Chapter 12

The Church Fathers on God and Time

From Irenaeus to Augustine

There is a story that gets told in almost every theology textbook. It goes something like this: the early Church Fathers taught that God exists outside of time in a timeless eternity, and this view was passed on seamlessly from the apostles through Augustine and Boethius to Aquinas and the Reformers. According to this story, divine timelessness was the unanimous teaching of the early church — a settled matter from the beginning. Anyone who questions it is questioning the entire tradition of Christian orthodoxy.

But that story, I believe, is too simple. In fact, it is misleading. When we look carefully at what the Church Fathers actually wrote about God and time, a much more complicated — and much more interesting — picture emerges. The reality is that the Fathers were engaged in a creative, sometimes messy, and often brilliant attempt to bring together two very different ways of thinking about God: the dynamic, personal, acting God of the Bible and the unchanging, perfect, timeless deity of Greek philosophy. Their views on God and time ranged from the strongly atemporalist (like Origen) to the surprisingly nuanced and even ambiguous (like Augustine). The patristic landscape is not a flat plain of agreement. It is more like a mountain range — with peaks and valleys, twists and turns, and plenty of places where the terrain is genuinely uncertain.

In this chapter, we will walk through the most important voices in the early church on God and time. We will meet Irenaeus, whose theology was deeply rooted in the biblical story of God's saving actions in history. We will encounter Clement of Alexandria and Origen, who drank deeply from the wells of Greek philosophy. We will consider the Cappadocian Fathers — Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa — whose groundbreaking work on the Trinity opened doors they may not have fully realized. We will spend significant time with Augustine, whose treatment of time in Confessions Book XI is one of the most famous passages in all of Western philosophy. And we will look briefly at several other figures who contributed to the developing conversation. Along the way, we will also take note of Boethius, the bridge figure between the patristic and medieval eras, whose definition of eternity shaped everything that came after him.

My thesis in this chapter is straightforward: the Church Fathers' views on God and time were more diverse and more nuanced than the later tradition acknowledged. While many of them did absorb Greek philosophical assumptions about divine immutability and timelessness, others — including, on certain readings, Augustine himself — present a picture that is far more complex than a simple endorsement of strict atemporality. The classical tradition became more rigid over time, hardening into the strict timelessness of Boethius and Aquinas. But the earliest Fathers were more diverse, more open to a God who genuinely acts in time, and less uniformly committed to strict atemporality than the later tradition assumed.

Understanding this history matters enormously. If we think the Fathers spoke with one voice on this question, we may feel bound to accept their supposed consensus without question. But if the reality is messier than the textbook story suggests — if the earliest Christian theologians were themselves wrestling with these questions and arriving at different answers — then we are freed to continue that wrestling ourselves, guided by Scripture and reason, with gratitude for the insights of the past but without blind deference to a unanimity that never actually existed.

The Challenge: Two Worlds Collide

Before we look at individual thinkers, we need to understand the challenge the early Fathers faced. As we explored in Chapter 11, Greek philosophy — especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists — had developed a very specific picture of what divine perfection looks like. The truly perfect being, on this picture, is unchanging, unaffected by anything outside itself, and utterly beyond the flux and flow of time. Change was seen as a sign of imperfection. Emotions were a sign of vulnerability. Time was a sign of limitation. The highest reality — Plato's Form of the Good, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, Plotinus's One — was beyond all of these things. It was changeless, passionless, and timeless.

Now consider the God of the Bible. He creates the heavens and the earth in a sequence of days (Genesis 1). He walks in the garden in the cool of the day looking for Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:8). He grieves that He made humanity (Genesis 6:6). He calls Abraham, makes covenants, delivers Israel from Egypt, speaks through prophets, and responds to the prayers of His people. He relents from judgment when people repent (Jonah 3:10). He sends His Son into the world "when the fullness of time had come" (Galatians 4:4). The God of the Bible acts, responds, speaks, feels, and engages with His creatures in real time, in real history.

How do you bring these two pictures together? That was the challenge the early Church Fathers faced. They were educated people living in a world shaped by Greek philosophy. Many of them had studied Plato and the Stoics before they became Christians, or alongside their Christian faith. When they sat down to explain the God of the Bible to a Greek-speaking, philosophically educated world, they naturally reached for the categories they had been trained to use. And those categories — immutability, simplicity, impassibility, timelessness — were the categories of Greek philosophy.

The question is: did this synthesis distort the biblical picture of God? Did the Fathers, in their eagerness to make Christianity intellectually respectable in the Greco-Roman world, inadvertently import philosophical assumptions that sat uneasily with the scriptural portrait? As we will see, the answer is complex. Some Fathers leaned heavily toward the philosophical side. Others stayed closer to the biblical narrative. And some — like Augustine — tried to hold both sides together in ways that created real tensions they never fully resolved.

Irenaeus of Lyon: A God Who Acts in History

We begin with Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–202), one of the most important theologians of the second century. Irenaeus is a fascinating starting point because his theology is deeply rooted in the biblical narrative — more so than perhaps any other early Father. He did not write a philosophical treatise on the nature of divine eternity. Instead, he wrote theology that was shaped by the story of God's saving actions in history, and that story is fundamentally temporal.¹

Irenaeus is best known for two works: Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses) and Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. Both of these works are structured around what theologians call the "economy of salvation" — the unfolding plan by which God creates, redeems, and will eventually bring all things to their completion. For Irenaeus, God is above all the God who acts. God is the Creator who made all things out of nothing. God is the Lord who governs history. God is the Redeemer who sent His Son to rescue fallen humanity. And God is the one who will bring all of history to its final goal — what Irenaeus calls the "recapitulation" (anakephalaiōsis, ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of all things in Christ.²

This "economic" approach to theology — an approach centered on what God does rather than on abstract speculation about what God is in His inner being — is naturally temporal. It presupposes a God who acts at specific times, who enters into real relationships with His creatures, who responds to the unfolding events of history, and who works out a plan that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Irenaeus's theology has a narrative structure. It moves from creation through fall, through covenant, through the coming of Christ, through the Church age, toward a final consummation. This is the story of a God who is deeply involved in time — who is, as it were, the main character in the drama of history.

