fundamental level.¹⁸

Padgett calls his view "relative timelessness" — God is relatively timeless with respect to measured, physical time (He is not governed by it or constrained by it), but He is not absolutely timeless (He genuinely experiences succession and duration). This is an important distinction because it shows that the choice is not simply between "God in time just like us" and "God completely outside of time." There is a middle way: God transcends our kind of time while still being genuinely temporal in a deeper sense.¹⁹

I find much to appreciate in Padgett's work. His distinction between measured time and metaphysical time is helpful, and his insistence that God transcends physical time while remaining genuinely temporal captures something important about the biblical portrait of God. Where I differ from Padgett is mainly a matter of emphasis: I want to affirm more strongly that God's temporal experience involves genuine succession, genuine before-and-after, and genuine responsiveness to creaturely events in real time.

William Lane Craig: Temporal After Creation

William Lane Craig is one of the most important analytic philosophers of religion in the world today, and his treatment of God and time in Time and Eternity is one of the most sophisticated in the literature. Craig holds a "hybrid" view: God is timeless without creation and temporal with creation (a view explored in detail in Chapter 8). But for the purposes of this chapter, what matters is Craig's powerful case that God after creation is genuinely temporal.²⁰

Craig's arguments for God's temporality after creation are important contributions to the temporalist case. He argues that if time is dynamic (which he believes it is — he defends the A-theory), then God's real relations with a temporal creation are sufficient to make God temporal. If the world is genuinely changing — if new moments are coming into existence, if events are genuinely passing from future to present to past — then God's knowledge of the world is changing too. He knows what is happening now, and "now" is constantly shifting. This constant updating of God's knowledge constitutes genuine change, and genuine change entails genuine temporality.²¹

Craig also argues that a personal God must be temporal. Persons think, decide, respond, communicate, plan, and act — all of which require temporal succession. You cannot think a thought without temporal duration. You cannot make a decision without a "before" (considering options) and an "after" (choosing). You cannot communicate without a sequence of words or ideas. A personal being is a temporal being.²²

I agree with Craig on all of these points regarding God-after-creation. Where I disagree with Craig is on the pre-creation phase. Craig holds that God was timeless before creation and became temporal at creation. I believe, for reasons we will explore shortly, that God has always been temporal — that the dynamic life of the Trinity generates temporality even apart from creation. But Craig's arguments for divine temporality after creation are strong and compelling, and they form an important part of the overall case.

Garrett DeWeese: Omnitemporality and the Causal Theory of Time

Garrett DeWeese's God and the Nature of Time is, in my judgment, one of the most underappreciated books in this entire discussion. DeWeese develops a comprehensive case for divine temporality based on a causal theory of dynamic time, and he introduces the concept of omnitemporality that we defined earlier in this chapter.²³

Several features of DeWeese's work are especially valuable. First, his development of the causal theory of time: time is not a substance (like Newton's absolute time) or merely a set of relations between events (like Leibniz's relational time), but is grounded in causation. Where there is causal succession — where one event causes another — there is temporal succession. This has important implications for God, because if God's mental states involve causal succession (one thought causing or giving rise to another), then God's mental life is inherently temporal.²⁴

Second, DeWeese argues that the perichoretic relations of the Trinity — the mutual indwelling and dynamic interaction of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — generate divine temporality even before creation. If the persons of the Trinity enjoy genuine interpersonal relationship, and if such relationship involves anything analogous to the exchange, response, and interaction that characterizes personal relations, then there is causal succession in God's inner life even apart from any created order. This means God was temporal before He created — time did not begin with the Big Bang.²⁵

Third, DeWeese provides a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of omnitemporality. The "costs" are the loss of strict divine simplicity and strong immutability — but DeWeese argues persuasively that these attributes flowed more from Neoplatonic metaphysics than from biblical exegesis. The "benefits" are enormous: omnitemporality gives a much more robust understanding of creation ex nihilo, the efficacy of petitionary prayer, and divine providence than any atemporalist alternative.²⁶

I find DeWeese's work deeply congenial to my own position. His concept of omnitemporality, his causal theory of time, his perichoretic grounding for pre-creation divine temporality, and his cost-benefit analysis all align closely with what I am arguing in this book. If anything, I would want to go further than DeWeese in spelling out the transcendent dimension of God's temporal experience — His ability to access all of created time — but the foundation he lays is excellent.

