Chapter 24

The Metaphysics of Time

A-Theory, B-Theory, Presentism, and Eternalism

Why Metaphysics Matters for Theology

I want to begin this chapter with a confession. When I first started studying the God-and-time question, I wanted nothing to do with the metaphysics of time. The debates between A-theorists and B-theorists, presentists and eternalists, growing-blockers and moving-spotlighters struck me as the worst kind of academic navel-gazing — philosophers inventing puzzles to keep themselves employed. I wanted to get to the biblical arguments, the theological payoffs, the pastoral implications. Who cares whether presentism or eternalism is true? Just tell me about God.

I was wrong. And I want to tell you why, because if you are tempted to skip this chapter, you will be making the same mistake I almost made.

Here is the thing. When we ask whether God is in time or outside of time, we are not just asking a theological question. We are asking a question whose answer depends on what time is. And what time is turns out to be one of the hardest and most contested questions in all of philosophy. If time is one kind of thing, then certain pictures of God become much more plausible. If time is another kind of thing, then different pictures become attractive. The metaphysics of time is not some technical detour on the way to theology. It is one of the main roads we have to walk if we want to know what we are really saying when we say that God is "eternal."¹

So in this chapter I am going to walk you through the major positions in the metaphysics of time. I will explain them in ordinary language. I will show you what is at stake philosophically and theologically. I will engage the strongest arguments on each side. And I will argue for the position that I think is most defensible and most hospitable to Christian theism — the A-theory of time, in its presentist form, paired with the author's distinctive claim that God has a unique capacity for transcendent temporal access. That last phrase probably sounds strange right now. By the end of this chapter it should make a lot more sense.

The Two Great Families of Time Theories

Let me start simple. Everything in the metaphysics of time eventually comes back to a single question. Here is the question: is the difference between past, present, and future an objective feature of reality, or is it merely a feature of how we experience reality?

Think about it this way. You are reading these words right now. The words you read thirty seconds ago are past. The words you will read in thirty seconds are future. That distinction — past, present, and future — feels utterly basic. It feels like the most obvious feature of our world. But here is the question: is that distinction really out there in the world, or is it just in our heads?

People who say the distinction is really out there — that there really is an objective present, that time really flows, that past and future are not equally real — are called A-theorists. People who say the distinction is only in our heads — that all moments of time are equally real, that temporal flow is an illusion, that "past," "present," and "future" are no more objectively real than "here" and "there" — are called B-theorists.²

These names come from the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, who in 1908 distinguished two ways of ordering events in time.³ The A-series orders events by their properties of pastness, presentness, and futurity. The B-series orders events by the tenseless relations of being earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than. So an event in the A-series might be "three years past" or "happening now" or "two days future." An event in the B-series is simply at a particular date, and it stands in earlier-than and later-than relations to other events regardless of when you are looking at it.

Natalja Deng puts the distinction crisply. The A- and B-theories "are divided over the question of whether time really passes (or flows) — whether it has a dynamic aspect that space lacks. A-theorists think it does, while B-theorists think it does not."⁴ For the A-theorist, time is dynamic. Things come into being. Things go out of being. The present is privileged. The flow of time is a real metaphysical feature of the world. For the B-theorist, time is static. Nothing really comes into being or goes out of being. All moments exist equally. Our sense that time flows is a kind of illusion — or at least not a feature of time itself, but of our minds.

This way of dividing up the territory is helpful for getting started, but it can also mislead. R. T. Mullins — whose work is central to this book — has argued that the A-theory / B-theory distinction is less clean than it often appears, and that we need to separate linguistic questions (how tensed and tenseless language work) from ontological questions (what moments of time actually exist).⁵ We will come back to Mullins's point later. For now, let me just flag the complication: what matters most for theology is not the A/B distinction as such, but what exists in time — the ontology of time. And that is where presentism, the growing block, and eternalism come in.

The Three Main Ontologies of Time

Before we go deeper into A-theory and B-theory, we need to meet their ontological cousins. "Ontology" just means "what exists." An ontology of time is a theory about what moments of time exist.

Here are the three main options.⁶

Presentism

Presentism is the view that only the present moment exists. The past no longer exists. The future does not yet exist. When I say "Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865," I am saying something true, but what makes it true is not the existence of the 1865 Lincoln in some other part of the four-dimensional universe. Lincoln, as a past person, no longer exists. Something about the present — maybe God's memory, or traces of the past, or what philosophers call "tensional properties" — grounds the truth of that past-tense claim.⁷

Presentism is the common-sense view. It is how we normally think about time when we are not doing philosophy. My grandmother is a presentist. Your grandmother is a presentist. Every person who has ever lived has been a presentist in everyday life, whether they knew the term or not. As the philosopher John Bigelow observed, presentism "was believed by everyone, both the philosophers and the folk, until at least the nineteenth century; it is written into the grammar of every natural language; and it is still assumed in everyday life, even by philosophers who officially deny it."⁸

And there is more. Mullins argues persuasively that presentism is the view classical Christian theology has always assumed — not the eternalism that many modern interpreters read into the tradition. Augustine in Confessions XI is a presentist. Boethius is a presentist. Anselm is a presentist. Thomas Aquinas is a presentist. The widespread modern assumption that the classical tradition held to eternalism is an anachronism.⁹

The Growing Block

The growing block view says that the past and the present exist, but the future does not yet exist. Reality is an ever-growing four-dimensional block. New time slices are constantly being added at the "leading edge" of reality, which is the present. The dinosaurs still exist — they are back there at the early end of the block. The Battle of Waterloo still exists. Napoleon still exists. But your descendants who will live in the year 2500 do not yet exist. Reality is growing.¹⁰

The growing block is a kind of middle position. It takes the past seriously (it exists) and the future seriously (it does not yet exist). It preserves the A-theorist's intuition that time has a real direction and a real flow, because time flows by growing. The present moves forward into what was the future, creating new reality as it goes.

