Chapter 27

The Incarnation and Time

Why a Timeless God Cannot Become Flesh

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." — John 1:14

Introduction: The Central Event of Christian Faith

Christianity has a center. That center is not a philosophical idea, not a moral system, and not even a set of doctrines. The center of Christianity is a Person — God the Son, who became flesh and blood at a particular moment, in a particular place, under a particular Roman emperor. We call that event the Incarnation, from the Latin in carne, meaning "in flesh." The Incarnation is the moment when the eternal God did something no ancient pagan philosopher would have dreamed of: He entered the world as a baby boy, born to a young woman in a manger in Bethlehem. He lived a real human life. He grew tired. He cried. He ate. He slept. And, in the end, He died on a Roman cross.¹

If this is true — and the creeds of the church confess that it is — then the Incarnation cannot be a side topic in Christian theology. It has to be the topic, the lens through which we look at every other doctrine. The Apostle Paul says plainly, "In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Col 2:9). The writer to the Hebrews calls Jesus "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature" (Heb 1:3). And John, in his magnificent prologue, tells us that the eternal Logos (λόγος), the Word who was with God in the beginning and who was God, "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).²

So here is the question this chapter is going to tackle. If Christianity's central event is that the eternal God became a temporal human being — that He was born, grew, suffered, and died — what does that tell us about God's relationship to time? I want to argue, in this chapter, that the Incarnation is one of the most powerful reasons we have for believing that God the Son is genuinely temporal. I want to argue that the classical doctrine of divine timelessness — the view that God exists in a changeless, successionless "eternal now" — cannot be squared with the Incarnation without producing contradictions, heresy, or both. And I want to walk carefully through the major strategies that timelessness defenders have offered, showing why each one ultimately fails.

This is a bold claim. Plenty of thoughtful Christians have believed in both divine timelessness and the Incarnation for almost two thousand years. I do not want to dismiss their work. They were wrestling with real questions, and they often did so brilliantly. But I believe — and I will try to show — that they never quite got around the basic problem: "becoming" is a temporal verb. If God the Son truly became flesh, then something new happened in His life. Something was true of Him at one moment that was not true of Him at an earlier moment. And that is enough, all by itself, to give God a history.³

Let me say, too, how this chapter fits into the larger book. In Chapter 21, we looked at the biblical portrait of Jesus — how the Gospels present His real growth, His real learning, His real suffering, His real death. In Chapter 26, we explored how the inner life of the Trinity itself generates a kind of "divine time" through the mutual love and response of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, in this chapter, we are going to bring the two together. We will use the Incarnation — that moment when the Son stepped into our creaturely time — as a test case for the whole debate over God and time. If a model of divine eternity cannot make sense of the Incarnation, then that model has to go.⁴

Here is my roadmap for the chapter. First, I will lay out the problem clearly, using the Definition of Chalcedon as our baseline. Second, I will survey the main Christological models on offer, especially the two-minds view, which is the most popular attempt today to hold timelessness and the Incarnation together. Third, I will walk through the four major strategies that atemporalists use to reconcile timelessness with the Incarnation, and I will show — drawing especially on Mullins and Holland — that each strategy fails. Fourth, I will sketch the temporalist solution: God the Son was always temporal, and the Incarnation is not a timeless being mysteriously stepping into time but an already-temporal divine Person entering creaturely time in a new mode. Fifth, and finally, I will summarize what I take the cumulative force of the argument to be, and I will respond to a few lingering objections.

The Problem Stated: Chalcedon and the Qua Move

In the year 451 AD, in the city of Chalcedon (across the Bosphorus from Constantinople), a council of roughly 500 bishops met to settle a question that had been tearing the church apart: How is Jesus Christ both God and man? After weeks of prayer, argument, and careful drafting, they produced what we now call the Definition of Chalcedon. It is the single most important Christological document in church history, and it remains the standard of orthodoxy for Catholics, Orthodox, and nearly all Protestants.⁵ Here is the heart of it:

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man... to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son.⁶

Let me break that down in plain English. Chalcedon teaches five things, and each of them matters for our question. First, Jesus Christ is one Person. He is not two people sharing a body. He is not a human being with a divine ghost riding along inside. He is one Person, one "I," one subject. Second, this one Person has two natures — one fully divine, one fully human. Third, those two natures are not mixed together into some new "God-man" nature. The divine nature stays divine, and the human nature stays human. Fourth, the two natures are also not separated from each other. They come together in one Person, Jesus of Nazareth. Fifth, the "properties" (attributes, qualities) of each nature are preserved: the divine nature does not lose its divine properties, and the human nature does not lose its human properties.