R. T. Mullins: The Most Rigorous Case for Divine Temporality

R. T. Mullins has produced what I believe is the most rigorous and sustained philosophical case for divine temporality in the entire literature. Across two major books — The End of the Timeless God (2016) and From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker (2025) — Mullins dismantles the atemporalist research program and develops a comprehensive positive account of what it means for God to be temporal.²⁷

In The End of the Timeless God, Mullins treats the question of God's relationship to time as a "research program" — a framework of core commitments and supporting hypotheses that can be tested for internal coherence. The core of the atemporalist research program includes divine timelessness, divine simplicity, and strong immutability. Mullins tests this research program against three key Christian doctrines: a theory of time, divine action (including creation), and the Incarnation. His conclusion is devastating: the atemporalist program fails on its own terms. It cannot coherently account for God's relationship to creation, God's knowledge of temporal facts, or the Incarnation of the Son. The research program has reached a dead end.²⁸

In From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Mullins develops the positive alternative. He addresses five fundamental questions: What is time? How is God responsible for time's existence? What does divine temporality mean? What structure might God give to a time series? And what are the implications for the Trinity, creation, providence, and the afterlife?²⁹

Perhaps Mullins's most important contribution is his argument that time is an attribute of God's own being. Time is not something "out there" that God enters or relates to from the outside. It is a feature of who God is — generated by the dynamic, perichoretic life of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in genuine, dynamic, mutually indwelling relationship, and this relationship involves real sequence and real exchange. That dynamic relationality just is a form of temporality. God has always been temporal because the Trinity has always been dynamic.³⁰

This is developed fully in Chapter 26, where we explore the Trinity and time in depth. But for now, the key point is that Mullins provides the strongest philosophical foundation for the claim that God's temporality is not an accident of creation but an essential feature of who God is.

The Author's Distinctive Position: Dynamic Divine Temporality with Transcendent Access

Now that we have surveyed the major temporalist thinkers, I want to lay out my own position in detail. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, I call my view dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access. Let me explain what this means and what makes it distinctive.

I agree with Wolterstorff that God is genuinely temporal — everlasting, experiencing real succession, acting in genuine temporal sequence. I agree with Mullins that God's temporality is grounded in the perichoretic life of the Trinity and that time is an attribute of God's own being. I agree with DeWeese that God is omnitemporal — present to every moment of time without being locked into any single temporal framework. I agree with Craig that the A-theory of time is correct and that a personal God must be temporal. And I agree with Padgett that God transcends measured, physical time while remaining genuinely temporal at a deeper level.

But I want to add something that none of these thinkers has fully developed: the concept of transcendent temporal access.

Here is the basic idea. God experiences genuine succession — He has a real "before" and "after" in His inner life. His temporal experience is not an illusion or a metaphor. But God is not bound by creaturely clock-time in the way that we are. We are locked into the present moment. We cannot see the future. We cannot revisit the past. We experience time one moment at a time, in strict linear sequence, with no ability to step outside that sequence.

God is different. He can access all moments of created time — past, present, and future — through His unique divine capacity. He is not locked into any one "now." He sees the whole sweep of temporal reality while still experiencing genuine succession in His own divine life. Think of it this way: when God interacts with Abraham in 2000 BC and with the apostle Paul in AD 55, He is genuinely present to each of them in their respective "nows." He is not watching from outside time like a spectator at a movie theater. He is there, in the moment, fully engaged. But He is also able to see how Abraham's story connects to Paul's, and how both connect to the story He is still writing today.

This is what I mean by "transcendent access." God's temporal experience is like ours in that it involves genuine sequence. But it is unlike ours in that it is not limited to a single temporal vantage point. God can — if I may put it carefully — "zoom out" to see the whole panorama of history, and "zoom in" to be fully present in any given moment. He experiences time both sequentially and with a kind of panoramic awareness that transcends the limitations of creaturely temporal experience.

The Near-Death Experience Analogy

I want to be very careful here, because I do not want to claim more than the evidence supports. But I find it suggestive — and I think many readers will too — that near-death experiences (NDEs) provide a striking analogy for the kind of temporal experience I am attributing to God.

Many NDEers report that during their experience, time worked in a radically different way than it does in ordinary life. Events that should have taken hours seemed to happen in moments. Some experiencers report that they saw their entire life flash before their eyes — not as a quick summary, but as a detailed, comprehensive review in which they seemed to relive every moment simultaneously and sequentially at the same time. Others report that time seemed to stretch or compress, that past, present, and future felt somehow accessible all at once, and that the ordinary rules of before-and-after no longer applied in the same rigid way.³¹

Now, I want to be very clear about what I am and am not claiming. I am not claiming that NDEs prove anything about divine time. I am not claiming that the NDE experience is identical to God's temporal experience. And I am not building my theological position on NDE research. The theological case for divine temporality stands on its own biblical and philosophical merits, as the rest of this chapter and book demonstrate.