Eternalism

Eternalism is the view that all moments of time equally exist. Past, present, and future are all part of the four-dimensional space-time manifold, and none of them is ontologically privileged. Napoleon exists (at his location in the block). You exist (at your location). Your great-great-grandchildren exist (at their locations). All of them are equally real. Our experience that there is a unique "now" moving through the block is, on this view, an illusion — a feature of our minds, not a feature of time itself.¹¹

This is the "block universe" view. It is sometimes called "four-dimensionalism," though those two terms are distinct (four-dimensionalism is more properly a view about how objects persist through time).¹² Eternalism is closely associated with certain interpretations of Einstein's relativity theory, which I will discuss in Chapter 31. It is also the standard companion of divine timelessness in contemporary philosophical theology — if all moments of time are equally real, then God can "see" all of them at once in a single timeless act of cognition.

There are other more exotic ontologies of time out there — the moving spotlight, fragmentalism, hypertime, eschatological presentism — and Mullins discusses them all in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker.¹³ But the three main options — presentism, the growing block, and eternalism — are where the action is. Let me now say a bit more about the moving spotlight, because it shows up in the theology-and-time literature.

The Moving Spotlight

The moving spotlight view combines eternalism with an A-theoretic twist. All moments of time equally exist (that is the eternalist part), but one of them is metaphysically privileged as "the present" — and which moment gets that privilege changes over time (that is the A-theoretic part). Imagine a block universe with a flashlight sweeping across it, illuminating one moment at a time. Every moment exists, but only one moment at a time is "lit up" as the present. As time passes, the spotlight moves, and different moments are illuminated.¹⁴

This is a strange view. It gets you some of the advantages of the A-theory (there is a real present, and time really flows as the spotlight moves) while holding onto the eternalist ontology (all moments really exist). But it is ontologically extravagant. Why posit the existence of all those other moments if you are going to pick out one as specially privileged? Mullins has argued extensively against the moving spotlight, and I find his arguments persuasive.¹⁵ I will not spend much time on it here.

How the Two Distinctions Line Up

So how do the A-theory / B-theory and the presentism / eternalism distinctions fit together? Here is the usual story.

Presentism is an A-theory. It says the present is metaphysically privileged (because only the present exists), and it says time genuinely flows (because new moments are constantly coming into existence and old ones are constantly ceasing to exist). The growing block is also an A-theory, for similar reasons. The moving spotlight is an A-theory (the spotlight picks out a privileged present).

Eternalism, by contrast, is usually paired with the B-theory. If all moments of time equally exist, then there is no special ontological status for the present, and time does not really flow.¹⁶

But here is where Mullins's caution is important. The fit is not as tight as people often assume. You can find eternalists who are A-theorists (moving spotlighters) and you can even find philosophers who hold weird combinations I will not trouble you with.¹⁷ For our purposes, though, the main lineup is simple: the dynamic, tensed, flowing view of time (A-theory) is usually paired with presentism or the growing block. The static, tenseless, block view (B-theory) is usually paired with eternalism.

From here on, when I say "A-theory," I mean primarily presentism. That is the most defensible version of the A-theory and the one with the best fit with Christian theology. When I say "B-theory," I mean primarily eternalism. That is the view that has most often been deployed in defense of divine timelessness.

A Deeper Look at the A-Theory

Let me now slow down and describe the A-theory in more detail. What exactly is being claimed?

The A-theorist claims several things. First, that there is an objective metaphysical distinction between the past, the present, and the future. This is not just a feature of how we talk. It is a feature of the world. If you and I disagree about whether an event is past or future, at most one of us is right — not because we occupy different positions on some block, but because the event really is past or really is future.

Second, the A-theorist claims that time genuinely flows. There is a real temporal becoming. Events come into being. Events pass away. This is not a trick of consciousness. It is a real feature of reality.

Third, the A-theorist typically holds that tensed propositions can change their truth value over time. The proposition "It is raining in Omaha" might be true now and false an hour from now. That is not because two different tenseless facts are at work ("It rains at 2 p.m." versus "It does not rain at 3 p.m."). It is because the proposition itself, including its tensed component, is true at one time and false at another.¹⁸

Fourth — and this is important for theology — the A-theorist takes the phenomenon of temporal experience seriously. Our experience of time passing, of events coming and going, of the present being uniquely real — all of this counts as evidence about the world. It is not merely a psychological curiosity to be explained away. It is a genuine window onto what time is really like.¹⁹

Craig makes this point powerfully. He writes that the flow of time "is an ineradicable part of the experience of a temporal being. Even if the future never becomes and the past is never really lost, the fact remains that for a temporal being the past is lost to him and the future is not accessible to him."²⁰ We do not just believe in temporal becoming. We experience it, constantly, in every moment of our conscious lives. Mellor, one of the most careful B-theorists, himself admits that "tense is so striking an aspect of reality that only the most compelling argument justifies denying it."²¹

Think about some of the features of our experience that only make sense on an A-theory. When your spouse comes home from the dentist and says "Thank goodness that's over!" — what are they thankful for? On the A-theory, they are thankful that the pain is in the past. It is done. It does not exist anymore. On the B-theory, all they could be thankful for is that the token they just uttered happens to be later than the painful event. Arthur Prior called this the "thank goodness that's over" argument, and I find it utterly devastating to the B-theory. Surely what my wife is thankful for is not the temporal position of her utterance but the pastness of the root canal.²²

DeWeese, following Prior, makes a similar point. Tensed language is not merely ineliminable from our speech; it is action-guiding in a way that no tenseless paraphrase can be. Imagine I believe the tenseless fact "The meeting starts at noon." I hold that belief all morning. What explains my getting up and going to the meeting at noon? It is not the tenseless belief — I have had that belief all morning. What explains my action is the tensed belief "The meeting is starting now."²³ Tensed beliefs motivate timely action. Tenseless beliefs do not. And the fact that our mental lives and our actions depend essentially on tensed beliefs is strong evidence that tense is a real feature of the world, not an illusion.

A Deeper Look at the B-Theory

Now let me try to describe the B-theory fairly. It will be tempting for me to caricature it, because I think it is wrong. But good philosophy demands that we steel-man the other side. So here is the B-theory at its best.

The B-theorist claims that all moments of time are ontologically on a par. The year 1500, the year 2026, the year 2500 — all of these equally exist in the four-dimensional space-time manifold. There is no privileged "now." What looks like the flow of time to us is a feature of our consciousness, not a feature of time itself.

