Chapter 26: The Trinity and Time — Perichoresis and the Foundation of Divine Temporality

At the very heart of the Christian faith stands a mystery that has captivated believers for two thousand years: God is one Being who exists eternally as three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the doctrine of the Trinity. Christians confess it every time they recite the Nicene Creed. They hear it echoed in the Great Commission, where Jesus tells His disciples to baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matt 28:19, ESV). It shapes our worship, our prayers, and our understanding of who God is.

But what does the Trinity have to do with time? As it turns out, quite a lot. In fact, I believe the Trinity provides the very foundation for understanding God's relationship to time. The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: the dynamic, relational life of the Trinity — the eternal perichoretic indwelling of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is itself the foundation of divine temporality, generating a form of "divine time" that exists as an attribute of God's own being, prior to and independent of creation.¹

This is one of the most important claims in our entire study, and it deserves careful attention. If this argument succeeds, it means several things at once. It means God was never atemporal — He has always experienced some form of temporal succession, rooted in the dynamic life of the three Persons. It means that created, physical, measurable clock-time began at creation, but time itself did not — because time is grounded in who God is, not merely in what God made. It means William Lane Craig's "timeless sans creation" phase is unnecessary — there is no need to posit a timeless period before creation, because the Trinity's relational life already generates temporality. And it means the classical claim that the intra-Trinitarian processions are timeless is deeply problematic — because genuine interpersonal relationship, even within God, requires some form of sequence and dynamism.

We will work through these claims carefully, drawing especially on the groundbreaking work of R. T. Mullins and Garrett DeWeese, while also engaging fairly with those who disagree — particularly Craig and Paul Helm. Let me say at the outset that the scholars on all sides of this debate are brilliant thinkers who deserve our respect. The disagreements here are genuine, and the stakes are high. But I am convinced that the evidence points clearly in one direction: the triune life of God is inherently temporal, and this has profound implications for everything else in our theology.

What Is Perichoresis? A Word That Changes Everything

Before we dive into the argument, we need to understand a key term: perichoresis (pronounced "perry-kor-EE-sis"). It comes from the Greek word perichōrēsis (περιχώρησις), which literally means something like "going around" or "interpenetration."² In everyday language, it describes the idea that the three Persons of the Trinity are so intimately connected, so deeply intertwined in their life together, that they completely indwell one another. The Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father, and the Holy Spirit is in both — and they are in the Spirit. There is a beautiful, dynamic togetherness at the very core of God's being.

Think of it this way. Imagine three close friends who know each other so well that they can finish each other's sentences. They share everything — their joys, their sorrows, their plans, their love. Now multiply that intimacy by infinity, and you begin to get a faint glimpse of what perichoresis describes. The Father, Son, and Spirit are not three separate Gods who happen to agree on things. They are one God whose very being involves this dynamic, interpenetrating communion of Persons.

The concept has deep roots in Christian history. Early church fathers like Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor used perichoresis to describe how the three divine Persons are inseparably related to one another — so inseparably that their perichoretic union is what distinguishes the Trinity from tritheism (the heresy that there are three gods rather than one).³ John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, gave the concept its classic formulation, describing the Persons as dwelling in one another without confusion or blending. The mutual indwelling is complete, so that the Father is wholly in the Son and the Spirit, the Son is wholly in the Father and the Spirit, and so on — yet each Person retains His distinct personal identity.

Now here is the crucial question for our study: Is this perichoretic life of the Trinity dynamic or static? Is it a living, active, relational communion — or is it a frozen, unchanging, timeless state? The answer we give to that question determines everything else. If perichoresis is dynamic, then the Trinity's inner life involves some form of succession and change — and that means God has always been temporal, even before He created anything. If perichoresis is static and timeless, then God's inner life involves no sequence whatsoever — and divine timelessness remains an option.

I am convinced that perichoresis is dynamic. And I believe the biblical, theological, and philosophical evidence strongly supports this conviction. Let me now walk through the case.

The Core Argument: Why Genuine Relationship Requires Sequence

The central argument of this chapter can be stated simply: genuine interpersonal relationship requires some form of temporal succession. If the Father loves the Son, and the Son responds to the Father's love, that response implies a "before" and "after" — even if the time involved is nothing like our creaturely clock-time. If the Spirit glorifies the Son, and the Son sends the Spirit, that sending implies sequence. If the three Persons communicate, commune, and share in the fullness of divine life together, that sharing is a living, active reality — not a frozen snapshot.

The Biblical Portrait of the Trinity's Inner Life

Scripture gives us many glimpses into the relational life of the Trinity. Jesus speaks constantly about His relationship with the Father. "The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing" (John 5:20, ESV). Notice the verb "shows" — it implies an active, ongoing communication. Jesus also says, "I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father" (John 14:31, ESV). The Son acts in response to the Father's will. The Spirit, meanwhile, "will glorify me," Jesus says, "for he will take what is mine and declare it to you" (John 16:14, ESV). The Spirit takes from the Son and communicates it — an active, sequential process.

Now, defenders of divine timelessness will quickly point out that these texts describe God's economic activity — His actions in relation to creation and salvation history. They will say that we cannot simply read these economic relations back into God's eternal, immanent life. And they have a point. We should be cautious about moving too quickly from what God does in history to who God is in Himself.

But here is the thing: the Christian tradition has always insisted that there is a genuine connection between the economic Trinity (God as He acts in the world) and the immanent Trinity (God as He is in Himself). The Son's obedience to the Father in history reflects something real about the eternal relationship between Father and Son. The Spirit's role in communicating and applying the work of the Son in history reflects something real about the Spirit's eternal relationship to the Father and the Son. As R. T. Mullins puts it, the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity "is only unhelpful when other areas of our theological system are in disarray."⁴ The distinction is important, but it should not be used to sever all connection between who God is in Himself and how He acts in history.

So when Scripture portrays the Father, Son, and Spirit in dynamic, active, relational terms, we should take this seriously as a window into the eternal life of God — not as mere metaphor or accommodation to human weakness.