What I am saying is that NDEs illustrate a conceptual possibility that many people find hard to imagine. When we hear that God can experience genuine succession and yet also have access to all of temporal reality, our first reaction might be: "That's a contradiction. You can't have both." But NDEers report exactly this kind of experience — a form of temporal awareness in which events are experienced both sequentially and with a kind of panoramic simultaneity, in which time is real and structured but not rigid and linear in the ordinary way. If human beings can have this kind of experience even briefly, it is certainly conceivable that God — whose capacities infinitely exceed ours — can have a qualitatively richer form of temporal experience that combines genuine succession with transcendent access. This is explored in much greater depth in Chapter 33.

What Makes This Position Distinctive

Several features distinguish my position from the other temporalist options:

First, unlike Craig, I believe God has always been temporal. There was never a "timeless phase" in God's life. The dynamic, perichoretic life of the Trinity generates temporality even apart from creation. God did not "become" temporal at the moment of creation. He has always been temporal, because He has always been the living, relational, Triune God. Created, physical, measurable time began at creation, but time itself — as a feature of God's being — has always existed. This will be developed in depth in Chapter 26.

Second, unlike open theists (discussed in Chapter 9), I affirm that God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge. God knows every future event with absolute certainty. He knows what every human being will freely choose to do, not because He determines those choices (as in Calvinism), and not because He knows what every creature would do in any possible circumstance (as in Molinism), but because His transcendent access to all of time allows Him to see future events without causing them. This is developed in Chapter 25.

Third, unlike process theologians (discussed in Chapter 10), I affirm creation ex nihilo, divine sovereignty, and the ultimate triumph of God's purposes. God is not merely a "fellow-sufferer who understands" (Whitehead) — He is the almighty Creator and Redeemer who will bring all things to their appointed end. His temporality does not compromise His power or sovereignty in any way.

Fourth, unlike strict atemporalists, I take the Bible's temporal language about God as genuinely descriptive of God's experience, not as metaphorical accommodation to human limitations. When Scripture says God "remembered" Noah (Gen 8:1), or that God "saw" the suffering of His people and "came down" to deliver them (Exod 3:7–8), or that God "sent forth His Son" in the fullness of time (Gal 4:4), these statements describe genuine temporal actions by a genuinely temporal God. They are not anthropomorphic accommodations to be explained away.

Fifth, I add the dimension of transcendent temporal access that most temporalist thinkers have not fully developed. Wolterstorff affirms unqualified temporality but does not explain how God can have exhaustive foreknowledge of a genuinely open future. Mullins is cautious about foreknowledge claims. DeWeese acknowledges the difficulty of God's knowledge of future contingents on an omnitemporal model. I propose that God's unique transcendent access to all of time resolves this difficulty: God can see future events because He is not locked into the creaturely present, even though He genuinely experiences temporal succession.

God's Temporal Life Before Creation

One of the most important — and most debated — questions in this entire discussion is: Did God exist in time before creating the universe? This question goes right to the heart of what we mean by divine temporality, and the different answers given to it reveal the deepest differences among temporalist thinkers.

There are three main positions on this question, and we need to look at each one carefully.

Swinburne: Infinite, Amorphous, Undifferentiated Time

Richard Swinburne says yes — God existed in time before creating the universe. But this pre-creation time was radically different from the time we experience now. It was what Swinburne calls "amorphous" and "undifferentiated." There was no way to measure it, no regular processes to mark intervals, no physical events to serve as temporal landmarks. God simply existed, and His existence had genuine duration, but there was no fact of the matter about how long that duration lasted. It was, in a sense, one long, featureless moment.³²

Swinburne's view has the virtue of simplicity. God is always temporal. There is no puzzling transition from timelessness to temporality. But it faces a significant objection from Craig, who argues that even amorphous time involves an infinite past — and an infinite past generates the difficulties that his kalam cosmological argument identifies. We will address this objection shortly.

