Chapter 13

The Medieval Period

Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, and the Eternal Now

Introduction: The Golden Age of Divine Timelessness

In the previous chapter, we traced how the Church Fathers — from Irenaeus to Augustine — began the great work of synthesizing biblical faith with Greek philosophical categories. We saw that their views on God and time were more diverse and more complicated than the later tradition often acknowledged. Augustine, for all his enormous influence, left behind a legacy that was sometimes in tension with itself — a God who creates time, who stands above time in timeless eternity, and yet who also acts, wills, responds, and enters into genuine relationship with His creatures across the unfolding of history.

Now we come to the medieval period. And here something remarkable happens. The doctrine of divine timelessness, which had been developing in various forms since the early centuries of the church, reaches its most polished, most powerful, and most systematic expression. The great medieval thinkers — Boethius, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and others — took the raw materials of the patristic tradition and built them into a magnificent intellectual cathedral. Their arguments for divine timelessness were precise, elegant, and deeply interconnected with the rest of their theology. For centuries, their synthesis was so compelling that hardly anyone questioned it.

I want to be honest about something right from the start. These thinkers were brilliant. Their arguments are not easy to dismiss. The medieval case for divine timelessness is the strongest case ever made, and anyone who wants to argue for divine temporality — as I do — must reckon seriously with what Anselm and Aquinas built. We cannot simply wave them away. We need to understand their arguments, feel their force, and then explain clearly where we think they went wrong.

Here is the thesis of this chapter: the medieval period saw the doctrine of divine timelessness reach its most sophisticated and systematic formulation, particularly in the works of Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, who wove together Greek metaphysics and Christian theology into a powerful but ultimately problematic synthesis. The synthesis was problematic not because these thinkers were careless — they were anything but careless — but because the philosophical assumptions they inherited from the Greek tradition were not always compatible with the God revealed in Scripture. As we will see, the medieval system depends heavily on strict divine simplicity, and when that foundation is questioned (as I believe it must be — see Chapter 30), the entire structure of divine timelessness comes under enormous pressure.

In this chapter, we will walk through the major medieval figures who shaped the timelessness doctrine: Boethius (the bridge figure from late antiquity whose definition of eternity set the terms for all subsequent discussion), Anselm (who grounded timelessness in perfect being theology), Thomas Aquinas (who gave us the most comprehensive and systematic classical treatment), and Duns Scotus (whose voluntarism introduced surprising tensions into the medieval consensus). We will also consider William of Ockham, who may have been the first medieval thinker to sketch, however tentatively, a theory of divine temporality. Finally, we will step back and consider the medieval synthesis as a whole — how timelessness became so deeply embedded in Christian theology that it took centuries to dislodge.

Let us begin with the figure who set the stage for everything that followed.

Boethius: The Definition That Shaped a Thousand Years

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 480–524) is one of those figures who stand at the hinge of history. He lived in the last days of the Roman Empire, served as a senator and consul under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, and was eventually imprisoned on charges of treason. It was in prison, awaiting execution, that he wrote his most famous work — The Consolation of Philosophy. This remarkable book, a dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy, became one of the most widely read works in the Western world for the next thousand years. And it contains what is arguably the single most influential definition of eternity in the history of Christian thought.

Here is the key passage. Lady Philosophy, consoling Boethius and helping him understand God's relationship to time and foreknowledge, declares:

Eternity is the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life. The meaning of this can be made clearer by comparison to temporal things. For whatever lives in time lives in the present, proceeding from past to future, and nothing is so constituted in time that it can embrace the whole span of its life at once. It has not yet arrived at tomorrow, and it has already lost yesterday; even the life of this day is lived only in each moving, passing moment.¹

Let us unpack this definition carefully, because every word matters. In the Latin, the crucial phrase is interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio — literally, "the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of interminable life."² What does this mean?

Think about your own life for a moment. Right now, you are reading this sentence. A moment ago, you were reading the previous sentence. Tomorrow, you will be doing something else entirely. Your life unfolds bit by bit, moment by moment. You cannot hold all of it at once. Yesterday is gone — you can remember it, but you cannot relive it. Tomorrow has not arrived — you can anticipate it, but you cannot experience it yet. You are stuck in the present, and the present is always moving.

Now imagine a being whose life does not work this way at all. Imagine a being who possesses the entirety of its life — every moment, every experience, every thought, every act — all at once, in a single, undivided present. There is no "yesterday" for this being, because nothing has passed away. There is no "tomorrow," because nothing is yet to come. Everything simply is, all at once, complete and perfect. That is what Boethius means by eternity. It is not just a very, very long stretch of time. It is not even an infinite stretch of time. It is a fundamentally different kind of existence — one that has no succession, no before-and-after, no flow from past through present to future.

Boethius was very clear about the difference between eternity and mere everlastingness. A being that exists forever — that has no beginning and no end — but still experiences one moment after another is not, in Boethius's sense, eternal. Such a being would be sempiternal (from the Latin sempiternitas), meaning "always enduring." It would still be in time, just never-ending time. True eternity, by contrast, is outside of time altogether. Boethius drew this distinction carefully: even if the universe had always existed (as Aristotle believed), it would still not be eternal in the proper sense, because it experiences succession.³

This distinction between eternity (aeternitas) and everlastingness (sempiternitas) became standard in medieval theology. And it raised a profound question that occupied the best minds for centuries: what exactly does it mean for God to "possess" His entire life "all at once"? Is this a kind of timeless duration — a life that is somehow stretched out but without succession? Or is it a point — a single, unextended instant with no duration at all?