The Philosophical Argument: Interpersonal Relationship Implies Sequence

Beyond the biblical data, there is a powerful philosophical argument here. What does it mean for persons to be in relationship? At a minimum, it means some form of mutual awareness, mutual responsiveness, and mutual engagement. Person A is aware of Person B. Person A acts toward Person B. Person B responds. This response may be simultaneous in some cases — but even simultaneous responsiveness involves a kind of structural ordering. There is an "acted upon" and a "responding to." There is a dynamic, not a stasis.

Think about what love involves. Love is not a static property like the color of an object. Love is active. It reaches out. It gives. It receives. It delights. Even if all of these things happen "at once" in some sense, they still involve a kind of dynamic movement — a living activity rather than a frozen state. And when we talk about three Persons in a love relationship, the dynamism multiplies. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, the Spirit shares in this love and communicates it — all of this is an active, living, dynamic reality.

Now, can all of this dynamism exist in a timeless, frozen "eternal now" — with no before, no after, no sequence whatsoever? I find this extraordinarily difficult to believe. If there is no sequence at all, then there is no process. If there is no process, then there is no activity. If there is no activity, then in what sense is the Trinity's life a living communion? It becomes, at best, a static state of affairs — not a relationship but a structure. And a structure, however beautiful, is not a community of persons sharing life together.

This is a point that Garrett DeWeese develops with particular clarity. In his important study God and the Nature of Time, DeWeese argues that if God's mental life involves a causal succession of mental states — if one thought or act gives rise to another — then this succession itself constitutes a form of time. He writes that this "would not be a limitation on God, since he is the cause of his own being, including his own mentality," and further notes that such a view "would aid our understanding of the dynamic relations among the persons of the Trinity prior to creation."⁵ The doctrine of perichoresis, he observes, "is often interpreted dynamically. For the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, to enjoy dynamic relationality in any sense analogous to the relationality of human persons would be to experience change."⁶

This is a crucial insight. If the perichoretic life of the Trinity involves anything like genuine interpersonal dynamism — and I believe it does — then it involves change. And change implies temporal succession. Not necessarily the kind of measurable, clock-driven time we experience as creatures. But some form of "before and after," some form of genuine sequence in God's inner life.

Mullins's Argument: Time as an Attribute of God's Own Being

The most rigorous and sustained philosophical case for grounding divine temporality in the Trinity comes from R. T. Mullins, especially in his second major work, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. Mullins's argument is both creative and carefully constructed, and it deserves extended treatment here because it provides the strongest philosophical foundation for the view I am defending.

The Immanent and Economic Trinity

Mullins begins by carefully distinguishing between the immanent Trinity (God as He is in Himself, apart from creation) and the economic Trinity (God as He acts in salvation history). This distinction matters because it allows us to ask a focused question: What is God like in Himself, even apart from anything He has created? Mullins argues that on his version of divine temporality, "God is not dependent upon creation for His existence or His triune nature." God "once existed without creation," and the temporalist holds that "God existed temporally prior to creation in an unmetricated state of affairs without any intrinsic change."⁷

This is an important point. The claim is not that God needs creation in order to be temporal. The claim is that God is temporal in Himself, by virtue of His own triune nature, and that He would be temporal even if He had never created anything. Creation introduces a new kind of time — physical, measurable, clock-time — but it does not introduce temporality itself. Temporality is already there, grounded in who God is.

Mullins describes the immanent Trinity as "a description of the essential (i.e. necessary and sufficient) properties for being divine that are displayed during this precreation moment and forever after." It is also "a description of the necessary and eternal relations that obtain between the divine persons of the Trinity."⁸ In other words, the immanent Trinity tells us what is essential to God's nature — what must be true of God in every possible world, whether or not He creates.

The Four Desiderata of Trinitarian Theology

Mullins identifies four basic claims that are necessary for a proper doctrine of the Trinity, drawing on the ecumenical creeds:

(T4) Monotheism: The divine persons are related in such a way that there is only one God, and not three Gods.⁹

These four claims represent the basic framework of Trinitarian orthodoxy as defined by the Nicene Creed. Any adequate model of the Trinity must preserve all four. What makes Mullins's argument so powerful is that he shows how divine temporality actually does a better job of preserving these commitments than divine timelessness does — especially when it comes to the thorny issue of the divine processions.

What Distinguishes the Persons?

A natural question arises: If the three divine Persons all share the same divine essence, what makes them distinct from each other? The traditional answer in classical theology is the doctrine of the divine processions — the Father "begets" the Son, and the Spirit "proceeds" from the Father (and, in the Western tradition, from the Son as well). These processions are what distinguish the Persons.

But Mullins argues that the processions are not actually necessary for distinguishing the Persons. What is necessary and essential for distinguishing them is "the fact that there are three centres of consciousness, each with robust first-person perspectives, each with unique de se beliefs, and each with unique wills."¹⁰ A de se belief (pronounced "day say") is a belief about oneself — "I am the Father," "I am the Son," "I am the Spirit." Each Person has a unique first-person perspective that the others do not share. The Father knows Himself as the Father. The Son knows Himself as the Son. The Spirit knows Himself as the Spirit. These unique self-referential perspectives are enough to distinguish the Persons without needing any causal processions.

This is important because it frees us from the philosophical problems that come with the doctrine of divine processions — problems we will examine in detail shortly. If the Persons can be distinguished by their unique first-person perspectives and personal properties, then we do not need the Father to "cause" or "generate" the Son in order to explain why they are different Persons. They are different Persons because they have different de se beliefs and distinct wills, while sharing the same divine essence and existing in the unbreakable perichoretic unity that makes them one God.

Perichoresis and the Unity of the Trinity

Mullins draws on the concept of perichoresis to explain how three distinct Persons can be one God. Following thinkers like Keith Yandell, Thomas McCall, and John Duns Scotus, Mullins identifies several conditions that must be met for the three Persons to constitute one God rather than three gods:¹¹

(T4a) For any Trinitarian Person P, it is logically impossible that P exist and either of the other Trinitarian Persons not exist.

(T4b) For any Trinitarian Person P, it is logically impossible that P will what is not willed by the other Trinitarian Persons.

(T4c) For any Trinitarian Person P, it is logically impossible that P engage in any activity in which the other Trinitarian Persons in no way engage.

(T4d) The Persons of the Trinity have complete non-inferential awareness of one another.

