Chapter 11

The Greek Philosophical Background

Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Shaping of Christian Thought

Introduction: Why the Greek Background Matters

Where did the idea come from that God exists completely outside of time? Was it taught in the Bible? Did the earliest Christians believe it? Or did it come from somewhere else — from a set of philosophical assumptions that the earliest Christian theologians absorbed from the culture around them?

These are not just academic questions. They go to the very heart of how we think about God. If the doctrine of divine timelessness — the idea that God has no experience of before or after, no sequence, no temporal flow in His life — came straight from the pages of Scripture, then we would have strong reason to accept it regardless of philosophical difficulties. But if it came primarily from Greek philosophy and was then read back into the Bible, that changes the picture dramatically. It means that a philosophical commitment may have been shaping how Christians read their own Scriptures for centuries, potentially distorting the biblical portrait of God.

I believe the evidence shows that the second option is closer to the truth. The doctrine of divine timelessness did not originate in the Bible. It was profoundly shaped by Greek philosophical ideas about the superiority of the unchanging over the changing — ideas that early Christian theologians absorbed, sometimes without fully realizing how much those ideas were reshaping their understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

This does not mean that the Church Fathers were foolish or dishonest. They were brilliant thinkers doing their best to articulate the faith in the intellectual language of their time. But it does mean that we need to be aware of where their ideas came from, so we can evaluate them carefully. As R. T. Mullins has observed, the historical development of the divine timelessness doctrine reveals a deep and consistent pattern: philosophical assumptions about divine perfection — drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and especially the Neoplatonists — became so deeply embedded in Christian theology that they were eventually treated as if they were biblical teaching.¹

This chapter begins Part III of our book, which traces the history of the God-and-time debate from its origins in ancient Greece through the present day. In this chapter, we will examine the major Greek philosophers whose ideas shaped the Christian doctrine of divine timelessness: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Stoics. We will see how each contributed a piece of the puzzle that would eventually become the classical theistic view of God's eternity. And we will begin to see a fundamental tension — a tension between the God of the Bible, who acts, responds, creates, speaks, grieves, and rejoices in time, and the God of Greek philosophy, who is unchanging, unaffected, and timeless.

How that tension was resolved — and whether it was resolved correctly — is one of the most important questions in all of theology.

The Pre-Socratics: Where It All Began

Before we get to Plato and Aristotle, we need to understand the intellectual world they inherited. The earliest Greek philosophers — often called the "pre-Socratics" because they came before Socrates — were already wrestling with a question that would shape all of Western philosophy: Is reality fundamentally about change, or is it fundamentally about permanence?

Two thinkers in particular set the stage for everything that followed.

Heraclitus: Everything Flows

Heraclitus of Ephesus (about 540–480 BC) believed that change is the most fundamental feature of reality. Everything is in constant motion. Nothing stays the same. His most famous saying captures this perfectly: you cannot step into the same river twice, because the water is always flowing and both you and the river are constantly changing.² For Heraclitus, the universe is characterized by constant flux. "Cold warms up, warm cools off, moist parches, dry dampens," he wrote.³ Change is not just something that happens in the world — it is the very nature of the world.

If Heraclitus were right, you might think his view would naturally lead to a picture of God as dynamic and active — a God who changes, responds, and acts in time. And in fact, the biblical portrait of God has strong echoes of this kind of thinking. The God of the Bible is constantly acting, responding, and doing new things. But Greek philosophy would take a very different path.

Parmenides: Nothing Changes

Parmenides of Elea (about 515–445 BC) took exactly the opposite view. He argued that all change is an illusion. How could something come into existence from nothing? That would mean that "nothing" exists — which is a contradiction. If something can be spoken of, Parmenides reasoned, it must exist. And since change requires something coming into existence from non-existence, change is logically impossible. What truly exists must be unchanging and eternal.⁴

Parmenides' argument sounds strange at first, but it had enormous influence. His student Zeno created his famous paradoxes — like Achilles and the tortoise — precisely to show that motion and change lead to logical absurdities. And Parmenides' basic instinct — that what is truly real must be permanent, unchanging, and beyond the reach of time — would become one of the most powerful ideas in Western philosophy.

Here is the crucial point: in the debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides, later Greek philosophy overwhelmingly sided with Parmenides. The unchanging was seen as more real, more perfect, and more divine than the changing. This judgment — this philosophical preference for permanence over change — would shape virtually everything that followed, including the Christian doctrine of God.

Plato and the Theory of Forms: The Eternal Over the Temporal

Plato (427–347 BC) is arguably the most influential philosopher in Western history, and his ideas about time and eternity had an incalculable impact on Christian theology. To understand how Plato shaped the doctrine of divine timelessness, we need to grasp his famous theory of Forms.

The Two-World Divide

Plato attempted to reconcile the competing views of Heraclitus and Parmenides by proposing that reality has two levels. There is the world of our everyday experience — the physical world of trees, rivers, horses, and human beings. This world is constantly changing, just as Heraclitus said. But behind and above this changing world lies a higher reality: the world of the Forms (or Ideas). The Forms are eternal, unchanging, perfect patterns or blueprints of everything in the physical world. There is a Form of Beauty, a Form of Justice, a Form of Equality, and so on. Every beautiful thing in the physical world is beautiful because it participates in the Form of Beauty. Every just action is just because it reflects the Form of Justice.⁵

Here is what matters for our discussion: Plato believed that the world of Forms is more real than the physical world. The changing, temporal world of our experience is a kind of shadow or reflection of the eternal, unchanging world of Forms. The Forms never change. They never come into existence or pass away. They are timeless, perfect, and permanently stable. The physical world, by contrast, is always in flux — things are born, grow old, decay, and die.

This sets up a fundamental value judgment that would echo through the centuries: the unchanging is superior to the changing. The eternal is higher than the temporal. What is permanent is more real than what is fleeting. This prejudice — and I deliberately call it a prejudice, because it is an assumption, not an argument — became deeply embedded in Western thought. And when Christian theologians later began asking about God's relationship to time, this prejudice powerfully shaped their answers.

Time as "the Moving Image of Eternity"

Plato's most important discussion of time comes in his dialogue the Timaeus, where he offers a creation story of sorts. In this dialogue, a divine craftsman (the Demiurge) creates the physical universe by looking at the eternal Forms and shaping the world of matter to resemble them as closely as possible. And in the process of creating, the Demiurge also creates time.