Boethius himself was not entirely clear on this point, and scholars have debated his meaning ever since. As Garrett DeWeese notes, there seems to be a tension right at the heart of Boethius's definition: "simultaneous possession" and "all at once" suggest something point-like and unextended, but "endless life" suggests something that has duration and fullness.⁴ A life lived in a single durationless instant does not seem like much of a life at all. But a life that has some kind of duration — even timeless duration — seems to require at least some form of succession or extension, which is exactly what Boethius was trying to rule out.

In more recent times, two major philosophical attempts have been made to resolve this tension. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann developed an influential reading of Boethius in which eternity involves "timeless duration" — a genuine life with fullness and content, but without temporal succession (as discussed more fully in Chapter 5).⁵ Brian Leftow proposed a different reading involving "quasi-temporal extension" — a way of understanding Boethian eternity as having distinct "points" that are not temporally ordered. DeWeese argues that neither proposal ultimately succeeds in making the concept of "timeless duration" coherent. If both the best contemporary readings of Boethius run into difficulties, perhaps the concept itself — life without any sequence — is simply incoherent.⁶

For our purposes, what matters most is the enormous influence Boethius had on subsequent thought. His definition of eternity became the starting point for virtually every medieval discussion of God's relationship to time. Anselm quoted it. Aquinas built on it. Even thinkers who disagreed with aspects of Boethius's view took his definition as the framework within which they worked. When we say "medieval timelessness," we are talking about the intellectual tradition that flows from this one passage in The Consolation of Philosophy.

There is one more feature of Boethius's thinking that deserves mention. Part of Boethius's motivation for developing his concept of eternity was the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. If God knows today what I will do tomorrow, it seems like my action tomorrow must already be determined. I cannot do otherwise than what God already knows I will do. But Boethius argued that this problem dissolves if God is truly timeless. A timeless God does not foreknow anything — He simply knows. He sees all events — past, present, and future from our perspective — in a single eternal gaze, the way we might see everything happening in the present moment. Just as my seeing you sit in a chair right now does not cause you to sit, God's eternal "seeing" of all events does not cause them to happen.⁷

This solution was enormously influential. Anselm, Aquinas, and many others would develop their own versions of it. But as we will see (especially in Chapters 6 and 25), this elegant solution creates as many problems as it solves — particularly when we ask how a timeless God who sees all events "at once" can genuinely interact with creatures in the present or respond to prayers in real time.

With Boethius's definition firmly in place, let us now turn to the first great medieval thinker who built on that foundation: Anselm of Canterbury.

Anselm: The Being Than Which Nothing Greater Can Be Conceived

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) is best known for his ontological argument — the famous argument that the very concept of "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived" proves that God must exist. (If the greatest conceivable being existed only in the mind but not in reality, then a greater being — one that existed in reality — could be conceived, which is a contradiction.) Whether or not this argument succeeds is a matter of lively philosophical debate. But what interests us here is how Anselm's concept of God as "the greatest conceivable being" shaped his understanding of divine eternity.

For Anselm, the question was straightforward: Is a timeless being "greater" than a temporal being? And his answer was yes — emphatically yes. A being that exists outside of time, that possesses its entire life all at once, that is not subject to the limitations and changes of temporal existence, is greater than a being that experiences time moment by moment. Why? Because temporal existence involves limitations. A temporal being loses its past (it can only remember, not relive, yesterday). A temporal being does not yet have its future (it must wait for tomorrow to arrive). A temporal being is, in a sense, always incomplete — always in the process of becoming, never fully "all there" at any given moment. A timeless being, by contrast, is fully complete, fully actual, fully present to itself at all "times" — or rather, outside of time altogether.⁸

Anselm drew heavily on Boethius's definition. In his Monologion, he wrote:

Hence, if this Being is said to exist always; since, for it, it is the same to exist and to live, no better sense can be attached to this statement, than that it exists or lives eternally, that is, it possesses interminable life, as a perfect whole at once. For its eternity apparently is an interminable life, existing at once as a perfect whole.⁹

Notice how closely Anselm follows Boethius. God's eternity is not simply endless duration stretching backward and forward through time. It is a qualitatively different mode of existence — life possessed perfectly, completely, "at once." Anselm's reasoning was grounded in his commitment to divine simplicity. If God is absolutely simple — without parts, without composition, without internal divisions — then He cannot have temporal parts. A life divided into successive moments would be a composite life, a life with parts. But God is simple. Therefore God's life must be undivided. Therefore God's life is tota simul — all at once.¹⁰

But Anselm also made an important move that went beyond Boethius. He did not merely argue that God is outside of time. He also argued that God's eternity somehow contains all of time. This is a crucial claim. In his Monologion, Anselm insisted that God exists at every time and every place, even though He does not exist in any time or place. As R. T. Mullins explains, Anselm wanted to say that God is not contained by time and place — that would limit Him — but that He is nonetheless present to every time and place because He sustains them all in existence.¹¹

In his Proslogion, Anselm declared of God: "No place or time confines You but You exist everywhere and always. And because this can be said of You alone, You alone are unlimited and eternal."¹² And in the Monologion, he concluded that God must "be present as a whole simultaneously to all places and times, and to each individual place and time."¹³