Now, right away, you can feel the difficulty. Divinity, on the classical view, includes properties like timelessness, immutability (changelessness), and impassibility (the inability to suffer). Humanity, on any view, includes properties like temporality, mutability, and passibility (the ability to suffer). So Jesus has both timeless and temporal properties? Both changeless and changing? Both impassible and able to suffer? How can the same Person have contradictory properties?

The classical answer is called the qua move, or the "reduplicative strategy." It goes like this: Christ is timeless qua divine (meaning "in virtue of His divine nature") but temporal qua human ("in virtue of His human nature"). The two natures keep their own properties; the Person holds them both. Tertullian used this move, and so did Athanasius, Apollinarius, and Gregory of Nazianzus. They thought they learned the strategy from the apostle Peter himself, in 1 Peter 4:1: "Christ suffered in the flesh." Christ suffered — but in His human flesh, not in His divine nature.⁷

At first glance, the qua move looks promising. After all, we use this kind of reasoning all the time without thinking about it. Take an apple. We say, "The apple is red." Why is it red? Because its skin is red. Peel the skin, and it is no longer red. So we might say the apple is red qua skin — in virtue of its skin. Or take Socrates. "Socrates is wise." Why? Because he has a well-trained mind. Remove his mind, and he is no longer wise. Socrates is wise qua mind.⁸

The thought is that we can apply this same logic to Christ. "Christ is timeless qua divinity; Christ is temporal qua humanity." The contradiction, it seems, disappears. The divine nature is timeless; the human nature is temporal; and the one Person, Jesus, holds them both without contradiction. For centuries, this has been the standard answer.

But here is where the trouble begins. Not every pair of opposing properties can be handled by the qua move. And I want to argue — following R. T. Mullins's careful work in The End of the Timeless God and Richard Holland's excellent God, Time, and the Incarnation — that timelessness and temporality are exactly the kind of properties the qua move cannot rescue.⁹ Before I make that case, though, let me lay out the leading Christological model on offer today. That way we can see, concretely, what the atemporalist has to work with.

The Two-Minds View: The Best Option on the Table

Since the late twentieth century, the most popular and most carefully developed model of the Incarnation among analytic philosophers of religion has been the two-minds view, associated especially with Thomas V. Morris's 1986 book The Logic of God Incarnate.¹⁰ Almost all recent attempts to defend the compatibility of divine timelessness with the Incarnation assume some version of this model. So we need to understand it.

The two-minds view starts with a distinction between a kind-essence and an individual-essence. A kind-essence is the set of properties that make something the kind of thing it is. So, for example, "bovinity" is the kind-essence of cows — the cluster of properties that make a thing a cow. "Humanity" is the kind-essence of human beings. "Divinity" is the kind-essence of God. An individual-essence, by contrast, is what makes this particular individual the very individual he or she is. It is the "haecceity" or "thisness" of a person.¹¹

The clever move in the two-minds view is this: a single individual-essence can have more than one kind-essence. It can have only one essentially, but it can have others contingently. So the second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, has divinity as His essential kind-essence. But He can contingently take on humanity as a second kind-essence, without giving up His divinity. In doing so, He does not become a different individual; He is still God the Son. But He now has everything required for being fully divine and everything required for being fully human.