Plato's famous description of time in the Timaeus has shaped all subsequent discussion. He writes that the creator "resolved to make a moving image of eternity, and as he set in order the heaven he made this eternal image having a motion according to number, while eternity rested in unity; and this is what we call time."⁶ This phrase — "the moving image of eternity" — is one of the most famous in all of philosophy. Time is a copy, an image, a reflection of something higher. Eternity is the original; time is the imitation. Eternity is still and unified; time moves and is divided into past, present, and future.

Notice the implication: if time is merely a "moving image" of eternity, then eternity itself must be something that does not move. Eternity is static. It does not flow. It does not have a "before" and "after." It simply is — unchanging, undivided, perfect. The Forms exist in this timeless eternity, and everything in the temporal world is a lesser reflection of them.

Furthermore, Plato argued that time itself is part of the created order. It came into being along with the physical universe. Before creation — if we can even use the word "before" — there was no time. "For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven he created them also," Plato says in the Timaeus.⁷ As Lawrence Fagg has observed, Plato effectively divided the cosmos into a temporal domain of the natural world and a nontemporal realm of an eternal Ideal.⁸

This should sound very familiar to anyone who has studied the Christian doctrine of divine timelessness. Augustine — perhaps the most influential Christian thinker in history — would later make almost exactly the same argument: God created time along with the world, so God Himself exists outside of time. As we will see, Augustine was deeply influenced by Plato (through the Neoplatonists), and the parallels are unmistakable.

The Platonic Prejudice Against the Temporal

We need to be very clear about what Plato was doing, because it matters enormously for our discussion. Plato was not just describing how things are. He was making a value judgment. He was saying that the eternal, unchanging realm of the Forms is better, higher, more real, and more worthy of our attention than the changing, temporal world of everyday experience. The eternal is perfect. The temporal is flawed.

This value judgment is not an argument. Plato never proves that changelessness is superior to change. He simply assumes it. And this assumption became so deeply woven into the fabric of Western philosophy that for centuries it was rarely questioned. When Christian theologians later applied this framework to God, they concluded — almost inevitably — that God must be unchanging and timeless. After all, if the unchanging is higher and more perfect than the changing, then the Most Perfect Being must be the Most Unchanging Being — and that means a Being who exists entirely beyond time.

But is this right? Is changelessness really superior to change? The God of the Bible creates, responds, acts, loves, grieves, and rejoices — all of which involve change and temporal sequence. Plato's assumption that the unchanging is better would eventually force Christian theologians to reinterpret all of this biblical language as metaphorical or "accommodative" — as language adjusted to our limited understanding rather than reflecting how God truly is. That is an enormous theological price to pay for an unargued philosophical assumption.

Aristotle and the Unmoved Mover: The God Beyond Time

If Plato gave Christian theology the prejudice against the temporal, Aristotle (384–322 BC) gave it the concept of God as a being utterly beyond time, change, and emotional engagement with the world. Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover" would become one of the most important building blocks for the later Christian doctrine of divine timelessness, especially as developed by Thomas Aquinas.

Aristotle on the Nature of Time

Aristotle's treatment of time in Book IV of his Physics is one of the most important discussions in the history of philosophy. Unlike Plato, who focused on the movement of the heavenly bodies, Aristotle brought the discussion of time down to earth. He connected time firmly to motion and change in the physical world.⁹

Aristotle argued that time cannot simply be equated with motion or change. Time and motion are closely linked, but they are not the same thing. Motion can be fast or slow, but time itself cannot be — because "fast" and "slow" are defined by reference to time. You call something "fast" because it covers a lot of distance in a short time. But you cannot call time itself "fast" or "slow" without falling into circularity.¹⁰

Yet Aristotle also insisted that time does not exist apart from change. We perceive time only when we perceive change. "When the state of our minds does not change at all, or we have not noticed its changing, we do not think that time has elapsed," he wrote.¹¹ Even in the dark, when we cannot observe any external movement, if something moves in our mind, we immediately recognize that some time has passed. So time is intimately connected to change and motion, even though it is not identical with them.

Aristotle's conclusion was that time is "the measure of motion" — or more precisely, the number or measure of change with respect to before and after.¹² Time is how we count, mark, and measure the changes that occur in the world. This seemingly simple definition had profound implications. If time is the measure of motion and change, then anything that does not change is not "in" time. Aristotle explicitly made this point: "Things which are always are not, as such, in time; for they are not contained by time, nor is their being measured by time."¹³

This creates the same two-level picture we saw in Plato. The physical world is temporal — it changes, moves, decays, and is measured by time. But there is also a realm of things that are eternal, unchanging, and not "in" time. And the ultimate reality in that eternal realm is what Aristotle called the "Unmoved Mover."

The Unmoved Mover: Aristotle's God

In his Metaphysics (Book XII), Aristotle argued that all motion in the universe must ultimately be explained by something that causes motion without itself being moved. This is the Unmoved Mover — the first cause of all motion and change in the universe, which itself is completely unchanging.

The Unmoved Mover is, for Aristotle, the highest being — something we might call God, though Aristotle's God is very different from the God of the Bible. The Unmoved Mover is "pure actuality" (energeia or actus purus in the Latin of later theologians). It has no potentiality — no unrealized possibilities, no capacity for change, no "becoming." It simply is, fully and completely, everything it can be, without any possibility of being different.¹⁴

What does the Unmoved Mover do? Surprisingly little, from a biblical perspective. Aristotle described the Unmoved Mover as "thought thinking thought" — self-contemplation. It does not create the world (Aristotle believed the world was eternal). It does not know or care about particular things in the world. It does not love, grieve, respond, or act. It simply thinks about itself, and by its sheer perfection, it attracts the rest of the universe the way a beloved attracts a lover — not by acting, but by being desirable.¹⁵

The Unmoved Mover has no temporal experience. It does not experience a "before" and "after." It does not act at one moment and rest at another. It is completely changeless, and therefore completely timeless. It is, in the most radical sense, beyond time.

