Chapter 21

Jesus and Time

The Incarnate God Who Was Born, Grew, Suffered, and Died

"But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law."
— Galatians 4:4

Introduction: The Heart of the Matter

Every argument in this book has been building toward this chapter. If I could only offer one piece of evidence for divine temporality — if I were allowed a single reason to believe that God genuinely experiences sequence, change, and real give-and-take with His creatures — I would point to Jesus. Specifically, I would point to the fact that in Jesus of Nazareth, God the Son became a human being. He was born at a particular moment in history. He grew up. He got tired. He wept at the tomb of a friend. He learned obedience through what He suffered. He was nailed to a Roman cross at about nine o'clock in the morning on a Friday, and He died at about three o'clock that afternoon. Three days later — not three eternities, not three timeless moments, but three literal days later — He rose from the dead. Then, forty days after that, He ascended to the Father.¹

Every one of those statements is a temporal claim. Every one of them involves a "before" and an "after." Every one of them, I will argue, is impossible for a strictly timeless being. That is the heart of this chapter, and in many ways, the heart of the entire book.

The thesis of this chapter is simple and profound: the Incarnation of God the Son is the most powerful biblical evidence that God is temporal. A God who is frozen forever in a timeless, motionless "eternal now" cannot be born, cannot grow, cannot learn, cannot suffer, cannot die, and cannot rise again. These are temporal verbs. They require a before and an after. They require sequence. They require time. And yet Christian orthodoxy has always insisted — against every heresy that tried to soften the claim — that the eternal Son of God really did all of these things. He did not merely appear to be born. He did not merely appear to suffer. The second Person of the Trinity genuinely, personally, really entered human history.²

In this chapter, I want to walk us through the key biblical passages that make this case. We will look at Galatians 4:4 ("in the fullness of time"), the prologue to John's Gospel (where the Word "was" and then "became"), the great kenosis hymn of Philippians 2, the sobering words of Hebrews 5 ("in the days of His flesh"), the brief but astonishing note in Luke 2 that Jesus "grew," and the hard saying of Mark 13:32 where Jesus admits He does not know something. Then I will show why each of these passages creates a serious — I believe fatal — problem for any theology that insists God is absolutely outside of time. The philosophical case for that conclusion will be developed more fully in Chapter 27, where I engage the technical arguments of Ryan Mullins and others. But the biblical case belongs here, in this chapter, and I want us to feel its weight.

Let me put my cards on the table. I believe that when we really pay attention to what Scripture says about Jesus, the classical view that God exists outside of time becomes untenable. Not difficult. Not mysterious. Untenable. The Incarnation is not something a timeless God could do. And since Jesus Christ is Lord — and since the God of Christianity is the God of Jesus Christ — we have to let the reality of the Incarnation reshape our doctrine of God. That is what we will do in this chapter.

The Stakes: Why the Incarnation Is the Decisive Test

Before we dive into the passages themselves, I want to pause and explain why the Incarnation is such a decisive test case for any theology of God and time. Theologian Brian Hebblethwaite put it this way: the Incarnation is one of the two doctrines — alongside the Trinity — that "set out the unique features of Christian faith in God."³ Remove the Incarnation, and you do not just have a slightly different version of Christianity. You have a different religion altogether. This is why Nicaea and Chalcedon were fought so fiercely. This is why the early church poured its best energy into getting Christology right. The Incarnation is not an optional add-on to the Christian faith. It is the faith's very spine.

Now, notice what this means for our question. If we are going to do theology as Christians, we cannot start with a philosophical definition of God and then try to fit Jesus into it. We have to start with Jesus — the Jesus revealed in Scripture — and let Him tell us what God is like. This is exactly the principle that the Reformation recovered. Martin Luther used to say that if you want to know what God is like, you should not gaze up into the abstract heavens but rather look at Christ crucified. The God-and-time question is no exception. If our definition of divine eternity makes the Incarnation impossible or incoherent, the problem is with our definition, not with the Incarnation.

Ryan Mullins puts the challenge to the classical atemporalist bluntly. Starting with the doctrine of timelessness and then trying to make the Incarnation fit, he argues, gets things backwards. "The Christian philosophical theologian," he writes, "has far more at stake in the Incarnation than in various formulations of immutability or simplicity."⁴ I agree with him completely. When doctrines collide, Jesus wins.

And here is the problem we will see again and again in what follows. The biblical passages about Jesus are saturated with temporal language. Every one of the texts we will examine uses verbs of becoming, growing, learning, suffering, sending, emptying — verbs that only make sense if the subject experiences sequence. When we apply this language to the second Person of the Trinity (which orthodox Christianity has always done), we are implicitly saying that God the Son has a temporal life. If we then add the classical claim that God is absolutely timeless, we produce a contradiction so sharp that no amount of philosophical footwork can smooth it over. That is the claim I will try to defend in this chapter.

Galatians 4:4 — "When the Fullness of Time Had Come"

We begin with a short verse that packs an enormous theological punch. The apostle Paul writes: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons" (Galatians 4:4–5, ESV). The phrase we want to focus on is "when the fullness of time had come."