How does this work out in practice? On the two-minds view, Christ has a divine mind (the eternal mind of God the Son, which possesses all the divine attributes) and a human mind (the created mind of Jesus of Nazareth, which grows, learns, feels hungry, and so on). The two minds are related in a special way. Morris calls this an "asymmetric accessing relation": the divine mind has full access to the human mind, but the human mind has access to the divine mind only as the divine Person wills. It is something like the relation between your conscious mind and your subconscious. You are one person, but your subconscious knows things your conscious mind does not directly access.¹²

The two-minds view is a "three-part Christology": it says that Christ is composed of a divine mind, a human mind, and a human body. There are also four-part versions (if one holds a trichotomist anthropology of body, soul, and spirit) and two-part versions (more like Athanasius, where the divine mind just takes a human body). But the three-part version is the most common.¹³

I should say at the outset that I think the two-minds view, properly understood, can be a helpful and even illuminating way to think about the Incarnation. I do not reject it wholesale. My concern is only with what happens when you try to combine it with divine timelessness. As we will see, the combination does not work. But before I get to that, let me note a few other Christological options on the table, so we have the full range in view.

One alternative is kenotic Christology, based on Paul's striking language in Philippians 2:7: "but emptied himself" (ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν, ekenōsen heauton). Kenotic models come in two broad flavors. Functional kenosis says that in the Incarnation, the Son did not give up any divine attributes; He simply limited the exercise of them, choosing (for example) not to make use of His omniscience in His human life. Ontological kenosis says that the Son actually gave up certain divine attributes — typically the "omni-attributes" like omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence — in order to live a genuinely human life. Ontological kenosis is more controversial, and more defenders of classical theism reject it, but both versions have thoughtful champions.¹⁴

Mullins rightly points out that neither flavor of kenosis can be combined with strict divine timelessness. The very idea of "emptying" or "limiting" involves giving something up, which involves change, which involves a before and an after. A timeless God cannot give up anything at a particular moment in history, because a timeless God has no particular moments in His life.¹⁵ So kenotic Christology, however it is developed, is simply incompatible with divine timelessness from the start. That leaves the two-minds view (and its cousins) as the atemporalist's best bet.

So here is where we stand. The classical theologian wants to hold two things together: (a) God the Son is timeless, immutable, and impassible, and (b) God the Son became incarnate, lived a human life in the first century, and suffered on the cross. To hold these together, the classical theologian typically adopts something like the two-minds view and deploys the qua move: Christ is timeless qua divinity and temporal qua humanity. Now I want to argue that this strategy, however elegantly developed, ultimately fails. I will do so in four steps, each corresponding to a major argument from Mullins's critique.

Problem #1: The Communicatio Idiomatum Makes the Qua Move Collapse

The first problem with the qua move, as applied to timelessness, is that it runs headlong into another doctrine of Chalcedonian Christology: the communicatio idiomatum, or "communication of attributes." Let me explain what this is, because it is going to do a lot of work in the argument.

The communicatio idiomatum is the classical teaching that the attributes of both natures can be truly said of the one Person of Christ. So we can say things like, "God died on the cross," or "The Son of God was crucified." These sentences sound strange at first. After all, the divine nature cannot die. Death is a property of the human nature, not the divine. But because Christ is one Person with two natures, we can attribute to the Person anything that is true of either nature. John of Damascus puts it this way: it is only in virtue of His humanity that the Son was crucified, but since He is one Person, we can say of Him — the one Person — that He was crucified. We can say, in the strict sense, "God was crucified," because the Person who was crucified is God.¹⁶

This is not a minor technical detail. The communicatio idiomatum is essential to the gospel. If we cannot truly say, "God loved me and gave Himself for me" (compare Galatians 2:20), then we do not have a gospel. The early church fought long and hard against any view (like Nestorianism, which we will meet in a moment) that would divide the Person of Christ in such a way that we could not make these unified statements. So the communicatio idiomatum is non-negotiable for any orthodox Christology.