Now, Irenaeus did not address the question of divine timelessness directly. He did not sit down and argue, "God is temporal, not timeless." That kind of abstract, philosophical analysis was not his style. But the overall shape of his theology points strongly in a temporalist direction. When Irenaeus talks about God, he talks about a God who creates in sequence, who plans and executes a salvation history that unfolds over centuries, who becomes incarnate at a particular moment in time, and who will return to bring history to its conclusion. This is not the language of a God who exists in a timeless, unchanging "eternal now." It is the language of a God who is actively engaged in the flow of time.³

Irenaeus also had a strong anti-Gnostic motivation. The Gnostics of his day — especially Valentinus and his followers — had developed elaborate mythologies about divine beings who existed in a timeless, spiritual realm called the "Pleroma" (fullness). For the Gnostics, the material world and the flow of time were evil — products of a fall from the timeless divine realm. Irenaeus fought against this view with everything he had. He insisted that the material world is good, that time and history are the arena of God's saving work, and that the God of the Bible is not a distant, timeless deity trapped in a spiritual realm above but a personal God who acts in the real world of space and time.⁴

I find Irenaeus's approach deeply congenial. His instinct was to start with the Bible and let the biblical story shape his theology, rather than starting with Greek philosophical categories and trying to fit the Bible into them. This is exactly the approach I believe we should take on the question of God and time. As we will see throughout this chapter, the Fathers who stayed closest to the biblical narrative tended to produce a more dynamic, temporally engaged picture of God. Those who leaned most heavily on Greek philosophy tended toward timelessness. Irenaeus stands at the beginning of the patristic period as a reminder that the earliest Christian theology was, at its core, a theology of divine action in time.

The Alexandrian School: Clement and Origen

If Irenaeus represents the more biblically grounded end of the patristic spectrum, the Alexandrian school — especially Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) and Origen (c. 185–254) — represents the opposite pole. The Alexandrians were deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, particularly Middle Platonism and (in Origen's case) the beginnings of what would later become Neoplatonism. They saw Greek philosophy not as an enemy of the Christian faith but as a preparation for it — a "schoolmaster" that had led the Greeks toward truth, just as the Law had led the Jews. This positive assessment of philosophy shaped their theology profoundly, including their views on God and time.⁵

Clement of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria was one of the first Christian thinkers to attempt a systematic integration of Christian faith and Greek philosophy. He was widely read in Plato, the Stoics, and various Middle Platonic thinkers, and he drew on them freely in his theological writings. In his major work, the Stromateis (Miscellanies), Clement develops a picture of God that is heavily influenced by the Platonic tradition.

For Clement, God is utterly transcendent — beyond human comprehension, beyond human language, and beyond the limitations of time and space. God has no spatial location, no bodily form, and no temporal extension. As Garrett DeWeese notes, Clement is among the early Christian Fathers who adopted from the Platonic tradition the idea of a durationless, unextended eternity.⁶ In his Stromateis, Clement describes God in strongly atemporalist terms, drawing on the same philosophical vocabulary that Plato had used to describe the timeless realm of the Forms.

At the same time, Clement was a Christian. He believed in the God of the Bible — the God who created the world, who spoke through Moses and the prophets, who sent His Son to redeem humanity. How did he reconcile this biblical portrait with his philosophical commitment to divine timelessness? The answer, for Clement, was primarily through the method of allegorical interpretation. When the Bible describes God as acting, speaking, grieving, or responding, Clement tended to treat this language as accommodative — as a way of speaking about God that adapts to human limitations rather than describing God as He truly is in Himself. The true God, for Clement, transcends all temporal categories. The biblical language of divine action in time is a concession to our weakness, not a revelation of God's actual experience.

This approach would become enormously influential in the Christian tradition. It established a pattern that would be followed by many subsequent thinkers: take the philosophical picture of God as timeless and unchanging as the "real" truth about God, and then reinterpret the biblical language as metaphorical or accommodative wherever it conflicts with the philosophical picture. As I have argued throughout this book, I believe this approach gets things exactly backward. We should start with Scripture and let it critique our philosophical assumptions — not the other way around. But we can see in Clement the beginning of a pattern that would dominate Christian theology for the next millennium and beyond.

Origen

Origen was arguably the most brilliant and influential theologian of the first three centuries of Christianity. He was also, in many ways, the most philosophical. Trained in the same Alexandrian intellectual culture as Clement, Origen absorbed Platonic philosophy even more deeply than his predecessor. His theology represents the most thorough synthesis of Christian faith and Greek philosophy in the pre-Nicene period.⁷

On the question of God and time, Origen is one of the most clearly atemporalist of the early Fathers. He held that God exists in a timeless eternity that is qualitatively different from the temporal existence of creatures. For Origen, eternity is not simply time stretching backward and forward without end. It is a fundamentally different kind of existence — one that involves no succession, no before-and-after, no temporal flow. R.T. Mullins notes that Origen articulated a robust doctrine of divine timelessness deeply rooted in Platonic thought.⁸ And P. Tzamalikos has devoted an entire monograph to exploring Origen's complex cosmology and ontology of time.⁹

Origen's reasons for holding to divine timelessness were closely connected to his broader theological commitments. He held to a very strong doctrine of divine immutability — God cannot change in any respect. He held to divine simplicity — God has no parts, no composition, no internal complexity. And he held that perfection requires changelessness. All of these commitments pointed naturally toward atemporality. If God cannot change, then God cannot transition from one temporal state to another. If God is simple, then God cannot have temporal parts. If perfection excludes change, then perfection excludes temporality.