Craig: Timeless Before Creation, Temporal After

Craig says no — God was not in time before creation. God existed in a timeless, changeless state, and then "became" temporal at the moment of creation. Craig's reasons for holding this view are closely connected to his kalam cosmological argument. He argues that an actual infinite cannot exist in reality and that an actually infinite past cannot be formed by successive addition. If God were always temporal, He would have existed through an infinite past — which the kalam argument says is impossible. Craig's solution is to deny that God was temporal before creation. God was timeless, and time began with the first created event.³³

This hybrid view is examined in depth in Chapter 8, where we explore its strengths and weaknesses. For now, I will simply note that while Craig's view is ingenious, it faces serious difficulties — especially the problem of how a timeless being can "become" temporal, and the problem of what causal work the timeless phase actually does. DeWeese points out that the conjunction "God is (tenselessly) timeless AND God is (present tense) temporal" seems to entail a straightforward contradiction.³⁴

Mullins and DeWeese: Time as an Attribute of God

Mullins and DeWeese both say yes — God existed in time before creation, because time is a feature of God's own being, generated by the Trinity's perichoretic life. The dynamic relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit involve genuine interpersonal exchange: the Father loves the Son, the Son responds; the Spirit glorifies the Son, the Son sends the Spirit. This exchange involves sequence — a genuine before and after. And where there is sequence, there is temporality.³⁵

On this view, God did not create time when He created the universe. He created physical time — the measurable, clock-based, relativistic time that is a feature of the physical cosmos. But time itself — as a fundamental feature of God's relational life — has always existed. There was never a "moment" when time did not exist, because God has always been the dynamic, living, relational Trinity, and the Trinity's relational life just is a form of temporal succession.

This is the position I find most compelling, and it is the one I hold. Time is not a creation of God in the way that the physical universe is a creation of God. Time is an attribute of God's being — something that flows from who He is as a dynamic, relational, Triune Person. Created, measurable, physical clock-time is indeed a creation of God — it began with the Big Bang and is governed by the laws of physics that God established. But time in its most fundamental sense — temporal succession, before-and-after, genuine sequence — is as eternal as God Himself, because it is grounded in the eternal life of the Trinity.

This position is developed in much greater depth in Chapter 26, where we explore the relationship between perichoresis and divine temporality. But the basic point is important for this chapter: I believe God has always been temporal, and I believe the Trinity provides the metaphysical foundation for this claim.

The Question of the Infinite Past

If God has always been temporal, then His past stretches back infinitely. There was never a first moment of God's existence. He has always existed, and His existence has always involved genuine temporal succession. But is this coherent? Craig's kalam cosmological argument suggests it is not. Craig argues that an actual infinite cannot exist in reality, that an actually infinite series cannot be formed by successive addition, and that therefore the past cannot be infinite. If the past cannot be infinite, God cannot have existed through an infinite past.³⁶

This is a significant objection, and it deserves a careful response. Several replies are available.

First, DeWeese and Mullins both argue that God's pre-creation temporal life may not involve the kind of discrete, measurable, successive events that the kalam argument targets. The kalam argument works by showing the absurdities that arise when you try to form an actual infinite by successive addition — adding one event after another in an unending chain stretching back into the past. But if God's pre-creation time is amorphous and unmeasured — not a series of discrete, countable moments but a smooth, continuous duration without internal metric structure — then the kalam argument does not straightforwardly apply. There are no discrete events to count, no successive additions to perform, and no absurdities of the Hilbert's Hotel variety to worry about.³⁷

DeWeese makes this point carefully. Craig's own critique of Swinburne's amorphous time tries to reintroduce objective intervals even in metrically amorphous time. Craig argues that even without a metric, one can identify intervals that are proper parts of other intervals, and that these stand in objective greater-than and less-than relations to each other. But DeWeese responds that the "points" Craig identifies in amorphous time are abstract points, and any interval contains an infinite number of such abstract points. The intervals themselves would also be abstract, and it is a fundamental axiom of transfinite mathematics that an infinite set can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with a proper subset of itself. So Craig's claim that one interval must be objectively "larger" than its proper subsets does not hold in the mathematical framework he is assuming.³⁸

Second, even setting aside the amorphous time response, there are well-known philosophical challenges to the kalam argument's claim that an actual infinite cannot exist. Many philosophers have argued that the absurdities Craig identifies (Hilbert's Hotel, infinite libraries, and so on) are not genuine logical impossibilities but merely counterintuitive consequences of actual infinities — consequences that we find puzzling but that do not entail any logical contradiction. The infinite is strange, but "strange" does not mean "impossible."³⁹

Third, and most importantly for our purposes, the question of the infinite past is a question about the detailed structure of God's pre-creation temporal life, and I do not think we need to resolve it definitively in order to affirm divine temporality. The core claim of divine temporality is that God genuinely experiences succession, genuinely acts in time, and has always been temporal. Whether "always" means "through an actually infinite past" or "through an amorphous, unmeasured pre-creation duration" or something we lack the conceptual resources to fully describe — these are important philosophical questions, but the answer to them does not affect the core case for divine temporality. What matters is that God has always been the living, dynamic, relational Trinity, and that His life has always involved genuine temporal succession.