This creates an interesting tension. God is outside of time — yet He is present to every moment of time. God experiences no succession — yet He sustains every successive moment in existence. How can a timeless being be genuinely present "at" a temporal moment? Anselm felt this tension and tried to address it in his later work De Concordia. There he explained: "Although in eternity there is only a present, nevertheless it is not a temporal present as ours is, only an eternal one in which all periods of time are contained."¹⁴

DeWeese makes an important observation about Anselm's view. If we strip away the constraints imposed by the doctrine of divine simplicity, Anselm's picture of God's eternity is actually very fruitful. It points toward a model in which God's existence is temporal in some rich sense — perhaps even a form of divine time that "contains" or transcends the physical time of the created universe.¹⁶ This is suggestive of the very position I am defending in this book — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access. Anselm saw that God must be present to all of time. He saw that God must sustain every moment in existence. He saw that God's relationship to time must be richer and more comprehensive than any creature's relationship to time. The only thing that prevented him from drawing the temporalist conclusion was his prior commitment to strict divine simplicity. Remove that commitment, and Anselm's insights actually support divine temporality rather than timelessness.

I should mention one more difficulty in Anselm's position. Mullins points out that Anselm was clearly a presentist — he believed that only the present moment is real, that the past no longer exists, and that the future does not yet exist.¹⁷ In Proslogion 22, for example, Anselm speaks of "what has had a past existence but does not now exist, and a future existence but does not yet exist." This is classic presentist language. But here is the problem: if only the present is real, how can a timeless God "see" past and future events that do not exist? On presentism, there is literally nothing there for God to see. The past is gone. The future has not arrived. This is a tension that the Boethian-Anselmian tradition never fully resolved, and it would become one of the most serious challenges for divine timelessness in later philosophical discussion (as we will see in Chapters 6 and 24).

Before we move on, let us consider a deeper question raised by Anselm's perfect being theology. Is timelessness really a "perfection"? Anselm assumed that it is — that a timeless being is greater than a temporal being. But why should we accept this assumption? The temporalist can argue that the assumption itself is a product of Greek philosophical prejudice. The Platonic tradition assumed that what is unchanging is superior to what changes, and that what is timeless is superior to what is temporal. But this is not a self-evident truth. We might just as well argue that a being who can genuinely act, respond, create, and relate in time is greater than a being who is frozen in a timeless present. A God who can hear your prayer right now and respond to it in real time seems, in an important sense, greater than a God who timelessly "sees" all prayers at once but never truly enters the moment of your need. I believe that temporal experience, far from being a limitation, is actually a feature of what it means to be a living, personal, relational God. But I am getting ahead of myself. The full case for this claim comes in Chapters 7 and 28.

Let us now turn to the towering figure of the medieval period — the theologian who gave divine timelessness its most complete and systematic defense.

Thomas Aquinas: The Angelic Doctor and the System of Timelessness

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is widely regarded as the greatest theologian and philosopher of the medieval period — indeed, one of the greatest in all of Christian history. His Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles remain among the most important works of systematic theology ever written. The Roman Catholic Church has traditionally regarded Aquinas as its preeminent theological authority, and his influence extends far beyond Catholicism into Protestant and even secular philosophy.

For our purposes, Aquinas matters enormously because he gave the doctrine of divine timelessness its most comprehensive, most rigorous, and most intricately argued formulation. In Aquinas, divine timelessness is not an isolated doctrine. It is woven into a vast, interconnected system that includes divine simplicity, divine immutability, the doctrine of pure act, the analogy of being, the five ways of proving God's existence, and the entire classical doctrine of God. To challenge timelessness in Aquinas is to challenge the whole system. That is both what makes his position so powerful and what makes it so problematic.

The Doctrine of Pure Act

To understand why Aquinas believed God must be timeless, we need to start with what he considered the most fundamental truth about God: God is actus purus — "pure act." This is a technical philosophical concept that goes back to Aristotle, and it needs some unpacking.

Aristotle distinguished between two modes of being: potentiality and actuality. A seed is potentially a tree. A block of marble is potentially a statue. A student is potentially a doctor. In each case, the thing has an unrealized potential — something it could become but has not yet become. When that potential is realized — when the seed grows into a tree, the marble is carved into a statue, the student earns her degree — the potential has been "actualized." Change, then, is the movement from potentiality to actuality.

Now here is the crucial step. Aquinas argued that God has no potentiality whatsoever. God is not "becoming" anything. God is not in the process of realizing some unrealized potential. God is fully actual — everything that God can be, God already is. God is "pure act" with no admixture of potentiality. As Aquinas put it, composite things have potential — they move from potential to actual. But God is simple, so He must lack potentiality and be pure act (Summa Contra Gentiles I.16–18).¹⁸

Why does this matter for timelessness? Because temporal change — the kind of change that happens when you move from one moment to the next — involves the actualization of potentials. At 8:00 AM, you are potentially eating breakfast. At 8:15 AM, you are actually eating breakfast. You have moved from potentiality to actuality. But if God has no potentiality, then God cannot undergo this kind of change. God cannot move from one state to another, because that would require having a potential state that is not yet actualized. And if God cannot change, God cannot be in time — because being in time necessarily involves change. At the very minimum, a temporal being changes in that it grows older, acquires new temporal properties ("it is now 3:00 PM"), and relates to different events as they come into existence and pass away.¹⁹