However, even Origen's picture is not without complexity. Despite his strong philosophical commitment to divine timelessness, Origen also affirmed that God acts providentially in history. God creates, God governs, God redeems. Origen spoke of God's providential care for His creatures in language that is unavoidably temporal. God responds to human choices. God guides the course of history toward a final goal. These descriptions sit uneasily with strict atemporality, and Origen never fully resolved the tension. He typically handled it by distinguishing between how God is "in Himself" (timeless, unchanging, simple) and how God appears "to us" (acting, responding, engaged in time). But this distinction raises its own questions: Is God's engagement with time merely apparent? Does God not really act, respond, and engage? If so, what becomes of the biblical portrait of God as a living, personal, relationally engaged deity?

Origen's influence on subsequent Christian theology was enormous — though it was also controversial. Several of his specific doctrines were later condemned (including his teaching on the pre-existence of souls and the possible ultimate restoration of all things, including Satan). But his broader theological method — using Greek philosophical categories to interpret and systematize Christian doctrine — became the dominant approach in both Eastern and Western Christianity. And with that method came the assumptions about divine perfection, immutability, and timelessness that Origen had absorbed from Platonic philosophy.

Philo of Alexandria: A Jewish Precursor

Before moving to the Cappadocians, we should note an important precursor to the Christian engagement with Greek philosophy: the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC–AD 50). Philo is a crucial figure because he represents the first major attempt to synthesize the God of the Hebrew Bible with the categories of Greek philosophy — and his influence on later Christian thinkers, especially Clement and Origen, was substantial.

Philo explicitly adopted Platonic language to describe the God of Israel. He taught that God's life is not time but eternity (aiōn, αἰών), and that eternity is the archetype and model of which time is merely an imitation. As DeWeese observes, Philo wrote that "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, the archetype and model for time. And in eternity nothing is past or future, but simply has being."¹⁰

Philo's synthesis of Jewish monotheism and Platonic philosophy created a template that Christians in Alexandria would follow. When Clement and Origen described God in atemporalist terms, they were not inventing something new. They were drawing on a tradition — the Philonic tradition — that had already shown how the God of Scripture could be interpreted through the lens of Greek philosophical categories. The question, again, is whether this interpretation does justice to the biblical text or distorts it. Philo's Platonic reading of the Hebrew Bible smoothed over the tensions between the dynamic, acting God of Israel and the changeless deity of Greek philosophy. But those tensions are real, and they deserve more careful attention than Philo gave them.

Athanasius and the Defense of Nicaea

Before we turn to the Cappadocian Fathers, we should briefly consider Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373), the great champion of Nicene orthodoxy. Athanasius is not primarily known for his views on time and eternity, but his fierce defense of the full deity of the Son — against the Arians, who taught that the Son was a created being — has important implications for our question.

Athanasius insisted that the Son is homoousios (ὁμοούσιος) — "of the same substance" — with the Father. The Son is not a creature. The Son is not a lesser divine being. The Son is fully God, eternally begotten of the Father, sharing the same divine nature. This affirmation is foundational for orthodox Christianity, and it was enshrined in the Nicene Creed of 325 (and expanded at Constantinople in 381).¹¹

But here is what matters for our discussion: Athanasius and the pro-Nicene theologians who followed him affirmed that the generation of the Son from the Father is eternal. The Father did not first exist alone and then, at some point, generate the Son. The Father has always been Father, and the Son has always been Son. This "eternal generation" was understood to be timeless — it has no beginning, no before-and-after, no temporal location. It simply is.

On the surface, this seems to support divine timelessness. And indeed, many defenders of timelessness have cited the doctrine of eternal generation in their favor. If the generation of the Son is timeless, then there must be a timeless dimension to the divine life. But the matter is not so simple. R.T. Mullins has pointed out that the doctrine of the divine processions — the Father begetting the Son and the Father and Son spirating the Spirit — actually creates tensions with strict timelessness.¹² If the Father causes the Son to exist (as the Nicene tradition affirms), and if causation involves some form of explanatory priority (the Father is the "source" or "fount" of divinity), then there is a question about whether this priority can be understood without any form of succession at all. We will explore this question more fully in Chapter 26, when we discuss the Trinity and time. For now, the important point is that even the doctrine of eternal generation — which seems to support timelessness — contains elements that are in tension with it.

Athanasius himself did not develop a systematic position on divine eternity. His primary concern was soteriological — establishing that the Son who saves us is fully God, not a lesser being. But his theological framework, with its emphasis on the dynamic, relational life of the Trinity, planted seeds that later thinkers would cultivate. If the Father, Son, and Spirit stand in real, dynamic, mutually constitutive relationships — if the divine life is genuinely relational — then we may ask whether such relations can be coherently understood as timeless. That is a question the Cappadocians would begin to address.