Here is the problem, as Mullins presses it. If we use the qua move and say, "Christ is atemporal qua divine but temporal qua human," and then we bring in the communicatio idiomatum, what we actually get is: "Christ simpliciter is atemporal" and "Christ simpliciter is temporal" — where simpliciter means "plain and simple," without qualification. That is, we get both "Christ is atemporal" and "Christ is temporal" applied to the very same Person. And that is a straight contradiction.¹⁷

The logical rule at work here is this: if "X qua G is F" is true, then "X is F" follows. If the apple qua skin is red, then the apple is red. If Socrates qua mind is wise, then Socrates is wise. The qua move works as a kind of explanation (it tells us why X is F), but it does not remove the plain fact that X is F. So when we say Christ is temporal qua human, it still follows that Christ is temporal. And when we say Christ is atemporal qua divine, it still follows that Christ is atemporal. And now we have contradictory properties attached to the same Person.¹⁸

Some defenders of the two-minds view might try to escape this by dropping the communicatio idiomatum or weakening it somehow. But that is not an option for an orthodox Christian. The communicatio idiomatum is how we say that God really loved us, that God really died for us, that God really took our nature. Without it, Jesus becomes a kind of divine-human team — a divine Person and a human person working together — which is precisely the heresy of Nestorianism that the early church rejected.¹⁹ And as I will show in the next section, the timelessness defender cannot avoid something very much like Nestorianism anyway.

Here is how Mullins puts the bind: "It is not the case that we have two unrelated subjects of predication. We have one person, one ultimate bearer of properties, who is said to be atemporal and temporal. Once we bring back in the communicatio idiomatum we have <Christ is atemporal simpliciter> and <Christ is temporal simpliciter>."²⁰ The contradiction does not go away. It just hides briefly behind the qua qualifier, then reappears as soon as we remember that the two natures belong to one Person.

The reason the qua move works for properties like "crucified" and "uncrucified" (to take one example) is that these are properties of the body, and the body and the divine nature are genuinely distinct things. The body can be crucified; the divine nature cannot. But timelessness and temporality are not properties of bodies — they are properties of the whole Person. A Person either experiences succession or does not. A Person either has a before and an after in His life or does not. You cannot tuck the succession away into the human nature while keeping the divine nature successionless, because it is the same Person who is (allegedly) experiencing both. Holland makes a similar point: "succession, in the context of the atemporal view, is nothing more than temporal sequence... the term 'simultaneous' is designed to rule out the notion of temporal sequence in the Divine life."²¹ If Christ — the Person — experiences real succession in His human life, then God the Son experiences real succession, and timelessness is lost.

Problem #2: Two-Minds Christology Risks Nestorianism

The second problem is even deeper. Even on its own terms, the two-minds view faces a serious charge of Nestorianism when combined with strict divine timelessness. Let me explain.

Nestorianism is the heresy (named after Nestorius, fifth-century bishop of Constantinople) that divides Christ into two separate persons — a divine person and a human person — who are somehow joined together. Classical orthodoxy, following the Council of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), rejects this firmly. Christ is one Person with two natures, not two persons.²²

Now, on the two-minds view, we already have two minds — a divine mind and a human mind. On dyothelite Christology (affirmed at the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–81), we also have two wills — one belonging to each nature. The medieval tradition often said that a person just is "a rational nature with a will" or "a self-conscious subject." If Christ has two minds and two wills, does that not make Him two persons?²³

Most defenders of the two-minds view reply: "Normally, two minds and two wills would make two persons. But in the unique case of the God-man, the two minds come together in such a way that they function as one person." Fair enough. But here is where divine timelessness makes things much, much worse.

Consider what the two minds look like on a strictly timeless Christology. Mullins lays it out in a way that, frankly, made me wince when I first read it. The divine mind is timeless, immutable, impassible, simple, and pure act. The human mind is temporal, mutable, passible, composite, and has potentiality. The divine mind experiences only uninterrupted joy, has no emotional response to anything ad extra, cannot be tempted, cannot suffer, and cannot acquire knowledge. The human mind has real moments of suffering, temptation, emotional response, and genuine learning. The divine mind cannot be simultaneous with the human mind, since simultaneity is a temporal relation and the divine mind stands in no temporal relations at all. The divine mind performs all its actions in one timeless present; the human mind acts sequentially over time. The divine mind does not exercise direct causal control over the human mind, and vice versa.²⁴

When you set out the two minds this way, it is really hard to see how they are one Person and not two. They share no temporal relations, because one is timeless and the other is not. They share no emotional life, because the divine mind is impassible. They share no will, because each nature has its own will. They share no causal connection, since the divine mind cannot cause effects in time and the human mind is a temporal creature. What, exactly, unites them?