Now, here is what matters for our story: when Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century sought to integrate Greek philosophy with Christian theology, he took Aristotle's concept of pure actuality — a being with no potentiality, no change, no temporal succession — and applied it to the God of the Bible. This was a bold and influential move. But it created enormous problems, because the God of the Bible is nothing like the Unmoved Mover. The God of the Bible creates, speaks, acts, responds, enters into covenants, sends prophets, becomes incarnate, and promises a future consummation. None of these activities fits with a being that is pure actuality, completely changeless, and utterly beyond time.

The Philosophical Connection: Pure Act and Timelessness

Why does Aristotle's concept of pure actuality lead to timelessness? The reasoning goes like this. Time involves change — the transition from one state to another. But change involves the actualization of a potential: something that could be becomes something that is. A seed has the potential to become a tree. When it grows, that potential is actualized. But if a being has no potentiality whatsoever — if it is already everything it can possibly be — then it cannot change. And if it cannot change, it cannot be temporal, because temporal existence involves at least the minimal change of transitioning from one moment to the next.

This argument would become the backbone of Aquinas's case for divine timelessness, which we will examine in Chapter 13. As Aquinas would argue, God is pure act with no potentiality; temporal change involves the actualization of potentials; therefore God cannot be temporal. The argument has genuine force. But notice that its foundation is Aristotle's metaphysics, not the Bible. The Bible never says that God is "pure actuality" or that He has "no potentiality." These are philosophical categories imposed on the biblical data, and they produce conclusions — like divine timelessness — that are in deep tension with what the Bible actually says about God.

As DeWeese has noted, the connection between Aristotle's philosophy and the Christian doctrine of divine timelessness is direct and traceable. The concept of God as pure act, free of all potentiality and therefore free of all change and temporal succession, runs like a golden thread from Aristotle through the medieval theologians and into the classical theistic tradition.¹⁶ William Lane Craig similarly observes that Aristotle's identification of the divine with pure actuality and self-thinking thought provided the philosophical template that Christian theologians would later use to argue that God must exist entirely outside of time.¹⁷

Plotinus and Neoplatonism: The Ultimate Transcendence

If Plato planted the seed and Aristotle watered it, Plotinus (AD 204–270) brought the idea of timeless divinity to full flower. Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, developed a vision of ultimate reality that is so radically transcendent, so completely beyond time and change, that even Plato's Forms look modest by comparison. And it was Plotinus — more than any other philosopher — who directly shaped the thinking of the early Christian theologians about God's eternity.

The One: Beyond Time, Beyond Thought, Beyond Being

At the center of Plotinus's philosophy is "the One" — the ultimate reality from which everything else flows. The One is not just eternal in the sense of lasting forever. It is not even a "being" in the ordinary sense. The One is beyond being, beyond thought, beyond time, beyond all categories and distinctions. It is absolute unity — so perfectly one, so completely simple, that no description can capture it, no words can adequately express it, and no thought can fully grasp it.¹⁸

From the One, reality flows downward through a series of emanations — like light radiating from the sun or water flowing from a spring. The first emanation from the One is Nous (Mind or Intellect), which contains the Platonic Forms. From Nous comes Soul, which gives rise to the physical world. Each level is less perfect, less unified, and further from the timeless perfection of the One. The physical world, at the bottom of this hierarchy, is the furthest from the One — and therefore the least real, the most divided, and the most deeply immersed in time.

This "emanation model" creates a picture in which time itself is a kind of fall from perfection. In Plotinus's system, time is what happens when the Soul "falls" from the timeless unity of eternity into the multiplicity and division of temporal existence. Time is not a good thing or a neutral thing — it is a deficiency, a loss, a departure from the perfect stillness of the One. As Plotinus himself described eternity: it is "life in repose," the complete absence of change and activity.¹⁹

Plotinus on Eternity and Time

Plotinus's discussion of time and eternity in Enneads III.7 is one of the most detailed and influential treatments in ancient philosophy. Here he developed the contrast between eternity — the timeless, changeless mode of existence proper to the intelligible world — and time — the flowing, successive mode of existence that characterizes the world of soul and matter.

In a passage that foreshadows his enormous influence on later Christian thinkers, Plotinus describes eternity in these terms: it is "life changelessly motionless and ever holding the Universal content ... in actual presence; not this now and now that other, but always all; not existing now in one mode and now in another, but a consummation without part or interval."²⁰ Eternity for Plotinus has no "earlier" or "later," no succession, no temporal intervals. It is all at once — a description that would later be formalized by Boethius in his famous phrase tota simul ("all at once").

Plotinus also made a crucial distinction that would shape all later discussion. He argued that the word "always," when applied to the eternal realm, does not mean "at all times" (which would imply temporal duration). It means something non-temporal — a kind of permanent, timeless existence that has no reference to time at all. As Richard Sorabji has observed, Plotinus resolved an ambiguity in Plato by stipulating that when speaking of eternal realities, "always" has a non-temporal sense, denoting true being as opposed to that which comes to be.²¹

In contrast to this timeless eternity, time is the "life of the Soul" — the restless activity of the soul as it moves from one thing to another, never content, never fully present, always grasping for the next moment. Time is succession, division, and multiplicity. It is what you get when perfect unity breaks apart into temporal fragments. Plotinus argued that the planets and stars were created not to constitute time itself (as Plato had suggested) but to provide a way of measuring time — the movement of the heavenly bodies manifests time but does not create it.²²

The relevance for Christian theology is enormous. When early Christian thinkers — especially the Alexandrians like Clement and Origen — began developing their theology of God, they were deeply immersed in this Neoplatonic framework. The idea that the highest reality is beyond time, beyond change, beyond multiplicity, and beyond emotional response seemed to them not just philosophically compelling but obviously true. And so, almost inevitably, they applied this framework to the God of the Bible. God, as the highest reality, must be like the One — utterly beyond time, utterly unchanging, utterly simple.

The Neoplatonic Chain: Simplicity, Immutability, Timelessness

One of Plotinus's most important contributions was making explicit the logical connections between simplicity, immutability, and timelessness. These three concepts form an interlocking chain: if you accept one, the others tend to follow.

The reasoning works like this. The One is absolutely simple — it has no parts, no composition, no internal distinctions of any kind. If it had parts, it would be a multiplicity, not a true unity. But if it is absolutely simple, it cannot change. Change requires having different properties at different times — being one way and then being another way. But a simple being has no "ways" to shift between. It just is what it is, without distinction or variation. And if it cannot change, it cannot be temporal, because temporal existence involves at least the minimal change of moving through successive moments.