In Greek, the phrase is to plērōma tou chronou (τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου). The word plērōma means "fullness," "completion," or "what fills up." The word chronos is the ordinary Greek word for time — the sequential time of clocks, calendars, and human history. Taken together, the phrase means something like "when the time was ripe" or "when history had reached the moment God had prepared for." Commentators often note that Paul is thinking of God's providential preparation of the world — the spread of Greek as a common language, the Roman roads that made travel easier, the spiritual hunger of a people tired of idolatry — all of these conditions coming together at just the right point in the unfolding story.⁵

Now stop and think about what this verse presupposes. It says that there was a time before the Son was sent, and that after a certain process of historical preparation, there came a moment when God sent Him. The sending is datable. We can point to the year (roughly 4 BC, by most scholarly estimates, given Herod the Great's death in 4 BC). We can point to the location — a stable in Bethlehem, a village in the Roman province of Judea. We can trace the genealogy in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 all the way back through the generations. This is not a sending that happens "outside of time" or "in eternity." It is a sending that happens at a particular moment within the stream of human history.

If God is absolutely timeless — if He has no "before" and no "after" — then what does it mean for Him to "send" His Son at one time rather than another? The atemporalist will typically respond that the sending is an eternal decree that merely appears to happen in time from our creaturely perspective. But Paul is not describing an eternal decree. He is describing a historical event. And the event has a date. A God who acts at one moment rather than another is a God who is related to moments. He is a God for whom "now" means something. He is, in short, a temporal God.

Michael Rea, in his book God Inside Time, notes the same connection when reflecting on Paul's preaching in Athens. Rea observes that God "came in the form of a man at just the right moment in human history. (Galatians 4:4)"⁶ The key phrase there is "just the right moment." A timeless God, strictly speaking, cannot have moments, much less right ones. The very idea of timing requires time. And Galatians 4:4 insists that the most important event in history had a right time.

It is worth pausing here to notice something else. Paul does not present the "fullness of time" as a contrast to the timelessness of God, as if God had been sitting in eternity waiting for the creaturely clock to finally hit the right tick. Paul's picture is of an active God who has been working history itself toward this point — raising up the patriarchs, forming a nation, delivering a law, exiling and returning a people, warning through prophets — and then, when His own historical preparation was complete, sending His Son. The "fullness" was something God filled up. The sending at that particular moment was not an arbitrary intrusion from outside time but the next step in a long, temporally unfolding plan.²⁸

Nicholas Wolterstorff has made this kind of observation central to his defense of what he calls "unqualified divine temporality." Wolterstorff points out that Scripture pervasively represents God as "having a history of action, knowledge and response." The burden of proof, he argues, lies on the eternalist to show why we should not take this pervasive biblical testimony at face value.²⁹ Galatians 4:4 is exactly the kind of text that places this burden squarely on the atemporalist. The eternalist must either show that the temporal language is all accommodation or figure out how a timeless God can "send" someone at a specific moment. Neither option has proved compelling to me, and I think the reason is that the text is not being misread — it really does assume a God who acts in time.

Some defenders of timelessness have tried to escape this by saying that God eternally wills the Incarnation to happen at a particular moment, and that His willing is itself timeless even though what He wills (the Incarnation) is temporal. That move may look promising on the surface, but it runs into a deep problem: if God's willing is truly timeless, then the effect of His willing (the Son's entry into the world) should be timeless too. Causes do not produce effects that are radically different in temporal character from themselves. A timeless cause should produce a timeless effect. But the Son's entry into the world is emphatically not timeless. It is dated, located, narrated. Something has to give.

What gives, I believe, is the timelessness assumption. God's sending of the Son is a temporal act because God is a temporal agent. "The fullness of time" is not a metaphor for a timeless moment. It is a real chronological marker in a real temporal history, acted upon by a real temporal God.

John 1:1–14 — "In the Beginning Was the Word... and the Word Became Flesh"

No passage in the New Testament shapes our understanding of the Incarnation more decisively than the prologue to John's Gospel. Here is the text:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1–5, 14, ESV)

I want us to notice something about the Greek verbs John uses. In verses 1–2, John describes the eternal state of the Word with the verb ēn (ἦν), which is the imperfect tense of "to be." The imperfect tense in Greek is used to describe a state of ongoing, continuous existence. It can be roughly translated "was, and continued to be." Three times in the first two verses, John hammers on this verb: the Word was in the beginning, the Word was with God, the Word was God. He is emphasizing that the Word had no beginning. Whatever we say about creation, the Word already existed.⁷

But in verse 14, the verb shifts. Suddenly John writes that the Word egeneto (ἐγένετο) flesh. This is the aorist tense of ginomai (γίνομαι), a verb that means "to become," "to come into being," or "to happen." Unlike the imperfect ēn, which describes ongoing state, the aorist egeneto describes a punctual event — something that happened at a specific point. The grammatical contrast is striking and almost certainly intentional. The Word did not merely continue to be; He became something new. At a particular moment, something happened that had not happened before.⁸

This grammatical shift is theologically explosive. As Ryan Mullins observes, "It is this 'becoming flesh' that lies at the root of the Christian understanding of the Incarnation."⁹ The Word, who eternally existed, entered a new state. There was a state of affairs in which the Word was not flesh. Then, at a particular moment, there was a new state of affairs in which the Word was flesh. Any way you slice it, that is temporal language. That is before-and-after language. That is the language of change, of sequence, of becoming.

Now here is the problem for divine timelessness. A being that exists in an absolute, motionless "eternal now" cannot become anything. Becoming implies a prior state (in which you were not X) followed by a later state (in which you are X). A strictly timeless being has no prior or later. It simply is what it is, all at once, without succession. If we try to say that the Word became flesh while remaining timeless, we are saying that something both was-not and was at the same time, in the same respect. That is not mystery. That is contradiction.

