Chapter 14

Reformation Through the Modern Era

From Calvin to Newton to Einstein

Introduction: A Quiet Revolution

In the previous chapter, we traced how the medieval period cemented divine timelessness as the unquestioned default position of Christian theology. The towering figures of Anselm and Aquinas had built such an impressive philosophical case for an atemporal God that, by the late Middle Ages, timelessness was not merely a view — it was the view. To question it seemed almost like questioning Christianity itself. But as we will see in this chapter, the story did not end with the medieval synthesis. A series of dramatic intellectual shifts — the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the rise of modern physics — would crack the foundations of the timelessness consensus and, over the course of four centuries, open entirely new ways of thinking about God's relationship to time.

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: the Reformation largely inherited the medieval consensus on divine timelessness, but the scientific revolution — especially Isaac Newton's concept of absolute time and Albert Einstein's theories of relativity — radically reshaped the philosophical landscape and opened new possibilities for reconsidering God's relationship to time. By the end of the period we are surveying — roughly from 1500 to 1930 — the old monopoly of divine timelessness had been broken. New voices were challenging the ancient consensus from multiple directions: philosophical, scientific, and theological. The story of how this happened is one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Christian thought.

We will walk through this story step by step, beginning with Martin Luther and John Calvin, moving through the age of Newton and Leibniz, pausing at the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and concluding with the revolutionary contributions of Karl Barth and Albert Einstein. Along the way, we will see how each thinker either reinforced or challenged the timelessness tradition — and how, by the twentieth century, the question of God and time had been blown wide open.

The Reformers: Luther and Calvin on God and Time

When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517, he was not thinking about God's relationship to time. His concerns were pastoral and soteriological — he wanted to reform the abuses of the indulgence system and recover the gospel of grace. John Calvin, writing his Institutes of the Christian Religion a generation later, was similarly focused on soteriology, ecclesiology, and the sovereignty of God. Neither Luther nor Calvin set out to challenge the classical doctrine of divine timelessness.

And yet, both Reformers inherited the medieval consensus on this question without fully examining it. Luther had been trained in the via moderna of late medieval scholasticism, while Calvin had studied both law and the humanities in France. Both were deeply influenced by Augustine, and both accepted the basic framework of classical theism — including divine simplicity, immutability, and, implicitly, timelessness. As Paul Helm has observed, even those who argued that passages like Psalm 90 imply timelessness, such as Augustine and Calvin, were drawing on assumptions shaped by their philosophical education.¹

Calvin, for his part, affirmed God's sovereignty over all things with extraordinary force. In his Institutes, Calvin speaks of God's providential governance in strongly temporal language — God ordains, decrees, governs, directs, sustains. God is intimately involved in every moment of history. Calvin writes that "not one drop of rain falls without God's sure command."² This kind of language presents God as actively engaged in the ongoing temporal process. And yet, Calvin never explicitly addresses whether this active, ongoing providential engagement implies that God Himself is temporal. He simply assumed, with Augustine and Aquinas, that God's eternal decree encompasses all of time from an atemporal vantage point.

Luther's theology contained similar tensions. Luther's emphasis on the viva vox evangelii — the living voice of the gospel — presupposes that God speaks to people at particular times and places. The Word of God, for Luther, is not an abstract, timeless truth hovering above history; it is a dynamic, powerful, effective word that creates faith when it is heard. God meets the sinner in the moment of preaching. This is a deeply temporal picture of how God relates to human beings. When Luther says that Christ is truly present in the Lord's Supper — not merely symbolically, but really, bodily present — he is affirming a kind of divine engagement with the "now" that sits uneasily with strict atemporality.

But here is the important point: neither Luther nor Calvin saw these tensions, because neither of them was asking the right question. The question "Is God in time or outside of time?" simply was not on their radar. They were fighting other battles — against Rome, against Zwingli, against the Anabaptists — and the metaphysics of divine eternity was not a pressing concern. The medieval answer (timelessness) was simply taken for granted, much as we might take for granted that the earth goes around the sun. It was part of the intellectual furniture of their world.

Calvin does, in certain passages, come close to an explicit affirmation of divine timelessness. In his commentary on Psalm 90, Calvin speaks of God as existing before the creation of time itself, and he sometimes uses language that echoes Augustine's atemporalist reading of the text. But even here, Calvin's primary concern is pastoral and doxological — he wants to comfort the faithful by assuring them that the eternal God is their refuge — not philosophical. He is not constructing a metaphysical theory of divine eternity; he is preaching. And as we saw in Chapter 3, the Hebrew concept of olam (עוֹלָם) in Psalm 90 does not require the philosophical concept of timelessness. It means something more like "indefinite, unbounded duration" — from age to age, without limit. Calvin's exegesis, colored as it was by the Augustinian tradition, read more into the Hebrew than was actually there.

Luther's Christology created even deeper tensions with timelessness, though Luther himself did not pursue them. Luther's insistence on the communicatio idiomatum — the sharing of properties between Christ's divine and human natures — meant that Luther was willing to say things about God that the classical tradition would have found shocking. The infinite, eternal God truly suffered on the cross. The timeless Creator truly died. If these statements are taken at face value, they suggest that God can undergo genuine temporal experiences — birth, suffering, death — that are very difficult to reconcile with strict atemporality. As we argued in Chapter 21 (and as Mullins has demonstrated at length), the Incarnation creates enormous problems for divine timelessness. Luther's robust Christology pointed in this direction, but Luther did not follow the thread.

I think this is worth noting because it reminds us that the acceptance of divine timelessness throughout much of Christian history was often more a matter of cultural and philosophical inheritance than of careful theological reflection. The Reformers, for all their brilliance and boldness, did not question everything. They questioned the pope, the sacramental system, the doctrine of justification — but they did not question the classical metaphysics of God. That questioning would have to wait for later generations.