Now this might sound crazy. But the B-theorist has genuine reasons for holding it. Here are the main ones.

First, B-theorists point to the theory of relativity. Einstein's special theory of relativity says that simultaneity is relative to reference frames. Two events that are simultaneous in one reference frame may not be simultaneous in another. If there is no absolute, frame-independent fact about which events are happening "now," then it seems there is no absolute present — and no absolute flow of time. This is the physics-based argument for the B-theory, and I will deal with it fully in Chapter 31.²⁴

Second, B-theorists point to the analogy between space and time. We do not think that my location here in Omaha is ontologically privileged over your location wherever you are. Tokyo is real even though I am not there. So (the B-theorist argues) why should the present moment be ontologically privileged over 1500 or 2500? Just as all spatial locations equally exist, so all temporal locations equally exist.²⁵

Third, B-theorists point to McTaggart's Paradox, which I will discuss in detail in a moment. They argue that the A-theory is internally incoherent — that the idea of events really possessing pastness, presentness, and futurity leads to contradiction.

Fourth, B-theorists have developed sophisticated accounts of tensed language. The "new tenseless theory of language," associated with D. H. Mellor, argues that tensed sentences cannot be translated into tenseless ones — but the truth conditions of tensed sentences can be given in purely tenseless terms. So tense is ineliminable from language, but not from the world.²⁶

These are serious arguments. I do not dismiss them. But I also do not think they succeed, as we will see.

McTaggart's Paradox — The Main B-Theory Weapon

The biggest single argument against the A-theory is McTaggart's Paradox. It comes from a 1908 article by the British idealist J. M. E. McTaggart, titled "The Unreality of Time."²⁷ Don't let the title fool you — McTaggart was not kidding. He really thought he had proved that time does not exist.

Almost no one agrees with McTaggart's conclusion that time is unreal. But his argument has nonetheless dominated the philosophy of time for over a century, because it seems to show that the A-theory is self-contradictory. If the argument works, then there is no dynamic time; there is only the static, tenseless time of the B-theory.

Let me lay out the argument as clearly as I can.

McTaggart assumes that past, present, and future events all equally exist. (This assumption is important — we will come back to it.) He then observes that every event has, or will have, or did have all three properties: pastness, presentness, and futurity. An event e that is now present was once future and will soon be past. But pastness, presentness, and futurity are incompatible properties. No event can have all three at once. And yet on the A-theory, e does have all three — not at the same time, but across time.²⁸

Now the A-theorist will naturally respond: "But e does not have all three properties at once. It has them successively. It was future, then became present, then became past." McTaggart's response is that this "solution" leads to an infinite regress. If e was future and is now present, then we need to ask: when was it future? The answer must be: at some earlier time t. But t itself must also have pastness, presentness, and futurity at different times. So we need a hyper-time to explain when t has these properties. But hyper-time has the same problem, so we need hyper-hyper-time. And so on to infinity.²⁹

This is the paradox. McTaggart claimed it showed that the A-theory is incoherent, and therefore (since time requires the A-theory) that time itself is unreal. B-theorists have used McTaggart's argument to make a weaker claim: the argument shows that the A-theory is incoherent, so we must accept the B-theory instead.

Now, does the argument work?

Why McTaggart's Paradox Fails

I do not think McTaggart's Paradox succeeds. Let me explain why.

The key problem with McTaggart's argument is hidden in its first assumption — the assumption that past, present, and future events all equally exist. This is a form of eternalism. But the A-theorist, especially the presentist, does not accept this assumption. For a presentist, past events do not exist. Future events do not exist. Only present events exist. So there is no single event e that "has" the properties of being past, present, and future. There is only the event as it presently exists, with the property of presentness. When that event "becomes past," it does not exchange presentness for pastness — it simply ceases to exist.³⁰

Craig makes this point brilliantly. "Events only have presentness; but they can be said to be past or future in the sense that it is (presently) true that they were once present or will be present."³¹ The apparent contradiction in McTaggart's argument arises only if we assume that events tenselessly possess the properties of pastness, presentness, and futurity. But the presentist denies this. On presentism, an event possesses only the tense it presently has, namely, presentness. No event ever possesses pastness or futurity, for non-present events do not exist.

DeWeese gives a similar diagnosis. McTaggart's paradox assumes a "hybrid dynamic-static theory of time" in which the A-series and B-series coexist side by side, and the flow of time is merely the sliding of the A-series along the B-series. "Of course, for this view to be correct, the events comprising the B-series must exist. B-series events all exist tenselessly and change merely in the acquisition or loss of some A-property. On a dynamic theory of time, of course, this ontology is simply false. So the use of McTaggart's Paradox to argue for static time simply begs the question."³²

Even the leading B-theorist R. Le Poidevin has conceded this point. "Presentism," he writes, "represents the only means to block McTaggart's proof of the unreality of time consistently with the assumption of a non-relational past, present, and future."³³ In other words: if you are a presentist, McTaggart's paradox cannot touch you.

So the paradox, far from being an argument against the A-theory, is really an argument against a confused half-A, half-B hybrid that no serious A-theorist accepts. The presentist can say: "When e was present, it was present. When e became past, it ceased to exist. There is no event e that possesses all three tenses. There is only the event as it presently exists, with the property of presentness, and then later there is no event at all." McTaggart's paradox dissolves.

This matters for our theology. The strongest argument against the A-theory does not work. And the A-theory, as we will see, is the view that fits best with Christian theism. So we have no philosophical reason to abandon the A-theory for the B-theory, and we have strong theological reasons to keep it.