The ancient church was keenly aware of this. Athanasius, fighting against the Arians, insisted on the eternal pre-existence of the Word while also insisting that the Word genuinely "became flesh." He pointed to John 8:58 ("Before Abraham was, I am") and John 17:5 ("the glory which I had with You before the world was") as evidence that the Son had enjoyed glory with the Father before creation.¹⁰ But Athanasius also insisted that in the Incarnation, something new happened. The Son, who had been with the Father in glory, "emptied himself" and "became flesh." This was an event. It had a time. It had consequences that continue. These facts, Mullins argues, "clearly have implications for God's relationship to time."¹¹

William Lane Craig, writing on the biblical witness, observes that the language of the New Testament consistently treats the Incarnation as a real event in history, not a timeless truth about the divine nature. The Word who was with God from all eternity came into the world at a particular moment.¹² If Craig is right — and I believe he is — then the prologue of John's Gospel itself testifies against the timelessness thesis. John could have described the Incarnation in timeless, static categories. He had the vocabulary. He knew the philosophical tradition around him. But he did not. He chose the dramatic contrast between ēn and egeneto, and he made sure we could not miss it.

Some defenders of timelessness have argued that "became" in John 1:14 is merely a figure of speech — a concession to human language. But this reading faces two enormous problems. First, John is not writing careless poetry; he is writing what almost all scholars recognize as a carefully composed theological prologue that defines the meaning of the entire Gospel. The verb choice is deliberate. Second, the same Greek verb ginomai is used throughout the New Testament for real becomings, real events, real comings-into-being. To say that this verb means something different when applied to the Son is special pleading. It is theology working to protect a prior philosophical commitment rather than letting the text speak.¹³

I will argue more fully in Chapter 27 that the standard philosophical move — the so-called qua strategy, which tries to say that the Son was timeless qua divine while being temporal qua human — fails to remove the contradiction. But even without the philosophical apparatus, the biblical text puts enormous pressure on the atemporalist. The Word was. Then the Word became. Before becoming, He was not flesh; after becoming, He was. If that is not a temporal sequence, nothing is.

Philippians 2:5–11 — The Self-Emptying Journey

The hymn of Philippians 2 is arguably the most concentrated Christological passage in the New Testament. Here is the full text:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5–11, ESV)

This passage is often called the "kenosis hymn," after the Greek verb ekenōsen (ἐκένωσεν), which means "emptied" (verse 7). Paul is tracing the path of Christ from a position of divine glory, down into the humility of human existence and even into the death of a common criminal, and back up to cosmic exaltation. It is a journey. It has a direction. It has a before, a during, and an after. And I want to argue that this journey language is impossible to map onto a strictly timeless God.

Look at the sequence Paul describes. First, Christ was "in the form of God" (en morphē theou, ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ) — the state of pre-existent divine glory. Second, He chose not to cling to equality with God. Third, He emptied Himself. Fourth, He took the form of a servant. Fifth, He was born in human likeness. Sixth, He humbled Himself further. Seventh, He became obedient. Eighth, He died — and not just any death, but death on a cross. Ninth, God exalted Him. Tenth, God gave Him the name above every name. Eleventh, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. That is eleven distinct stages in a single hymn, and every one of them implies a sequence — a temporal ordering of events in the life of the Son.¹⁴

Now the crucial question: what does it mean to say that a being "emptied" itself? The word kenoō means to make empty, to pour out, to give something up. It is the opposite of holding on. An atemporalist reading has to say that the Son timelessly and eternally empties Himself — that the emptying is not something that happens at a moment but is rather a timeless property of the divine life. But this runs into the same problem we saw with John 1:14. Emptying is an action word. It implies a prior state (having something) and a later state (not having it, or having it differently). "Eternally emptying" borders on nonsense. You cannot be eternally in the process of giving something up, because giving something up is by its nature transitional.

Ryan Mullins explores this problem at length in The End of the Timeless God. He distinguishes between two types of kenotic Christology. A functional kenosis says that the Son did not give up any of His essential divine attributes in the Incarnation; He simply limited the exercise of them. An ontological kenosis says that the Son actually gave up some of His omni-attributes (though not those essential to divinity) in order to become a genuine human. Mullins observes that neither view is compatible with strict timelessness: "The kenotic views will be of no help since the very idea of kenosis involves giving something up. A timeless God cannot give up anything for that would involve change and a new moment in the divine life."¹⁵

This is an absolutely decisive point. The moment you let any kenotic language into your Christology — and the New Testament itself forces us to — you have admitted that the Son undergoes some kind of change. And change requires time. A being that is absolutely changeless cannot empty itself of anything, because any emptying is a transition from one state to another.

Thomas Senor made a similar argument years ago, which Mullins helpfully summarizes. Senor argued that since the Incarnation represents a real change in the Son (acquiring a human nature He did not eternally have), the Son must be mutable, and since mutability entails temporal duration, the Son cannot be timeless. This argument does not depend on any fancy metaphysical apparatus; it rests on the plain meaning of Philippians 2:7.¹⁶

Some defenders of timelessness try to say that the Son eternally has His human nature — that there was never a moment at which the Son lacked it. On this view, there is no real "taking on" of humanity; the Son just eternally has both natures. But this collapses the Incarnation into something unrecognizable. Paul writes that Christ "took" the form of a servant and was "born" in human likeness. Luke writes about a birthday in Bethlehem. The Gospels write about Jesus's growing up, His ministry, His specific hunger and thirst, His specific exhaustion, His specific death. None of this makes any sense if the human nature is simply co-eternal with the divine. The human nature of Christ came into being, as Mullins emphasizes, "at a particular point in time. The humanity of Christ simply did not exist until sometime around 4 BC. At that time it came into existence."¹⁷

Notice also the last movement of the hymn: God "highly exalted" Jesus and "bestowed on him the name that is above every name." The Greek verb is hyperhypsōsen (ὑπερύψωσεν) — "super-exalted." This too is an event. It happens after the death and resurrection. It is a response to what the Son did. And it is bestowed upon Him — the Father gives Him something. Every ounce of this is temporal.