Post-Reformation Scholasticism: The Hardening of the Classical Position

If the Reformers left the question of divine timelessness largely unexamined, their successors made matters worse — at least from the perspective of those who would later argue for divine temporality. In the generations following Luther and Calvin, Protestant theologians undertook a massive project of systematization. They wanted to organize the insights of the Reformation into coherent, comprehensive theological systems. To do this, they turned to the very tools they had inherited from their medieval predecessors: Aristotelian logic, scholastic categories, and the conceptual apparatus of classical theism.

The result was what historians call "Protestant scholasticism" or "Reformed orthodoxy." Lutheran and Reformed theologians of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — figures like Francis Turretin, Gisbertus Voetius, and the architects of the great Reformed confessions — produced elaborate dogmatic systems that systematized the Reformers' insights using medieval categories. In the process, they also hardened the classical positions on divine attributes, including timelessness, simplicity, and immutability.

Consider the Westminster Confession of Faith, adopted in 1646. In its second chapter, "Of God, and of the Holy Trinity," the Confession declares:

There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute.³

Notice the language: God is "without body, parts, or passions." He is "immutable" and "eternal." This is the classical theistic package — simplicity (no parts), impassibility (no passions), immutability (no change), and eternity (understood, in the tradition, as timelessness). The Westminster divines were not innovating; they were codifying. They were taking the philosophical assumptions of Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas and embedding them in a confessional standard that would shape Reformed theology for centuries.

Francis Turretin, perhaps the most important systematician of Reformed orthodoxy, made the connection between eternity and timelessness explicit. Turretin distinguished between time and eternity as two mutually opposed "species of duration." He wrote that time and eternity "are not related to each other as part and whole, but as species of duration mutually opposed. Eternity always was and will be. However, time neither always was nor always will be, but will cease with the world."⁴ For Turretin, God's eternity is not simply endless time — it is a fundamentally different kind of duration, one that lacks succession and change. This is divine timelessness in its most explicit Reformed formulation.

Similarly, the Lutheran tradition hardened the classical position through its own scholastic systematization. Lutheran dogmaticians of the seventeenth century, such as Johann Gerhard and Abraham Calov, affirmed the same cluster of classical divine attributes. While the Lutherans and the Reformed differed sharply on questions of Christology, the Lord's Supper, and predestination, they agreed almost entirely on the doctrine of God's eternity. Both sides assumed that God is outside of time.

I want to be fair here. These theologians were not foolish, and they were not simply parroting medieval philosophy without thought. They had good reasons — or at least reasons that seemed good to them — for affirming the classical package. Simplicity protected God's unity and aseity. Immutability protected God's faithfulness and reliability. Impassibility protected God from being a passive victim of creaturely events. And timelessness protected God's comprehensive knowledge and sovereign control. These are real theological concerns, and the classical package addressed them elegantly.

But the price was high. By embedding these philosophical commitments in confessional standards, the Protestant scholastics made it much harder for later generations to question them. To challenge divine timelessness was now not merely to challenge a philosophical position — it was to challenge a confession of faith. This is one reason why the debate over God and time has been particularly difficult in Reformed circles, where confessional fidelity is prized.

Meanwhile, a few dissenting voices could be heard, even in this period. The Socinians — followers of Faustus Socinus and Laelius Socinus — rejected divine timelessness entirely. The Racovian Catechism, the major confessional statement of Socinianism, declared that "God's eternity consists only in existing without beginning and without end."⁵ In other words, God is everlasting, not timeless. This was a striking departure from the mainstream, and it foreshadowed arguments that would become much more prominent in later centuries. The Socinians also denied God's exhaustive foreknowledge — a position I reject — but their affirmation of divine temporality was, in my judgment, a step in the right direction, even if they took it for the wrong reasons.

The story of the Reformation era, then, is a story of missed opportunities. The Reformers' own theological instincts — their emphasis on the dynamic, personal, relational God who encounters sinners in the present moment — pointed toward divine temporality. But these instincts were not followed through philosophically. Instead, the post-Reformation scholastics doubled down on the medieval inheritance, and the classical theistic package became more deeply entrenched than ever. It would take a revolution in science to crack the consensus open.

The Precursors: From Oresme to Gassendi

Before we come to Newton, we should note that the ground had been prepared by several lesser-known but important figures. As Mullins has documented, the relational view of time — the view that time exists only when change exists — had dominated Western Christendom for centuries. But as scholasticism drew to an end and the Reformation began, a more widespread dissent could be observed. The old Aristotelian philosophy of science was giving way to a new scientific revolution. Several theologians, philosophers, and scientists began to argue that time could exist without change, or at least without the motion of the celestial bodies.³³

A common thought experiment from this period imagined that God could pause the movements of the heavens if He wanted to, and then unpause them. Would time stop during the pause? Thinkers like Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–1382) and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) argued that it would not — time would continue to flow even if every physical process in the universe were frozen. This argument, drawn partly from the story of God stopping the sun in Joshua 10, was used to challenge the Aristotelian idea that time depends on motion.³⁴

These speculations led some thinkers to reject the relational theory of time in favor of an absolute theory. And this, in turn, led to a fascinating development: several thinkers began to equate God's immensity and eternity with absolute space and time. If time flows independently of physical events, what grounds its existence? The answer, for these thinkers, was God. Time exists because God exists. God's eternity — His everlasting duration — is the foundation of absolute time, just as God's omnipresence is the foundation of absolute space.