Simplicity Entails Timelessness

Let us look more closely at how Aquinas gets from simplicity to timelessness. As William Lane Craig explains, the doctrine of divine simplicity as the medievals understood it is truly radical. It does not merely say that God does not have physical parts (like arms and legs). It says that God has absolutely no composition in His nature or being whatsoever. God does not have distinct attributes — His omnipotence is His goodness, His knowledge is His love, His essence is His existence. God stands in no real relations. He does not literally love, know, or cause His creatures (in the sense of entering into real relations with them). God's nature or essence is not even distinct from His existence — God simply is the pure act of existing.²⁰

Now, if God is simple in this radical sense, He obviously cannot be temporal. A temporal being exists at different times — at time one and at time two, for example. But a simple being stands in no real relations, and existing at different times involves being related to those times. A temporal being has phases of its life that are not identical — what God is doing "now" is different from what God was doing "before." But an absolutely simple being cannot have distinct phases, because that would introduce composition. A temporal being has temporal parts — the part of God's life that is happening now, the part that has already happened, the part that is yet to come. But a simple being has no parts of any kind.²¹

So if God is simple, He must possess His life "all at once" — tota simul, just as Boethius said. There is no before and after in God. There is no succession. There is no temporal flow. God is simply God — eternally, timelessly, and all at once.

Similarly, Craig notes, if God is immutable in the strict medieval sense — utterly incapable of change in any respect — then He cannot be temporal either. A temporal being undergoes at least extrinsic change: it co-exists with different temporal events as they come and go. And even if we weaken immutability to mean only "incapable of intrinsic change," a temporal God would still be constantly changing — growing older, knowing that "it is now Tuesday" and then later that "it is now Wednesday," performing new actions at each new moment.²² A strictly immutable God cannot do any of this. Therefore, a strictly immutable God must be timeless.

Aquinas on God's Knowledge of Temporal Events

One of the most challenging aspects of Aquinas's position is his account of how a timeless, simple God can know temporal events — especially future contingent events (events that have not yet happened and that might go one way or another depending on free choices). Aquinas took up this problem at great length, building on the solutions proposed by Augustine and Boethius but adding his own distinctive contributions.

Aquinas's basic approach was this: God has perfect knowledge of all things by knowing Himself. Since God is the cause of all things, and since God's power is His essence (given divine simplicity), God has perfect knowledge of everything He can produce. And since God is pure act, He has perfect knowledge of everything He does in fact produce. All truths are represented to God through His own essence.²³

But here a serious difficulty arises. As Mullins explains, temporal events — what Aquinas called "singulars" — do not always exist. A future event does not yet exist. A past event no longer exists. If God's knowledge is timeless and unchanging, how can He know what currently exists, when "what currently exists" is constantly changing? In Summa Contra Gentiles I.63, Aquinas considered this objection directly: "Singulars are not always. Either therefore they are always known by God, or they are known at one time and unknown at another. The first is impossible, since about what is not there can be no knowledge... The second is also impossible, because the knowledge of the divine intellect is altogether unchangeable."²⁴

Aquinas's solution drew on the Boethian model. Strictly speaking, God does not foreknow anything. God timelessly knows all events, and He timelessly knows which propositions are true at any point in the temporal series. But His knowledge is like our knowledge of the present — it does not make the events it "sees" necessary. God's eternal gaze takes in all of time at once, the way we might survey an entire landscape from the top of a mountain. From our vantage point in time, events are past, present, or future. From God's eternal vantage point, they are all simply "there," all equally present to His timeless knowledge.²⁵

Aquinas's Models of Eternity

Here is something interesting about Aquinas that scholars have noticed: he did not have just one model of eternity. He had at least three, and he used them in different contexts depending on which problem he was trying to solve. As DeWeese observes, Aquinas had Augustine's timelessness simpliciter, Boethius's point-like model, and Anselm's timelessness as a supertemporal dimension available to him — and he made use of all three at different points in his writings.²⁶

Sometimes Aquinas spoke of eternity as unextended — like a point. He compared eternity to time using the image of a point that is outside a line but co-exists with every point on the line:

God's understanding has no succession, as neither does His being. He is therefore an ever-abiding simultaneous whole — which belongs to the nature of eternity. On the other hand, the duration of time is stretched out through the succession of before and after. Hence, the proportion of eternity to the total duration of time is as the proportion of the indivisible to something continuous.²⁷

On this model, eternity has no extension at all. It is a dimensionless point "outside" the line of time, yet somehow co-present with every moment on that line.

But at other times, Aquinas spoke of eternity as involving a kind of timeless duration. After all, God is a living being, and as Aquinas himself noted, "that which is truly eternal not only exists but lives. Now living includes in a way activity... and flow of duration is more apparent in activity than in existence."²⁸ If God is alive, then His eternity must be more than a durationless point. It must be rich and full — a genuine life. But how can a life have fullness and richness without any succession?

This tension between point-like atemporality and timeless duration runs through Aquinas's entire treatment of eternity, just as it ran through Boethius's. And I think it reveals something important: the concept of timeless eternity is under enormous internal pressure. It tries to affirm two things that seem to pull in opposite directions — that God's eternity has no succession (no before and after, no flow) and that God's eternity is a genuine, full, rich life. These two claims are very difficult to hold together. A life without any sequence, any unfolding, any "and then..." does not seem like a life at all. But a life with genuine fullness and content seems to require at least some form of succession. The medieval thinkers felt this tension, and they never fully resolved it.