I will be honest with the reader: I find the possibility of an infinite divine past more plausible than Craig does, but I hold this cautiously. This is an area where I think intellectual humility is appropriate. We are talking about the inner life of God before anything else existed — a reality that stretches the limits of human conceptual resources. What I am confident about is that God has always been temporal, that He did not "become" temporal at creation, and that the perichoretic life of the Trinity is the metaphysical foundation for His eternal temporality. The precise structure of God's pre-creation temporal life is a question I am content to leave partially open.

Objections to Divine Temporality

Every important theological position faces objections, and divine temporality is no exception. Atemporalists have raised several important concerns about the claim that God is temporal. I want to address these fairly and show why I believe they are not decisive.

Objection 1: "Doesn't divine temporality make God finite?"

This is perhaps the most common worry. If God is "in time," doesn't that mean He is limited — bounded — finite? After all, temporal things come and go. They are born and they die. They have a beginning and an end. If God is temporal, doesn't that make Him like a creature — finite and bounded?

The answer is no. A temporal God with no beginning and no end is infinite in duration. He has always existed and will always exist. There has never been a moment when God did not exist, and there will never be a moment when God ceases to exist. This is what the Bible affirms when it says that God is "from everlasting to everlasting" (Ps 90:2) — a phrase that uses explicitly temporal language to describe God's infinite existence. God's temporality does not make Him finite any more than His omnipresence makes Him a physical object. God transcends the limitations of creaturely temporal experience while genuinely experiencing time.⁴⁰

The hidden assumption behind this objection is the Platonic idea that timelessness is inherently superior to temporality — that what is unchanging and atemporal is more perfect than what changes and is temporal. But this assumption is precisely what is under dispute. I see no reason to accept it. The God of the Bible is a living, acting, responding, creating God. His life is dynamic, not static. His perfection is not the perfection of a frozen statue but the perfection of an infinitely active, infinitely loving, infinitely creative Person. Temporality is not a deficiency in God. It is a feature of His life — a reflection of His dynamic, relational nature.

Objection 2: "Doesn't divine temporality compromise God's sovereignty?"

Some people worry that if God is temporal, He is somehow "subject to" time — that time is a force or a framework that constrains God against His will. If God is "in time," doesn't that mean time is God's master?

This objection confuses the claim that God is temporal with the claim that God is a prisoner of time. God is the Lord of time, not its prisoner. He created physical time. He governs it. He transcends it even while experiencing it. To say that God experiences temporal succession is not to say that some external force imposes time upon God against His will. God's temporality is intrinsic to who He is — it flows from His own nature as a dynamic, relational, Triune Being. It is not a cage; it is an expression of His life.⁴¹

An analogy might help. We say that God is a knowing being — He has thoughts and knowledge. Does this mean that God is "subject to" logic in a way that compromises His sovereignty? Does the fact that God cannot believe contradictions — that He knows 2 + 2 = 4 and cannot believe otherwise — mean that logic is God's master? Of course not. God's rationality is intrinsic to who He is. It is not an external constraint but a feature of His perfection. The same is true of His temporality. God's experience of succession is part of who He is — not an external limitation imposed upon Him.

Objection 3: "Doesn't divine temporality reduce God to a creature?"

The worry here is that by making God temporal, we are putting Him on the same level as His creatures. We experience time; now we are saying God experiences time too. Isn't this reducing the Creator to the level of the creature?

Not at all. God's temporal experience is qualitatively different from creaturely temporal experience, just as God's knowledge is qualitatively different from human knowledge, God's power is qualitatively different from human power, and God's love is qualitatively different from human love. When we say God is omniscient, we do not mean He knows things the way we do — laboriously, partially, through inference and evidence. We mean He knows all things perfectly, immediately, comprehensively. His knowledge is not a bigger version of our knowledge; it is a qualitatively different kind of knowledge.

Similarly, when we say God is temporal, we do not mean He experiences time the way we do — locked into the present, unable to see the future, slowly losing the past. We mean He experiences genuine succession — real before and after — but in a mode that transcends our limitations. He can access all of time. He can see the future without waiting for it to arrive. He can know the past without it slipping away. His temporal experience is not a bigger version of ours; it is a qualitatively different kind of temporal experience. Saying that God experiences time no more reduces Him to a creature than saying that God knows things reduces Him to a creature. In both cases, the divine mode of the attribute infinitely transcends the creaturely mode.

Objection 4: "Doesn't divine temporality require abandoning classical theology?"