It is worth noting that this move was also driven by a growing recognition that God not only causally sustains the universe in existence, but that the laws of nature are a manifestation of God's continual operation in creation. As John Tillotson argued, God is not an absentee landlord who set the universe in motion and then stepped back. He is continually, actively, at every moment, sustaining and governing His creation. This vision of divine providence — so deeply congruent with the biblical portrait — naturally suggested a God who is present in time, not outside of it.³⁵

Interestingly, not all of these precursors drew the full inference from absolute time to divine temporality. Nicole Oresme, for instance, affirmed an absolute theory of time and space but continued to hold to divine timelessness. He still maintained, with Boethius, that God's life "is at once complete as a whole" — the classic definition of timelessness.³⁶ Oresme saw no contradiction between affirming that time flows independently of physical events and affirming that God exists outside of time. It would take Newton to draw the full inference: if absolute time is grounded in God's eternal duration, then God Himself must be temporal.

Isaac Newton: The First Great Argument for Divine Temporality

In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica — the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, usually just called the Principia. It is one of the most important scientific works ever written. In it, Newton laid out his three laws of motion and his theory of universal gravitation, providing the mathematical framework that would dominate physics for over two centuries. But what many people do not realize is that Newton's physics was built on a deeply theological foundation — and that foundation included one of the most important contributions to the God-and-time debate in the entire history of Christian thought.

Newton drew a crucial distinction between absolute time and relative time. In the Scholium to his Definitions at the beginning of the Principia, Newton writes:

Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.⁶

What Newton is saying here is that there is a difference between time itself and our measurements of time. Relative time is what clocks and calendars record. Absolute time is the underlying reality that we are trying to measure. Clocks may be more or less accurate, but time itself flows on regardless, "without relation to anything external."

Now, at first glance this might look like Newton is saying that time exists all by itself, independently of everything — including God. But this reading would be deeply misleading. As William Lane Craig has emphasized, modern secular scholars tend to forget how devout a theist Newton was and how central his theism was to his entire metaphysical outlook.⁷ For Newton, absolute time was not independent of God at all. It was, in fact, grounded in God's own eternal being.

In the General Scholium to the Principia, which Newton added in the 1713 second edition, he makes this theological grounding explicit:

He is eternal and infinite ...; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity.... He is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and, by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space.⁸

This is a remarkable passage. Newton is saying that absolute time and absolute space are not substances that exist independently of God. They are not attributes of God either. Rather, they are what Newton calls "emanative effects" of God — immediate consequences of God's own being. Because God is eternal (His duration reaches from eternity to eternity), there exists an everlasting duration. Because God is omnipresent (His presence extends from infinity to infinity), there exists an infinite space. Absolute time and space are constituted by God's eternity and omnipresence.⁹

Newton's position is important for several reasons. First, it represents perhaps the first major philosophical argument for divine temporality in Christian intellectual history. While a few earlier figures, like Nicole Oresme and Pierre Gassendi, had begun to question the relational theory of time and to toy with the idea that time might exist independently of the motion of celestial bodies, Newton was the first major thinker to build a comprehensive case that God is temporal.¹⁰ As R. T. Mullins observes, several thinkers of this era — including Oresme, Gassendi, Newton, and Samuel Clarke — began to equate God's immensity and eternity with absolute space and time. This "led to a flight away from divine timelessness toward divine temporality."¹¹

Second, Newton thought his position was closer to the biblical conception of God than the classical alternative. He regularly invoked Acts 17:28 — "in Him we live, and move, and have our being" — as support for the idea that space and time exist in God, constituted by His attributes.¹² Unlike the ancient Greek philosophers and later theologians who spoke of eternity as timeless, Newton nowhere describes God's eternity as lacking temporal succession. For Newton, God's eternity is the source or fountainhead of duration.¹³

Third, Newton's concept of absolute space as, in some sense, God's "sensorium" — the medium through which God is immediately present to all physical objects — was a powerful image of divine immanence. The sensorium was the aspect of the mind in which mental images of physical objects are formed. Newton argued that because physical objects exist in space and God is omnipresent, they literally exist in God and are immediately present to Him. God has no need of mental images of things, since the things themselves are present to Him.¹⁴

Now, Newton's position was not without its problems. In his earlier treatise, "On the Gravity and Equilibrium of Fluids," Newton had argued that space (and by implication time) is neither a substance, nor a property, nor nothing at all. It cannot be nothing because it has properties such as infinity and uniformity. It cannot be a property because it can exist without bodies. Neither is it a substance. Newton says explicitly: "It is not substance ... because it is not absolute in itself, but is as it were an emanant effect of God, or a disposition of all being."¹⁵ This notion of space and time as "emanative effects" of God is philosophically unusual and raises questions about the ontological status of time. Is it something created? Something uncreated but distinct from God? Or something that is, in some sense, part of God's own being?

These questions would be debated extensively in the years that followed. But regardless of how one resolves them, Newton's contribution to the God-and-time debate was enormous. He broke the medieval consensus. He showed that a serious Christian thinker could affirm divine temporality — that God exists in time — without abandoning orthodox Christian faith. And he did so on the basis of both philosophical reasoning and what he took to be the biblical portrait of God.

Where Newton fell short, as Craig has argued, was not in his analysis of absolute or metaphysical time — he had solid theological grounds for positing such a time — but in his incomplete understanding of physical time. He assumed too readily that an ideal clock would give an accurate measure of time independently of its motion. Moving clocks, it turns out, run slowly — a truth unknown to Newton that was finally grasped only with the advent of Einstein's Relativity Theory. But as Craig notes, if confronted with this relativistic evidence, Newton would no doubt have welcomed the correction and seen in it no threat at all to his doctrine of absolute time.¹⁶ Relativity corrects Newton's concept of physical time, not his concept of absolute time.