DeWeese has traced this chain of reasoning carefully: Neoplatonic doctrines of degrees of being, immutability, and simplicity — as incorporated by Augustine into his understanding of God — logically require God to be timeless.²³ The argument runs through several steps. The greatest and truest being must be immutable (since change implies a loss or gain of some perfection). What is immutable is timeless (since temporal existence involves change). The greatest and truest being must be simple (since composition implies dependence on parts). What is simple is timeless (since temporal succession introduces complexity). Therefore, the greatest being — God — must be timeless.

This chain of reasoning is powerful. But notice its foundation: it rests entirely on the Neoplatonic assumption that the highest reality must be absolutely simple, absolutely unchanging, and therefore absolutely beyond time. These are philosophical commitments, not biblical ones. The Bible never says that God is "simple" in this technical sense. It never says that God cannot change in any way whatsoever. And it never says that God exists outside of time. These are conclusions drawn from Greek philosophical assumptions — and the question is whether those assumptions are correct.

Philo of Alexandria: The Bridge Between Athens and Jerusalem

Before we trace the direct influence of Neoplatonism on Christian theology, we should note an important bridge figure: Philo of Alexandria (about 13 BC–AD 50), a Jewish philosopher who lived in the great intellectual center of Alexandria, Egypt. Philo was steeped in both the Hebrew Scriptures and Greek philosophy, and he made a bold attempt to show that the two were compatible — indeed, that Moses had anticipated the insights of Plato.

Philo explicitly applied Platonic and proto-Neoplatonic categories to the God of the Bible. In a striking passage, he wrote: "So with God there is no future, for he has put beneath himself the very boundaries of all times. Indeed, his life is not time, but eternity (aiōn), the archetype and model for time. And in eternity nothing is past or future, but simply has being."²⁴

This is a crucial text, because it shows a Jewish thinker — writing before the birth of Christianity — already interpreting the God of the Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of Greek philosophy. Philo's God is not the dynamic, responsive, temporal God of the Exodus narrative or the Psalms. Philo's God is the timeless deity of Plato's Timaeus — beyond time, beyond change, with no past or future, only eternal being.

Philo was enormously influential on early Christian thinkers in Alexandria, including Clement and Origen. Through Philo, the synthesis of biblical faith and Greek philosophy was already well underway before the first Christian theologians began their work. The ground had been prepared. And when Christians in Alexandria began developing their theology, they found Philo's synthesis ready and waiting — a powerful model for how to read the Bible through the lens of Greek philosophical assumptions about divine perfection.

The Stoics: Apatheia and Divine Impassibility

While the Stoics made less of a direct contribution to the doctrine of divine timelessness than Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus, their influence on another crucial aspect of the classical theistic package cannot be ignored: the doctrine of divine impassibility — the idea that God is not affected by anything external and has no emotional responses to the world.

Stoic Philosophy and the Ideal of Apatheia

The Stoics were a school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 BC. Their ethical ideal was apatheia (ἀπάθεια) — literally, "freedom from passions." The Stoic sage was someone who had achieved complete mastery over his emotions, who was not disturbed by external events, and who remained serene and untroubled regardless of what happened. Passions — anger, grief, fear, excessive joy — were seen as irrational disturbances of the soul, deficiencies that the wise person would overcome.

The Stoics did not deny that emotions exist. They simply believed that emotions are a sign of weakness and irrationality. The person who grieves over a loss is allowing external events to disturb his inner peace. The person who gets angry is allowing something outside his control to affect his state of mind. True wisdom, for the Stoics, means rising above all of this — achieving a state of calm, rational detachment that cannot be shaken by anything in the world.²⁵

When this ideal was applied to God, the results were predictable. If apatheia is the highest state for a human being, then surely God — the highest being of all — must possess apatheia in the most perfect degree. God cannot be affected by anything external. God cannot be disturbed by the suffering or sin of His creatures. God cannot grieve, be angry, or feel compassion in any genuine sense. God is utterly impassible — beyond all emotional response.

The Connection to Timelessness

The Stoic doctrine of divine apatheia is closely linked to the doctrine of divine timelessness, because genuine emotional response requires temporal sequence. Think about it: if I am moved with compassion by someone's suffering, that means I was in one emotional state before I saw the suffering (no compassion), and then I moved to a different emotional state afterward (compassion). That transition from one state to another is a temporal event — it happens in time, it involves a before and an after.

But if God is timeless and changeless, He cannot make this transition. He cannot move from one emotional state to another. He cannot be affected by anything that happens in the world, because being "affected" implies a change — and a timeless being cannot change. So timelessness and impassibility reinforce each other: a timeless God cannot have genuine emotional responses, and a God who has genuine emotional responses cannot be timeless.

This connection is developed at length in the companion book, The Heart of God: Does God Feel? It is also explored in Chapter 28 of this book, where we argue that divine passibility (the view that God has genuine emotional responses) requires divine temporality. The key point for now is simply that the Stoic ideal of apatheia contributed another important piece to the classical theistic package. Together with Platonic timelessness, Aristotelian pure actuality, and Neoplatonic simplicity, Stoic apatheia helped create a picture of God that is profoundly different from the emotional, responsive, temporally active God of the Bible.

As Mullins has argued, the doctrines of impassibility and timelessness form part of an interlocking system: classical theism brought together simplicity, immutability, impassibility, and timelessness into a tightly connected package. Challenge one, and you put pressure on the others. Accept one, and you are drawn toward the rest.²⁶

Later Neoplatonists: Refining the Framework

After Plotinus, several later Neoplatonic thinkers further developed the framework of timeless eternity. While they may be less well known than Plato or Aristotle, their contributions are important because they helped create the precise philosophical vocabulary that Christian theologians would later adopt.

Iamblichus and the Distinction Between Static and Flowing Time

Iamblichus (died around AD 325) introduced an important distinction between "static" time and "flowing" time. Drawing on Plato's three-level ontology — the universal itself, the participated universal, and the particular that participates — Iamblichus distinguished between "generative" time (a higher, static form) and "generated" time (the lower, flowing form that we experience in daily life). The superior time is static and always the same; the lower time flows and resides in its participants.²⁷

This distinction is significant because it provided a more refined vocabulary for talking about the difference between God's eternity and our experience of time. It is not simply that God is "outside" time — rather, God exists in a qualitatively different kind of time (or non-time) that is static, permanent, and unchanging, while we exist in a flowing, changing, successive time. This more nuanced picture would influence later Christian thinkers who tried to explain how a timeless God could relate to a temporal world.