Consider what it would take to read Philippians 2 as consistent with strict divine timelessness. You would have to translate every action verb into a state of timeless being. The emptying becomes "always already emptied." The taking becomes "always already having taken." The humbling becomes "eternally humbled." The dying becomes "timelessly dead." The exalting becomes "eternally exalted." Not only is this exegetically preposterous; it effectively dissolves the Incarnation into a static, atemporal doctrine that no longer requires the historical events it was supposedly describing. If the hymn of Philippians 2 can be read as a series of timeless truths, we do not need the manger, the cross, or the empty tomb at all. We only need a philosophical abstraction.

Hebrews 5:7–8 — "In the Days of His Flesh"

The letter to the Hebrews offers one of the most theologically dense and emotionally gripping portraits of the incarnate Son's human experience. Consider chapter 5:

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him. (Hebrews 5:7–9, ESV)

Look carefully at the first phrase: "in the days of his flesh" (en tais hēmerais tēs sarkos autou, ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ). The author of Hebrews locates the events of Jesus's earthly life in a specific period — "the days of His flesh." This phrase alone implies a temporal framework: there was a time when Jesus existed in the flesh, offering prayers with loud cries and tears, and that time is distinct from His present state as exalted High Priest. The author is not embarrassed by the temporal framework; he uses it deliberately, because the whole argument of Hebrews depends on understanding what Jesus did in history.

Notice also that Jesus is described as praying with "loud cries and tears" — almost certainly a reference to Gethsemane. This is the picture of a genuine man in genuine anguish, crying out to His Father at a specific moment in history, facing a specific death that is coming in the next few hours. There is no way to abstract this scene out of time. The agony of Gethsemane takes place in a particular garden, on a particular night, in a particular city, a few hours before a particular execution.

But the verse that really opens the argument wide is verse 8: "Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered" (καίπερ ὢν υἱὸς ἔμαθεν ἀφ᾽ ὧν ἔπαθεν τὴν ὑπακοήν). Two verbs demand our attention: emathen ("he learned") and epathen ("he suffered"). Both are aorist verbs, describing specific historical actions. The author of Hebrews is saying that Jesus — the Son of God — went through a process of learning obedience, and that this learning was mediated by what He suffered.

Pause there for a moment. Jesus learned. That is not a metaphor. That is not an accommodation. That is a plain statement of fact from an inspired author of Scripture. The Son learned obedience. There was a time before He had learned it, and a time after He had learned it, and the process of learning took place through suffering. This is not an incidental detail; it is part of the main argument about Jesus's qualifications to be our great High Priest.

Now, what does it mean for someone to learn? Learning is paradigmatically temporal. You start in a state of not-yet-knowing. You go through experiences. You come to know. You cannot compress this into a timeless instant. A being who has always already known everything has nothing to learn. And yet Hebrews says that Jesus, the Son, learned. He moved from one cognitive state to another. He grew in something. This is the earthly life of the Son that the author of Hebrews presents.

Now the atemporalist has a standard move here. She will say: yes, Jesus learned qua human, but the Son did not learn qua divine. The human nature is where the learning happens; the divine nature remains changeless. This is the reduplicative strategy, which I will engage more fully in Chapter 27. For now, let me simply note the problem. Hebrews does not say "Jesus's human nature learned." It says "he" learned. Singular pronoun. Same subject as "he was heard" and "he was a son." The author of Hebrews is speaking about the one person, Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. And that one person, Hebrews says, learned obedience.

Ryan Mullins has shown in detail why the reduplicative strategy fails to escape this problem. Once we take the doctrine of the communication of attributes (communicatio idiomatum) seriously — the Chalcedonian doctrine that the properties of each nature are predicated of the one person — we end up saying both "Christ is timeless simpliciter" and "Christ is temporal simpliciter," which is a flat contradiction.¹⁸ The easier and more faithful move is to admit that the Son is not timeless. He is eternal in the sense of having no beginning or end, but He experiences genuine temporal sequence — which is why Hebrews can say, without flinching, that the Son learned.

The author of Hebrews also says that the Son was "made perfect" (teleiōtheis, verse 9). The passive form suggests a process of being brought to completion. In Greek, teleiōtheis comes from the root telos, meaning "end" or "goal." It describes reaching a state of mature completion. For a timeless God, of course, there can be no being "made perfect," because there is no process of coming-to-completion for a being who is eternally what He is. But Hebrews happily attributes this process to the Son.

I do not think the author of Hebrews is a sloppy theologian. I think he knew exactly what he was saying, and I think he was saying it because he understood the Incarnation in temporal terms. The Son of God entered human history, passed through a period called "the days of His flesh," learned obedience through suffering, was brought to completion through the cross, and became our High Priest. Every step is temporal. And that is the gospel of Hebrews.

Let me underscore the pastoral force of this. Hebrews is not a book written for philosophers. It is a book written for suffering Christians. The author's whole point in chapter 5 is that Jesus, the great High Priest, really knows what we are going through because He really went through it Himself. He really prayed in anguish. He really learned obedience through suffering. He really endured. This is pastoral gold. But it only works if we take the temporal claims at face value. If Jesus only seemed to pray in anguish, if He only seemed to learn obedience, if He only seemed to suffer — if, underneath the appearance, He was actually a timeless being untouched by any of it — then the comfort the author of Hebrews is trying to offer evaporates. The comfort of the gospel rests, in the end, on the reality of Jesus's temporal experience. And that means it rests on the temporality of the Son.³²

Luke 2:52 — A Boy Who Grew

Perhaps the quietest but most extraordinary testimony to Jesus's temporal experience comes in the concluding verse of Luke's infancy narrative: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52, ESV).