Samuel Clarke and the Defense of Newtonian Theism

Newton's views on God and time were vigorously defended by his friend and intellectual ally Samuel Clarke, one of the most important philosophers and theologians of early eighteenth-century England. Clarke's A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705) contains one of the clearest early modern statements of divine temporality. Clarke argued that the concepts of eternity and necessary self-existence are "so closely connected, that because something must of necessity be eternal independently and without any outward cause of its being, therefore it must necessarily be self-existent." Further, "that being, therefore, which has no other cause of its existence but the absolute necessity of its own nature must of necessity have existed from everlasting, without beginning, and must of necessity exist to everlasting without end."¹⁷

Notice what Clarke is saying: God's eternity consists in existing from everlasting to everlasting — without beginning and without end. This is the temporalist understanding of eternity, not the atemporalist one. God endures through all of time; He does not stand outside of time. Clarke, like Newton, held that absolute time is constituted by God's eternal existence, and that God's "now" is the present moment of absolute time.

Clarke's position became especially important when he entered into his famous correspondence with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — a correspondence that produced one of the most important debates in the entire history of the philosophy of time.

Gottfried Leibniz: The Relational Theory of Time and Its Theological Implications

Leibniz disagreed sharply with Newton and Clarke on the nature of time. Where Newton held an absolute theory — time exists independently of events, flowing uniformly whether or not anything happens — Leibniz defended a relational theory. On Leibniz's view, time is nothing but the order of successive events. No events, no time. Time does not exist as an independent container waiting to be filled; it is simply the structured arrangement of things that happen, one after another.¹⁸

The famous correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke (1715–1716) was sparked when Leibniz wrote a letter complaining that Newton's ideas were detrimental to religion.¹⁹ Clarke replied by defending Newton, and a rich exchange of five letters on each side followed. The correspondence touched on a wide range of issues — the principle of sufficient reason, the nature of space and time, the doctrine of God — but for our purposes, the key issue was the nature of time itself.

Clarke, following Newton, affirmed that absolute time exists and that it flows independently of created events. Leibniz denied this and affirmed that time is merely the order of moments — a relational structure that depends entirely on the existence of changing things.²⁰ Leibniz pressed an ingenious objection against Newton and Clarke's position, an objection that Mullins calls the "Sooner Objection." If absolute time flows necessarily and independently of events, Leibniz asked, then why didn't God create the world sooner? If time was flowing for an eternity before God decided to create, what reason did God have for creating at one moment rather than at any other? Since God is perfectly rational and always acts for a sufficient reason, and since (on the absolute theory) there is no relevant difference between one empty moment and another, God could have had no reason for choosing one moment of creation over another. But a God who acts without a reason is not truly perfect. Therefore, Leibniz concluded, the idea of an absolute time flowing before creation must be rejected.²¹

Leibniz's objection was serious, and it has generated extensive discussion. As Mullins explains, Leibniz was pressing the point that pure absolute duration — the idea that time necessarily flows at an equal rate regardless of created events — creates a problem for divine rationality. If there are infinitely many empty moments before creation, all of them equally good (or equally empty), then God would have no sufficient reason to choose one over another.²²

Clarke's response, essentially, was to deny that God needs a reason to choose one moment over another when the moments are genuinely indistinguishable. If two options are exactly alike, God can simply choose one — His will is free, and He does not need a contrastive reason for every choice. This response has some force, but it did not fully satisfy Leibniz, and the debate was left unresolved at Leibniz's death in 1716.

The Leibniz-Clarke debate is important for the God-and-time question for several reasons. First, it brought the absolute vs. relational theories of time into sharp focus and showed that each had significant implications for theology. If time is relational (as Leibniz held), then there was no time before creation — time began when God created the first events. This is congenial to the classical view that God exists timelessly "before" creation and becomes temporal only with creation (a position William Lane Craig would later develop in detail, as we explored in Chapter 8). If time is absolute (as Newton held), then time has always existed because God has always existed, and God has always been temporal.

Second, the debate showed that the question of divine temporality was not a merely abstract puzzle. It had real consequences for how we understand God's freedom, rationality, and relationship to creation. The Leibniz-Clarke correspondence elevated the God-and-time question from a footnote in scholastic theology to a central issue in early modern philosophy.

Immanuel Kant: Time as a Form of Human Intuition

If Newton and Leibniz disagreed about the nature of time, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) proposed a radically different answer that sidestepped their debate entirely. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that time is not a feature of reality "in itself" — it is a form of human intuition. That is, time is a structure that our minds impose on our experience. We cannot help experiencing the world temporally — everything we perceive is ordered in time — but this tells us nothing about how reality is "in itself," apart from our perception of it.

Kant distinguished between the phenomenal world (the world as we experience it, structured by time, space, and the categories of our understanding) and the noumenal world (reality as it truly is, apart from our perceptual apparatus). We can know the phenomenal world through experience and science. But the noumenal world — the way things really are "in themselves" — is, in principle, inaccessible to us. We cannot step outside our own minds to see reality without the "lenses" of time and space.

The implications of this for theology were enormous. If time is merely a form of human intuition — a feature of how we perceive reality, not a feature of reality itself — then what can we say about God's relationship to time? If God belongs to the noumenal realm (the realm of things as they are in themselves), then God may not be temporal at all. Time would be a creaturely limitation, a feature of our way of experiencing the world, not a feature of ultimate reality. On this view, the question "Is God in time?" might be unanswerable — or even meaningless — because time is a human category that may not apply to God.