These conditions describe what perichoresis means in rigorous philosophical terms. The Persons are so deeply interconnected that they cannot exist apart from each other (T4a), cannot will differently from each other (T4b), cannot act independently of each other (T4c), and are completely transparent to each other (T4d). This is not three gods who happen to cooperate. This is one God whose being involves three Persons in an unbreakable communion.

Notice something important here. These conditions describe a dynamic, living relationship. Willing together, acting together, being aware of each other — these are not static properties. They are active realities. And active realities involve some form of temporal succession, as we argued above. The perichoretic life of the Trinity, when properly understood, is an inherently temporal reality.

Craig's Counter-Argument: Can Perichoresis Be Timeless?

Before pressing forward, we need to engage fairly and carefully with the most important counterargument. William Lane Craig — one of the finest analytic philosophers of religion alive today — argues that the perichoretic life of the Trinity can indeed be timeless. Craig's argument deserves a full hearing because it is the strongest case available for the timelessness of the Trinity's inner life.

In Time and Eternity, Craig considers the objection that God must be temporal because interpersonal relationships — specifically the intra-Trinitarian relationships — involve temporality. He responds by arguing that "the persons of the Trinity could not be affected, prompted, or responsive to one another in an unchanging and, hence, timeless way."¹² Craig uses an analogy: think of iron filings clinging to a magnet. The magnet affects the filings, and the filings respond to the magnet's force, but neither the magnet nor the filings need to change position for this to be the case. On the macroscopic level, action and response can be simultaneous, involving "neither change nor temporal separation."¹³

Craig goes on to appeal to perichoresis itself as evidence for timelessness. He argues that in the perichoretic interpenetration of the Trinity, "each person is completely transparent to the others. There is nothing new that the Son, for example, might communicate to the Spirit, since that has already been communicated. There exists a full and perfect exchange of the divine love and knowledge, so that nothing is left undone which needs to be completed."¹⁵ Since nothing new ever needs to happen, no change ever needs to occur. And since no change occurs, God's inner life can be entirely timeless.

This is a thoughtful and carefully stated argument. Craig is right that if nothing new ever occurs in the Trinity's inner life — if everything is always already complete — then there is no obvious need for temporal succession. And his magnet analogy nicely illustrates how a relationship of influence can exist without change.

Why Craig's Argument Fails

Despite its sophistication, I believe Craig's argument ultimately fails for several reasons.

First, the magnet analogy is misleading. Craig acknowledges that "on a deeper level change is going on constantly" in the magnet case, since the magnetic influence is mediated by electromagnetic radiation moving at finite velocity.¹⁶ The macroscopic appearance of changelessness masks an underlying dynamism. But with God, there is no such underlying dynamism on Craig's view — the timelessness is supposed to go "all the way down." The analogy thus breaks down at precisely the point where it is supposed to do its work. In the physical case, action and response are really simultaneous events occurring in time. Craig wants action and response with no events and no time at all — which is a much stronger and more puzzling claim.

Second, the "nothing new to communicate" argument proves too much. If the fact that nothing new can be communicated between the Persons means that no temporal succession is needed, then by the same logic, the Persons are not really doing anything at all. They are not actively loving, actively knowing, actively delighting in one another. They are simply existing in a state where love, knowledge, and delight are statically "present" in some atemporal sense. But this drains the concept of interpersonal relationship of all its meaning. A "relationship" in which nothing ever happens — no giving, no receiving, no responding — is not a relationship in any sense that we can recognize. It is a static structure, not a living communion.

Third, the analogy of lovers gazing into each other's eyes cuts against Craig's position. When we describe two lovers as "lost in that timeless moment," we do not mean that time has literally stopped. We mean that they are so absorbed in each other that they have lost track of time. Time is still passing — their hearts are still beating, their pupils are still dilating, their neurons are still firing. The experience is deeply temporal even though it feels timeless. Using this analogy to support literal divine timelessness is precisely backwards. It illustrates how intense relational experience can create the subjective impression of timelessness while being thoroughly temporal in reality.

Fourth, Craig's argument ignores the difference between completeness and stasis. We can agree that the Trinity's love is always complete — there is never a deficiency, never a lack, never something missing that needs to be added. But completeness does not require changelessness. A fountain can be always full and always flowing. The water level never drops, but the water is constantly in motion. Similarly, the Trinity's love can be always complete while also being always active, always dynamic, always alive. The completeness of the love does not preclude temporal succession; it simply means that the succession never involves deficiency or decline.

For these reasons, I believe Craig's attempt to ground the Trinity's perichoretic life in timelessness does not succeed. The inner life of the Trinity is better understood as a dynamic, living, temporal communion — a communion that is always complete but never static, always full but never frozen.

DeWeese's Argument: Perichoresis, Causation, and Metaphysical Time

Garrett DeWeese develops a complementary argument that approaches the question from the angle of his causal theory of dynamic time. On DeWeese's view, time is not a container that things exist in. Rather, time is constituted by causal relations — one event causes another, and this causal succession is what makes time real. If there are causal relations, there is time. If there are no causal relations, there is no time.¹⁷

DeWeese then asks: Are there causal relations in God's inner life? If God's mental life involves a causal succession of mental states — one thought giving rise to another, one act of will producing a response — then this succession constitutes a form of "metaphysical time" that is distinct from physical, created time. This metaphysical time would exist even without any physical universe. It would be grounded in God's own being — in the causal dynamics of the divine mind.¹⁸

The doctrine of perichoresis reinforces this picture. If the three Persons of the Trinity are dynamically related — if the Father's love causally produces the Son's responsive love, if the Spirit's glorification of the Son is an active process — then there are genuine causal relations within God. And genuine causal relations constitute genuine time. Not physical time, not clock-time, not the kind of time measured by cesium atoms and atomic clocks. But real, metaphysical time — a genuine "before and after" in God's inner life.

DeWeese's conclusion is that an omnitemporal God — a God who experiences genuine temporal succession — "would experience succession in his mental states, thus being much more in line with what we understand by 'person.'" Moreover, "in Trinitarian theology, the individual persons of the Trinity would exist in dynamic relationship before the creation of the temporal world, thus grounding the dynamic emphasis of the perichoresis or mutual indwelling, interpenetration, of the Trinity."¹⁹

I find DeWeese's argument highly congenial. It aligns well with Mullins's approach while adding the philosophical precision of a causal theory of time. Together, Mullins and DeWeese provide a robust case for grounding divine temporality in the perichoretic life of the Trinity.