Some atemporalists argue that if we give up divine timelessness, we must also give up divine simplicity, divine immutability, and other classical attributes — and that this amounts to abandoning the Great Tradition of Christian theology.

This objection deserves a nuanced response. I do believe that divine temporality requires us to revise strict classical divine simplicity and strong immutability (this is developed fully in Chapter 30). But "revision" is not the same as "abandonment." What we are revising is not the biblical teaching about God, but certain philosophical interpretations of that teaching that were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy — particularly Neoplatonism.

As DeWeese observes, the attributes of divine simplicity and strong immutability "flowed more from a Neoplatonic metaphysical system than from biblical exegesis."⁴² The Bible does not teach that all of God's attributes are identical to each other and to His essence (strict simplicity). It does not teach that God cannot undergo any change whatsoever, including relational changes (strong immutability). What the Bible teaches is that God's character, nature, and purposes do not change (Mal 3:6; Jas 1:17), that God is faithful and dependable, and that He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8). I affirm all of this. What I deny is the philosophical overlay — the claim that God is so absolutely simple and unchangeable that He cannot even experience temporal succession or respond relationally to His creatures. That claim goes beyond what Scripture teaches, and it creates problems far more serious than anything it solves.

We can hold a qualified immutability (God's essential nature never changes, but His relational states and emotional responses genuinely change) and a modified view of simplicity (God's attributes are genuinely His own, inseparable from His being, but distinguishable from one another) without abandoning the Great Tradition. In fact, I would argue that we are recovering what is most important in that tradition — the conviction that God is the living, personal, all-powerful Creator and Redeemer — while setting aside philosophical additions that actually obscure the biblical portrait of God.

Objection 5: "Doesn't divine temporality undermine God's foreknowledge?"

If God is temporal — if He experiences genuine succession and is genuinely "in" time in some sense — how can He know the future? If the future has not yet happened (as the A-theory of time affirms), and if God is temporal, then isn't God just as ignorant of the future as we are?

This is a serious objection, and it is the one that leads open theists like William Hasker, Clark Pinnock, and Gregory Boyd to deny that God has exhaustive foreknowledge. If God is temporal and the future is genuinely open, they reason, then God cannot know what free creatures will do in the future. I reject this conclusion. God does have exhaustive definite foreknowledge — He knows with absolute certainty every event that will ever occur, including every free choice made by every creature.

How is this possible for a temporal God? This is where my concept of transcendent temporal access does its most important work. God is temporal — He experiences genuine succession. But He is not locked into the creaturely present. He has access to all of time, including the future. He can "see" future events without causing them, without determining them, and without compromising the genuine freedom of the creatures who will choose them. His foreknowledge is not based on deterministic decrees (Calvinism), not based on knowledge of counterfactuals (Molinism), and not based on seeing a "block universe" from outside (eternalism). It is based on His unique divine capacity to access temporal reality that we — locked into the present — cannot access.

Is this mysterious? Absolutely. But every theory of divine foreknowledge involves mystery. The Calvinist faces the mystery of how God's decrees are compatible with genuine human freedom. The Molinist faces the mystery of what "grounds" God's knowledge of counterfactuals. The atemporalist faces the mystery of how a timeless God can interact with a temporal world at all. My position faces the mystery of how a temporal God can access future events that have not yet occurred. I submit that my mystery is no more severe than the others, and that it has the enormous advantage of taking seriously both God's genuine temporality and His exhaustive foreknowledge.

This topic is developed at great length in Chapter 25, where we explore the model of simple foreknowledge with transcendent access.

The Biblical Case in Brief

While the full biblical case for divine temporality is presented in Chapters 16–23, it is important to note here that the biblical evidence strongly supports the position we have been developing. The Bible consistently portrays God as a being who acts in time, creates in temporal sequence, responds to events as they happen, plans and executes a salvation history that unfolds over centuries, and personally enters human time in the Incarnation.

Consider just a few of the most striking features of the biblical portrait:

God creates in temporal sequence. Genesis 1 presents creation as a series of ordered, sequential divine acts. God speaks, and things happen — one after another, in a structured temporal order. "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day" (Gen 1:5 ESV). This language presupposes that God acts in time, that His creative acts have a temporal order, and that He moves from one creative act to the next. As we explore in Chapter 17, this temporal sequence is not an accommodative framework imposed by the human author; it reflects the genuine temporal structure of God's creative activity.

God responds to human actions. When Israel cries out in Egypt, God says, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them" (Exod 3:7–8 ESV). The language of seeing, hearing, knowing, and coming down is inherently temporal. God sees the suffering, hears the cry, and responds with action. Response requires temporal sequence: first the event, then the response.