The Cappadocian Fathers: Dynamic Trinitarianism

The three Cappadocian Fathers — Basil of Caesarea (c. 329–379), Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–390), and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394) — made what is arguably the most important theological contribution of the entire patristic period: the definitive articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. Their work established the framework within which all subsequent Trinitarian theology — both Eastern and Western — has been conducted. And their understanding of the Trinity has profound, though often unnoticed, implications for the question of God and time.¹³

The Cappadocians developed the classic formulation: one ousia (οὐσία, essence or substance), three hypostaseis (ὑποστάσεις, persons). God is one in being but three in person. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share the same divine nature — they are homoousios — but they are distinct persons, distinguished by their relations of origin. The Father is unbegotten. The Son is begotten of the Father. The Spirit proceeds from the Father (and, in the later Western addition, from the Son as well). These relations of origin — generation and procession — are what distinguish the three persons from one another while preserving their unity in nature.

What makes this relevant for the God-and-time question is the dynamic, relational character of the Cappadocian understanding of the Trinity. For the Cappadocians, the divine life is not a static, frozen perfection. It is a living, dynamic communion of persons who genuinely relate to one another. The three persons are bound together in what later theology would call perichoresis (περιχώρησις) — a mutual indwelling, a mutual interpenetration, a dynamic coinherence in which each person fully shares in the life of the others.¹⁴

Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of the divine persons in deeply relational terms. In his Theological Orations, he describes the Father, Son, and Spirit as three who are inseparably united in their being and action — such that where one is, the others are also. Their life together is a life of mutual love, mutual knowledge, and mutual indwelling.¹⁵ As R.T. Mullins has argued in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor maintained that this perichoretic inseparability is what distinguishes the Trinity from tritheism — it is the internal, essential relatedness of the divine persons that makes them one God rather than three gods.¹⁶

Here is the crucial question: can this kind of dynamic, relational life be coherently understood as timeless? If the Father genuinely loves the Son, if the Spirit genuinely communicates with the Father, if the three persons genuinely relate to one another in mutual knowledge and love — does this not require some form of sequence? Love is not a static state; it is a living activity. Communication implies a sender and a receiver, a thought formed and a thought received. Mutual indwelling suggests a dynamic process, not a frozen snapshot. Can these things really be "all at once," with no succession, no before-and-after, no temporal flow?

The Cappadocians themselves did not address this question directly. They were not interested in the abstract philosophical question of whether the divine life involves temporal succession. Their concern was to defend the full deity of the Son and the Spirit against various heresies (Arianism, Eunomianism, Pneumatomachianism) and to articulate the Trinitarian faith in a way that was both scripturally faithful and philosophically coherent. They took for granted, as most educated people of their time did, that the highest reality is unchanging and timeless. But their own Trinitarian theology, with its emphasis on the dynamic, relational, mutually indwelling life of the three persons, sits uneasily with the strict timelessness they inherited from the philosophical tradition.

There is a further complication. David Bradshaw, in his important article "Time and Eternity in the Greek Fathers," has argued that the Greek Fathers — including the Cappadocians — did not hold to divine timelessness in the same way that the Western tradition, with its emphasis on divine simplicity, did. According to Bradshaw, the Greek Fathers distinguished between things that have a beginning and involve temporal intervals, and God, who has no beginning and involves no intervals — but this is not the same as the Western doctrine of strict timelessness rooted in divine simplicity.¹⁷

Mullins, however, disagrees with Bradshaw on this point. He argues that Gregory of Nyssa, at least, clearly did have timelessness in mind, since Gregory held that God exists without beginning, without end, and without temporal intervals, succession, or moments in His life.¹⁸ This is an ongoing scholarly debate, and I do not think it can be settled definitively. What we can say is this: the Cappadocians' dynamic Trinitarianism opened a door that later temporalists would walk through, even if the Cappadocians themselves did not walk through it. Their theology contains resources for a temporalist understanding of God that they did not fully develop — but that we, with the benefit of centuries of further reflection, can develop on their behalf.

Gregory of Nyssa deserves special mention here. Of the three Cappadocians, he is the most philosophically sophisticated and the most interesting for our purposes. Gregory developed a rich theology of divine infinity — God is infinite, unbounded, without limit. He also developed a concept of epektasis (ἐπέκτασις) — the idea that the redeemed will experience an eternal growth or progress into the infinite life of God, a never-ending journey deeper and deeper into the divine goodness. This concept is fascinating because it introduces a dynamic, progressive element into the idea of eternity. If the redeemed are eternally growing into God, then the afterlife is not a static, frozen state but a dynamic, ever-deepening experience. And if creaturely eternity involves this kind of dynamic progression, it raises the question: might divine eternity also involve some form of dynamic life — some form of genuine sequence and temporal flow — rather than the static "eternal now" of the timelessness tradition?

Again, Gregory did not draw this conclusion himself. But the seeds are there in his theology, waiting to be cultivated. And this is part of my broader argument in this chapter: the Church Fathers were more diverse and more suggestive on the question of God and time than the later tradition acknowledged. Even those Fathers who officially held to divine timelessness often said things — about God's actions, about the Trinity's relational life, about the dynamic character of divine perfection — that point in a more temporalist direction.