The Doctrine of Divine Processions: A Critical Problem

We now come to one of the most challenging — and most important — parts of this chapter. The classical doctrine of the Trinity includes not only the perichoretic unity of the Persons but also the doctrine of the divine processions. According to this doctrine, the Father "begets" or "generates" the Son, and the Spirit "proceeds" from the Father (and, in Western theology, from the Father and the Son). These processions are what the Nicene Creed refers to when it says the Son is "begotten of the Father before all ages" and the Spirit "proceeds from the Father."

The divine processions have been understood throughout most of church history as timeless — the Father timelessly causes the Son to exist, and the effect (the Son's existence) is also timeless. This is how Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea answered the Arians, who claimed that "there was a time when the Son was not." The orthodox response was: No, the Father's begetting of the Son is timeless, so the Son has always existed and is co-eternal with the Father.²⁰

But does this doctrine work on a temporalist view of God? This is where things get complicated. Paul Helm has argued that divine temporality, combined with the doctrine of divine processions, leads straight to the heresy of Arianism. This is a serious charge, and we need to examine it carefully.

Helm's Charge of Arianism

Helm's argument can be stated as a series of logical steps. Mullins presents it in formal terms as the "Charge of Arianism":²¹

(CA1) All causes are temporally prior to their effects. (This is the Swinburne Causal Principle, which most divine temporalists accept.)

(CA2) If the Father causes the Son to exist, the Father exists temporally prior to the Son.

(CA3) The Father causes the Son to exist. (This is the doctrine of divine processions.)

(CA5) If the Father exists temporally prior to the Son, the Son lacks the property of eternality.

(CA7) If the Son lacks the property of eternality, the Son is extensively inferior to the Father.

(CA9) If the Son is extensively inferior to the Father, then the Son and Father are not homoousios.

This is a devastating conclusion for any Christian theologian. If divine temporality combined with divine processions leads to a denial of homoousios — the foundational claim that Father and Son share the same divine essence — then the temporalist is in serious trouble.²²

Attempted Solutions That Fail

Several divine temporalists have tried to respond to Helm's argument while keeping the doctrine of divine processions intact. Let us examine their efforts.

William Hasker's first response is to argue that for any given time at which the Father is causing the Son to exist, the Father was already causing the Son to exist at a prior time. And for that prior time, the same analysis applies — the Father was causing the Son to exist at an even earlier time. This generates an infinite regress. But as Mullins correctly points out, this "doesn't ever get around to actually answering the Charge of Arianism."²³ The infinite regress never reaches a point where we can say definitively that the Son has always existed. It just pushes the question back indefinitely.

Hasker's second response is to reject premise (CA1) — the Swinburne Causal Principle — for the specific case of divine causation. Perhaps God can cause something to happen at the same time He performs the causal act. This would allow the Father to cause the Son to exist simultaneously rather than temporally prior. Mullins acknowledges that "this at least avoids the Charge of Arianism," but he argues that "it does not avoid the deeper problem of ontological subordination."²⁴ Even if the Father causes the Son to exist simultaneously, the Son is still caused — and a caused being is not a se (self-existent). This brings us to an even deeper problem.

The Inconsistency Problem

Mullins develops a second, more fundamental argument against the divine processions that goes beyond the specific issue of temporal priority. He calls it "the Inconsistency Problem," and it applies to atemporalists and temporalists alike — anyone who holds the doctrine of divine processions faces this difficulty.²⁵

The argument begins with the doctrine of homoousios — the claim that the three divine Persons are of the same essence. Mullins defines a minimal version of homoousios:

(IP1) Minimal Homoousios: The three divine Persons are (i) extensively and intensively equal to each other, and (ii) extensively and intensively superior to all other beings.²⁶

"Extensively equal" means they have all the same great-making properties. "Intensively equal" means they have those properties to the same degree. No Person has a divine attribute that another Person lacks, and no Person has an attribute in a greater or lesser degree than another.

Now, consider the doctrine of aseity — the claim that God exists a se, from Himself, with no dependence on anything external for His existence. Aseity is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental attributes of God. As Lindsay Cleveland notes in discussing this attribute, traditional theists regard divine aseity "as one of the most fundamental aspects of our understanding of God."²⁷

(IP3) Aetiological Subordination: The Son is subordinate to the Father in that the Son is caused to exist by the Father. (This is the doctrine of divine processions.)

If the Son is caused to exist by the Father, then the Son does not exist a se. His existence is derived from the Father. But if aseity is a great-making property essential to divinity, and if the Son lacks aseity, then the Son lacks a property that the Father has. This means the Son is not extensively equal to the Father — which contradicts homoousios.

More formally: If the Father has aseity and the Son does not (because the Son's existence is caused by the Father), then the Son has a property (aseity) and does not have it — a flat contradiction. The homoousios doctrine requires that all three Persons share all essential divine properties. Aseity is an essential divine property. But the doctrine of processions says the Son lacks aseity. Therefore, the homoousios doctrine and the doctrine of processions are inconsistent with each other.²⁸

This is a profound result. It means the problem is not divine temporality at all — the problem is the doctrine of divine processions itself. Whether God is timeless or temporal, the processions create a conflict with homoousios by attributing aseity to the Father but not to the Son.

Attempts to Save the Processions

Theologians have tried various strategies to avoid this contradiction. Some have replaced "causation" with "grounding" — the Father does not cause the Son to exist but rather "grounds" the Son's existence. But as Mullins argues, this does not actually solve the problem. If the Son's existence is grounded in the Father, then the Son's existence is still derived and dependent. The Son still lacks aseity, and the contradiction remains.²⁹

Others have tried to redefine aseity so that it applies to the Trinity as a whole rather than to each Person individually. On this view, the Trinity taken as a unit is a se, but individual Persons need not be. Hasker takes this approach, arguing that certain independence conditions are requirements for the Trinity as a whole but "none of them is a requirement for each divine person."³⁰ But this creates its own problems. If the Son lacks aseity — if the Son's existence is derived from and dependent on the Father — then the Son is, in a straightforward sense, ontologically subordinate to the Father. The Father is self-existent; the Son is not. That looks like exactly the kind of inequality that the homoousios doctrine was designed to prevent.