A classical answer is that they are united by the "assumption relation" — the unique relation by which the Son takes on this particular human nature. There is also the appeal to the en/anhypostasia distinction, which says that the human nature of Christ never existed as a person on its own, because from the moment it was conceived it was always united to the Son. These are important theological resources, and I do not want to dismiss them. But they face a real problem on the timelessness model.²⁵

Mullins argues that the timelessness view cannot really ground the an/enhypostasia constraint. The constraint says: the human nature of Christ would not be a person if it were not assumed by the Son. But on the two-minds view combined with timelessness, the human nature has a full mind, a full will, and a full body. It thinks, feels, suffers, grows, and prays — all in exactly the same way any human person does. On the timelessness view, the divine mind does not actually do anything in time with this human nature; it just timelessly "assumes" it from all eternity. So what is the functional difference between Christ's human nature and mine? My human nature also exists because God created it; if God were to "assume" my human nature in the same timeless way, would I not be a God-man too?²⁶

Proponents of the view will insist that there is something unique about the Son's assumption of this human nature. But what is that unique thing? On a temporal view, we can say: the Son actively willed, at a particular moment, to take on this particular human nature, and He continues to will that union moment by moment. The relationship is personal, ongoing, dynamic. On a timeless view, the "assumption" has to be a single timeless state, with no real temporal engagement. And it becomes hard to see how that timeless state amounts to anything more than a generic logical relation — a relation that does not obviously make the two minds into one Person.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying the two-minds view is inherently Nestorian. It may well be defensible when combined with divine temporality. What I am saying is that when you add strict timelessness, you end up with two "minds" that share so little — no temporal relations, no emotional life, no common acts — that the appearance of Nestorianism becomes nearly impossible to shake. And as orthodox Christians, we really do not want to end up with Nestorianism. So that is another strike against combining the two-minds view with divine timelessness.

Problem #3: A Timeless Mind Cannot Be Embodied

The third problem is, in some ways, the most striking, because it is so concrete. The Incarnation is not just that God the Son took on a human mind; it is that He took on a human body. "The Word became flesh" (John 1:14, emphasis mine). This embodiment is central to the doctrine. But can a timeless mind really be embodied?

Robin Le Poidevin and R. T. Mullins have both argued that it cannot.²⁷ Their argument goes like this. To be embodied is not just to have some loose relation to a body; it is to stand in a specific set of relations. Building on the philosophical literature on embodiment, Mullins identifies five conditions that have to be met for a mind to count as genuinely embodied:

(1) Felt sensation: The goings-on of the body cause pleasure or pain in the mind. When the body is warmed by the sun, the mind feels pleasure; when the body is wounded, the mind feels pain.

(2) Inner bodily awareness: The mind can feel the inside of the body — hunger, thirst, fatigue, tension, fullness, and so on.

(3) Basic bodily action: The mind can move the body through a direct act of will, without having to "do" anything else in between.

(4) Perspectival perception: The mind's perceptual window onto the world is from the perspective of this particular body. The mind sees what the body's eyes see, hears what the body's ears hear, from the body's location in space.

(5) Emotional and cognitive influence: The thoughts and feelings of the mind are affected by the body. Bodily weakness affects one's thinking; bodily sickness affects one's mood.

These five conditions are drawn from ordinary reflection on what it means to be an embodied mind like you or me. If I cannot feel sensations through my body, if I cannot feel its inner states, if I cannot move it directly, if I cannot see through its eyes, and if its condition does not affect my thoughts — am I really embodied in it, or am I just somehow associated with it from a distance?

Now, Mullins argues — and I find this argument powerful — that a timeless divine mind cannot satisfy these conditions. Let us go through them one by one.²⁸

On condition (1), felt sensation: a timeless mind cannot feel the succession of bodily sensations, because that would require a succession of mental states, which would require temporality. The body warms up, feels warm, then cools down; the embodied mind experiences a sequence of warm-cool-cold. A timeless mind, by definition, has no sequence in its experience. Further, on classical theism, a timeless mind is also impassible, meaning it cannot be affected from outside. The warming sun would not cause anything in the timeless mind.