Other Patristic Voices: Pseudo-Dionysius, John Chrysostom, and the Broader Landscape

Before we turn to Augustine, it is worth briefly noting several other patristic voices that contributed to the developing conversation about God and time.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Dionysius (writing c. 500) produced a body of work that deeply influenced both Eastern and Western Christian theology. His writings, especially The Divine Names, present a strongly apophatic (negative) theology in which God transcends all human categories — including temporal ones. Pseudo-Dionysius clearly links divine eternity with immutability. He writes that God is "utterly incapable of all change and movement" and that while God is the cause from whom eternity, time, and days are derived, God Himself transcends all of these. God cannot act at one time and not at another — for if He did, He would suffer change and therefore not be eternal.¹⁹

Pseudo-Dionysius's view is among the strongest atemporalist positions in the patristic tradition. His influence was enormous — both Thomas Aquinas and the Eastern mystical tradition drew heavily on his writings. But his approach raises the same questions we have seen throughout this chapter: if God truly cannot act at one time and not at another, what do we make of the biblical portrait of a God who creates at a specific moment, who sends His Son in the fullness of time, who will return to judge the living and the dead? The more radically one pushes the logic of strict timelessness, the more difficult it becomes to account for the temporal actions that the Bible attributes to God.

John Chrysostom

John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), the great preacher of the early church, dealt with the question of divine eternity primarily in the context of Trinitarian theology. When discussing the eternal generation of the Son — the question of how the Father can "beget" the Son without this implying a temporal beginning — Chrysostom appealed to God's timeless eternity. The generation of the Son is not a temporal event; it is an eternal, timeless reality.²⁰ This is a typical patristic move, and it shows how deeply the assumption of divine timelessness had become embedded in the theological vocabulary of the late fourth century.

Yet Chrysostom is also one of the great expository preachers, and his sermons are filled with language of God acting, responding, grieving, and rejoicing in ways that presuppose temporal engagement. Like so many of the Fathers, Chrysostom held to timelessness as an official theological position while using temporal language about God in his actual pastoral and homiletical practice. This gap between official theology and pastoral practice is itself significant. It suggests that the strict timelessness position, however philosophically coherent it may be, does not fit naturally with the way Christians actually think about, pray to, and relate to God.

The Broader Pattern

Across the patristic landscape, we can discern a common pattern. Most of the Fathers, especially those educated in Greek philosophy, accepted some version of divine timelessness. But almost all of them also spoke of God in temporal terms when they were doing biblical exegesis, preaching, or discussing God's saving actions in history. The tension between the philosophical commitment to timelessness and the biblical language of divine temporal action was never fully resolved in the patristic period. It was, in many ways, papered over — handled by an implicit distinction between how God is "in Himself" (timeless) and how God appears or acts "toward us" (temporal). But as we will argue throughout this book, this distinction raises more questions than it answers. If God only appears to act in time but does not really do so, then the biblical portrait of God as a personal, responsive, emotionally engaged deity is fundamentally misleading. And I do not believe we should accept that conclusion.

Augustine of Hippo: The Most Influential Voice

We come now to the most important figure in the entire patristic discussion of God and time: Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine's treatment of time in Book XI of his Confessions is one of the most famous passages in all of Western philosophy. His views shaped virtually every subsequent Christian thinker who wrote about God and time, and they continue to dominate the discussion today. Any serious engagement with the question of God's relationship to time must grapple with Augustine.

But here is what I want to emphasize from the outset: Augustine's position is more complex, more nuanced, and in some ways more internally conflicted than the later tradition acknowledged. He is routinely cited as a straightforward defender of strict divine timelessness, and in many passages he clearly is. But he also says things — about God's actions, God's will, God's knowledge, and God's engagement with creation — that sit uneasily with strict atemporality. Understanding Augustine requires us to hold together multiple strands of his thought, not all of which point in the same direction.

Augustine's Neoplatonic Background

To understand Augustine's views on God and time, we must first understand his intellectual background. Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was deeply involved in Manichaeism and then Neoplatonism. His encounter with the writings of the "Platonists" — almost certainly Plotinus and Porphyry — was a decisive turning point in his intellectual and spiritual journey. In his Confessions, he describes reading "certain books of the Platonists" as a transformative experience that helped free him from his earlier materialism and pointed him toward a spiritual understanding of God and reality.²¹

DeWeese has carefully traced the Neoplatonic roots of Augustine's views on God and time. He identifies three key Neoplatonic doctrines that shaped Augustine's understanding: (1) the doctrine of degrees of being — the idea that some things have a "higher" or "truer" existence than others, with the unchanging having more being than the changing; (2) the doctrine of strong immutability — God cannot change in any way whatsoever; and (3) the doctrine of divine simplicity — God has no composition, no parts, no internal distinctions. DeWeese shows that all three of these doctrines, when taken together, lead naturally to the conclusion that God is timeless.²²

On the doctrine of degrees of being, Augustine followed Plotinus in holding that the unchanging has a higher degree of reality than the changing. God, as the highest being, must be the most unchanging — and therefore the most timeless. Augustine writes in De Trinitate: "That which is changed does not retain its own being, and that which can be changed, even if it is not actually changed, is able not to be that which it had been. For this reason, only that which not only is not changed, but also is even unable to be changed in any way, is most truly said to be."²³ Here the influence of Neoplatonism is unmistakable. Being and changelessness are identified. The more unchanging something is, the more "real" it is. And God, as the most real of all beings, must be the most unchanging — which means the most timeless.

On divine simplicity, Augustine followed the Neoplatonic tradition in holding that God has no composition or parts. Augustine, as DeWeese puts it, "denies that God is properly called a substance that has properties; he is more properly called an essence because he is properties." A simple being cannot have temporal parts — successive states that make up a temporal series. Therefore, a simple God must be timeless.²⁴

These Neoplatonic commitments — degrees of being, strong immutability, simplicity — formed the philosophical foundation on which Augustine built his understanding of divine eternity. The question we must ask, however, is whether these philosophical assumptions are correct. Are they demanded by Scripture? Or are they imports from a philosophical tradition that, however brilliant, may not be fully compatible with the God of the Bible? As I argued in Chapter 6, I believe that strict divine simplicity and strong immutability are not taught in Scripture and create serious theological problems when taken to their logical conclusions. Augustine's acceptance of these doctrines from Neoplatonism shaped his view of divine eternity in ways that may not be biblically warranted.