God enters human time in the Incarnation. "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law" (Gal 4:4 ESV). The Incarnation is the most powerful biblical evidence for divine temporality. God the Son entered human history at a particular point in time. He was born, grew, learned, suffered, died, was raised, and ascended. These are irreducibly temporal events. A strictly timeless God cannot undergo these kinds of changes, as we explore in Chapter 27. The Incarnation demonstrates that God can and does act temporally — and this is exactly what the temporalist position affirms.

God will act in the future. The second coming, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, the new creation — these are all future events that God has promised and that He will bring about at appointed times. "For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God" (1 Thess 4:16 ESV). God's future actions presuppose genuine temporality. He has made promises that He will fulfill, plans that He will execute, and a story that He will bring to its climax.

Across every part of Scripture — Genesis to Revelation — God is portrayed as a being who acts in time, plans across time, and enters time. The atemporalist must explain all of this language as metaphorical accommodation. The temporalist takes it at face value. I believe the temporalist reading is more faithful to the text.

Omnitemporality and the Attributes of God

Before we close this chapter, I want to briefly address how divine temporality relates to several other important divine attributes. Some of these topics receive full treatment in later chapters, so here I will provide only a summary and a cross-reference.

Omnitemporality and Divine Personhood

One of the strongest arguments for divine temporality is the argument from personhood. God is a person — indeed, three persons in one Being. Personhood involves thinking, deciding, responding, communicating, planning, and acting. All of these require temporal succession. You cannot think a thought without temporal duration. You cannot decide without a "before" (deliberating) and an "after" (choosing). You cannot respond without a prior event to respond to. A timeless person is, at best, a deeply puzzling concept — and at worst, an incoherent one.⁴³

DeWeese acknowledges that the concept of a timeless person cannot be decisively shown to be incoherent — the criteria of personhood are too much in dispute in contemporary philosophy for such a demonstration. But he insists that "it is not at all clear in what sense an atemporal being, which could not enter into temporal relations with other persons and experience temporal change, would be at all analogous to what we commonly understand by 'person.' The explanatory burden on the atemporalist is indeed heavy."⁴⁴ I agree. Omnitemporality makes much better sense of divine personhood than atemporality does.

Omnitemporality and Providence

An omnitemporal God can exercise providential care for His creatures in a much more robust and satisfying way than a timeless God. If God is genuinely present in every moment of time, He can guide, sustain, direct, comfort, and intervene in real time. He is not merely "timelessly willing" that certain events occur in a certain order. He is actually there, in the moment, acting and responding.

As DeWeese argues, an omnitemporal view "can give a much more robust understanding of divine providence" because God, being temporal, can enter into real temporal relations with His creatures, adjusting His providential plans in response to their free choices while never losing sight of His ultimate purposes.⁴⁵ This is explored fully in Chapter 29.

Omnitemporality and Prayer

The efficacy of petitionary prayer is much easier to understand if God is temporal. If God "hears" prayers in real time and acts in response, then prayer is genuinely efficacious — it makes a real difference to what God does. DeWeese makes this point forcefully: "Omnitemporality gives a view in which God, being temporal, 'hears' prayers and so acts as to bring about the answers in the as-yet contingent future — effects which are genuinely contingent upon the prayer."⁴⁶

On the atemporalist view, God timelessly wills the entire course of history, including our prayers and His responses to them. But if God's response is timelessly willed, in what sense is it a genuine response to our prayer? The temporalist view preserves the genuine interactional character of prayer: we pray, God hears, God acts. This is explored fully in Chapter 35.

Omnitemporality and the Incarnation

As we noted briefly above, the Incarnation is one of the most powerful arguments for divine temporality. God the Son "became flesh" (John 1:14). He was born at a particular time, grew through childhood, learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8), was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was raised on the third day. These are irreducibly temporal events. A strictly timeless God cannot "become" anything — becoming requires change, and change requires time.

Mullins has argued at length, in both The End of the Timeless God and God, Time, and the Incarnation, that every attempt to reconcile divine timelessness with the Incarnation fails.⁴⁷ The reduplicative strategy (saying "the Son qua divine is timeless, the Son qua human is temporal") does not work because the person must be either timeless or temporal — and the one person of Christ clearly lived a temporal life. Four-dimensionalist approaches face subordination problems. Two-minds Christology faces interaction problems. The only coherent option, Mullins argues, is that the Son is temporal — and was always temporal, even before the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the entrance of an already-temporal divine Person into creaturely time in a new and more intimate mode.