The New Tenseless Theory of Language

After McTaggart's Paradox, the next major argument for the B-theory is the "new tenseless theory of language," developed by D. H. Mellor.³⁴ Older B-theorists tried to translate tensed sentences into tenseless ones — "It is raining now" into "It rains at 2 p.m. on October 12, 2025," and so on. This project failed, as Mellor himself admits. Tensed sentences cannot be translated into tenseless ones without loss of meaning.³⁵

But Mellor argues that this does not matter. What matters is not whether tensed sentences can be translated, but what makes them true. Mellor argues that the truth conditions of tensed sentences can be given in purely tenseless terms. "It is now 2 p.m." is true if and only if the token of that sentence occurs at 2 p.m. That is a tenseless fact about the time of utterance. So no tensed facts are needed to make tensed sentences true. Only tenseless facts are needed.³⁶

This is a clever move. But it fails. Craig, DeWeese, and many others have shown why.³⁷ The short version is this: Mellor's analysis does give a tenseless rule for when a tensed sentence is truly uttered, but it does not give the truth conditions of the tensed sentence itself. The proposition expressed by "It is now 2 p.m." is not the same as the proposition "This token occurs at 2 p.m." The first is a claim about when it is; the second is a claim about when a token occurs. Those are different claims, and the second cannot replace the first.

More importantly, Mellor himself admits that the key issue is the presentness of experience. We experience ourselves as being in a present moment. We do not experience ourselves as tenselessly located on a block. Mellor tries to explain this presentness away as a feature of our judgments about experience rather than of experience itself — but this is a stretch, and Mellor's own admission that "the presence of experience is the crux of the matter" shows that he knows the real issue cannot be dodged.³⁸

I will not go deeper into the technical details here. Craig's chapter 4 in Time and Eternity is the place to go if you want the full philosophical treatment.³⁹ The bottom line is that the new tenseless theory of language does not succeed in eliminating tensed facts from the world. Tense is a real feature of reality, not just of language.

The Argument from Experience

One of the most powerful arguments for the A-theory is simply the argument from experience. We experience time as flowing. We experience a genuine distinction between past, present, and future. We experience ourselves as being in a present moment that moves forward into the future. These experiences are not occasional or marginal. They are constant, universal, and central to what it is to be a conscious being.

Now, B-theorists will say these experiences are illusory. The experiences are real, but they do not reflect reality. Our minds generate the illusion of flow; reality itself is static.

But this response faces a deep problem. The experience of flow is itself a flow of experience. Craig puts it elegantly: "An illusion or appearance of becoming involves becoming... A person who has a supposedly illusory experience of becoming is experiencing the becoming of his experiences, and this experiencing is itself a flux of experience."⁴⁰ So even if there is no external becoming in the physical world, there is at least internal becoming in consciousness. And if consciousness involves becoming, then the B-theory has not really eliminated becoming from reality. It has just pushed it into the mind.

This is a powerful move. It shows that the B-theorist cannot consistently claim that all becoming is illusory, because the very experience of illusion requires becoming. At minimum, the mental life of conscious beings involves temporal flow — and that is enough to give the A-theorist what she needs. If God is a conscious being, and if conscious beings involve temporal flow, then God is temporal. (I will develop this argument more fully in later chapters.)

The Arguments from Action and Rational Belief

Here is another argument for the A-theory, which I find very compelling. Our rational action depends on tensed beliefs. Without tensed beliefs, we cannot act in a timely way. And without tensed facts, we cannot have tensed beliefs that are reliably true.

Let me unpack this. Suppose you are at a restaurant, and your friend is about to leave for the airport. You know her flight is at 3 p.m. But this tenseless knowledge does not tell you when to say goodbye. To know when to say goodbye, you need to know what time it is now. That is a tensed belief: "It is now 2:30 p.m." Without such a tensed belief, you cannot act in a timely way.⁴¹

Now the B-theorist will say that tensed beliefs can be explained tenselessly — they are beliefs whose truth depends on the time at which they are held. But the question is not just whether tensed beliefs can be given tenseless truth conditions. The question is whether there are tensed facts that those beliefs track. And if there are no tensed facts, then our tensed beliefs are not tracking anything real — they are systematically mistaken about an objective feature of the world that does not exist.

This makes our practical rationality deeply suspect on the B-theory. Our entire temporal life is built on tensed beliefs — on caring about what is happening now, on dreading what is coming, on regretting what has passed. If the B-theory is right, all of this is misdirected. There are no "nows" to care about. There is no future to dread. There is no past to regret (except in the sense that the events are at B-earlier locations on the block). Our emotional and practical life depends on tense — and if tense is not real, our emotional and practical life is based on an illusion.

I find this an unacceptable conclusion. Our entire phenomenology of time — our experience of present urgency, future hope, and past regret — cannot be explained away as illusion. It is too basic, too pervasive, too essential to who we are. The A-theory takes our experience at face value. The B-theory declares our experience to be systematically misleading. On this point, I side with the A-theorist.

Theological Implications of Presentism

So we have seen that the A-theory, in its presentist form, survives the main philosophical challenges and has strong independent arguments in its favor. Now let me show why the A-theory fits better with Christian theism than the B-theory.

On presentism, reality is dynamic. New things come into being. Old things pass away. The universe has a real history. Creation is a real temporal beginning. Salvation is a real temporal drama. The eschatological future is genuinely future — not yet real, to be brought into being by God's action. God's interactions with creatures are real events that happen at real times and have real before-and-after structures.

All of this fits perfectly with the biblical portrait of God. God creates. God acts. God speaks. God hears prayers. God responds. God intervenes. God judges. God redeems. All of these are temporal actions with a real before (the situation before the action) and a real after (the situation after the action). Presentism provides the metaphysical framework within which this biblical narrative makes sense.

Consider just a few examples. Scripture says God "created the heavens and the earth" (Gen 1:1). On presentism, this means: at some point in the past, God brought into being a universe that had not previously existed. Before creation: no universe. After creation: a universe. This is a genuine temporal transition, not merely a tenseless eternal fact.

Scripture says God "heard the groaning" of Israel in Egypt (Exod 2:24). On presentism, this means: the Israelites groaned, and God heard them, and God then responded by sending Moses. The groaning preceded God's hearing. God's hearing preceded His response. There is a real temporal sequence in God's dealings with His people.

Scripture says God will "come again" (Acts 1:11). On presentism, this means: the second coming is a real future event that has not yet happened. When it happens, something new will occur — something that currently does not exist.

Notice how different all of this looks on eternalism. If eternalism is true, then there is no sense in which anything ever really "comes into being." The universe has always existed (at its temporal locations). The Exodus has always existed (at its temporal location). The second coming has always existed (at its temporal location). Nothing ever really happens. Everything just tenselessly is.