Proclus and Transcendent Time

Proclus (AD 410–485) elaborated further on the distinction between timelessness, time, and things-in-time. He distinguished succession from time itself, proposing a kind of "transcendent time" that gives structure to change without itself changing. Interestingly, as one scholar has noted, Proclus's idea of a transcendent, eventless flow of time sounds in some respects remarkably similar to Newton's much later concept of "absolute time" — time that flows uniformly and independently of events.²⁸ But for Proclus, this transcendent time is the realm of the Forms — the patterns or causes of temporal events, held together as a completed whole.

Proclus is also important because of his involvement in a famous debate with the Christian philosopher John Philoponus in the sixth century. Proclus argued that the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo (creation from nothing) was incompatible with divine perfection, timelessness, immutability, and simplicity. If God creates the universe from nothing, Proclus reasoned, then God undergoes a change — from not creating to creating. But a perfect being cannot change. Therefore, either the world is eternal (as the Neoplatonists believed) or the Christian God is not truly perfect.²⁹ This argument — which essentially turns the classical theistic attributes against the Christian doctrine of creation — would become one of the most important challenges for the medieval theologians to address, as we will see in Chapter 13.

Ammonius and Boethius's Predecessor

Ammonius (AD 435–517) was another important late Neoplatonist who supported the timeless interpretation of eternity. In a commentary on Aristotle, Ammonius articulated the timeless view with particular clarity, insisting that "we shall not allow anyone to say that the knowledge of the gods runs along with the flow of things, nor that anything with them is past or future." For the gods, only "is" can be used — not the "is" that is counted alongside "was" and "will be," but an "is" that exists before the level of temporal images and signifies "undeviating unchangeability."³⁰

Ammonius was an older contemporary of Boethius, and while the exact lines of influence are debated, both may have been influenced by their common predecessor, Proclus. What matters is that by the time Boethius wrote his famous definition of eternity in the Consolation of Philosophy — "the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of interminable life" (tota simul) — he was not inventing something new. He was codifying a tradition of philosophical thinking about timeless eternity that stretched back through the Neoplatonists to Plotinus and ultimately to Plato. Boethius's definition, which would dominate all medieval discussion of divine eternity (as we will see in Chapter 13), was the product of nearly a millennium of Greek philosophical reflection.

How Greek Philosophy Shaped Christian Theology

Now we come to the crucial question: How did all of these Greek philosophical ideas make their way into Christian theology? The answer involves one of the most significant intellectual encounters in history — the meeting of biblical faith and Greek philosophy in the early centuries of the Christian era.

The Alexandrian Synthesis

The city of Alexandria, Egypt, was the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean world. It was home to one of the greatest libraries in antiquity and a center of both Jewish and Greek learning. It was in Alexandria that Philo had already begun the work of synthesizing Jewish faith with Greek philosophy. And it was in Alexandria that the first major Christian theological school was established.

Clement of Alexandria (about AD 150–215) and Origen (about AD 185–254) were the pioneering figures in this school, and both were deeply immersed in Greek philosophy — particularly Platonism and its Neoplatonic developments. They saw no fundamental conflict between Greek philosophy and Christian faith. In their view, the Greek philosophers had grasped important truths about God — truths that complemented and illuminated what Scripture taught.

Clement explicitly argued that philosophy was a kind of preparatory discipline that led the Greeks toward the truth, just as the Law of Moses had prepared the Jews. Philosophy was, in Clement's phrase, a "schoolmaster" for the Greeks. And the truths that philosophy taught about God — His unchangeableness, His simplicity, His transcendence — were genuine truths that could be incorporated into Christian theology without distortion.³¹

Origen went even further. Deeply influenced by Platonic philosophy, Origen developed a strongly atemporalist view of God. For Origen, God is utterly beyond time, utterly unchanging, and utterly transcendent. All temporal language about God in Scripture — God acting, creating, responding, grieving — must be understood as accommodative language, adjusted to our limited human understanding. It tells us something about how God relates to us, but not about how God is in Himself.³²

The Alexandrian approach set a pattern that would dominate Christian theology for centuries. When there was a conflict between the biblical portrait of God (as dynamic, responsive, and temporal) and the philosophical portrait of God (as unchanging, simple, and timeless), the philosophical portrait was treated as the deeper truth, and the biblical language was reinterpreted accordingly. The unstated assumption was that the Greek philosophers had correctly identified the essential attributes of the highest being, and that Scripture, while inspired, was using imprecise, metaphorical language when it described God in temporal terms.

The Assumptions That Were Never Questioned

What makes this synthesis so important — and so problematic — is that the philosophical assumptions at its foundation were rarely questioned. When educated Christians in the second and third centuries encountered Greek philosophy, they found a set of ideas about God that seemed obviously true to anyone trained in the Greek intellectual tradition:

First, what is unchanging is superior to what changes. This seemed self-evident. Change implies imperfection — either you change for the better (which means you were previously imperfect) or you change for the worse (which means you are becoming imperfect). A perfect being would not need to change, and could not change for the worse. Therefore, the most perfect being must be utterly unchanging.

Second, what is simple is superior to what is complex. A composite being depends on its parts and on whatever put those parts together. But God is self-sufficient, dependent on nothing. Therefore, God must be absolutely simple — without parts, without composition, without any internal distinctions.

Third, what is beyond time is superior to what is in time. Temporal existence means being subject to the ravages of time — to decay, loss, and the impermanence of passing moments. A being beyond time is not subject to any of this. Therefore, the most perfect being must exist outside of time altogether.

Fourth, what is unaffected is superior to what is affected. Being affected by external events means being dependent on those events — being in some sense at the mercy of what happens. A truly sovereign, self-sufficient being cannot be affected by anything outside itself. Therefore, God must be completely impassible — beyond all emotional response.