Still others have appealed to ineffable mystery. The church fathers — Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, and others — sometimes acknowledged the difficulty and simply declared that the divine processions are a mystery beyond human comprehension. As Mullins observes, the fathers sometimes even cited Isaiah 53:8 (translating it as "who can speak of his generation?") to justify this appeal to mystery.³¹ But as Timothy Pawl has pointed out, one cannot play the "ineffable mystery" card when faced with a derived contradiction. If the premises logically entail a contradiction, the response cannot be "it's a mystery" — the response must be to reject one of the premises.³²

The Temporalist Solution: God Has Always Been Temporal

With the doctrine of divine processions set aside, the divine temporalist is free to affirm the following picture of God's eternal life:

God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — has always existed as three co-equal, co-eternal, perichoretically united Persons. None of the three is caused by or derived from the others. All three share the same divine essence fully and equally. Their perichoretic life — their mutual love, mutual knowledge, mutual willing, and mutual delight — is a dynamic, living, active reality that involves genuine temporal succession. This temporal succession is what we might call "divine time" or "metaphysical time" — a form of time that is qualitatively different from created, physical, measurable clock-time but is genuinely temporal in the sense that it involves real sequence, real "before and after," and real dynamism.

God Was Never Atemporal

If the Trinity's perichoretic life is inherently temporal, then God was never in a state of absolute timelessness. There was never a "phase" of God's existence in which He experienced no sequence, no succession, no before-and-after whatsoever. This is a significant departure from the classical tradition, which has generally held that God is timelessly eternal. But I believe it is the right departure, for all the reasons we have discussed in this book. A genuinely living, relational, personal God — a God who loves, who acts, who communicates within His own triune being — is a God who experiences temporal succession.

This does not mean that God is "trapped" in time or "limited" by time. God's temporal experience is His own — it is qualitatively different from ours. He is not at the mercy of the clock. He does not wait anxiously for the future or regret the past. His experience of temporal succession is the experience of a God who is the Lord of time, not its prisoner. As we have argued throughout this book, God's temporality is combined with His unique ability to access all moments of created time — past, present, and future — through what we have called "transcendent temporal access" (see Chapter 7 for the full development of this model).

Created Clock-Time Began at Creation, but Time Itself Did Not

A common way of putting the point is this: "time began at creation." And in one sense, this is true. Physical, measurable, structured time — the time of clocks and calendars, of years and seconds and nanoseconds — began when God created the physical universe. Before creation, there was no physical universe and therefore no physical time. The Big Bang marks the beginning of cosmic time.

But in another, deeper sense, "time began at creation" is misleading. Because time itself — understood as genuine sequence and succession — did not begin at creation. Time, in this deeper sense, is an attribute of God's own being, grounded in the perichoretic life of the Trinity. God was experiencing temporal succession before He created anything. The three Persons were living their dynamic, relational life together before the universe existed. That life involved a genuine "before" and "after" — even though there was nothing external to measure it against.

Mullins captures this distinction nicely. On his "identification version of divine temporality," at the pre-creation moment, God exists "without beginning, without end, and without succession" — but not necessarily without succession, as the atemporalist claims. God could undergo succession if He freely chose to act. This pre-creation moment is a genuine temporal location, even though no intrinsic change is occurring in it. It is "earlier-than any possible moment that God might freely bring about."³³ This is fundamentally different from divine timelessness, because a timeless moment cannot stand in any "earlier-than" relations to other moments.

Craig's "Timeless Sans Creation" Is Unnecessary

One of the most important implications of our argument is that Craig's hybrid view — timeless without creation, temporal with creation — becomes unnecessary. Craig posited the timeless-sans-creation phase primarily to avoid the problem of an infinite past. If God was always temporal, then He has existed through an infinite series of past moments, which Craig's kalam cosmological argument says is impossible. The timeless phase solves this problem: God was timeless before creation (no infinite past), and then became temporal at creation.³⁴

But as we argued in detail in Chapter 8, Craig's two-phase view faces serious philosophical problems of its own. How are the timeless and temporal phases related? Not temporally — the timeless phase has no temporal properties. Not logically — timelessness and temporality are incompatible properties. Craig says "causally" — but then admits that God's timeless phase exercises no causal power, since all causal activity begins at creation. As DeWeese points out, Craig's view seems to entail the contradiction that God both is and is not temporal.³⁵

If the Trinity's perichoretic life already generates temporality, then there is no need for a timeless phase at all. God has always been temporal — not in the sense of existing within created, physical time (which only begins at creation), but in the sense of experiencing genuine succession within His own divine life. The timeless-sans-creation phase is an unnecessary complication that creates more problems than it solves.

The Question of the Infinite Divine Past

If God has always been temporal, does this mean the past is infinite? This is one of the most difficult questions in the entire debate, and we should approach it with appropriate humility. Craig's kalam cosmological argument holds that an actual infinite cannot be formed by successive addition, so the past cannot be infinite. If the past is infinite, then an infinite number of events have occurred — and Craig argues that this is impossible.³⁶

First, DeWeese argues that the kalam argument may not apply to God's pre-creation temporal life. Craig's arguments against the actual infinite target collections of "finite, contingent, moveable entities that can be added or subtracted" (as J.P. Moreland puts it). But God's pre-creation mental states are not finite, contingent, or moveable in the way that physical objects are. They are divine mental states — infinite in nature, necessary in existence, and not the sort of things that generate the absurdities Craig worries about (like Hilbert's Hotel). As DeWeese observes, "it is not at all clear that a causal succession of God's mental states would satisfy the conjunction of qualifications" needed to generate the standard objections to actual infinites.³⁷

Second, the kalam argument's second key premise — that an actual infinite cannot be formed by successive addition — may not be as strong as it appears. DeWeese notes that this premise "does not seem clearly to be true" when applied to God's metaphysical time.³⁸ If God has always existed, then the infinite series of past moments was never "formed" by starting at some point and adding moments one by one. It simply always existed. No one "counted" from negative infinity to the present. God has simply always been — and "always" means through an infinite past.