Kant himself did not develop a detailed theology of divine eternity. His primary interest was epistemological — he wanted to show the limits of what human reason can know. But his framework had a profound influence on the theology that followed. If Kant was right that we cannot know things as they are in themselves, then all our language about God — including our temporal language — might be merely a description of how God appears to us, not of how God truly is. This created a powerful philosophical pressure to retreat from any confident claims about God's nature, including claims about whether He is temporal or timeless.

I should note that I find Kant's position on time ultimately unsatisfying, for several reasons. First, I believe that the Bible gives us genuine knowledge of God — not merely knowledge of how God appears to us through the lens of our limited intuitions. When Scripture says that God acts, responds, creates, grieves, and loves, I take these as genuine (though not exhaustive) descriptions of what God is really like. The Kantian framework threatens to turn all of Scripture's God-talk into mere phenomenal appearances, which is a form of theological agnosticism I am not willing to accept.

Second, Kant's claim that time is merely a form of human intuition has been seriously challenged by subsequent developments in both philosophy and physics. The A-theory of time, which affirms that temporal becoming is a real feature of reality and not merely a subjective impression, remains a viable and well-defended position (as we will see in Chapter 24). And modern physics — while it raises fascinating questions about the nature of time — has not shown that time is merely subjective.

Nevertheless, Kant's influence was enormous. He set the stage for nineteenth-century theology by creating a philosophical environment in which talk about God's nature (including His relationship to time) seemed increasingly problematic. And his most important theological heir — Friedrich Schleiermacher — would take Kant's insights in a direction that significantly reshaped the debate about divine eternity.

It is also worth noting that Kant's framework had an indirect effect on the timelessness debate that he probably did not intend. By arguing that we cannot know things as they are "in themselves," Kant made it harder to defend any strong metaphysical claim about God — including the classical claim that God is timeless. If we cannot know the noumenal realm, then the atemporalist's confident assertion that God exists in a timeless "eternal now" is just as problematic as the temporalist's claim that God experiences succession. Kant's critical philosophy cuts both ways. It undercuts the philosopher's ability to prove divine timelessness just as much as it undercuts the ability to prove divine temporality. In that sense, Kant leveled the playing field, even if he did not intend to. The question of God and time would have to be settled on other grounds — biblical, theological, and (eventually) scientific — rather than by the kind of a priori metaphysical reasoning that the classical tradition had relied upon.

Friedrich Schleiermacher: Eternity as Absolute Causality

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is often called the "father of modern theology," and with good reason. Writing in the wake of Kant's philosophical revolution, Schleiermacher set out to reconstruct Christian theology on a new basis — one that did not depend on the metaphysical claims that Kant had called into question. Instead of grounding theology in rational proofs or propositional revelation, Schleiermacher grounded it in the religious consciousness — the immediate feeling of "absolute dependence" that he took to be the essence of religion.

Schleiermacher's treatment of divine eternity reflects this new approach. Rather than defining God's eternity in the traditional metaphysical terms of timelessness (the tota simul of Boethius) or even in Newton's terms of absolute temporal duration, Schleiermacher reinterpreted eternity in terms of God's absolute causality. God's eternity, for Schleiermacher, is His being the cause of all temporal things — His creative and sustaining power that underlies every moment of time. To say that God is "eternal" is to say that God is the absolute ground of all temporal existence, the one upon whom every moment depends.²³

This was a significant departure from the classical tradition in several respects. First, Schleiermacher was not interested in the metaphysical question of whether God has temporal succession or not. He thought that kind of question was inappropriate — it tried to go behind the religious consciousness and make claims about God's inner nature that we have no warrant to make. Second, by defining eternity in terms of causality rather than timelessness, Schleiermacher effectively shifted the conversation from metaphysics to function. The important thing is not whether God exists "in" time or "outside" time, but that God is the absolute cause and ground of everything temporal.

I appreciate Schleiermacher's attempt to move beyond abstract metaphysical speculation and to ground theology in something concrete and experiential. But I think his approach ultimately falls short. The biblical God is not merely an abstract "ground" of temporal existence — He is a personal agent who acts, speaks, responds, and relates. The question of whether God experiences temporal succession is not a piece of idle metaphysical curiosity; it is directly relevant to whether God truly interacts with us in the way the Bible describes. If God does not experience before and after, He cannot genuinely respond to prayer, react to sin, or enter into real give-and-take relationship with His creatures. Schleiermacher's functional approach sidesteps these vital questions rather than answering them.

Nevertheless, Schleiermacher's contribution to the God-and-time debate was significant. By reinterpreting eternity in non-metaphysical terms, he opened the door for later theologians to rethink the classical doctrine of divine timelessness without feeling that they were simply abandoning the tradition. He showed that there were alternatives to the binary of "God is timelessly eternal" versus "God is temporally everlasting" — even if I do not think his particular alternative was the right one.

Karl Barth: A Revolutionary Revision That Fell Short

Karl Barth (1886–1968) is widely regarded as the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and his treatment of divine eternity in Church Dogmatics II/1 is one of the most discussed and debated passages in modern theology. Barth attempted something ambitious: he wanted to reject the classical doctrine of divine timelessness, which he saw as tainted by Greek philosophical assumptions, and replace it with a more dynamic, biblically grounded understanding of God's eternity. The result was creative, influential — and ultimately confused.

Barth began by insisting that God's eternity is not mere timelessness. The classical tradition, he argued, had made the mistake of defining God's eternity in purely negative terms — as the absence of time, the absence of succession, the absence of change. But the God of the Bible is not defined by what He lacks. God's eternity must be understood positively, as a rich, dynamic reality that is the source of time rather than its negation.