These four assumptions — the superiority of changelessness, simplicity, timelessness, and impassibility — form what we might call "the Greek philosophical package." They are logically interconnected: each one supports and reinforces the others. And they were absorbed into Christian theology so thoroughly that for centuries they were treated not as philosophical assumptions but as established theological truths — truths about God that no orthodox Christian could question.

But are they true? That is what we are investigating in this book. And as I have argued in earlier chapters (especially Chapters 5–6), there are powerful reasons to doubt every one of these assumptions. The unchanging is not obviously superior to the changing — a living, loving, responsive being may be greater than a frozen, static one. Absolute simplicity creates more problems than it solves (see Chapter 30). Timelessness is incompatible with the Incarnation (see Chapter 27). And impassibility contradicts the overwhelming biblical testimony that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures (see Chapter 28 and the companion book The Heart of God).

The Fundamental Tension: The God of the Bible vs. the God of the Philosophers

We are now in a position to see the fundamental tension that has animated the God-and-time debate from its earliest days. On one side stands the God of the Bible — the God who creates in six days, calls Abraham, delivers Israel from Egypt, speaks through the prophets, becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ, and promises a future consummation of all things. This God acts. He responds. He creates. He speaks. He grieves. He rejoices. He enters into covenants. He sends His Son "in the fullness of time" (Galatians 4:4). Every one of these activities is temporal — it involves a before and an after, a sequence of events, a genuine engagement with the flow of history.

On the other side stands the God of the philosophers — the God of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Stoics. This God is unchanging. He is simple. He is timeless. He is beyond all emotional response. He does not act in sequence. He does not respond to events. He does not grieve or rejoice. He exists in an eternal, undifferentiated "now" — beyond time, beyond change, beyond all the limitations of temporal existence.

These are two very different portraits. And the question that confronted early Christian theology — and that still confronts us today — is: which one is the real picture of God? Or can they somehow be reconciled?

The Classical Solution: Reinterpret the Bible

The classical tradition, from Augustine through Aquinas and beyond, chose a clear answer: the philosophical portrait represents how God truly is, and the biblical language must be reinterpreted accordingly. When the Bible says God "repented" of making Saul king (1 Samuel 15:11), it does not mean God genuinely changed His mind — because God cannot change. When the Bible says God was "grieved" by human sin (Genesis 6:6), it does not mean God genuinely felt grief — because God cannot be affected by anything external. When the Bible says God "acts" at particular moments in history, it does not mean God performs temporal actions — because God is timeless. All of this language is "accommodative" — God condescends to speak in temporal terms so that limited human beings can understand, but in reality, God's experience is entirely different from what these texts seem to describe.

This hermeneutical strategy — the strategy of treating virtually all temporal and emotional language about God as metaphorical or accommodative — has been the dominant approach in Christian theology for over a millennium. And it has a certain logic to it: if God really is timeless, then temporal language about Him cannot be literally true, and some kind of reinterpretation is necessary.

The Temporalist Response: Reexamine the Philosophy

But there is another possibility — one that I believe is both more faithful to Scripture and more philosophically sound. Instead of reinterpreting the Bible to fit Greek philosophy, we can reexamine the philosophy in light of the Bible. Instead of assuming that the Greek philosophers were right about divine perfection and then reading Scripture through that lens, we can start with Scripture's own portrait of God and ask whether the philosophical assumptions are actually correct.

When we do this, we discover something remarkable. The philosophical assumptions that led to divine timelessness are not as solid as they seemed. The claim that the unchanging is always superior to the changing is not self-evident — it is an assumption that privileges a particular kind of perfection (static perfection) over another kind (dynamic perfection). The claim that God must be absolutely simple is philosophically problematic and creates more problems than it solves. The claim that timelessness is superior to temporality begs the very question at issue. And the claim that emotional detachment is superior to emotional engagement flatly contradicts the biblical portrait of a God who loves, grieves, and is moved with compassion.

The temporalist tradition — represented today by scholars like Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, Garrett DeWeese, and R. T. Mullins — argues that we should start with the biblical portrait and let it guide our philosophy, not the other way around. The Bible presents a God who genuinely acts in time, who genuinely responds to events, who genuinely enters into the flow of history. If our philosophy cannot accommodate this, then the philosophy needs to be revised — not the Bible.

I agree with this approach. I believe the overwhelming weight of the biblical evidence points to a God who is genuinely temporal — who experiences real sequence and succession, who acts in the present, and who enters into genuine, responsive relationship with His creatures. The Greek philosophical assumptions that led to divine timelessness were not self-evidently true. They were products of a particular intellectual tradition that privileged permanence over change, stasis over dynamism, and detachment over engagement. And while the early Christian thinkers who absorbed those assumptions were brilliant and sincere, I believe they were wrong on this point.

A Closer Look: Specific Lines of Influence

Having laid out the general picture, let me trace some specific lines of influence between Greek philosophy and Christian theology on the question of God and time. These connections are well documented in the scholarly literature, and understanding them helps us see exactly how philosophical assumptions shaped theological conclusions.

From Plato to Augustine

The most important single line of influence runs from Plato through Plotinus to Augustine. Augustine (AD 354–430) is the towering figure in Western theology, and his views on God and time — developed especially in Book XI of his Confessions — shaped all subsequent discussion. Augustine explicitly acknowledged his debt to the "books of the Platonists" (which in his case meant Neoplatonic writings, particularly those of Plotinus), and scholars have extensively documented the Neoplatonic elements in his theology.³³

Augustine's argument for divine atemporality follows a clear Neoplatonic logic: God created time along with the world; since God created time, God must exist outside of time; and since God exists outside of time, He experiences all of reality in a single, timeless present. Augustine's memorable response to the question "What was God doing before He created the world?" — that the question is ill-formed because there was no "before" creation — is a direct application of the Platonic idea that time is part of the created order.³⁴

Augustine's argument for God's atemporality is rooted not primarily in biblical exegesis but in the doctrines of divine simplicity and immutability, which he inherited from Neoplatonism. In The Trinity, Augustine wrote that God's essence "has absolutely nothing changeable about its eternity or its truth or its will," and that God should be understood as "wholly everywhere without place, everlasting without time, without any change in himself making changeable things, and undergoing nothing."³⁵ These are philosophical claims, drawn from the Neoplatonic tradition, and applied to the God of the Bible. Augustine's great achievement was to weave these philosophical ideas so seamlessly into his theology that for centuries they were treated as biblical teaching. But they are not. They are philosophical imports — and deeply influential ones.