The Greek verb translated "increased" is proekopten (προέκοπτεν), the imperfect of prokoptō, which means "to advance," "to make progress," or "to move forward." The imperfect tense denotes continuing, ongoing action. Luke is saying that over a period of years, Jesus was progressively advancing — in wisdom (sophia), in physical stature (hēlikia, which can mean age or size), and in favor (charis) with God and people.

This is a staggering statement. The eternal Son of God advanced in wisdom. He grew taller. His moral and spiritual maturity developed. His relationship with the Father deepened through the process of human development. He learned to read. He learned the Torah. He learned a trade. He learned the Aramaic dialect of His Galilean village. At age twelve, Luke tells us, He was already so insightful that the teachers in the temple were amazed (Luke 2:47). But even after that, the text says, He continued to advance.

Orthodox Christianity has always affirmed this. Nothing in Luke 2:52 contradicts the Chalcedonian definition that Jesus is fully God and fully man. What Luke is telling us is that the humanity of the Son is a real humanity, with a real developmental arc. And since the one person who is the Son of God really does possess that human nature, the one person really does grow.

Now, can a timeless being grow in wisdom? Can a timeless being increase in stature? The answer is obvious. No. Growth is a paradigm case of temporal change. You start at point A and move to point B. A being that is eternally and timelessly all that it is at once cannot grow, any more than a point can become a line or a snapshot can become a movie.

Once again, the atemporalist will invoke the reduplicative strategy: Jesus grew qua human, not qua divine. But remember our earlier point: Scripture consistently uses singular pronouns for this single person. Luke does not say "the humanity of Jesus increased in wisdom." He says "Jesus increased in wisdom." The subject is the person, not a part of the person. And that person is the eternal Son.

Brian Hebblethwaite, Colin Gunton, and many other Christologists have argued that if we really take the unity of the person of Christ seriously — if we resist any Nestorian tendency to split Him into two — then the growth and development of Jesus must be ascribed to the one eternal Son. As Gunton puts it, if time is the "moving image" and eternity is "unmoving," what is eternity "doing in the very temporal figure of Jesus of Nazareth?"¹⁹ The question answers itself. The classical view generates the contradiction; jettisoning strict timelessness removes it.

I love this verse for its simplicity. Luke does not give us a philosophical argument. He just tells us that Jesus grew. And in that simple pastoral observation, he dismantles centuries of Platonic baggage that had been piled on top of the Christian doctrine of God. Our God is not an unmoving perfection that merely appeared to be a human being. He is a living Person who genuinely took on our humanity and really walked through it — from infancy to childhood to adulthood. That is our God. And that is a temporal God.

Mark 13:32 — What the Son Did Not Know

We come now to one of the most difficult verses in the New Testament — a verse that has puzzled orthodox theologians for two thousand years. Jesus, speaking of the day of His return, says: "But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32, ESV; cf. Matthew 24:36).

The Greek phrase oude ho huios ("not even the Son," οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός) is striking. Jesus ranks the ascending order of who does not know — not humans, not angels, not even the Son — and in doing so, He admits that in some genuine sense, He did not know the day of His own return.

I want to be careful here. This is not a verse we should use to prop up any theology that denies the omniscience of the Son. Orthodox Christianity has insisted, rightly, that the Son as God knows all things. What Mark 13:32 tells us is that in His incarnate, earthly state, the Son genuinely accepted limits on His human knowledge. This is consistent with a kenotic understanding of the Incarnation: the Son did not give up His essential divine attributes, but He either limited the exercise of His omniscience (functional kenosis) or genuinely relinquished access to certain knowledge in His human mind (a more ontological kenosis).

However we parse the precise Christology, what the verse cannot mean — and what the classical atemporalist needs it to mean — is that the Son eternally and timelessly does not know something. Because the Son does know all things in His divine nature. What Mark 13:32 describes is a temporal limitation on the human mind of Jesus. And a temporal limitation on the Son's knowledge is exactly what a strictly timeless God cannot have.

Ryan Mullins makes this point with a series of sharp logical claims. He asks: can God the Son, if He is timeless, immutable, and impassible, entertain the same first-person beliefs as Jesus? Consider the belief, "I am ignorant of the second coming." Jesus, on earth, held that belief. Can the timeless Son hold it? Mullins argues no. A timeless, omniscient being cannot hold the belief that He is ignorant of anything. And if the Son cannot hold the same first-person beliefs as Jesus, then — on pain of Nestorianism — the Son and Jesus are not the same person.²⁰

This is a genuinely powerful argument. The atemporalist faces a dilemma: either (a) affirm that the Son really did hold the same first-person beliefs as the human Jesus, which requires the Son to be temporal and to experience real ignorance at a moment, or (b) deny that the Son and Jesus share the same first-person beliefs, which turns the Incarnation into a form of Nestorianism (two persons somehow united). Orthodox Christianity has always denied Nestorianism. So the price of maintaining divine timelessness is the loss of orthodox Christology. That is a price no thoughtful Christian should be willing to pay.

The temporalist answer is simpler and more biblically natural. The Son is a temporal Person. In the Incarnation, He genuinely took on a human mind that had limits, including ignorance of the day of His return. At that moment in time (during His earthly ministry), He genuinely did not know, in His human knowing, the precise timing of His future coming. And because the Son and Jesus are one and the same Person — not two persons artificially conjoined — we can say without contradiction that the Son, in His incarnate state, did not know. When the Son later ascended and was glorified, His human knowledge was doubtless expanded, but Mark 13:32 describes the actual earthly state of affairs during His ministry. It is a genuine window into the temporal life of the incarnate God.