The Problem of Eternal Causes and Temporal Effects

One of the most significant difficulties Aquinas faced was explaining how a timeless God can produce temporal effects. If God's act of creating is eternal and unchanging, why is the universe not also eternal? If God timelessly wills that creation exist, why does creation begin at a particular moment rather than existing from eternity?

Mullins presses this objection forcefully. Aquinas's response was to say that God's act of willing and understanding is identical to His act of creating (since God is simple, all His acts are identical). When God wills that something exist, He also wills when it should exist — He appoints a time for it. Just as an agent can will something without immediately producing it (Aquinas used the analogy of planning a trip in advance), God can eternally will that creation begin at a particular moment.²⁹

But as Mullins points out, this analogy fails precisely because of divine simplicity. The reason a human agent can will something without immediately producing it is that the agent's will and act are distinct — I can decide to do something now but carry out the action later. But for Aquinas, God's will, intellect, act, and being are all identical (simplicity). There is no gap between God's willing and God's acting. So if God eternally wills creation, His willing is His acting, and the effect should be eternal too.³⁰ This is a serious internal difficulty for the Thomistic system, and Aquinas never satisfactorily resolved it.

Aquinas and the Static Theory of Time

There is one more important aspect of Aquinas's view that deserves attention. DeWeese notes that while Aquinas frequently spoke of time's passage in dynamic terms — using language that implies time genuinely flows — his solution to the foreknowledge problem seems to push him toward what we would today call a B-theory or static theory of time.³¹ If God timelessly sees all events — past, present, and future — as equally "present" to Him, this seems to imply that past and future events are, in some sense, already "there" to be seen. But if the future already exists (so that God can see it), then the future is not genuinely open. All events are fixed, and temporal flow is an illusion.

This is exactly the block universe view that many modern physicists and philosophers embrace (as we will discuss in Chapters 24 and 31). But Aquinas lived long before the development of the B-theory. He spoke of time as dynamic — as genuinely flowing from past through present to future. Yet his theology seems to require a static view in which all moments are equally real. DeWeese suggests that Aquinas may have sensed, at least tacitly, that his concept of divine timelessness logically implied a static theory of time, even though his ordinary language about time was dynamic.³² This represents a genuine inconsistency in his thought — one that later thinkers would have to confront.

Craig makes a related observation. He points out that the doctrines of divine simplicity and immutability as Aquinas understood them "find absolutely no support in Scripture, which at most speaks of God's immutability in terms of His faithfulness and unchanging character." To try to prove divine timelessness on the basis of divine simplicity or immutability, Craig suggests, "takes on the air of trying to prove the obvious via the less obvious."³³ Strict simplicity and strict immutability are not biblical doctrines — they are philosophical imports from the Greek tradition. And building the entire doctrine of divine eternity on these philosophical foundations means that the whole structure is only as strong as those foundations. If simplicity and immutability (in their strict classical formulations) are rejected — as I believe they must be — then the Thomistic case for divine timelessness falls with them.

Let me pause here and say something personal. I have enormous respect for Thomas Aquinas. Reading his work is like watching a master architect design a cathedral — every stone is in its place, every arch supports the others, every detail contributes to the whole. His system is magnificent. But I believe it is built on a foundation that cannot bear the weight placed on it. When we reject strict divine simplicity — and the Trinitarian, incarnational, and biblical reasons for rejecting it are powerful (see Chapter 30) — the entire Thomistic case for timelessness comes apart. That is not a criticism of Aquinas's intelligence. It is a criticism of the philosophical assumptions he inherited from the Greek tradition — assumptions that, as we saw in Chapter 11, were never derived from Scripture in the first place.

Duns Scotus: The Subtle Doctor and the Seeds of Change

John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308) — known as "the Subtle Doctor" for the extraordinary precision and complexity of his thinking — offers us something very different from Aquinas. While Scotus still operated within the medieval consensus on divine timelessness, his philosophical innovations introduced tensions into the classical framework that, in retrospect, pointed toward divine temporality.

Scotus was a Franciscan friar whose academic career took him from Oxford to Paris. His most relevant works for our study are found in his Lectura and Ordinatio, both of which are commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences — the standard theological textbook of the medieval university. Scotus's views on God, time, and contingency are found primarily in Book I, Distinctions 38–39.³⁴

Voluntarism: The Primacy of Will

The most important difference between Scotus and Aquinas lies in their understanding of the relationship between God's intellect and God's will. Aquinas was an intellectualist — he held that God's will is guided by His intellect. God wills what is good because His intellect apprehends what is good. The intellect has a certain priority over the will.

Scotus, by contrast, was a voluntarist. He emphasized the primacy of the divine will. God's will is genuinely free — radically free. God does not merely will what His intellect shows Him to be necessary or optimal. God freely chooses, and His choices are not determined by anything prior to them. This emphasis on divine freedom and the sovereignty of the divine will marked a significant departure from the Thomistic framework.

Why does this matter for the God-and-time question? Because voluntarism introduces genuine contingency into the divine life. If God freely chooses — and if He could have chosen otherwise — then there is something genuinely dynamic about God's relationship to the world. Free choice implies alternatives, and choosing among alternatives seems to require a "before the choice" and an "after the choice." A God who freely decides to create this world rather than that one, to redeem humanity through this plan rather than that one, seems to be a God who experiences something like temporal succession — at least in the moment of choosing. This is not to say that Scotus himself drew this conclusion. He did not. But his voluntarism created a tension with the strict Thomistic framework that later thinkers would exploit.