This will be explored much more fully in Chapter 12, where we examine the Church Fathers' views on God and time in detail. The key point for this chapter is simply that the Platonic philosophical tradition provided the conceptual tools and assumptions that shaped Augustine's theology of divine eternity.

From Aristotle to Aquinas

The second great line of influence runs from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225–1274). While Augustine drew primarily on Plato (via the Neoplatonists), Aquinas drew primarily on Aristotle. Aquinas's great project was to integrate Aristotle's philosophy with Christian theology, creating a comprehensive synthesis that has been called "the medieval synthesis."

From Aristotle, Aquinas took the concept of pure actuality (actus purus). God, Aquinas argued, is pure act with no potentiality. This means God cannot change — because change involves the actualization of a potential, and a being with no potentiality cannot actualize anything. And if God cannot change, God cannot be temporal — because temporal existence involves at least the minimal change of existing first at one moment and then at another.

Aquinas also took from Aristotle the connection between simplicity and timelessness. A simple being (one with no parts or composition) cannot have "temporal parts" — successive states that compose its life. Therefore, a simple being must experience its entire life at once, in a single, undivided present. This is precisely Boethius's tota simul, which Aquinas adopted and defended.

The result was a powerful and comprehensive argument for divine timelessness: God is pure act → God cannot change → God is not temporal → God exists in a timeless "eternal now." This argument has genuine philosophical force. But its foundation is Aristotelian metaphysics, not Scripture. The Bible never describes God as "pure act" or denies that God has any "potentiality." These are philosophical categories, and they produce theological conclusions that are in deep tension with the biblical portrait of a God who acts, responds, and engages with His creatures in time.

We will examine Aquinas's arguments in detail in Chapter 13. For now, the key point is the genealogy: the doctrine of divine timelessness as articulated by Aquinas is not a biblical doctrine. It is a philosophical construction, built on Aristotelian foundations, and imposed on the biblical text through the hermeneutical strategy of treating temporal language about God as metaphorical.

The Stoic Influence on Impassibility

The third line of influence runs from the Stoics to the early Church Fathers' doctrine of divine impassibility. The Stoic ideal of apatheia — freedom from passions — was widely admired in the ancient world. It represented a moral ideal: the wise person rises above emotional disturbance and achieves a state of rational calm.

Early Christian writers were deeply influenced by this ideal. When they described God's "perfection," they naturally included emotional impassibility — freedom from passions — as one of its components. God, they reasoned, cannot be disturbed by events in the world. God cannot grieve, because grief implies suffering, and a perfect being cannot suffer. God cannot be angry in a genuine emotional sense, because anger implies loss of rational control. All the biblical language about God's emotions must therefore be metaphorical — accommodations to our human way of understanding, not descriptions of God as He truly is.

The relevance for the God-and-time question is clear: genuine emotional response requires temporal sequence. You cannot be genuinely moved with compassion by someone's suffering unless you move from one emotional state (no compassion) to another (compassion), and that transition happens in time. If God is genuinely impassible — beyond all emotional response — then there is one less reason to think He is temporal. But if God genuinely does respond emotionally to His creatures (as the Bible overwhelmingly portrays), then He must be temporal, because emotional response requires temporal sequence. This is the argument from divine passibility to divine temporality, which we develop fully in Chapter 28.

The Value Judgment at the Heart of It All

As we step back and look at the big picture, one thing stands out above everything else: the Greek philosophical tradition bequeathed to Christian theology a deep and pervasive value judgment — the conviction that the unchanging is inherently superior to the changing, and that the timeless is inherently superior to the temporal.

This value judgment is so deeply embedded in Western thought that we rarely notice it. It feels like common sense. Of course the unchanging is better than the changing! Of course the eternal is more perfect than the temporal! But when we stop and examine this assumption, it turns out to be far less obvious than it seems.

Consider: is a statue more perfect than a living person? A statue is unchanging — it stands there, forever the same. A living person changes constantly — growing, learning, responding, feeling, acting. Which is greater? Most of us would say the living person, without hesitation. Life, responsiveness, engagement, and relationship are higher, not lower, than frozen immobility.

Or consider: is a God who loves without being affected by what He loves really more perfect than a God who genuinely enters into His creatures' joys and sorrows? The Greek philosophers would say yes — the God who remains unaffected is more self-sufficient, more independent, more complete. But the Bible says something very different. The God of the Bible is moved with compassion, grieved by sin, overjoyed at repentance. This is not a deficiency. It is a sign of how great God's love is — a love that takes the risk of genuine engagement with a broken world.

The temporalist tradition argues that the Greek value judgment is wrong. Temporal existence is not a deficiency. It is a mode of being that allows for genuine action, genuine response, genuine relationship, and genuine love. A temporal God who enters into the flow of history, who acts in the present moment, who genuinely responds to His creatures' prayers and needs — this God is not less perfect than a timeless, frozen, unresponsive deity. He is more perfect, because He is alive, and life is greater than death, and love is greater than indifference.

As Mullins has argued, the question is not whether God is "in" time in the way creatures are — bound to clock-time, locked into the present moment, unable to see the future. I agree with Mullins that God transcends creaturely time in important ways. The question is whether God experiences genuine temporal sequence — a real before and after, a genuine engagement with the flow of events. I believe He does. And I believe that the Greek philosophical tradition's assumption that such experience is a deficiency rather than a perfection was a profound mistake — a mistake that has distorted Christian theology for centuries.³⁶

Counterarguments and Fair Engagement

Before we close this chapter, I want to engage fairly with several objections that defenders of the classical tradition might raise against the narrative I have presented.

Objection 1: "The Greeks Got It Right"

Some defenders of divine timelessness will say: "Yes, the doctrine came from Greek philosophy — but so what? The Greek philosophers were right! They grasped genuine truths about God through the use of natural reason, and the Church was correct to incorporate those truths into its theology. The fact that an idea originated in Greek philosophy does not make it wrong."

This is a fair point, and I want to acknowledge its force. It is absolutely true that Greek philosophy produced many genuine insights. The laws of logic, the foundations of mathematics, the basic categories of metaphysics — all of these came from the Greek tradition, and Christians have rightly made use of them. The mere fact that an idea originated in Athens rather than Jerusalem does not automatically disqualify it.