The Resurrection and Ascension: Temporal Acts of God

I want to add one more biblical consideration to the cumulative case, even though it reaches slightly beyond the six core passages in the master outline for this chapter. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus are, if we take the Gospels seriously, God's most decisive temporal acts within history. And they are impossible to fit into a strictly timeless frame.

Paul tells us that Christ was raised "on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:4). The Gospels are emphatic about the timing. Jesus died on Friday afternoon. He was laid in the tomb before sundown. Early on Sunday morning, the women went to the tomb and found it empty. The Gospels count the days. They note the times. Luke's Gospel even tells us how long the resurrected Jesus appeared to His disciples before the ascension — "over forty days" (Acts 1:3).

None of these time markers can be dissolved into a timeless truth. If you say the resurrection is a timeless fact about Jesus, you have to say that in some sense He was always already risen — which is simply nonsense. He really died. His body was really in the tomb. Then, at a specific moment early on Sunday, that changed. The women looked in and the body was gone. Jesus appeared — first to Mary Magdalene, then to other disciples, then eventually to five hundred at once (1 Corinthians 15:6). Each of these appearances was a temporal event.³⁰

The ascension is equally striking. Acts 1:9–11 tells us that Jesus, speaking with the disciples, "was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight." Two angels then said, "This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." The whole scene presupposes temporal succession: Jesus was here, then He was lifted up, then He was out of sight, and He will come back. The ascension is not a timeless truth. It is an event with a before (Jesus present on earth with His disciples) and an after (Jesus exalted at the right hand of the Father until His return). And the return itself, as Acts 1:11 insists, is a future event — something that has not yet happened but will happen.

This future orientation is part of the everyday fabric of Christian hope. We do not merely believe that Jesus is timelessly reigning. We believe that He died, rose, ascended, and will come back. Between His ascension and His return, we wait. We pray "Come, Lord Jesus." This whole structure of Christian eschatological hope is temporal through and through. It assumes a God who acts in a real future, toward a real goal, at a real moment yet to come.³¹

I spell out the eschatological implications of this more fully in Chapter 23, where I examine Revelation and the age to come. But even here, in our study of the incarnate Son, we cannot miss the point. The Jesus who was born temporally and died temporally was raised temporally and ascended temporally and will return temporally. The whole arc of the gospel is a temporal arc. And the central character of that arc is God the Son. He is not watching the arc from a timeless vantage point; He is living it. He is the arc. That is the gospel, and that is why I find any theology that denies divine temporality finally incompatible with the Christian faith itself.

The Atemporalist's Problem: Becoming, Duration, and the Impossibility of Incarnation

At this point I want to pull back and state in its clearest form the problem the Incarnation poses for divine timelessness. The problem can be stated as a short philosophical argument, which I will develop more fully in Chapter 27 but which is worth laying out here:

(1) A strictly timeless being cannot undergo change, because change involves a before-state and an after-state, and a timeless being has no before or after.

(2) The Incarnation is a genuine change in God the Son — specifically, the change from not being embodied to being embodied, from not having a human nature to having one.

(3) Therefore, if God the Son is strictly timeless, the Incarnation did not happen.

(4) But the Incarnation did happen.

(5) Therefore, God the Son is not strictly timeless.

This argument seems to me to be airtight. The only way to escape it is to deny one of the premises. You can deny (1), but that is simply to redefine timelessness in a way that no longer rules out change — which is precisely to abandon the classical view. You can deny (2), but that requires saying either that the Son eternally has His human nature (collapsing the Incarnation into a timeless truth) or that the Incarnation did not involve a real change in the Son (which the New Testament language of "became," "emptied," "took" seems to contradict). You can deny (4), but then you have abandoned Christianity. No Christian wants to deny (4). So we are driven to deny (1) and accept that God the Son is not strictly timeless.

The standard fallback for the atemporalist, as we have seen, is the reduplicative qua move. But as Mullins has shown, this move does not actually remove the contradiction; it merely relocates it. When you say that Christ is atemporal qua divine and temporal qua human, you have to decide whether the subject (Christ) bears both properties simpliciter. If yes, contradiction. If no, Nestorianism. The qua strategy, Mullins writes, "may help with certain properties, but it does not help with the divine timeless research program."²¹

The council of Chalcedon itself anticipated and, I think, ruled out the qua move. The definition states that "the union does not destroy the difference of the two natures, but on the contrary the properties of each are kept, and both are joined in one person and hypostasis."²² The key point is that the properties are joined in the one person. This is precisely what rules out a mereological solution where the human parts have temporal properties and the divine parts have timeless properties. Chalcedon insists that whatever is true of each nature is true of the one person. And the Son, as the one person, cannot coherently be both timeless and temporal.

Garrett DeWeese makes a similar argument in God and the Nature of Time, quoting Thomas Senor's succinct statement of the problem:

(12) Jesus Christ was the bearer of temporal properties.

(13) No bearer of temporal properties is atemporal.

(14) Jesus Christ = God the Son (a divine person).