Synchronic Contingency

Scotus's most important contribution to the philosophy of time was his revolutionary concept of synchronic contingency. To understand what this means and why it matters, we need to recall the standard Aristotelian view of contingency.

For Aristotle, a state of affairs is contingent only if a different state of affairs is possible at a different moment. In other words, something is contingent because it could have been otherwise at some other time. Right now, the sun is shining. But at some other time, it might be raining. The sunshine is contingent because it is temporary. Aristotle even said: "What is, necessarily is, when it is; and what is not, necessarily is not, when it is not."³⁵ In other words, at the moment when something is actual, it is necessary (at that moment). Contingency is only a feature of what might happen at other times.

Scotus rejected this. He argued that a state of affairs can be contingent at the very moment it obtains. Even while something is happening right now, it is possible that it not be happening right now. The actual state of affairs, at the very instant it is actual, coexists with the genuine possibility that it might not be actual. This is what DeWeese calls "synchronic contingency" — contingency at the same moment, not across different moments.³⁶

This was a major advance in the philosophy of modality (possibility and necessity), and it had profound implications for the philosophy of time. As DeWeese argues, Scotus's synchronic contingency entails a genuinely dynamic view of time — a view in which temporal becoming is objectively real, not merely a psychological illusion. If the present moment is genuinely contingent — if things really could be otherwise right now — then the present has a special metaphysical status that distinguishes it from the past (which is fixed) and the future (which is not yet determined). This is precisely what the A-theory of time affirms.³⁷

Scotus on God's Knowledge of Future Contingents

Scotus also offered his own solution to the problem of how God knows future contingent events, and it differed significantly from both the Augustinian and Thomistic approaches. Scotus rejected the view (associated with Bonaventure and Augustine) that God knows contingent things through ideas in His mind that represent them along with all their properties and relations. He also rejected the Thomistic solution that God knows contingent things by knowing Himself as their cause and by timelessly seeing all events from His eternal vantage point.³⁹

Instead, Scotus argued that the ground of God's knowledge of contingent events must be God's own essence — but that the fact that a particular contingent proposition receives the truth-value "true" rather than "false" is determined by God's will. As one scholar summarizes Scotus's position: "The fact that God knows every true proposition has its ground in his essence, although the fact that this proposition received the truth-value 'true' and not its opposite — is determined by his will."⁴⁰

Whether this solution is successful is debatable. But what is significant for our purposes is what Scotus rejected. By turning away from the Thomistic solution (which depends heavily on God's timelessly seeing all events at once), Scotus opened the door to a conception of God's relationship to time that is not so clearly committed to a static theory of time. Granted, Scotus did not walk through that door himself. But the door was open.⁴¹

The Univocity of Being

One more contribution of Scotus deserves mention. Against Aquinas's doctrine of analogy — the view that our language about God is neither univocal (meaning exactly the same thing when applied to God and to creatures) nor equivocal (meaning something entirely different) but analogous (meaning something similar but not identical) — Scotus argued for what he called the univocity of being. "Being" means the same thing when applied to God and to creatures, even though God and creatures differ infinitely in how they possess being.⁴²

This matters for the God-and-time question because the doctrine of analogy provides the classical atemporalist with a convenient escape route. Whenever the Bible says that God "acts" or "responds" or "changes His mind," the atemporalist can say: "Ah, but those terms are being used analogously. They do not mean the same thing when applied to God as they mean when applied to us. God 'acts' in a timeless, non-sequential sense that is analogous to — but different from — our temporal acting." Scotus's univocity of being makes this move more difficult. If "being" means the same thing for God and for creatures, it becomes harder to maintain that "acting" or "responding" means something radically different for God than for us. And if God really acts and responds in a sense that we can understand, then God seems to be genuinely temporal.

Mullins and others have noted that the Thomistic doctrine of analogy is itself closely dependent on divine simplicity. Without simplicity, it is difficult to motivate the need for analogy in the first place.⁴³ If simplicity falls, analogy loses its motivation, and we are free to take the biblical language about God's temporal activity at face value. This is exactly what I believe we should do.

William of Ockham: The First Sketch of Divine Temporality?

William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347) deserves a place in our survey, even though the master prompt's focus is on Anselm, Aquinas, and Scotus. Ockham built on Scotus's concept of synchronic contingency and dynamic time, and he may have been the first medieval thinker to articulate something approaching a theory of divine temporality.

Ockham was a nominalist — he rejected the idea that abstract universals exist independently of particular things. This nominalism led him to a relational view of time that is strikingly modern. Time, for Ockham, is not a "thing" in its own right. It is the measure by which we determine the duration of motion, rest, and the existence of objects.⁴⁴ This is reminiscent of the relational theories of time discussed in Chapter 2.