But the question is not whether any idea from Greek philosophy can be true. The question is whether these particular ideas — that God must be absolutely simple, absolutely immutable, absolutely timeless, and absolutely impassible — are true. And the burden of proof is on the person who claims they are, because these ideas are in significant tension with the biblical portrait of God. If the Bible consistently and pervasively portrays God as acting in time, responding to events, and experiencing genuine emotions, then anyone who claims that all of this is "merely metaphorical" needs to provide strong reasons for that claim. Simply appealing to Greek philosophical authority is not enough.

Objection 2: "The Biblical Writers Used Greek Categories Too"

Another objection: "The later biblical writers, especially in the New Testament, were already using Greek philosophical categories. The New Testament was written in Greek, and its authors were influenced by Greek thought. So the synthesis of biblical faith and Greek philosophy is not an alien imposition — it is already present in Scripture itself."

This is partly true. The New Testament writers did use Greek words and concepts. The prologue of John's Gospel uses the term Logos (λόγος), which has a rich Greek philosophical history. Paul engages with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens (Acts 17). There is genuine engagement with Greek thought in the New Testament.

But there is a crucial difference between using Greek terms and adopting Greek philosophical assumptions. The New Testament writers use the term Logos but fill it with radically different content — the Logos is not Plato's impersonal Form of the Good but a Person who "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Paul engages with the Stoics in Athens but does not adopt their doctrine of apatheia — he proclaims a God who is close to every person, a God who "made from one man every nation of mankind" and who "has fixed a day on which he will judge the world" (Acts 17:26, 31). The New Testament writers were selective and critical in their engagement with Greek thought, not uncritical adopters of Greek assumptions about divine perfection.

Objection 3: "This Is the Genetic Fallacy"

A third objection: "You are committing the genetic fallacy — judging an idea by its origins rather than by its merits. Even if divine timelessness originated in Greek philosophy, it might still be true. You need to evaluate the arguments, not just trace the history."

This is an excellent philosophical point, and I fully agree. The genetic fallacy is a real logical error, and I do not intend to commit it. I am not arguing that divine timelessness is false simply because it came from Greek philosophy. I am arguing that its origins matter for a different reason: they help us understand why the doctrine was so readily accepted, and they remind us that its acceptance was not based on careful exegesis of Scripture but on a prior philosophical commitment that was read into Scripture.

The arguments for and against divine timelessness have been presented in Chapters 4–7 and will be further developed in the philosophical chapters (Part V). This chapter's purpose is not to refute timelessness by appeal to its origins but to help the reader understand why this doctrine became so dominant — and to raise awareness that its dominance was driven more by philosophical assumptions than by biblical evidence. Knowing the history helps us approach the arguments with fresh eyes, free from the assumption that timelessness must be correct simply because "the tradition" has always taught it.

Objection 4: "Not All Church Fathers Were Atemporalists"

A final objection: "You are oversimplifying. Not all Church Fathers were strict atemporalists. Some had more nuanced views."

This is absolutely correct, and it actually supports my argument. As we will see in detail in Chapter 12, the early Church Fathers were not uniformly committed to strict divine timelessness. Irenaeus, for example, had a deeply temporal, narrative theology. Even Augustine, who is usually cited as the champion of divine timelessness, sometimes used temporal language about God that sits uneasily with strict atemporality. The Cappadocian Fathers developed a dynamic, relational doctrine of the Trinity that creates real tension with timelessness.

The fact that the earliest Fathers were more diverse in their views — and that the tradition became more rigid over time, hardening into the strict timelessness of Boethius and Aquinas — actually strengthens the case that timelessness was a philosophical import rather than a biblical given. If timelessness were clearly taught in Scripture, we would expect the earliest Christian thinkers — those closest to the apostolic tradition — to teach it consistently. The fact that they did not suggests that it took time for the Greek philosophical influence to fully permeate Christian theology.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Athens

In this chapter, we have traced the Greek philosophical roots of the Christian doctrine of divine timelessness. We have seen how Plato's theory of Forms introduced the fundamental value judgment that the unchanging is superior to the changing. We have seen how Aristotle's concept of the Unmoved Mover provided the philosophical template for a God who is pure actuality, utterly beyond time and change. We have seen how Plotinus and the Neoplatonists developed a vision of timeless eternity that went even further, making time itself a kind of fall from perfection. And we have seen how the Stoic ideal of apatheia contributed to the classical theistic picture of a God who is beyond all emotional response.

Together, these philosophical traditions created a powerful set of assumptions about divine perfection — assumptions that privileged changelessness over change, simplicity over complexity, timelessness over temporality, and detachment over engagement. When Christian theologians in Alexandria and elsewhere began articulating their faith in these philosophical categories, they absorbed these assumptions almost without question. The result was the classical theistic "package" — a set of interlocking divine attributes (simplicity, immutability, impassibility, timelessness) that shaped Christian theology for over a millennium.

But as I have argued throughout this book, these assumptions are not self-evidently true, and they are in significant tension with the Bible's own portrait of God. The God of Scripture is dynamic, responsive, emotional, and temporal. He acts in history, responds to prayer, enters into covenants, and will return at a future time to make all things new. This God is not less perfect than the static, timeless deity of Greek philosophy. He is more perfect — because He is alive, and alive in a way that makes genuine love, genuine relationship, and genuine engagement with His creatures possible.

In the next chapter, we will continue our historical survey by examining how the Church Fathers received and developed the Greek philosophical heritage. We will see that the patristic period was not a monolith — some Fathers embraced the Greek framework wholeheartedly, while others retained a more biblical, more temporal vision of God. The story is more complex and more interesting than the standard narrative suggests.

But the lesson of this chapter is clear: the doctrine of divine timelessness has its roots not in Scripture but in Athens. The question is not merely historical — it is theological and deeply personal. The God we worship, pray to, and trust with our lives — is He the frozen, changeless, timeless deity of the philosophers? Or is He the living, dynamic, responsive, temporal God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus? I believe the Bible points us unmistakably toward the latter. And understanding where the idea of divine timelessness came from is an essential first step in freeing ourselves from an assumption that, however venerable, may not be true.

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