On condition (2), inner bodily awareness: to feel an empty stomach is to experience a specific mental state caused by the body's condition. This requires the mind to change as the body's condition changes. But a timeless mind cannot change. Jesus got hungry in the wilderness after His forty-day fast (Matt 4:2). The human mind of Jesus felt the hunger. But on the timelessness view, the divine mind of the Son could not feel that hunger, because feeling it would involve succession and change.

On condition (3), basic bodily action: this one is trickier. The atemporalist might argue that God, being omnipotent, can move any physical object through a "basic" act, so surely He can move His own body. But there are two problems. First, on the two-minds view with dyothelitism, there are two wills, and both presumably will that the body perform some action. That is a problem of overdetermination — we have two causes where we only need one. One of the wills is superfluous. Second, the classical Christological tradition explicitly denies that the divine mind directly interacts with the body. Thinkers as diverse as Origen, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, and Peter Lombard all claim that the human mind serves as the mediator between the Son and the body — a kind of "wall" protecting the divine nature from the "grossness" of human flesh. So on the classical view, the divine mind does not directly move the body. It moves the body only through the human mind.²⁹

On condition (4), perspectival perception: the mind's "locus of perception" on the world is from the body's perspective. The embodied mind perceives "one thing, then another, then another." But this is successive. A timeless mind cannot perceive successively. Moreover, a timeless, omniscient mind does not acquire knowledge through the body at all. It just knows everything timelessly. So the body is not a genuine perceptual window for a timeless divine mind.

On condition (5), emotional and cognitive influence: the body's condition affects the mind. When the body grows tired, the mind feels worn out and may think, "I should get some sleep." But a timeless, impassible mind cannot be affected by the body's condition. It cannot grow tired, cannot feel weary, cannot entertain — in any meaningful way — the thought "I should get some sleep." The divine mind just timelessly knows everything and timelessly enjoys undisturbed bliss.

So on all five conditions (except possibly a weak version of condition 3), a timeless mind fails to be embodied in the usual sense. At best, the divine mind has a loose, generic relation to the body through omnipresence — but omnipresence is not embodiment. God is "present" to every rock, tree, and galaxy by way of omnipresence. That is not what we mean when we say Jesus was embodied.³⁰

Now, the atemporalist might reply: "Well, the human mind of Jesus is embodied, and that is enough." But that is the very problem. If only the human mind of Jesus is embodied, then only the human mind is truly incarnate. The divine mind — which, remember, is God the Son — is merely associated with the body in some external, timeless way. But the Christian confession is that God the Son Himself became flesh, not that He merely supervised a human mind that was embodied. As Mullins puts it, "God the Son is a divine mind. If a timeless divine mind cannot become embodied, and God the Son is a divine mind, God the Son cannot become embodied."³¹

This is, to my mind, one of the most decisive arguments in the whole discussion. Christianity is a religion of incarnation — of God taking on flesh in a particular human body in first-century Palestine. If divine timelessness renders genuine embodiment impossible, then divine timelessness renders the Incarnation impossible. And since we are not going to give up the Incarnation, we should give up divine timelessness.

Problem #4: Knowledge De Se and the Identity of the Person

The fourth problem concerns something philosophers call knowledge de se, which is a fancy Latin term for "knowledge about oneself from the inside." Let me explain what this is, because it matters.

Suppose I am in a grocery store, and I notice that someone is leaving a trail of spilled sugar down the aisle. I look up and down the aisle, following the trail, trying to find the culprit. Eventually I realize — with some embarrassment — that the trail leads from my own cart. The sugar is leaking out of my own bag. Before the realization, I knew that someone was spilling sugar. After the realization, I knew that I was spilling sugar. The second kind of knowledge — "I am spilling sugar" — is de se, self-referential knowledge. It is a belief about myself that I hold from my own first-person perspective.³²

Now, here is a striking feature of de se beliefs: they cannot be shared between different persons. Two different people cannot have literally the same de se belief, because the "I" in each belief refers to a different person. If you believe "I am hungry" and I believe "I am hungry," we have beliefs of the same form — but they are different beliefs, with different propositional contents. Your "I" means you; my "I" means me.