Confessions Book XI: God, Time, and Creation

We turn now to the heart of Augustine's discussion: Book XI of the Confessions. This is where Augustine tackles the questions of time, eternity, and God's relationship to both — and it is one of the most extraordinary passages in all of Christian literature.

Augustine begins with a prayer that sets the tone for everything that follows. He addresses God as one who exists outside of time, in eternity: "O Lord, since you are outside of time in eternity, are you unaware of the things that I tell you? Or do you see in time the things that occur in it?"²⁵ Already we see the framework: God is outside of time. Eternity is something other than time. The question is how a God who is outside of time relates to the events that happen within time.

Augustine then takes up the classic question that had been posed as an objection to the doctrine of creation: "What was God doing before He created heaven and earth?" This question had been asked many times before, and it was understood as a challenge to the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing. If God is eternal, and if He decided at some point to create the world, then what was He doing for all those endless ages before He created? Was He just sitting around, doing nothing? And if He was doing nothing and then started doing something (creating), does this not imply a change in God — a change from inactivity to activity?²⁶

Augustine's response is famous — and devastating. The question is ill-formed, he says, because it assumes that there was time "before" creation. But there was no time before creation, because God created time itself along with the world. Time is not an eternal container in which God exists and into which He places a created world. Time is itself part of the created order. It came into existence with creation, not before it. As Augustine puts it: "It is therefore true to say that when you had not made anything, there was no time, because time itself was of your making. And no time is co-eternal with you, because you never change; whereas, if time never changed, it would not be time."²⁷

In his later reflection on this theme, Augustine drives the point home even further: "Let them understand that before all time began you are the eternal Creator of all time, and that no created thing is co-eternal with you, even if any created thing is outside time."²⁸

Augustine's argument can be summarized in a chain of reasoning: (1) Time began with the creation of the universe. (2) God created the universe. (3) Therefore, God created time. (4) If God created time, He could not have done so in time. (5) Therefore, God exists outside of time.²⁹

This is a powerful argument, and it has been enormously influential. William Lane Craig observes that this line of reasoning, while clear, depends on certain assumptions — most importantly, the assumption that God is strongly immutable, meaning that God cannot change in any respect whatsoever. If we accept this assumption, then Augustine's argument follows: there can be no succession in God's being, and therefore the eternity in which God exists must be timeless.³⁰

But the assumption of strong immutability is precisely what is at issue in the contemporary debate. If we accept qualified immutability — the view that God's essential nature, character, and purposes never change, but that God's relational states, emotional responses, and interactions with creatures can genuinely change — then the argument does not go through in the same way. God can create time without existing entirely outside of time. God can be the creator of creaturely, physical, measurable time without existing in a timeless eternity. Perhaps God existed in a form of "divine time" before creation — a time generated by the dynamic relations of the Trinity — and then created creaturely time when He created the world. This is precisely the position I have been arguing for throughout this book, drawing on the work of Mullins and DeWeese (see Chapter 26).

Augustine on the Nature of Time

After establishing his view of God's relationship to time, Augustine launches into one of the most celebrated philosophical discussions in history: an analysis of the nature of time itself. His famous confession of perplexity has resonated with readers for sixteen centuries: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know."³¹

Augustine proceeds to analyze time with remarkable philosophical acuity. He argues that neither the past nor the future truly exist — the past is no longer, and the future is not yet. Only the present exists. But the present, upon examination, turns out to be a durationless instant — it has no extension, because any interval we call "present" can be divided into parts that are past, present, and future. So the present is real but without duration.³²

How then do we measure time? If the past does not exist and the future does not exist, and the present has no duration, then what are we measuring when we speak of "long" and "short" periods of time? Augustine's answer is that we measure time in the mind. Time is a kind of mental extension — a distentio animi (distension of the mind). The mind expects the future, attends to the present, and remembers the past. It is in this mental activity — this stretching of the mind across the flow of experience — that temporal duration is to be found.³³

This psychological theory of time is fascinating, and it has generated enormous scholarly discussion. For our purposes, what matters is its connection to Augustine's view of divine eternity. If time is a feature of the created mind — if it is, in some sense, a mental phenomenon rather than an objective feature of reality "out there" — then God's existence outside of time becomes more intelligible. God's mind is not a created mind, so God's experience is not structured by the temporal categories (past, present, future, duration) that structure creaturely experience. God does not expect the future, attend to the present, and remember the past. He sees all of time in a single, undivided act of knowledge. As Augustine writes: "All Thy years stand at once."³⁴

It is worth noting that Augustine's psychological theory of time has interesting parallels with later philosophical views — particularly those of Kant, who also held that time is a form imposed on experience by the mind rather than a feature of reality in itself. DeWeese discusses this parallel and notes that Augustine's view, like Kant's, raises difficult questions about the objective reality of time and temporal becoming.³⁵

The Tensions in Augustine

Now we come to what I consider the most important part of our discussion of Augustine: the tensions in his position. While Augustine clearly holds, as an official theological and philosophical position, that God exists in a timeless eternity, he also says things that pull in a different direction. These tensions are significant because they suggest that even Augustine — the patron saint of divine timelessness, so to speak — found it difficult to hold the atemporalist position consistently.