Mullins has argued that eternalism is fundamentally incompatible with the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. If all moments of time equally exist, then there is no state of affairs in which God exists without the universe. The universe is, in effect, co-eternal with God. Even William Lane Craig, no friend of Mullins on every issue, agrees: eternalism "emasculates" creation ex nihilo and "does not do justice to the biblical data, which give us clearly to understand that God and the universe do not timelessly co-exist, but that the actual world includes a state of affairs which is God's existing alone without the universe."⁴²

The problem goes deeper than creation. Eternalism also undermines salvation. If every moment of time equally exists, then every moment of suffering equally exists. The suffering of the cross is still happening. The suffering of the martyrs is still happening. The suffering you endured as a child is still happening, eternally, at its location on the block. Nothing ever really passes away. Mullins argues this makes the Christian hope of salvation from suffering deeply problematic: "On four-dimensional eternalism, the person stage that exists at the time of the suffering will never cease to exist at the time of the suffering. Granted, Morag has later temporal counterparts that are not suffering, but that does not relieve the eternal suffering of this particular Morag stage. The suffering Morag stage is co-eternal with God."⁴³

I find this argument from salvation especially powerful. The Christian hope is that God will wipe away every tear, that the former things will pass away, that there will be no more sorrow or crying or pain (Rev 21:4). On eternalism, this cannot literally be true. The former things cannot pass away, because they equally exist at their locations on the block. The tears of the past are still being cried, forever, at their block locations. Eternalism makes the eschatological comfort of Revelation 21 into a kind of illusion — things only pass away relatively, for the later stages of people who exist in both earlier and later block locations. The actual suffering itself never ceases.

Presentism, by contrast, makes perfect sense of this hope. On presentism, the former things really do pass away. They stop existing. When God wipes away every tear, the tears are genuinely gone. They are not still being shed at some other location on the block. They are gone — absolutely, metaphysically, ontologically gone. Only the new creation remains.

This fits the biblical portrait of eschatological hope. And it fits the biblical portrait of God's dealings with history generally. Presentism is the metaphysics of the Bible.

The Theological Cost of Eternalism

Let me develop this further. Eternalism is often deployed in service of divine timelessness. The argument runs like this: if all moments of time equally exist, then God can see all of them at once in a single timeless act of cognition. This preserves God's omniscience and His transcendence of time without committing Him to temporal succession.⁴⁴

But Mullins has argued powerfully that this strategy fails on multiple levels.⁴⁵ First, eternalism itself involves change and succession — the change from earlier events to later events along the block. It is not a genuine "timeless" theory; it is a theory of time. So even an eternalist God would be related to a manifold that contains change, sequence, and before-and-after relations.

Second, eternalism is incompatible with many core Christian doctrines. I mentioned creation ex nihilo and the hope of salvation. Let me add a few more.

The doctrine of the last judgment presupposes a genuinely future event that has not yet occurred. On eternalism, the last judgment has always existed (at its temporal location). It is not really "future" except in a relative sense — that it is later than our present position. But it is as real as the Battle of Waterloo. It simply is, at its block location. This drains the last judgment of its urgency and its reality as a future divine act.

The doctrine of prayer presupposes that God hears our prayers and can respond. On eternalism, every prayer ever prayed already exists. God has always been hearing them. And every response already exists. The back-and-forth of prayer and answer — the dynamic relational structure that the Bible takes for granted — collapses into a static set of tenseless facts about what is located where on the block.

The doctrine of divine foreknowledge, ironically, becomes strange on eternalism. On eternalism, God's "foreknowledge" is really just knowledge of what is already there on the block. It is not so much fore-knowledge as simultaneous knowledge of the whole block. But the Bible repeatedly speaks of God knowing in advance what will happen — suggesting a genuine future that God sees before it occurs. Eternalism dissolves this sense of genuine foreknowledge.

The doctrine of creation comes under still more pressure. As Craig observes, the biblical doctrine of creation requires that there be a state of affairs in which God exists and the universe does not. On eternalism, the universe always exists — at its temporal locations — and there is no state of affairs in which only God exists. This is incompatible with the straightforward reading of Genesis 1:1 and countless other biblical texts.⁴⁶

Now, defenders of eternalism will say these problems can be resolved with sufficient ingenuity. And to be fair, there are sophisticated eternalist treatments of creation, prayer, and the last judgment. But the resolutions always feel forced. They always require tweaking our ordinary understanding of biblical claims to fit an exotic metaphysical framework. The presentist, by contrast, can take biblical claims at face value. If presentism is true, the Bible means what it seems to mean when it talks about God's temporal acts.

Given the choice between an exotic metaphysics (eternalism) that requires constant reinterpretation of Scripture and a common-sense metaphysics (presentism) that fits Scripture naturally, I think the choice is clear. We should be presentists.

What About Science?

At this point, someone is going to raise the physics objection. Does not relativity theory require the B-theory? Does not modern science show that all moments of time are equally real?

This is a serious question, and I will address it at length in Chapter 31. For now, let me say two things.

First, the physics does not require the B-theory. Einstein himself interpreted his theory in B-theoretic terms, but this was a philosophical interpretation, not a physical implication. Craig has argued at length (and persuasively, I think) that the relativity of simultaneity can be handled by a neo-Lorentzian interpretation that preserves an absolute present — just one that is empirically inaccessible due to the Lorentz transformations of moving frames.⁴⁷ On this interpretation, there is a real absolute "now," but we cannot empirically detect it because of the way space and time transform between reference frames.

Second, and more importantly, even if physics favored the B-theory, that would not settle the matter. Physics is not the only source of evidence about the nature of time. Our phenomenology of temporal experience is also evidence. Our practical rationality depends on tense. And our theology requires genuine temporal becoming. Against all of this, the B-theoretic interpretation of relativity would have to be weighed — not simply accepted.

In fact, as Deng notes, the block-universe interpretation of relativity has faced significant philosophical push-back in recent decades, and some interpretations of quantum mechanics — such as the "collapse" theories — are hospitable to an A-theoretic metaphysics.⁴⁸ Physics is not monolithic on this question.