To capture this, Barth proposed that God's eternity contains three dimensions: pre-temporality (God exists "before" time — He is the source and ground of time's beginning), supra-temporality (God exists "above" time — He transcends and encompasses all of time), and post-temporality (God exists "after" time — He is the goal and consummation toward which all of time is moving). God's eternity, on this view, is not the static, frozen "eternal now" of Boethius and Aquinas. It is a living, dynamic reality that embraces time from all sides — from before, from above, and from beyond.²⁴

This sounds promising. And Barth's insistence that God's eternity should be understood in positive, dynamic terms rather than in purely negative ones is, I think, exactly right. The biblical God is not an immovable, passionless, timeless monad. He is the living God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — whose inner life is characterized by dynamic, loving relations. Barth was right to push back against the static categories of Greek metaphysics.

But here is the problem. Despite his explicit rejection of "timelessness," Barth went on to affirm the very features that define timelessness. He affirmed that God exists without beginning and without end — and without succession. He praised and affirmed Boethius's definition of divine eternity — the very definition that is universally recognized as the locus classicus of divine timelessness. He insisted that God's life is "one eternal moment" that lacks a before and after, such that there is no "second moment" in the life of God.²⁵

As Mullins has demonstrated with devastating clarity, Barth's position is ultimately indistinguishable from the divine timelessness he claimed to reject. To say that God exists without succession is to say that God is timeless — there is no other way to parse it. If God's life has no before and after, if there are no successive moments in His experience, then God is atemporal, regardless of what labels we attach to His eternity. Adding the word "dynamic" to timelessness does not change the substance of the position; it merely obscures it. Mullins calls this the "Barthian Blunder" — and it is a blunder worth naming because it has been repeated by numerous subsequent theologians.²⁶

This is not to deny that Barth made a real contribution to the debate. His insistence that God's eternity should be understood positively, as the source and ground of time, was a step forward. His recognition that Greek philosophical categories had distorted the Christian doctrine of God was also important. And his influence on subsequent theology — particularly on Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann, whom we will discuss shortly — was immense. But on the specific question of whether God experiences temporal succession, Barth's answer was, in the end, the same as Boethius's: No. And that, I believe, is the wrong answer.

Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann: Time and the Future of God

Two of Barth's most important theological heirs — Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) and Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024) — pushed the conversation about God and time in directions that Barth himself had not explored. Both thinkers took seriously the idea that God's relationship to time must be understood in dynamic, not static, terms. But they went further than Barth in different ways.

Pannenberg, in his three-volume Systematic Theology, developed a complex position in which the future has a kind of ontological priority. For Pannenberg, God's eternity is not best understood as timelessness, nor simply as temporal duration, but as the "power of the future" — the future is the mode of God's being that is primary, because God is the one who brings about the consummation of all things. God's eternity "encompasses" time, and the meaning of history is determined retroactively, from its eschatological end. Only at the end of history will the full truth of God's being be revealed.

Pannenberg's approach has several strengths. His emphasis on God's relationship to the future aligns well with the strong eschatological orientation of the New Testament. His insistence that God's eternity is not mere timelessness, but a reality that encompasses and embraces time, is a welcome departure from the classical tradition. And his recognition that temporal language about God — especially language about God's future acts of judgment and consummation — should be taken seriously as genuine descriptions of divine activity is an important corrective to the accommodationist reading that dismisses all temporal language about God as metaphorical.

However, Pannenberg's position is also quite speculative, and his claim that the future has ontological priority over the past and present raises difficult philosophical questions. If the future is ontologically prior, does the past lack reality until the future "retroactively" determines its meaning? This seems to undermine the common-sense intuition (and the biblical affirmation) that the past is real and fixed. I appreciate Pannenberg's attempt to take God's future seriously, but I think the A-theory of time — with its affirmation that the present is the locus of reality and that the past is fixed — is a better framework for understanding God's temporal experience.

Moltmann, in works like The Trinity and the Kingdom and The Coming of God, developed an even more radical eschatological approach to divine temporality. For Moltmann, God genuinely suffers with His creation, is affected by historical events, and has a future — a future that includes the transformation of all things in the new creation. Moltmann's God is deeply temporal: He acts in history, responds to suffering, and moves creation toward its eschatological goal. In this respect, Moltmann's theology is a powerful corrective to the static, impassible God of the classical tradition.

But Moltmann's position also has serious problems. His theology sometimes veers too close to process categories, suggesting that God's own being is constituted by His relationship to the world — that God somehow needs the world in order to be fully Himself. This threatens the classical Christian affirmation of God's aseity — His self-sufficiency and independence from creation. God does not need the world; He freely chose to create it out of love. While Moltmann rightly affirms that God is genuinely affected by the world's suffering, he sometimes seems to suggest that God's very identity depends on the world's history. This, I believe, goes too far.

Nevertheless, both Pannenberg and Moltmann made important contributions to the God-and-time debate by insisting that God's relationship to time must be understood in dynamic, eschatological terms. They helped move theology beyond the static categories of classical theism and toward a more biblical, more relational understanding of divine eternity. Their work set the stage for the contemporary debate that we will survey in Chapter 15.

Two other twentieth-century theologians deserve brief mention. Robert Jenson, in his Systematic Theology, went further than either Pannenberg or Moltmann by proposing a radical temporalism in which God is His own future. For Jenson, the Trinity is constituted by its narrative — God's identity is shaped by the story of creation, redemption, and consummation. While Jenson's creativity is admirable, his position pushes beyond the bounds of orthodox Christian theism by seeming to make God dependent on the historical process for His very identity. This is a step too far, in my judgment, though Jenson's insistence that God's eternity must be understood narratively and eschatologically is a valuable insight.