First, consider Augustine's language about God's actions. Throughout his writings, Augustine describes God as creating, willing, planning, responding, judging, redeeming, and saving. These are all temporal activities. You cannot create without there being a "before creation" and an "after creation" — at least in some sense. You cannot respond to something without there being a "before the response" and an "after the response." Augustine knows this, and he tries to handle it by saying that all of God's actions are, from God's perspective, a single timeless act. But this claim is difficult to make sense of. Is God's act of creating the world really the same act as God's act of becoming incarnate in Christ? Is God's act of calling Abraham really the same act as God's act of sending the Spirit at Pentecost? These seem like genuinely different actions, occurring at genuinely different times. Collapsing them all into a single timeless act seems to drain them of their distinctiveness and their temporal reality.

Second, consider Augustine's view of divine knowledge. Augustine affirmed that God has complete knowledge of all temporal events — past, present, and future. God sees all of history in a single act of timeless knowledge. But Augustine's unique contribution, as DeWeese points out, was the idea that God has timeless knowledge of temporal events. This is a concept that the Greek philosophers did not share; for Aristotle, for example, the divine mind was too exalted to concern itself with the details of temporal existence. Augustine insisted, against the Greeks, that God knows every particular event in time — every sparrow that falls, every hair on every head. This is a deeply biblical conviction, rooted in passages like Psalm 139 and Matthew 10:29–30.³⁶

But can we coherently affirm both that God is timeless and that God knows temporal events as temporal? If God knows that it is now 3:00 PM on a Tuesday — if God knows what time it is right now — then God's knowledge includes tensed content (what is happening now, what has happened, what will happen). And tensed knowledge seems to require a temporal knower — someone who is in time, experiencing the present as present, not viewing all of time from a timeless vantage point. This is the argument from divine knowledge of tensed facts, which we discussed in Chapter 6 as one of the decisive arguments against divine timelessness. Augustine did not address this problem, but it is a real tension in his position.

Third, consider Augustine's treatment of God's will. In his later writings, especially City of God, Augustine wrestles with the question of how God can decide to create the world without this decision representing a change in God. He affirms that God's decision to create is eternal — God has always willed to create, and the creation occurs at the time God eternally willed it to occur. But this raises the question: if God eternally willed to create, why did the world begin to exist at a particular moment? Why not earlier? Why not later? Augustine's answer is that there is no "earlier" or "later" from God's timeless perspective — but this answer, while consistent with his atemporalist position, is deeply counterintuitive. Mullins notes that Augustine confesses his own puzzlement on this point, saying in City of God XII: "I confess my ignorance about the ages which passed before the creation of mankind, yet I am certain that no creature is co-eternal with the Creator."³⁷

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, Augustine never takes the Incarnation into account in his discussion of God and time. As Ryan Mullins observes in God, Time, and the Incarnation, Augustine's treatment of time in Confessions Book XI makes no mention of the fact that God the Son became incarnate — entered human time, was born, grew, suffered, and died. This is a striking omission. If God the Son truly became a human being who lived in time, then the question of God's relationship to time cannot be settled by philosophical reflection alone. The Incarnation is a datum that any adequate theory of divine eternity must account for. And as we will argue in Chapter 27, the Incarnation provides powerful evidence that God is temporal, not timeless.³⁸

Augustine on Presentism and the A-Theory

One further aspect of Augustine's thought deserves mention, because it is relevant to the contemporary debate about the philosophy of time. In his analysis of time in Confessions Book XI, Augustine argues that the past and the future do not exist objectively — only the present is real. This is strikingly similar to what contemporary philosophers of time call "presentism" — the view that only the present moment exists, and that past and future entities and events are not real. Augustine is, in effect, one of the earliest presentists in the history of philosophy.³⁹

Presentism is closely associated with the A-theory of time — the dynamic, tensed view of time that holds that the present is objectively real, that time genuinely "flows," and that temporal becoming is a real feature of reality. As we will discuss in Chapter 24, the A-theory is more congenial to theism and to the biblical portrait of God than the B-theory (the static, tenseless view). It is therefore ironic that Augustine — who holds to divine timelessness — also holds to a theory of time (presentism) that is most naturally paired with divine temporality. A presentist world is a world in which there is an objective present moment — a "now." And if there is an objective "now," it seems natural to think that God knows what is happening now and acts in the present. This is another tension in Augustine's thought that the later tradition largely ignored.

Boethius: The Bridge to the Medieval World

We close this chapter with a brief look at Boethius (c. 480–524), who stands as a bridge figure between the patristic and medieval periods. Boethius is enormously important for the God-and-time question because he formulated the definition of divine eternity that became standard for the next thousand years. His influence cannot be overstated: every medieval theologian who discussed divine eternity — from Anselm to Aquinas to the Reformers — began with Boethius's definition.

In Book V of his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius defines eternity as interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio — "the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of interminable life." This definition has several key elements. First, eternity is interminable — it has no beginning and no end. Second, it involves the possession of life — eternity is not an empty abstraction but a living reality. Third, it is complete and perfect — nothing is lacking, nothing is partial, nothing is in process. Fourth, and most importantly, it is tota simul — "all at once." God possesses His entire life simultaneously, in a single undivided present. There is no succession, no before-and-after, no temporal flow. Everything is present to God at once.⁴⁰

Boethius contrasts this timeless eternity with sempiternity — everlasting existence through time. A sempiternal being endures through all of time, from infinite past to infinite future. But a sempiternal being still experiences time — it still has a "before" and an "after," a past and a future. God's eternity, for Boethius, is not mere sempiternity. It is something qualitatively different — a mode of existence that transcends time altogether.