From this, Mullins constructs an argument that I think is devastating for the timelessness view.³³ It runs roughly like this:

(22) If two entities entertain different de se beliefs, they are different persons.

(23) God the Son, if timeless, cannot entertain the same de se beliefs as Jesus (the incarnate human mind of Christ).

(24) God the Son is timeless, immutable, and impassible (this is just the classical view).

(25) Therefore, God the Son cannot entertain the same de se beliefs as Jesus.

(26) Therefore, God the Son is not the same person as Jesus — which is Nestorianism.

The crucial premise is (23). Why can a timeless God not entertain the same de se beliefs as Jesus? Consider the sorts of de se beliefs Jesus had during His earthly life:

(27) "I am suffering on the cross."

(28) "I begin to feel hungry at 11:00 a.m. on March 3, AD 28."

(29) "I begin to feel full at 12:00 p.m. on March 3, AD 28."

(30) "I am ignorant of the day or hour of the second coming" (compare Mark 13:32, "But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father").

Can God the Son — on the timelessness view — entertain any of these beliefs? Take (27). The classical view holds that God is impassible, meaning He cannot suffer. So God the Son cannot entertain the belief "I am suffering." Take (28) and (29). These involve "beginning" — a temporal transition. A timeless God cannot begin anything, because beginning requires a before and an after. Take (30). On the classical view, God is omniscient in the sense that He timelessly knows everything. He cannot entertain the belief "I am ignorant" about anything.

So the de se beliefs Jesus held on the cross, in the wilderness, and throughout His life are beliefs a timeless God the Son simply cannot have. But these are not just incidental beliefs; they are beliefs that define the incarnate life. If God the Son cannot share these beliefs with Jesus, then God the Son is a different person from Jesus. And that, once again, is Nestorianism — the very heresy Chalcedon was designed to rule out.³⁴

Could the atemporalist reply: "God the Son holds the tenseless belief <my human nature is hungry at 11:00 a.m. on March 3, AD 28>"? Sure, but that is a different belief. It is a belief about the human nature, not a first-person belief from the human nature. It is like the difference between my believing "I am hungry" and my doctor believing "my patient is hungry." Those are not the same belief, even if they track the same fact.³⁵

Could the atemporalist say: "God the Son holds the timeless belief <I begin to feel hungry at 11:00 a.m. on March 3, AD 28>"? That would entail that the Son begins to have an experience at a time — which is incompatible with His timelessness. Or could the atemporalist say: "The Son holds this belief qua humanity"? That just takes us back to Problem #1, where the qua move collapses under the communicatio idiomatum.

The de se argument, to my mind, locks in what the embodiment argument began. The incarnate life of Jesus is full of genuine de se beliefs — beliefs about His own hunger, tiredness, sorrow, suffering, ignorance, and waiting. These beliefs are not accidental features of the Incarnation; they are what makes it an Incarnation, a genuine taking-on of human life. If God the Son, on the timelessness view, cannot hold any of these beliefs, then He is not the Person who actually lived that life. And then the Incarnation is not really an Incarnation at all.

Problem #5: Four-Dimensionalism, Eternal Subordination, and Modal Collapse

There is one more strategy the atemporalist sometimes tries, and I want to address it briefly. Some defenders of divine timelessness combine their view with four-dimensional eternalism — the B-theory of time, on which all moments (past, present, and future) are equally real, and the four-dimensional universe is a kind of "block" that God timelessly views all at once. The thought is that if all times are equally real, then God does not need to become incarnate at a time; He is timelessly related to the whole block, and the human nature of Jesus is located at a particular four-dimensional slice of that block.³⁶

Mullins raises a devastating objection here: if four-dimensional eternalism is true, then the Son is eternally incarnate. There is no time at which He is not incarnate, since the whole block is equally real. But if the Son is eternally incarnate, then He is eternally subordinate to the Father in the economy of salvation. And eternal subordination is a serious Trinitarian problem.³⁷

Classical Trinitarian theology distinguishes the immanent Trinity (God as He is in Himself, eternally) from the economic Trinity (God as He acts in creation and salvation). In the economy of salvation, the Son is obedient to the Father; this is a real subordination, but it is a contingent role the Son freely takes on, not a permanent feature of who He is. If the economic subordination becomes eternal — baked into the very being of God — then we lose the equality of the divine Persons. We end up with a Son who is ontologically subordinate to the Father, which is not orthodox Trinitarianism.