Third, Mullins offers a different approach. On his identification version of divine temporality, God existed in a pre-creation moment that involved no intrinsic change. If no change was occurring, there were no successive events to count. The pre-creation "moment" may be a single, infinite-duration state rather than an infinite series of discrete events.³⁹ Richard Swinburne takes a similar view, arguing that God's pre-creation existence was a single, undifferentiated temporal state — with no ticking clock, no discrete events, no "successive addition" of anything. Swinburne argues that there would be no difference between a divine act of self-awareness lasting one millisecond and one lasting a million years, because in the absence of any external standard of measurement, duration is amorphous and unmeasured.⁴⁰

I find the third option most promising, though I want to be cautious about speculating too far into what God's pre-creation life was like. What I am confident about is this: the kalam argument, even if sound, does not force us into Craig's timeless-sans-creation position. There are credible alternatives that allow the temporalist to affirm that God has always been temporal without being committed to an infinite series of discrete past events in the way Craig's argument targets.

The Classical Response: Are the Intra-Trinitarian Processions Timeless?

We need to engage one more important argument from the classical tradition. Even apart from Craig's specific arguments, the classical tradition has long insisted that the intra-Trinitarian processions are timeless. The Nicene Creed says the Son is "begotten of the Father before all ages," and the fifth ecumenical council makes it explicit that the processions are achronos — without time.⁴¹ This was the orthodox answer to Arianism: the Father's begetting of the Son is not a temporal event but a timeless, eternal reality. The Son is co-eternal with the Father because the procession by which the Son exists is itself eternal and timeless.

First, if we are right that the doctrine of divine processions should be abandoned (as argued above), then the question of whether the processions are timeless or temporal becomes moot. There are no processions — the three Persons are equally a se, equally self-existent, and none is caused or generated by another. The historical context in which the processions were declared "timeless" was the Arian controversy, where the whole point was to deny that the Son had a beginning. If we reject the processions entirely, we preserve the anti-Arian conclusion (the Son has no beginning) without needing the problematic mechanism (timeless processions).

Second, even if one wishes to retain the processions in some form, the claim that they are timeless faces serious difficulties. As Mullins has argued extensively, the traditional defenders of timeless processions — from Athanasius to the medieval scholastics — typically relied on divine timelessness as a whole to guarantee the timelessness of the processions. If the Father is timeless and the Son is timeless and the begetting is timeless, then there is no temporal gap between them. But if we have already shown that divine timelessness faces overwhelming objections (as we argued in Chapters 5–6 and 30), then the foundation for timeless processions collapses. You cannot have timeless processions without a timeless God.⁴²

Moreover, as Kevin Giles points out, divine timelessness plays a load-bearing role in the doctrine of the processions. It was precisely because the processions were understood as timeless that they could avoid the Arian conclusion that the Son had a beginning. Remove timelessness, and the processions no longer do the theological work they were designed to do — which is exactly what Helm's argument demonstrates.⁴³

Implications for Other Doctrines

The argument of this chapter has significant implications for several other theological loci. Let me briefly note the most important connections.

The Incarnation

If God the Son has always been temporal — experiencing genuine succession within the perichoretic life of the Trinity — then the Incarnation is not the moment when a timeless God "enters" time. Rather, it is the moment when an already-temporal divine Person takes on human nature and begins to experience creaturely time from the inside. This makes the Incarnation far more philosophically coherent than it is on a timelessness view, because we do not need to explain how a being with no temporal properties suddenly acquires them. The Son already has temporal properties; at the Incarnation, He adds creaturely temporal properties to the divine temporal properties He has always had. (This argument is developed in full in Chapter 27.)

Divine Emotions

If the Trinity's inner life is genuinely temporal, then God's emotional responses to creaturely events can also be genuinely temporal. God can truly grieve over sin, truly rejoice over repentance, and truly respond with compassion to suffering — because He exists in a temporal mode that allows for genuine responsiveness. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond to anything, because response requires a before (the event) and an after (the response). A temporal God can. (This is developed further in Chapter 28 and in the companion book, The Heart of God.)

Divine Action and Providence

A temporal God who has always been temporal can act in the world in a genuinely interactive way. He can hear prayers and respond to them. He can guide history in real time. He can perform miracles at the right moments. He can grieve with those who grieve and rejoice with those who rejoice. All of this requires temporality — and the Trinitarian foundation for temporality developed in this chapter provides the metaphysical grounding for it. (Providence and divine action are treated in detail in Chapter 29.)

The Intermediate State and Eternity

If time is grounded in God's own being rather than in the created order, then time does not cease when the physical universe ends (or when a person dies). The intermediate state — the period between death and resurrection — involves temporal experience of some kind, because God is temporal and those who are with God participate in His temporal life. This coheres well with the biblical evidence that the souls under the altar cry "How long?" (Rev 6:10) and that the rich man and Lazarus experience events in sequence (Luke 16:19–31). (These texts are exegeted in detail in Chapter 34.)

Objections and Responses

Let me now address several objections that might be raised against the argument of this chapter.

Objection 1: "Doesn't this make the Trinity a process rather than a being?"

No. To say that the Trinity's inner life is dynamic and temporal is not to say that God is a process rather than a being. Persons are beings who engage in processes — loving, knowing, willing, acting. A human person is a being who thinks thoughts in sequence, loves in real time, and acts in the world temporally. Nobody says that this makes a human person a mere "process." Similarly, a divine Person who experiences temporal succession within the perichoretic life is a being — an eternal, infinite, uncreated, self-existent being — who experiences His life temporally. The temporality is a feature of how God lives, not a denial of the fact that He is.

Objection 2: "Doesn't temporal succession in God imply that God changes, and therefore that He is imperfect?"

This objection assumes that all change implies imperfection — that any transition from one state to another involves a loss or a deficiency. But that assumption is false. Some changes involve no loss whatsoever. A fountain that is always full and always flowing changes constantly but never becomes less full. A musician who plays a beautiful piece moves from note to note, but each note is perfect. Similarly, God's temporal succession does not involve any decline, any loss, or any deficiency. His love is always perfect, always full, always complete — but it is also always active, always dynamic, always alive. The change involved is not the change from imperfection to perfection (or vice versa) but the change involved in living — the dynamic, vital activity of three Persons loving each other forever. (For the full treatment of divine immutability and the distinction between essential and relational change, see Chapter 30.)