The context of Boethius's definition is important. He was writing the Consolation of Philosophy while awaiting execution, and his discussion of divine eternity occurs in the context of a debate about divine foreknowledge and human freedom. If God knows in advance what we will do, can our actions be truly free? Boethius's solution — which would become the standard solution for centuries — is that God does not know our actions "in advance" at all. God's knowledge is not foreknowledge (praevidentia, looking forward in time) but providentia (looking forward spatially, as from a high vantage point). God sees all of time from His timeless vantage point, the way a person standing on a mountaintop can see the entire valley below at once. From God's perspective, our future actions are not future — they are present. God sees them now, in His eternal present, even though they are future from our perspective.⁴¹

As Ryan Mullins observes, the view held by Augustine and Boethius — that God's existence is atemporal — quickly became the accepted model in Christian theology. Paul Helm emphasizes that this became the "classical" view, writing that "the classical Christian theologians, Augustine ... or Aquinas or John Calvin, each took it for granted that God exists as a timelessly eternal being."⁴²

Boethius's definition and his providential model were extraordinarily influential. But they also raise serious questions, which we have addressed in earlier chapters and will address again in later ones. Can God really see all of time "at once"? Does this not imply the B-theory of time — the static, block-universe view in which all moments are equally real? And if so, does this not conflict with the A-theory, which holds that the present is objectively special and that temporal becoming is real? (See Chapter 24 for the full treatment of this issue.) Furthermore, can God genuinely relate to creatures in the present if He sees all of time simultaneously? Does the tota simul model not reduce God's relationship to each moment to something impersonal and detached — more like a spectator watching a replay than a person genuinely engaged in the action? These are the questions that later temporalists would press with increasing force. (We will examine the medieval development of these themes in detail in Chapter 13.)

What the Patristic Period Teaches Us

As we come to the end of our survey, let me draw together the main lessons of this chapter.

First, the Church Fathers' views on God and time were more diverse than the later tradition acknowledged. It is simply not true that the Fathers spoke with one voice on this question. Irenaeus's narrative, economic theology is far more naturally temporal than atemporal. Clement and Origen leaned heavily toward atemporality, but even they used temporal language when discussing God's providential action. The Cappadocians developed a dynamic Trinitarianism that creates genuine tension with strict timelessness. Augustine held to timelessness as an official position but wrestled with tensions he never fully resolved. The picture is complex, and any attempt to reduce it to a simple consensus is historically inaccurate.

Second, the influence of Greek philosophy — especially Neoplatonism — on the development of the doctrine of divine timelessness was profound. This does not mean the doctrine is automatically wrong. An idea can come from philosophy and still be true. But it does mean that we should not treat the patristic consensus on timelessness (to the extent that there was one) as though it were a pure expression of biblical teaching. It was, in significant measure, a synthesis of biblical faith and philosophical speculation. And where the philosophical element conflicts with the biblical portrait, I believe we should give priority to Scripture.

Third, even those Fathers who held to divine timelessness often said things that sit uneasily with it. Augustine's temporal language about God's actions, his presentist theory of time, and his failure to account for the Incarnation in his discussion of eternity are all examples. The Cappadocians' dynamic Trinitarianism is another. These tensions are not trivial. They suggest that the atemporalist position, however popular it was, was never fully integrated with the other commitments of patristic theology — especially the commitment to a God who truly acts in history, who truly becomes incarnate, and who truly relates to His creatures in personal, dynamic, emotionally engaged ways.

Fourth, the classical tradition became more rigid over time. The earliest Fathers (like Irenaeus) were more open to a dynamic, temporally engaged picture of God. The later Fathers (like Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius) were more committed to strict atemporality. And by the time of Boethius and Aquinas, the doctrine of divine timelessness had hardened into something close to a dogma — so deeply embedded in the theological tradition that it was rarely questioned. But the fact that a doctrine becomes widely accepted does not make it true. And the diversity of the earlier tradition should give us confidence that questioning divine timelessness is not an act of theological rebellion — it is a return to the creative, open, biblically rooted spirit of the earliest Christian theology.

Finally, I want to return to the personal note I struck at the beginning of this chapter. The question of God and time is not just an abstract philosophical puzzle. It matters for how we relate to God, how we pray, and how we understand God's engagement with our lives. The Church Fathers knew this. Even when they were at their most philosophical, they were ultimately concerned with the living God — the God who created them, redeemed them, and would one day bring them into His eternal presence. Their wrestling with the question of God and time was, at its deepest level, a wrestling with the question of who God is and how He relates to us. That is the same wrestling we are engaged in throughout this book. And I believe that by listening carefully to the diversity of the patristic tradition — by hearing not just one voice but many voices, some in harmony and some in tension — we are better equipped to reach a conclusion that is both faithful to Scripture and philosophically sound.

The Fathers gave us much to be grateful for. Their Trinitarian theology, their Christology, their defense of the faith against heresies — these are permanent achievements that no Christian should take lightly. But on the specific question of God's relationship to time, I believe they were more often influenced by philosophical assumptions than by biblical teaching. And where philosophy and Scripture diverge, it is Scripture that must have the final word. In the chapters that follow, we will make the case that Scripture, rightly understood, points toward a God who is genuinely temporal — who experiences real sequence and succession, who acts in real time, who responds to His creatures with genuine emotion, and who entered human time in the Incarnation. The Fathers opened the conversation. It is now our task to continue it — with gratitude, with humility, but also with the confidence that the truth about God is worth pursuing wherever it leads.

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