Oscar Cullmann, in his influential Christ and Time (1946), argued from a very different direction — biblical theology rather than systematic theology — that the biblical concept of eternity is not Platonic timelessness but "endless time." Cullmann insisted that the primitive Christian conception of time was linear and redemptive-historical: time runs from creation to consummation, and God's eternity consists in His encompassing this entire temporal span. While Cullmann's linguistic arguments about the Greek word aiōn have been criticized (as we discussed in Chapter 3, following James Barr's important corrections), his fundamental point stands: the biblical portrait of God is far more congenial to everlastingness than to timelessness. Cullmann helped break the hold of the Platonic interpretation of eternity on biblical scholarship, and his work remains influential today.³⁷

Albert Einstein: Relativity and the Challenge to the A-Theory

No discussion of the modern history of the God-and-time debate would be complete without Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Einstein's theories of relativity — the Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and the General Theory of Relativity (1915) — revolutionized our understanding of space and time, and their implications for theology have been debated ever since.

To understand what Einstein did, we need to go back briefly to Newton. Newton, as we have seen, held that absolute time flows uniformly for everyone, everywhere, always. There is a single, universal "now" — the present moment of absolute time — that is the same for every observer in the universe. If it is "now" for me, it is "now" for a person on the other side of the galaxy, at the same absolute instant.

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity challenged this picture. Einstein demonstrated that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all observers, regardless of their relative motion. From this seemingly simple postulate, Einstein derived a series of astonishing consequences: time dilation (moving clocks run slower), length contraction (moving objects are shorter in the direction of their motion), and — most importantly for our purposes — the relativity of simultaneity.

The relativity of simultaneity means that events which are simultaneous for one observer may not be simultaneous for another observer who is in motion relative to the first. There is no single, universal "now." Different observers, moving at different velocities, will disagree about which events are happening "at the same time." An event that lies in my future might already be in the past for an observer moving rapidly past me. Simultaneity is not absolute; it is relative to one's frame of reference.²⁷

This result has been widely interpreted as supporting what philosophers call the B-theory of time and the "block universe" picture. On the B-theory, all moments of time are equally real. The past, present, and future all exist together in a four-dimensional "block" of spacetime. The appearance that time "flows" — that the present is special and that events come into being and pass away — is an illusion. In the words of the great physicist Hermann Minkowski, who developed the mathematical formalism for Special Relativity: "Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."²⁸

If the block universe interpretation of relativity is correct, then divine timelessness becomes more natural. God could be conceived as existing outside the four-dimensional spacetime block, viewing all of it at once — past, present, and future equally spread out before Him. This is, in effect, a physics-based version of the classical doctrine of divine eternity as tota simul — the complete, simultaneous possession of interminable life.

Many philosophers and physicists have concluded, on the basis of relativity, that the A-theory of time is dead. If there is no absolute "now," then the A-theory's claim that the present is objectively special and that temporal becoming is real cannot be sustained. And if the A-theory falls, one of the strongest philosophical supports for divine temporality falls with it.

But — and this is a crucial "but" — there are very strong reasons to think that this conclusion is premature. Craig has argued persuasively that the philosophical foundations of Einstein's Special Theory rest on verificationist assumptions that are no longer widely accepted. Einstein's 1905 paper redefined key concepts like "time" and "simultaneity" in terms of empirically verifiable operations — specifically, in terms of clock synchronization by light signals. But this operationalist redefinition assumes that absolute space does not exist. As Craig puts it, Einstein's theory "far from disproving the existence of absolute space, actually presupposes its non-existence."²⁹ The justification for this assumption was essentially verificationist: if absolute space and absolute rest cannot be empirically detected, they do not exist. But verificationism as an epistemological theory has been thoroughly discredited in the philosophy of science.

Moreover, Craig points to an alternative interpretation of relativity — the neo-Lorentzian interpretation — that preserves all of the empirical predictions of Einstein's theory while also affirming absolute simultaneity and a privileged reference frame. On the Lorentzian view, there is a "real" now — a preferred frame of reference in which simultaneity is absolute — but the effects of time dilation and length contraction make it empirically undetectable. The Lorentzian and Einsteinian interpretations are empirically equivalent — they make exactly the same predictions about every possible experiment — but they disagree about the metaphysics of time. The Lorentzian view preserves the A-theory and with it the possibility of divine temporality.³⁰

Craig also notes that, in a remarkable development, twentieth-century cosmology may have provided a way to identify the preferred reference frame. The cosmic microwave background radiation, discovered in 1965, is at rest with respect to the expanding space of Big Bang cosmology. It serves as a kind of "aether," distinguishing a universal rest frame. Recent tests have even detected the earth's motion relative to this background radiation, in a sense fulfilling the dream of nineteenth-century physics of measuring the "aether wind."³¹

As historian of science Gerald Holton has observed, what Einstein did, in effect, was to shift the focus of space-time from the "sensorium of Newton's God" to the "sensorium of Einstein's abstract thought-experimenter" — in Holton's words, "the final secularization of physics."³² But for someone like Newton — or for any theist — such a secular outlook impedes rather than advances our understanding of the nature of reality. Modern physical theories say nothing against the existence of God or against the metaphysical time constituted by His eternity.

I want to be very clear: I am not denying the empirical success of Einstein's theories. Relativity is one of the most thoroughly confirmed theories in the history of science. Time dilation is real; GPS satellites have to correct for it. The physical predictions of relativity are not in doubt. What is in doubt is the philosophical interpretation of those predictions — specifically, the claim that relativity proves the block universe and refutes the A-theory of time. It does not. A full treatment of this topic will be given in Chapter 31. For now, it is enough to note that Einstein's theories, while they did radically reshape the philosophical landscape, did not settle the God-and-time question.