(15) God the Son is not atemporal.²³

This argument has the advantage of being simple and devastating. Jesus clearly had temporal properties (getting hungry at a specific time, feeling tired at another specific time, rising from the dead on the third day after His crucifixion, and so on). Jesus is identical with God the Son (orthodox Christology). Therefore God the Son has temporal properties. Therefore God the Son is not atemporal. DeWeese himself notes that "it stretches the theological imagination to attribute permanent timelessness to two members of the Trinity and temporality to another" — an excellent point, since ascribing temporality to the Son alone would split the Trinity into members with radically different modes of being.²⁴ Far better to admit that all three Persons are temporal (a view I develop in detail in Chapters 26 and 7), and that the Incarnation is what it appears to be: the entrance of the already-temporal Son into creaturely time in a new mode.

There is also a deeper, theological reason why the Incarnation should push us away from timelessness. If God the Son is really and permanently incarnate — if, as the creed says, He continues as the God-Man forever, reigning over a kingdom that will never end — then the Incarnation is not a temporary or illusory condition. The second person of the Trinity has been human for two thousand years and will continue to be human forever. This permanent union of the divine Person with a human nature means that whatever is true of the human nature of Christ is ongoingly true of the Person. The Son was a real human being in history. He continues to be a real, glorified human being now. He will always be that. A timeless being cannot sustain that kind of ongoing, living union with a temporal human nature.²⁵

Previewing the Full Philosophical Answer (Chapter 27)

Because the philosophical arguments here are intricate and deserve their own extended treatment, I have reserved the full development for Chapter 27 of this book, which engages directly with Ryan Mullins's extensive treatments of this topic. In that chapter I will walk through in detail why the reduplicative strategy fails, why two-minds Christology runs into interaction problems, why a timeless being cannot be spatially located or embodied, and why four-dimensionalist attempts to rescue timelessness end up leading to subordinationism. Here I simply want to signal that the biblical case laid out in this chapter does not stand alone. It connects to a rigorous philosophical case that I believe makes divine timelessness impossible to maintain if we hold to historic Christology.

For now, let me offer a brief preview of the positive alternative. The position I will defend in Chapter 27 — and have been quietly assuming throughout this book — is that God the Son is a temporal Person in the sense that He experiences genuine succession, has before-and-after in His divine life, and can therefore really enter into creaturely time without contradiction. The Incarnation, on this view, is not the absurd attempt to fit a timeless being into a time-bound life. It is the entrance of an already-temporal divine Person into the measured time of created reality, where He takes on a human nature in a new and unprecedented way. The Son's divine life provided the "platform" on which the Incarnation could coherently unfold. No contradiction; no qua gymnastics; no Nestorian splitting. Just the eternal, temporal Son entering our world in real, redemptive, personal presence.

This position honors both the eternal pre-existence of the Son (which the creeds insist upon) and the genuine temporal particularity of His earthly life (which the Gospels narrate). It respects Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon. And it does so without asking us to embrace a philosophical framework that makes the Incarnation unintelligible.

Jesus as the Revelation of the Temporal, Responsive, Emotional God

I want to close our examination of the biblical material with one further observation that I think is often overlooked. Jesus does not merely show us what humanity should look like. He shows us what God is like. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father," He said (John 14:9). If this is true — and orthodox Christianity has always insisted that it is — then the character revealed in Jesus's earthly life is the character of God the Father, too. And the character revealed in Jesus's earthly life is unmistakably temporal, responsive, and emotional.

Think of the scenes from Jesus's ministry. He weeps at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) — a genuine emotional response to a particular death of a particular friend at a particular time. He is "moved with compassion" (Greek esplanchnisthē) at the sight of a hungry crowd, at a leper, at a grieving widow (Mark 1:41, Matthew 14:14, Luke 7:13). He grows angry at hardness of heart (Mark 3:5). He rejoices in the Holy Spirit when the disciples return from a successful mission (Luke 10:21). He experiences overwhelming sorrow in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:37–38). None of these is a calm, detached, eternally unchanging state. All of them are responses to particular events at particular times.

Now, if Jesus reveals God, then God is like this. God is responsive. God is emotional. God's life is dynamic. And a God whose life is dynamic cannot be strictly timeless. This point is developed in detail in Chapter 28 of this book (on divine emotions and time), where I argue, with Ryan Mullins, that genuine emotional responsiveness logically requires temporal sequence.²⁶ A companion argument appears in my earlier book, The Heart of God, which defends the genuine passibility of God and treats Jesus's emotional life as evidence of the Father's emotional life as well.

I find it significant that the entire Gospel tradition portrays Jesus as someone who engages. He is not aloof, not detached, not indifferent. He is pursued by crowds, interrupted at dinners, sought out at night, touched by the desperate, and He responds to each of these encounters — often with surprise ("Who touched me?"), often with questions, often with feeling. This Jesus is the face of God. And this Jesus is indubitably a temporal actor in a temporal world. If He is the face of God, then God is not a timeless abstraction. God is the kind of Being whose very life has the shape of give and take, of response and initiative, of before and after.

One more thing. Jesus prays. He prays in the morning (Mark 1:35). He prays all night (Luke 6:12). He prays when joyful (Luke 10:21) and when agonized (Matthew 26:39). Prayer is a paradigm case of a temporal activity. You begin praying, you continue praying, you finish praying. You ask something, you wait, you receive (or don't). Jesus's prayer life — including, most famously, the Lord's Prayer itself, which He taught to His disciples — presupposes that both the Pray-er and the Prayed-to are temporal. If the Son prays to the Father, and the Father hears the Son, then there is a relational dynamic between them that involves real sequence. This is what we would expect if, as I argue elsewhere in this book, the perichoretic life of the Trinity itself involves a form of divine time grounded in the Persons' mutual indwelling and loving (see Chapter 26).

Responding to Objections

Before concluding, I want to engage three natural objections.

Objection 1: "All this temporal language about Jesus is accommodation — God speaking down to us in terms we can understand. The underlying reality is timeless."