Objection 3: "Doesn't this position conflict with the creeds?"

This is a serious concern, and I want to address it honestly. The Nicene Creed says the Son is "begotten of the Father before all ages." If we reject the doctrine of divine processions, are we rejecting the Creed?

I do not think so — at least not in its essential intent. The Creed's purpose in affirming that the Son is "begotten of the Father before all ages" was to deny the Arian claim that the Son was a creature who came into existence at some point in time. The Creed was saying: "The Son is not a creature. The Son is fully divine, co-eternal with the Father, sharing the same essence." I affirm all of this wholeheartedly. The Son is fully divine, co-eternal with the Father, and homoousios with the Father and the Spirit.

What I am questioning is not the anti-Arian intent of the Creed but the specific metaphysical mechanism by which it was expressed. The creedal language of "begetting" was used to explain how the Son could be fully divine and yet distinct from the Father. But as Mullins and Craig have both argued, the causal language of the processions creates more problems than it solves — it leads to the Inconsistency Problem and the threat of ontological subordinationism.⁴⁴ We can preserve the Creed's essential teaching — the full, co-equal, co-eternal divinity of the Son — while updating the metaphysical framework used to express it. This is not unfaithfulness to the tradition; it is theological development in service of the tradition's deepest commitments.

Objection 4: "If we reject the processions, how do we distinguish the Persons?"

As noted above, Mullins argues that the Persons are distinguished by their unique first-person perspectives, de se beliefs, and personal properties — not by causal relations. The Father knows Himself as Father. The Son knows Himself as Son. The Spirit knows Himself as Spirit. These are unique, irreducible personal identities that do not require any one Person to be the "cause" of another. The Persons are also distinguished in the economy of salvation by the distinct roles they freely assume — the Father sends, the Son becomes incarnate, the Spirit applies — but these economic roles are contingent and voluntary, not constitutive of the Persons' identity.⁴⁵

Objection 5: "Isn't this position novel? Hasn't the church always affirmed divine timelessness?"

It is true that the majority tradition in church history has affirmed divine timelessness. But as we surveyed in Part III of this book (Chapters 11–15), the majority tradition also developed under heavy influence from Greek philosophy — particularly the Platonic and Neoplatonic assumption that change and temporality are marks of imperfection. Many of the church fathers who affirmed divine timelessness did so because they shared this Greek assumption, not because the biblical text demanded it. When we go back to the Bible itself (as we did in Part IV, Chapters 16–23), we find a God who acts, speaks, responds, grieves, rejoices, and interacts with His creation in thoroughly temporal language. The biblical portrait of God is far more congenial to divine temporality than to divine timelessness.

Moreover, the position I am defending has important recent advocates. Swinburne, Wolterstorff, DeWeese, and Mullins have all argued for divine temporality on philosophical grounds. The position is not novel in the sense of being unprecedented — it has been developed carefully by some of the finest minds in contemporary philosophy of religion.

The Author's Position: Perichoresis and Dynamic Divine Temporality

Let me now pull the threads of this chapter together and state my own position as clearly as I can.

I believe that the dynamic, perichoretic life of the Trinity is the foundation of divine temporality. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have always existed in a living, active, relational communion that involves genuine temporal succession — not the measurable, clock-driven succession of created time, but a deeper, more fundamental form of succession rooted in the dynamic activity of three Persons loving, knowing, and willing together.

Compared to classical timelessness, it avoids the deep incoherence of claiming that a living, personal, relational God exists in a frozen, unchanging, succession-less "eternal now." It takes the biblical language of God's inner life seriously — language that consistently portrays God as active, dynamic, and relational. And it avoids the problems that timelessness creates for the Incarnation, divine emotions, divine action, and the knowledge of tensed facts (see Chapters 6, 27, 28, and 29 for these arguments).

Compared to Craig's hybrid view, it avoids the puzzling and arguably incoherent claim that God has two "phases" of existence — one timeless, one temporal — with no clear account of how they are related. Craig's timeless-sans-creation phase is an unnecessary complication once we see that the Trinity already generates temporality. We do not need a timeless phase to avoid the infinite past problem, because the pre-creation divine life may involve amorphous, unmeasured duration rather than an infinite series of discrete events.

Compared to open theism, this position preserves exhaustive definite foreknowledge. God's temporal experience does not mean He is limited to knowing only the present. Through His transcendent temporal access, God can see and know all of time — past, present, and future — while still experiencing genuine succession within His own divine life. As argued in Chapter 25, foreknowledge is not causation: God's knowing what we will freely do does not cause us to do it. And as argued in Chapter 32, divine temporality does not require an "open" future.

The position I am defending — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access, grounded in the perichoretic life of the Trinity — is, I believe, the most biblically faithful, philosophically coherent, and theologically fruitful understanding of God's relationship to time available to us. It preserves everything that matters in the classical tradition (God's eternity, His infinity, His unchanging character, His sovereignty over time) while correcting the errors introduced by the Hellenistic assumption that temporality is a deficiency.

Conclusion: The Living God Beyond the Clock

We began this chapter by asking what the Trinity has to do with time. The answer, I have argued, is: everything. The Trinity is not a static structure but a living communion. The perichoretic life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a dynamic, active, relational reality — and dynamic, active, relational realities are temporal realities. Time is not something that began at creation. Time is grounded in the very being of God — in the eternal, dynamic, living fellowship of the three divine Persons.

This means that when we pray, we are not reaching out to a frozen, distant deity locked in a changeless "eternal now." We are speaking to a living God — a God whose inner life is alive with the dynamic love of Father, Son, and Spirit. A God who acts, who responds, who feels, who cares. A God who is genuinely present with us in every moment of our lives — not because He stands outside of time looking in, but because He is the Lord of time itself, the One in whom all temporal succession finds its ultimate source and ground.