The Landscape Transformed: Where Things Stood by the Early Twentieth Century

By the early decades of the twentieth century, the conversation about God and time had been transformed beyond recognition. Consider how far we have come from the medieval consensus that we described in Chapter 13.

In the medieval period, divine timelessness was virtually unquestioned. It was supported by the full weight of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, by the towering authority of Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas, and by centuries of theological reflection. To question timelessness was to question the entire edifice of classical theism.

By the early twentieth century, that consensus had been cracked open from multiple directions. Newton and Clarke had argued for divine temporality on both philosophical and biblical grounds. Leibniz had challenged Newton but had also raised important questions about the nature of time that continued to generate debate. Kant had complicated the entire discussion by questioning whether we can know anything about God's relationship to time at all. Schleiermacher had reinterpreted eternity in non-metaphysical terms. Barth had attempted (unsuccessfully, in my view) to find a third way between timelessness and temporality. Pannenberg and Moltmann had pushed toward a more dynamic, eschatological understanding of divine eternity. And Einstein had introduced a radically new picture of time that seemed to some to vindicate timelessness (via the block universe) but that others saw as leaving the question open.

Beyond the figures we have discussed in detail, other intellectual movements were also challenging the timelessness consensus. In biblical theology, Oscar Cullmann's Christ and Time (1946) argued influentially that the biblical concept of eternity is not Platonic timelessness but "endless time" — the linear, redemptive-historical view of time that runs from creation to consummation (as discussed in Chapter 3). In analytic philosophy, Nelson Pike's God and Timelessness (1970) would soon argue that divine timelessness is not clearly supported by the philosophical tradition. Richard Swinburne was developing his influential case for divine temporality in The Coherence of Theism (1977). Nicholas Wolterstorff was preparing his landmark essay "God Everlasting" (1975), arguing for unqualified divine temporality. Process theologians like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, while departing from orthodoxy in ways I cannot accept (as discussed in Chapter 10), were also challenging the static, timeless God of classical theism.

It is remarkable how quickly the consensus unraveled once it was seriously questioned. For more than a millennium, divine timelessness had been the virtually unchallenged assumption of Western theology. Within the space of just a few centuries — from Newton's Principia in 1687 to the explosion of analytic philosophy of religion in the 1970s and 1980s — the monopoly was broken beyond repair. As Mullins notes, the flight from divine timelessness toward divine temporality that began with figures like Oresme, Gassendi, Newton, and Clarke accelerated dramatically in the twentieth century, fueled by analytic philosophy, biblical theology, and a growing dissatisfaction with the classical theistic package.³⁸

This does not mean that divine timelessness disappeared. Far from it. As we will see in the next chapter, a number of formidable philosophers and theologians continue to defend the atemporalist position with great sophistication. But the key point is that, by the twentieth century, they were defending a position that could no longer simply be assumed. The burden of proof had shifted. Where once it was the temporalist who had to justify a departure from the consensus, now it was the atemporalist who had to defend a position that was under sustained and multi-directional attack. This shift in the burden of proof is, in itself, one of the most significant developments in the history of the doctrine of God.

The old monopoly was over. The question of God's relationship to time had become, for the first time in nearly two millennia, a genuine, live, multi-sided debate. Where that debate stands today will be the subject of our next chapter.

Conclusion: Seeds of a Revolution

The period from the Reformation to the early twentieth century was a time of dramatic intellectual change in the Western world. In theology, in philosophy, and in science, old certainties were questioned and new possibilities were explored. The doctrine of divine timelessness, which had seemed so secure for so many centuries, was not immune to these upheavals.

We have traced a complex story in this chapter. The Reformers — Luther and Calvin — accepted the medieval consensus on timelessness without examining it, even as their own theological emphases on God's personal, active, relational engagement with the world created unresolved tensions with atemporality. The post-Reformation scholastics hardened the classical position further, embedding timelessness, simplicity, immutability, and impassibility in confessional standards like the Westminster Confession. Isaac Newton broke dramatically with the tradition by arguing that God is temporal — that absolute time is constituted by God's eternal duration — and that this was more faithful to the biblical portrait of God than the Platonic timelessness of the philosophers. Leibniz challenged Newton with the relational theory of time, pressing important objections but also raising questions that would fuel centuries of further debate. Kant complicated the entire discussion by arguing that time is a form of human intuition, not a feature of reality in itself. Schleiermacher reinterpreted divine eternity in functional rather than metaphysical terms. Barth attempted a creative revision but ultimately fell back into the timelessness he claimed to reject. Pannenberg and Moltmann pushed toward more dynamic, eschatological approaches. And Einstein's theories of relativity radically reshaped the philosophical landscape, challenging Newton's absolute time but — as I have argued — not definitively settling the question in favor of the block universe or divine timelessness.

Through all of these developments, I believe we can see the hand of God at work — not determining the outcome of every philosophical debate, but providentially guiding the conversation toward a deeper, richer, more biblical understanding of who He is. The seeds planted by Newton — the idea that God is genuinely temporal, that He endures through all of time, that His eternity is not the frozen stillness of Platonic timelessness but the living, dynamic duration of a personal, relational, Triune God — would eventually blossom into the full-blown case for divine temporality that we are making in this book. In the next chapter, we will survey the contemporary landscape of the debate and see how those seeds have grown into a rich and diverse harvest of scholarship.

The revolution that Newton began is not yet complete. But the trajectory, I believe, is clear. The God of the Bible is not the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, the One of Plotinus, or the Timeless Being of Boethius. He is the living God who creates, sustains, acts, speaks, responds, grieves, rejoices, and — in the fullness of time — sends His Son into the world to save sinners. He is the God who meets us in the present moment, who hears our prayers in real time, who walks with us through every day of our lives. He is the God beyond the clock — but He is not beyond time.