This is a standard atemporalist move, and I find it unconvincing. First, the accommodation strategy proves far too much. If temporal language about Jesus is all accommodation, then so is temporal language about God's covenant-making, His hearing of prayers, His saving acts in history, His judgments on nations, and virtually every concrete biblical description of God's activity. We are left with a God whom the Bible tells us about only through falsehoods. That cannot be right. Second, and more importantly, the New Testament is not vague about Jesus's temporal experience. The Gospels are narrative accounts of events. The author of Hebrews is not writing poetry; he is making a theological argument that depends on specific historical facts. Treating the entire narrative framework as mere accommodation guts the biblical witness. Third, if accommodation is going on somewhere, it is surely in the abstract philosophical terms borrowed from Plato and the Neoplatonists, not in the lived historical narratives of Scripture. The right direction of accommodation is not to reinterpret the Bible in terms of Greek metaphysics but to revise our Greek-influenced metaphysics in light of the Bible.

Objection 2: "You're ignoring the classical theologians who accepted both the Incarnation and divine timelessness. They must have seen something you don't."

I respect the classical theologians deeply, and I want to give them their due. But I also want to point out that many of them — Aquinas, Boethius, Anselm — were working within a philosophical framework that they had largely inherited from Greek philosophy, not from Scripture. They were brilliant, and they did the best they could with the tools available. But their tools included certain assumptions about perfection that were Platonic rather than biblical (such as the idea that any change implies imperfection). Ryan Mullins has made a persuasive case that the classical synthesis simply cannot coherently account for the Incarnation.²⁷ The classical theologians mostly handled the tension with variations on the qua move, which, as we have seen, does not actually resolve the contradiction. I believe we can honor the classical tradition's deep concern for divine transcendence without buying its particular Greek-inflected view of timelessness. That is what dynamic divine temporality attempts to do: preserve what is theologically true in the tradition (God's radical otherness, His sovereign independence, His unchanging faithfulness) while abandoning what is philosophically broken (strict atemporality, pure-act simplicity, strong immutability).

Objection 3: "If God the Son is temporal, doesn't this make Him less than the Father?"

No, and here is why. The worry is that ascribing temporality to the Son would make Him a lesser, more creature-like Person than the Father, who (on the classical view) remains timeless and unchangeable. But this worry only arises if we assume that timelessness is a perfection — if we assume, with Plato, that whatever changes is inferior to whatever does not. I reject that Platonic assumption. Temporality, as I will argue more fully in Chapter 26, is not a limitation borrowed from creatures; it is an attribute of the Triune God Himself, grounded in the dynamic, loving relations of the Persons. All three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — exist in a divine temporal life that is radically unlike creaturely clock-time but is nevertheless genuinely temporal. The Incarnation is therefore not a case of one timeless Person becoming temporal (while the other two remain timeless); it is a case of an already-temporal Son entering a new relationship with creaturely time. On this view, the ontological unity of the Trinity is preserved, and the Son is not diminished — He is simply doing what only a living, personal, temporal God could do.

Conclusion: The God Who Showed Up

Let me bring this to a close. Over the course of this chapter, we have looked at six biblical texts that together make a powerful cumulative case for the temporality of the incarnate Son — and, by extension, of God Himself. Galatians 4:4 tells us that the sending of the Son was dated to "the fullness of time." John 1:1–14 sets up a sharp grammatical contrast between the Word's eternal "being" and His punctual "becoming" flesh. Philippians 2:5–11 traces an eleven-step journey of the Son from pre-existent glory through emptying, incarnation, death, and exaltation. Hebrews 5:7–8 locates Jesus's earthly life "in the days of His flesh" and says He learned obedience through suffering. Luke 2:52 notes His progressive advancement in wisdom, stature, and favor. Mark 13:32 records His candid acknowledgement of not knowing the day of His return. Each of these texts, taken on its own, creates serious problems for divine timelessness. Taken together, they make the classical view, in my judgment, untenable.

The broader picture that emerges is this: the God of Christian faith is the God revealed in Jesus Christ. And the Jesus revealed in Scripture is not a timeless actor pretending to experience time from outside time. He is the living Son of God, who entered history at a specific moment, lived a real human life in real human time, learned obedience through suffering, laid down His life at Calvary, rose again on the third day, ascended to the Father, and will one day return. He will not return from outside time into time. He will return in time — at a particular moment in the future, at a specific point on the calendar we do not yet know. That future coming is, itself, more evidence that the Son of God is a temporal agent in a temporal history.

All of this points us to a God who is neither a timeless block of pure being nor a petty deity trapped in our frail clock-time. He is the dynamic, living, Triune God who experiences real sequence in His own divine life, who has genuinely entered our creaturely time in the Incarnation of the Son, and who continues to act within history until He brings all things to their appointed consummation. A God who shows up, in person, at the fullness of time.

I began this chapter by saying that if I were allowed only one argument for divine temporality, I would point to Jesus. I stand by that. Every week in the Church's confession, we say that we believe in Jesus Christ, "who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead." Every phrase in that confession is a temporal claim. Every phrase assumes a God who acts in history. The creed itself, in other words, is already a declaration of divine temporality. All I am asking is that we let the creed shape our metaphysics, rather than forcing our metaphysics to explain away the creed.

God the Son showed up. He was born. He grew. He suffered. He died. He rose. He ascended. He is coming back. Let that plain fact reshape how we think about eternity. The God of the gospel is not the God of the Platonic philosophers, locked in a motionless eternity. He is the Living One who has drawn near to us in time, and who walks with us through time, until time finds its ultimate fulfillment in Him.