More importantly, Ockham's solution to the problem of foreknowledge and human freedom had implications for God's relationship to time that went beyond anything his predecessors had been willing to say. Craig observed that "for Ockham the relationship between God's foreknowledge and future contingents was a literally conceived concern, for he held that God's eternity was not a state of timelessness, but that God, though immutable, endures throughout all past, present, and future time."⁴⁵

Ockham rejected the solutions to the foreknowledge problem offered by Augustine, Aquinas, and Scotus — all of which were at least potentially consistent with a timeless God. Instead, he proposed his own solution, which involved denying that all past-tense propositions are accidentally necessary. Some past-tense propositions, Ockham argued, are really about the future — and therefore they do not share the necessity of the past. A proposition like "God knew yesterday that you would sit down today" is grammatically about the past, but it is really about the future (your sitting down today). Since the future is still contingent, the proposition is still contingent too.⁴⁶

The key insight is this: Ockham believed that the modal status of God's knowledge depends on the modal status of the objects of that knowledge. Before a contingent event is "posited in reality" (actually happens), it is still contingent — even for God. There is a definite moment in God's life when a contingent event ceases to be potential and becomes actual. And that implies that God Himself experiences temporal becoming — that there is a genuine "before" and "after" in God's knowledge of the world.⁴⁷

DeWeese concludes that "Ockham ventured further than his predecessors in articulating a doctrine of divine temporality." Whether Ockham avoided making this conclusion explicit because it would have been considered radical, perhaps even heretical, is impossible to say. But those who regard divine temporality as a critical part of Ockham's solution to the foreknowledge problem seem justified in that assessment.⁴⁸

Ockham thus stands as a transitional figure. He did not break fully with the medieval consensus — he still spoke of divine immutability, for example. But his philosophical innovations pointed unmistakably toward a God who exists in time, who experiences genuine temporal becoming, and who relates to the contingent world in a genuinely temporal way. It would take several more centuries before these implications were fully developed. But the first crack in the medieval consensus had appeared.

Later Medieval Developments and the Medieval Synthesis

The ideas articulated by Scotus and Ockham did not go unnoticed. DeWeese reports that their views "apparently caused no small stir in Oxford, and even in the Church hierarchy."⁴⁹ The 14th century saw lively debates about time, contingency, foreknowledge, and God's relationship to the temporal order — debates that laid important groundwork for the Reformation and the modern era (which we will explore in Chapter 14).

But before we leave the medieval period, we need to step back and appreciate the remarkable synthesis that Anselm and Aquinas — drawing on Augustine and Boethius before them — had achieved. This synthesis can be summarized as follows:

First, divine simplicity: God has no composition, no parts, no real distinctions in His being. All of God's attributes are identical to each other and to His essence. God simply is — pure, undifferentiated, infinite being.

Second, divine immutability: Because God is simple and pure act, He cannot change in any respect. There is no movement from potentiality to actuality in God. God's nature, knowledge, will, and acts are all eternally and unchangingly what they are.

Third, divine timelessness: Because God is immutable, He cannot exist in time. Existing in time would require change — at minimum, acquiring new temporal properties, performing successive acts, relating to new events. Since God cannot change, He must be outside of time altogether, possessing His entire life tota simul.

Fourth, divine impassibility: Because God is simple, immutable, and timeless, He cannot be affected by anything external to Himself. He has no emotional responses that are caused or influenced by creaturely events. (God may "love" in some timeless, unchanging sense, but He does not experience shifting emotions in response to what happens in the world.)

Fifth, the analogy of being: Because God is so radically different from creatures, our language about God must be understood analogously. When the Bible says God "acts," "responds," "grieves," or "rejoices," these terms do not mean what they mean when applied to us. They point to something in God that is analogous to our acting, responding, grieving, and rejoicing — but the reality in God is utterly unlike our experience. In particular, God's "acts" do not involve temporal succession, and God's "emotions" do not involve change.

This is both the strength and the weakness of the medieval synthesis. Its strength is its coherence. Everything fits together. Once you accept divine simplicity, the rest follows with almost mathematical precision. And the system has enormous intellectual elegance — there is a reason the greatest minds of the medieval world found it compelling.

Its weakness is also its coherence. Because everything hangs together, the system is vulnerable at its foundations. If strict divine simplicity is rejected — and I believe the biblical, Trinitarian, and incarnational reasons for rejecting it are overwhelming (see Chapter 30) — then immutability (in its strict form) falls too, and with it falls timelessness, and with timelessness falls impassibility. The medieval synthesis is an all-or-nothing proposition. Either the whole classical package stands, or the whole classical package falls. And when it falls, what emerges is a God who is genuinely temporal, genuinely responsive, genuinely emotional, and genuinely present in every moment of His creatures' lives — which is precisely the God we find in the pages of Scripture.

Assessment: What the Medieval Period Got Right and What It Got Wrong

Before we close this chapter, I want to offer a balanced assessment of the medieval contribution to the God-and-time debate. This is important because it would be easy — and unfair — to dismiss the medievals as simply wrong. They were not simply wrong. They were wrestling with genuine and profound theological questions, and many of their insights remain valuable even for those of us who reject their ultimate conclusions about timelessness.

What the Medievals Got Right

First, they were right to insist on God's transcendence. God is not a creature. He is not bound by the same limitations that bind us. His relationship to time must be qualitatively different from ours. The temporalist who argues that God is "in time" must be careful to distinguish divine temporality from creaturely temporality. God experiences genuine succession, yes — but He is not trapped in the present the way we are. He is not ignorant of the future the way we are. He is not subject to the entropy and decay that time imposes on physical creatures. The medievals were right to insist that God transcends creaturely limitations. Where they went wrong, I believe, was in concluding that transcendence requires timelessness. It does not. God can be temporal and still be radically unlike creatures in His temporal experience. This is exactly what I am arguing in this book — what I call "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access" (see Chapters 7 and 25).