For our purposes, what matters is that we need not feel forced into eternalism by scientific considerations. Presentism remains a live philosophical option, supported by powerful arguments from experience, from language, from action, and from theology.

A Critical Clarification about My Position

At this point I want to clarify something about my own view, because it might seem that I am trying to have my cake and eat it too. I hold that God has exhaustive foreknowledge of the future. But I also hold presentism. How can I hold both?

Here is the tension. If presentism is true, the future does not yet exist. So how can God know what does not exist? On eternalism, this is easy: God knows the future because it is already there, somewhere on the block. But on presentism, the future is literally nothing, metaphysically. It has no existence at all. So how can God have knowledge of it?

This is a genuine challenge, and it deserves a careful response. I will develop the response fully in Chapter 25, which is devoted entirely to divine foreknowledge. But let me sketch the answer here.

My view is that God has a unique capacity for what I call "transcendent temporal access." God is genuinely temporal — He experiences succession, He lives in time — but His mode of temporal experience is not limited to the creaturely mode of being locked into the present. God can, in some way, access all of time. He can see the future even though the future does not yet exist, in something like the way He could see all the spatial locations of the universe even before the universe was created.

This is not eternalism. I do not claim that the future exists in some part of a block that God can view. The future does not exist. Presentism is true. But God has a unique divine capacity — grounded in His being as God, not in the metaphysics of the block — that allows Him to know what will be even though what will be is not yet.

I readily admit that this is mysterious. I cannot fully explain how it works. But I do not think the mystery is a problem. Every model of divine foreknowledge faces mystery somewhere. The Calvinist model has the mystery of how God's decrees can both determine free actions and preserve responsibility. The Molinist model has the mystery of the "grounding" of counterfactuals of freedom. The open theist "model" has the cost of denying what the Bible clearly teaches about God's foreknowledge. My model has the mystery of how God accesses a future that does not yet exist. But at least my model preserves everything the Bible teaches: God is temporal, God genuinely interacts with creatures, creatures have libertarian free will, and God knows the future exhaustively.

For now, the key point is this: presentism is compatible with divine foreknowledge, but not on the basis of the block. The basis is a unique divine capacity that has no creaturely analog. Chapter 25 develops this fully.

Addressing the Moving Spotlight Alternative

Some readers may wonder whether the moving spotlight view offers a better compromise. It combines eternalism (all moments exist) with an A-theoretic element (one moment is privileged as "the present"). Could this give us divine foreknowledge (via eternalism) without sacrificing the A-theoretic intuition (via the moving present)?

Mullins has argued against the moving spotlight in From Divine Timemaker, and I find his arguments convincing.⁴⁹ The main problem is ontological extravagance. Why posit all those other existing moments if only the spotlighted moment matters? If we need a privileged present anyway, why not just have a present and nothing else (presentism)? The moving spotlight seems to combine the disadvantages of both presentism (need for a privileged present) and eternalism (ontological bloat of the full block) while getting the advantages of neither.

Additionally, the moving spotlight shares many of eternalism's theological problems. If all moments of time exist, then the creation ex nihilo problem comes back. If the suffering moments exist, then the salvation problem comes back. The moving spotlight does not really escape the difficulties of eternalism; it just repackages them.

I therefore reject the moving spotlight as an inferior alternative to straightforward presentism.

The Growing Block: A Near Ally

What about the growing block view? The growing block is my closest competitor. It says that the past and present exist but the future does not. This preserves the A-theoretic intuition that time has a real direction and that the future is genuinely open. And it has some advantages over presentism — for example, it can ground truths about the past in past realities (since the past still exists).

I have some sympathy for the growing block, and I do not want to be too hard on its defenders. But I ultimately side with presentism, for three reasons.

First, the growing block faces its own challenges. The main one is the "now" problem — why is the edge of the block the "now"? If all past moments are equally real, why is my present moment the privileged one, rather than, say, 1850? The growing block defender has to say something about why the edge of the block has privileged status. But presentism has an easy answer — there is no other moment, so the present moment is trivially privileged because it is all there is.⁵⁰

Second, the growing block runs into some of the same problems as eternalism for salvation and eschatology. If the past still exists, then the suffering of the past still exists. The cross is still happening. The Holocaust is still happening. Even granting that the future does not yet exist, the persistence of past suffering in the block raises similar concerns to those I raised about eternalism.

Third, presentism has the simplest ontology. It posits only the present. Everything else — ways of grounding past-tense truths, ways of explaining change, ways of explaining God's foreknowledge — can be handled by appeals to resources available in the present moment (tensional properties, traces, God's memory, etc.). Presentism is parsimonious, and parsimony is a virtue.

So while I regard the growing block as a respectable alternative to presentism, I think presentism is better. It is simpler, more theologically serviceable, and more faithful to the phenomenology of temporal experience. Presentism is the view Christians should embrace.

A Note on Mullins's Caution about A-Theory vs. B-Theory

I mentioned earlier that Mullins is cautious about the A-theory / B-theory terminology. Let me return to his point now.

Mullins argues that the A-theory and B-theory distinction is really about how we describe time linguistically and which properties or relations are more fundamental. But these linguistic issues do not settle the ontology of time. What matters, Mullins argues, is not whether you call yourself an A-theorist or a B-theorist but whether you hold to presentism, the growing block, or eternalism. "Knowing the basic distinction between the A-theory and B-theory of time is no longer helpful in doing philosophical theology. What will help us is looking at different ontologies of time and their complementary theories on persistence through time and change."⁵¹

I think Mullins is broadly right. The ontological question is more fundamental than the linguistic one. That is why I have focused most of this chapter on the ontological distinctions (presentism, growing block, eternalism) rather than the linguistic ones (tensed vs. tenseless). Still, the A-theory / B-theory language is deeply entrenched in the literature, and most readers will find it helpful as a rough guide. I have tried to use the labels in ways that are careful and not misleading.

The bottom line is this: what theology needs is not an abstract commitment to tensed language but a metaphysical commitment to presentism. The world is such that only the present moment of time exists. This is the ontology that fits the biblical portrait of God and that provides the metaphysical framework within which the Christian story can be coherently told.

A Brief Engagement with Some Contemporary Philosophers

Before I conclude, let me briefly engage some contemporary philosophers of time whose work I have drawn on, so that readers can know where to turn for further reading.