This is explored fully in Chapter 27, but the point is important for this chapter: the central event of the Christian faith — God becoming human — is powerful evidence that God is temporal.

Omnitemporality and Divine Emotions

I have argued in a companion book, The Heart of God, that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures — He truly loves, grieves, rejoices, and is angered. These are not merely metaphorical descriptions or anthropomorphic accommodations. They are genuine features of God's inner life. But genuine emotional response requires temporality. You cannot genuinely "respond" to an event without a temporal sequence: first the event, then the response. If God grieves over human sin, the sin must come first and the grief second. If God rejoices over a sinner's repentance, the repentance must precede the joy.

Mullins has shown that this point applies with special force to divine wrath. If God timelessly and immutably has wrath toward sinners, then God is wrathful toward them before they sin — which is unjust. Genuine wrath must be a response to sin, and response requires temporal sequence.⁴⁸ This is explored fully in Chapter 28.

Omnitemporality and Creation Ex Nihilo

The doctrine of creation ex nihilo — creation out of nothing — is much easier to understand on a temporalist view than on an atemporalist one. If God is temporal, then creation is a genuine temporal act: at one moment, there is no universe; at the next moment, by God's free choice and powerful word, the universe comes into existence. There is a real "before" (God alone) and a real "after" (God plus creation). The transition from non-creation to creation is a genuine change, and genuine change requires time.

On the atemporalist view, creation ex nihilo is deeply puzzling. If God is timeless and changeless, in what sense does He "bring about" the existence of the universe? Timeless causation — causation without any temporal dimension — is a concept that no atemporalist has been able to explain satisfactorily, as we argued in Chapter 6 using Mullins's development of the Oppy Causal Principle.⁴⁹

Summary and Prospect

Let me gather the threads of this chapter together. We have been making the positive case for divine temporality — the view that God genuinely experiences time. Here is what we have established:

First, we defined omnitemporality: God is present to every moment of time, experiences genuine succession (real before-and-after), and is not locked into any single temporal framework. His temporal experience is qualitatively different from ours, but it is genuinely temporal — involving real sequence, real process, and real engagement with events as they occur.

Second, we surveyed the major temporalist thinkers — Swinburne, Wolterstorff, Padgett, Craig (after creation), DeWeese, and Mullins — noting their shared commitments and distinctive contributions. The temporalist position is not a fringe view. It is held by some of the most brilliant philosophers of religion in the world, and it has been developing in sophistication and rigor for the past half-century.

Third, we presented the author's distinctive position: dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access. God experiences genuine succession but is not limited to the present moment the way creatures are. He can access all of temporal reality — past, present, and future — through His unique divine capacity. This allows Him to have exhaustive foreknowledge without being locked into the creaturely present, and without compromising the genuine openness of the future from the creaturely perspective.

Fourth, we addressed the crucial question of God's temporal life before creation. I argued, following Mullins and DeWeese, that God has always been temporal — that the dynamic, perichoretic life of the Trinity generates temporality even apart from creation. Created, physical time began with the universe, but time itself, as a feature of God's being, has always existed.

Fifth, we engaged with the major objections to divine temporality — that it makes God finite, that it compromises His sovereignty, that it reduces Him to a creature, that it requires abandoning classical theology, and that it undermines foreknowledge — and showed that none of these objections is decisive.

Sixth, we briefly indicated how omnitemporality relates to other divine attributes — personhood, providence, prayer, the Incarnation, divine emotions, and creation ex nihilo — noting that in each case, the omnitemporal view provides a more satisfying and coherent account than the atemporalist alternative.

The picture that emerges is one of a God who is alive, dynamic, relational, and personal — a God who genuinely engages with His creatures in time, who responds to their prayers, who enters their history, and who will bring all things to their appointed end. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the God who spoke to Moses from the burning bush, who led Israel through the wilderness, who sent His Son in the fullness of time, and who will one day make all things new. This is not a frozen, static, timeless deity watching creation unfold from a distance. This is the living God — the God who is with us, in our time, sharing our joys and bearing our sorrows.

As DeWeese concluded in his own study, omnitemporality is "a tenable theory meriting serious attention" — and indeed, more than that, "the concept has greater explanatory power" than its atemporalist competitors, and thus "commends itself to our acceptance."⁵⁰

In the next chapter, we turn to one of the most important and influential attempts to split the difference between timelessness and temporality: William Lane Craig's hybrid view that God is timeless without creation and temporal with creation. We will give Craig's position a thorough and fair hearing — and then explain why, despite its ingenuity, it ultimately does not succeed.