Second, they were right to insist on the completeness and perfection of God's knowledge. God knows everything — past, present, and future — with absolute certainty. Nothing takes God by surprise. Nothing escapes His notice. The medievals were right to defend exhaustive divine knowledge. Where they went wrong was in thinking that such knowledge requires timelessness. As I argue in Chapter 25, God can know the future exhaustively through simple foreknowledge with transcendent access — a capacity to "see" all of time without being trapped outside of time.

Third, they were right to insist on the unchanging character of God. God does not flip-flop. His character is rock-solid. His promises are trustworthy. His purposes will not fail. The medievals were right to defend divine constancy and faithfulness. Where they went wrong was in extending this constancy into an absolute, metaphysical immutability that rules out all change in God — including genuine emotional responses, real-time interaction with creatures, and the capacity to act at particular moments in history. As I argue in Chapter 30, qualified immutability — God is unchanging in His essential nature but dynamic in His relational and emotional life — is both more faithful to Scripture and more philosophically coherent than the strict immutability of the medieval tradition.

What the Medievals Got Wrong

First, and most fundamentally, they relied too heavily on Greek philosophical assumptions that were not derived from Scripture. The entire medieval case for divine timelessness rests on strict divine simplicity — and strict divine simplicity is a product of Greek metaphysics (especially Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism), not of biblical theology. As we saw in Chapter 11, the philosophical prejudice that unchanging being is superior to changing being goes back to Plato's theory of Forms. This prejudice was absorbed into the Christian tradition through the Church Fathers, and the medievals systematized it into a comprehensive theological framework. But the prejudice itself is just that — a prejudice. There is no reason to think that temporal experience is inherently inferior to atemporal existence. Indeed, from a biblical perspective, temporality seems to be a feature of what it means to be personal, relational, and alive — all qualities that Scripture ascribes to God in the most emphatic terms.

Second, they created a system that is extremely difficult to reconcile with the Bible's pervasive portrait of God as a temporal agent. The Bible does not present a God who exists in a timeless, undifferentiated "eternal now." It presents a God who creates in sequence, calls Abraham at a particular time, delivers Israel from Egypt in a particular historical moment, speaks to prophets at particular moments, becomes incarnate "in the fullness of time" (Gal. 4:4), and has a future plan that has not yet been fully realized. The medieval response to this massive body of temporal language was the doctrine of analogy — reinterpreting all of this language as merely analogous, not literal. But as we will argue in Chapter 16, this strategy proves too much. If all temporal language about God is merely analogous, then virtually everything the Bible says about God becomes analogous, and we lose any real knowledge of who God is and what He is like.

Third, they created a system that is, I believe, incompatible with several core Christian doctrines. The Trinity requires real relations among the divine Persons — the Father loves the Son, the Son responds to the Father, the Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son, on the Western view). But strict simplicity denies real relations in God (see Chapter 26). The Incarnation requires that God the Son entered time, was born, grew, suffered, and died — all temporal activities. But a strictly timeless God cannot enter time (see Chapter 27). Divine emotional responsiveness requires that God genuinely reacts to what His creatures do — but a strictly timeless, impassible God cannot react, because reaction implies temporal succession (see Chapter 28). In each case, the medieval system runs into conflict with doctrines that are more central to Christian faith than the philosophical assumptions that generated the system in the first place.

Fourth, and most practically, the medieval system creates a God who is, in important ways, relationally distant. A God who is timelessly, unchangeably, impassibly "seeing" all events at once is not a God who meets you in your moment of need. He is not a God who hears your prayer "right now" and responds to it. He is not a God who suffers with you when you suffer. He is not a God who rejoices with you when you rejoice. The medieval God is majestic, awe-inspiring, and intellectually satisfying — but He is not the God of the Bible, who walks with Adam in the cool of the day, who hears the cries of the Israelites in Egypt, who weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, who says to the thief on the cross: "Today you will be with me in Paradise." That God — the God of Scripture — is a God who lives in time, acts in time, and loves in time. And that is the God I believe in.

Conclusion: The Legacy of the Medieval Period

The medieval period gave the doctrine of divine timelessness its finest hour. Boethius's definition of eternity, Anselm's perfect being theology, Aquinas's comprehensive system of pure act and divine simplicity — together they created an intellectual tradition of extraordinary power and beauty. For centuries, this tradition was the default position of Christian theology. To question it was almost unthinkable.

But the seeds of change were planted even within the medieval period itself. Scotus's synchronic contingency and voluntarism created tensions with the classical framework. Ockham's treatment of foreknowledge pointed, however tentatively, toward a God who exists in time. And the internal tensions within the system — the difficulty of combining "timeless duration" with genuine atemporality, the problem of eternal causes producing temporal effects, the challenge of reconciling a timeless God with presentism — showed that the medieval synthesis, for all its elegance, was under strain.

In the next chapter, we will trace what happened when the medieval consensus encountered the Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the philosophy of the modern era. The cracks that Scotus and Ockham introduced would widen dramatically as thinkers like Newton, Leibniz, Kant, and eventually Einstein reshaped the philosophical landscape. The conversation about God and time was about to change forever.

But we should leave the medieval period with gratitude as well as critique. These thinkers — Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham — were giants. They took the hardest questions in theology and philosophy seriously, and they gave answers of remarkable depth and sophistication. Even when we disagree with their conclusions, we can learn from their method, their rigor, and their passion for understanding the God they loved and served. Our disagreement with them is not a dismissal of them. It is a continuation of the conversation they began — a conversation about the most important Being in the universe, and His relationship to the reality in which we live, move, and have our being.