The classical tradition was right about many things. God is eternal. God is infinite. God's character never changes. God is sovereign over all of time and history. All of these things are true, and I affirm them without reservation. But the classical tradition was wrong to equate "eternal" with "timeless." An eternal God is a God who exists through all time — past, present, and future — with no beginning and no end. An eternal God can also be a temporal God — a God who experiences genuine sequence while also transcending creaturely limitations. The Trinity shows us that this is not only possible but necessary. The living God of Scripture — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is the God beyond the clock.⁴⁶

Footnotes

¹ The thesis of this chapter aligns closely with the arguments of R. T. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology (London: Routledge, 2025), chap. 6, "The Trinity," and Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, Routledge Philosophy of Religion Series (London: Routledge, 2004), chap. 10, "Implications of Omnitemporality." Both argue that the dynamic life of the Trinity grounds divine temporality. ↩

² John Anthony McGuckin, ed., The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 260. The term literally means "going around" or "rotation" and was adapted theologically to describe the mutual interpenetration of the divine Persons. ↩

³ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "The Immanent Trinity." Mullins notes that thinkers like Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor maintained that perichoretic inseparability distinguishes the Trinity from tritheism. Cf. John Duns Scotus, who argued that this inseparability allows the Persons to be the same being without being identical to each other. ↩

⁴ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," note 1. ↩

⁵ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 9, "Models of Divine Temporality," note 31. ↩

⁶ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 10, "Implications of Omnitemporality," under "Conclusion." ↩

⁷ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "The Immanent Trinity." ↩

⁸ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "The Immanent Trinity." ↩

⁹ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "The Immanent Trinity." These four desiderata are common among Trinitarians after the Nicene Creed, and Mullins intentionally states them in minimal terms to allow for multiple models. ↩

¹⁰ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "The Immanent Trinity." ↩

¹¹ Keith Yandell, "How Many Times Does Three Go into One?" in Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, ed. Thomas McCall and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 168. Cited and discussed in Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "The Immanent Trinity." ↩

¹² William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 85. ↩

¹³ Craig, Time and Eternity, 85. ↩

¹⁴ Craig, Time and Eternity, 85. ↩

¹⁵ Craig, Time and Eternity, 85–86. ↩

¹⁶ Craig, Time and Eternity, 85. ↩

¹⁷ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 4, "Causal Theories of Time." DeWeese develops his causal theory throughout chaps. 4–5 and applies it to God in chaps. 9–10. ↩

¹⁸ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 9, "Models of Divine Temporality." ↩

¹⁹ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 10, "Implications of Omnitemporality," under "Conclusion." ↩

²⁰ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "Helm's Subordinationist Argument." Mullins explains that the Nicene Creed of 381, by affirming the Son was "begotten of the Father before all ages," intended to affirm that the Father timelessly causes the Son to exist in such a way that the Son is also timeless. ↩

²¹ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "Helm's Subordinationist Argument." The formal presentation of the Charge of Arianism is Mullins's reconstruction of Helm's argument. ↩

²² Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 14, "Time and the Trinity." Helm first raised this objection in his earlier writings and developed it further in the second edition. ↩

²³ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "Helm's Subordinationist Argument." Mullins is discussing William Hasker, Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 220–221. ↩

²⁴ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "Helm's Subordinationist Argument." Mullins is discussing Hasker's second response, which involves rejecting the Swinburne Causal Principle for divine causes. ↩

²⁵ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." ↩

²⁶ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." ↩

²⁷ Lindsay K. Cleveland, cited in Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." Cleveland is discussing the central importance of divine aseity in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought. ↩

²⁸ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." The formal argument derives a contradiction from IP1 (minimal homoousios), IP3 (aetiological subordination), and standard claims about divine aseity. ↩

²⁹ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." Mullins considers the strategy of replacing causation with grounding but argues it does not resolve the problem. ↩

³⁰ William Hasker, "God's Only Begotten Son," in Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, ed. Thomas McCall and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 225–226. Discussed in Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "Fiddling with Aseity." ↩

³¹ Stephen R. Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 41. Cited in Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." ↩

³² Timothy Pawl, In Defense of Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 89–90. Cited in Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." ↩

³³ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 4, "Creationism," under the section comparing timeless existence to a temporal pre-creation moment. ↩

³⁴ Craig, Time and Eternity, 232–237. Craig develops his two-phase view in chap. 6, "Divine Eternity." ↩

³⁵ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 10, "Implications of Omnitemporality," under the discussion of Craig's view. DeWeese argues that the conjunction "God is (tenselessly) timeless and God is (present tense) temporal" appears to be a contradiction. ↩

³⁶ Craig, Time and Eternity, 221–230. Craig's kalam arguments are developed here and in his earlier work, The Kalam Cosmological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1979). ↩

³⁷ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 10, "Implications of Omnitemporality." DeWeese is engaging with Wes Morriston's and J.P. Moreland's qualifications of the kalam argument. ↩

³⁸ DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 10, "Implications of Omnitemporality." ↩

³⁹ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 4, "Creationism." Mullins argues that on his identification version of divine temporality, the pre-creation moment involves no intrinsic change — God exists "without beginning, without end, and without succession," but not necessarily without succession as the atemporalist claims. ↩

⁴⁰ Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 140. Swinburne argues that in the absence of external measurement, there is no difference between a divine act of self-awareness lasting one millisecond and one lasting a million years. Cf. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, chap. 9, "Models of Divine Temporality," note 32. ↩

⁴¹ Richard Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 143. Cited in Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "Helm's Subordinationist Argument." Cf. Timothy Pawl, Conciliar Trinitarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 18. ↩

⁴² See the arguments against divine timelessness developed in Chapters 5–6 of this book, as well as R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chaps. 3–6, which systematically dismantles the timelessness research program. ↩

⁴³ Kevin Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 108. Cited in Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "Helm's Subordinationist Argument." ↩

⁴⁴ Craig has argued that the doctrine of divine processions should be abandoned because it lacks biblical support and leads to subordinationism. See William Lane Craig, "Is God the Son Begotten in His Divine Nature?" TheoLogica 3 (2019): 29. Mullins agrees: "Trinitarians of all stripes, regardless of their views on divine eternality, should abandon the doctrine of divine processions." Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "There Is More Than One Way to Be an Arian: The Inconsistency Problem." ↩

⁴⁵ Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 6, "The Trinity," under "The Immanent Trinity." ↩

⁴⁶ For the author's full model of dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access, see Chapter 7. For the application of this model to foreknowledge, see Chapter 25. For the argument from the Incarnation, see Chapter 27. For the argument from divine emotions, see Chapter 28. ↩

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