Arthur Prior (1914–1969) was perhaps the greatest A-theorist of the twentieth century. He developed tense logic as a formal way of handling temporal language and argued powerfully that tensed propositions cannot be reduced to tenseless ones. His "thank goodness that's over" argument is a classic and has been cited countless times in the literature. Prior's work remains the starting point for any serious defender of the A-theory.

Dean Zimmerman is a contemporary philosopher who has defended presentism and engaged the theology-and-time debate with care. His essays on "The Privileged Present" are important resources.⁵² Zimmerman shows how presentism can be philosophically coherent and how it avoids the problems that B-theorists have alleged against it.

Craig Callender is a contemporary philosopher of time whose book What Makes Time Special? engages the question of why time seems so different from space. Callender does not endorse the A-theory, but his careful analysis of our temporal experience provides ammunition for A-theorists.⁵³

D. H. Mellor is the major contemporary B-theorist. His book Real Time II defends the new tenseless theory of language. Mellor is worth reading carefully — he is the most sophisticated contemporary defender of the view I reject. If the B-theory can be saved, Mellor is the one who will save it. But I do not think he succeeds, as I have argued above.

Among philosophical theologians, Mullins's work is the most important contemporary resource. The End of the Timeless God and From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker together constitute the most sustained philosophical theology of divine temporality ever written. Mullins engages the metaphysics of time with care and brings its results to bear on every major Christian doctrine. I recommend his work without reservation.

Garrett DeWeese's God and the Nature of Time is another excellent resource. DeWeese defends omnitemporality via a causal theory of dynamic time and engages the A-theory / B-theory debate with philosophical sophistication. I have drawn heavily on his work throughout this chapter.

Putting It All Together

We have covered a lot of ground. Let me try to summarize the main argument of this chapter.

The metaphysics of time matters for theology because our theological claims about God's relationship to time depend on what time is. The two main families of time theories are the A-theory (dynamic, tensed, with a real flow of time and an objectively real present) and the B-theory (static, tenseless, with all moments equally real on a block). Each of these families has characteristic ontological commitments. The A-theory is usually paired with presentism (only the present exists) or the growing block (past and present exist). The B-theory is usually paired with eternalism (all moments equally exist).

The main philosophical argument against the A-theory is McTaggart's paradox. But McTaggart's paradox only works against a confused hybrid of the A- and B-theories. Against a pure presentist A-theory, the paradox dissolves. The presentist denies that past, present, and future events all exist; only the present exists. So there is no event that possesses contradictory A-properties across time.

The main philosophical arguments for the A-theory include the argument from experience (we directly experience time as flowing), the argument from action (our rational action depends on tensed beliefs tracking tensed facts), and the argument from language (tensed sentences cannot be eliminated or fully reduced to tenseless ones).

The theological arguments for the A-theory are even more powerful. The A-theory, and especially presentism, fits the biblical portrait of God as a dynamic, acting, responding agent who creates in time, interacts with creatures in time, and brings about a genuinely future eschatological consummation. The B-theory, and especially eternalism, has deep problems with creation ex nihilo, salvation from suffering, prayer, the last judgment, and eschatological hope.

My position — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent temporal access — builds on the A-theoretic foundation. God is genuinely temporal. Time genuinely flows. The present is ontologically privileged. And yet God is not locked into the creaturely present: He has a unique capacity to know and access all of time. This is not a B-theoretic claim about the ontological status of future events. The future does not exist. But God, in His unique transcendent mode, knows the future anyway. How? I cannot fully explain. Mystery remains. But it is a smaller mystery than the ones introduced by eternalism, Calvinism, Molinism, and open theism. And it preserves what matters most: the biblical portrait of the living, acting, responding God.

Counterarguments and Responses

Let me now briefly engage three important counterarguments.

Counterargument 1: The A-theory is pre-scientific

Some will say the A-theory is a pre-scientific relic, a vestige of folk metaphysics that modern physics has overturned. We should defer to the physicists, and the physicists tell us that time is a B-series dimension of the four-dimensional space-time manifold.

Response: This overstates the case. The physicists do not speak with one voice on this. Many leading physicists have held B-theoretic views, but others have been more cautious. And the philosophical interpretation of physics is not the same as the physics itself. Relativity tells us that simultaneity is frame-relative; it does not tell us that there is no absolute present. Craig's neo-Lorentzian interpretation preserves absolute simultaneity while accommodating all the empirical predictions of relativity.⁵⁴ Furthermore, there are active research programs in quantum gravity (such as causal set theory) that are hospitable to A-theoretic metaphysics.⁵⁵ We need not feel pushed by science into the block universe.

Even more importantly, physics is not the only source of evidence about time. Our phenomenology, our practical rationality, and our theology all count as evidence too. If physics genuinely conflicted with these, we would have a problem. But physics does not genuinely conflict with them — at worst, certain philosophical interpretations of physics conflict with them. We are free to hold the A-theory on the combined basis of experience, rationality, theology, and a defensible interpretation of physics.

Counterargument 2: Presentism is committed to strange abstract entities

Some critics argue that presentism needs strange entities — like tensional properties, individual essences, or abstract times — to ground truths about the past. Without such entities, past-tense sentences have no truthmakers. But these entities are ad hoc and implausible.⁵⁶

Response: Mullins has engaged this objection carefully in From Divine Timemaker, and I will only summarize his response here. First, the Christian presentist has God available as a truthmaker. God's perfect memory of the past can ground truths about the past. Abraham Lincoln exists — if not in the past block universe, then in the intermediate state, awaiting resurrection. The Christian has theological resources that the secular presentist does not, and these resources solve many of the truthmaker worries.⁵⁷

Second, tensional properties are not ad hoc. We use them all the time in ordinary speech. I have the property having been a child in 1990. That property is instantiated now, in me, pointing back toward the past. Such properties are no more strange than many other relational properties we readily accept.

Third, the alternative — eternalism — carries much higher ontological costs. Eternalism posits the existence of every past and future moment as a fully real four-dimensional chunk of reality. That is an enormous ontological commitment. Presentism, by contrast, posits only the present moment plus whatever tensional or divine resources are needed to ground past- and future-tense truths. Presentism is more parsimonious, not less.

Counterargument 3: The A-theory cannot handle divine foreknowledge

If presentism is true, the future does not exist. So God cannot know the future, because you cannot know what does not exist. Therefore, if we want to preserve divine foreknowledge, we need eternalism.

Response: This is the most important counterargument, and I will respond briefly here (and at length in Chapter 25). The key move is to distinguish between two different ways of knowing: direct cognitive access to an existing object, and a unique divine capacity to know what will be even when it is not yet. God's foreknowledge is not the former but the latter.

How is this possible? I cannot fully explain. But I think any model of divine foreknowledge faces unexplained mystery somewhere. The Calvinist model has the mystery of how divine decree is compatible with human responsibility. The Molinist model has the grounding objection. Open theism has the mystery of how God can make specific prophetic claims that come true if He does not know the future.

My model has the mystery of how God can know a future that does not exist. But this mystery is not an objection to the model — it is an invitation to humility before the incomprehensibility of divine cognition. God is God. His mode of knowing is not identical to our mode of knowing. He knows the future by a unique transcendent capacity that has no creaturely analog. I do not claim to understand how. I claim only that we have good reason to believe it, on the basis of the Bible's teaching about God's knowledge and the biblical portrait of a temporal, acting, responding God.

Cross-References to Other Chapters

The metaphysics of time covered in this chapter is foundational for many of the arguments in later chapters. Let me flag the most important connections.

Chapter 25 develops the model of simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access. This is the positive proposal for how God can know the future without eternalism. It presupposes the A-theoretic framework developed in this chapter.

Chapter 26 develops the argument that the Trinity generates divine temporality even before creation. This argument is A-theoretic: the perichoretic dynamic relations of Father, Son, and Spirit involve real sequence and succession. A B-theoretic framework would struggle to make sense of genuine Trinitarian relationality.

Chapter 27 develops the argument that the Incarnation requires divine temporality. This argument also presupposes an A-theoretic framework: becoming flesh is a real event that happens at a real time. On eternalism, the Incarnation would be a tenseless fact about the block, which does not do justice to the biblical claim that "the Word became flesh" at a particular moment.

Chapter 28 develops the argument that divine emotions require divine temporality. Genuine emotional response requires the kind of temporal sequence (event, then response) that only the A-theory provides.

Chapter 31 addresses the physics objection to the A-theory in detail, including relativity, the neo-Lorentzian interpretation, and quantum mechanical considerations.

All of these later arguments build on the foundation laid in this chapter. The A-theory and presentism are the metaphysical platform on which the rest of the book stands.

Conclusion

Let me bring this long chapter to a close.

The metaphysics of time is not a distraction from theology. It is one of the main roads into theology. What we think about time shapes what we think about God. If time is a static, tenseless manifold of equally real moments, then divine timelessness is natural and the biblical portrait of a living, acting, responding God becomes strained. If time is a dynamic, tensed reality in which the present is ontologically privileged and temporal becoming is real, then divine temporality is natural and the biblical portrait makes perfect sense.

I have argued in this chapter that the A-theory, and specifically presentism, is the correct metaphysics of time. It is philosophically defensible against McTaggart's paradox, the new tenseless theory of language, and other standard B-theoretic arguments. It is supported by the argument from experience, the argument from action, and the argument from language. It fits the biblical portrait of God far better than eternalism does. And it provides the framework within which the rest of this book's arguments can be developed.

My own distinctive position is dynamic divine temporality with transcendent temporal access. On this view, God is genuinely temporal — He lives in time, experiences succession, acts sequentially, responds to creatures in real time. But God is not locked into the creaturely mode of being stuck in the present. He has a unique divine capacity to know and access all of time, including the future that does not yet exist. This is not eternalism. The future really is not yet. But God's relation to the future is different from ours, and His knowledge of the future is more complete than ours could ever be.

This position honors both the A-theoretic intuition that time is dynamic and the biblical teaching that God knows the future. It avoids the theological disasters of eternalism (the collapse of creation, salvation, and eschatological hope) while preserving what matters in divine foreknowledge (God's ability to declare the end from the beginning). It is the view I believe best fits Scripture, reason, and experience.

In the chapters ahead, we will see how this metaphysical foundation supports arguments about Trinity, Incarnation, foreknowledge, providence, emotions, and eschatology. The metaphysics of time is the foundation. Everything else is built on it.

A Final Word

I want to close with a word about why this chapter has been so long, and so seemingly abstract.

I know that philosophical metaphysics can feel distant from the warm realities of Christian faith. When we are on our knees in prayer, we are not thinking about presentism versus eternalism. When we worship at the Lord's Supper, we are not calculating whether time is tensed or tenseless. When we are comforting a grieving friend, we are not running through McTaggart's paradox.

But the point of this chapter is that our unreflective, moment-by-moment Christian life already assumes a particular metaphysics of time. When we pray, we assume that God is with us right now, hearing us right now, able to respond right now. When we grieve, we assume that there is a real present in which our pain is real and a real future in which it might be healed. When we worship, we assume that God is really here, entering into genuine relationship with us at this very moment.

All of this assumes the A-theory. All of this assumes presentism. All of this assumes that the present is ontologically privileged, that time really flows, that past and future are not equally real. Christian faith, as it is actually lived, is A-theoretic to the core.

What this chapter has done is to make explicit what Christian faith already assumes. It has shown that what we unreflectively assume in prayer and worship is, in fact, the correct metaphysics of time. Our prayer lives are not built on a philosophical mistake. Our worship is not grounded in an illusion. The God we love, the God who loves us, the God who entered time in Jesus Christ — He really is with us now, in a now that is metaphysically real, in a time that really flows, in a world where His love meets ours in moment-by-moment communion.

The metaphysics of time is not cold philosophy. It is the skeleton of our most intimate Christian experience. Get it right, and the whole body of Christian theology takes its proper shape. Get it wrong, and the body will be distorted in ways that ramify through every doctrine and every practice.

I hope this chapter has convinced you that getting it right matters. And I hope it has convinced you that the A-theory, in its presentist form, is the view we should embrace.