The atemporalist might try to escape this by saying the Son is subordinate only "conditionally" — that is, conditional on God's decision to create and redeem. But this produces a modal collapse: if divine simplicity and immutability are true (as classical timelessness requires), then God cannot have done otherwise; what He does is identical to what He is; the actual world is the only possible world; and the Son's subordination is, in the end, metaphysically necessary. Modal collapse is widely (and rightly) seen as catastrophic for classical theism, because it implies that God could not have refrained from creating — which contradicts the traditional confession that creation is a free act of God.³⁸

So the atemporalist faces a hard choice. Either (a) hold to simplicity and immutability and accept modal collapse; or (b) give up simplicity and immutability — but then lose the main reasons for holding to timelessness in the first place, since timelessness is traditionally derived from simplicity and immutability.³⁹ Either way, the four-dimensional eternalist defense of the Incarnation comes apart.

Responding to Atemporalist Objections

At this point, I want to pause and consider some objections that a thoughtful defender of divine timelessness might raise. I want to do this because, as I said at the beginning, I do not want to caricature the classical view. These thinkers are serious Christians doing serious theology. Let me try to represent their best responses charitably, and then show why, in my judgment, they still fall short.

Objection 1: The Incarnation Is a Mystery — We Should Not Expect to Understand It Fully

This is the "mystery" response, and Richard Swinburne famously used something like it early in his career (though he later abandoned the timelessness view partly because of these difficulties).⁴⁰ The thought is that the Incarnation is, by its very nature, beyond our full comprehension. Of course we cannot fully explain how a timeless God becomes a temporal man. That is part of the wonder. Our inability to work it out philosophically should not lead us to reject either timelessness or the Incarnation.

I understand the impulse behind this response, and I share some of its reverence. The Incarnation is a mystery. I do not pretend to comprehend fully how the eternal Son became a man. But there is a difference between mystery (something our minds cannot fully grasp) and contradiction (something that cannot possibly be true because it contradicts itself). The Trinity is a mystery: three Persons, one God. We do not fully understand how, but there is no contradiction. The Incarnation is a mystery: one Person, two natures. Again, hard to understand, but not contradictory.

The problem is that "a timeless being becomes temporal" is not just hard to understand — it contains a straight contradiction. "Becomes" means "starts being what it was not before." But a timeless being has no "before." So to say that a timeless being becomes anything is to say that a being with no "before" started being something it was not in the "before" it does not have. That is not mystery; that is nonsense. Appeals to mystery are appropriate when we bump up against the limits of our finite minds trying to grasp an infinite God. They are not appropriate when the problem is that our theological claims are logically incompatible.

Here is another way to see the difference. If I say, "God is both a Father and a Son," that looks contradictory on the surface, but with the Trinitarian distinction between Persons and nature, the apparent contradiction dissolves. The contradiction was only apparent. But if I say, "A timeless God becomes flesh," no amount of further distinction dissolves the contradiction at the heart of "becomes." The contradiction is not just apparent — it is structural. It is built into the meaning of the words.

Objection 2: Leftow's "Eternally Incarnate" View

Brian Leftow has defended a sophisticated position on which God the Son is timelessly or eternally incarnate. There never was a "before" the Incarnation; the Son simply is, from all eternity, incarnate in Christ. The temporal life of Jesus is a projection of this eternal state into creaturely time.⁴¹

I have two responses. First, this view produces exactly the "eternal subordination" problem we discussed in Problem #5. If the Son is eternally incarnate, He is eternally subordinate, and classical Trinitarian equality becomes difficult to maintain. Second, and more importantly, this view cannot make sense of the biblical witness that the Incarnation was a genuine event in history. The New Testament does not portray the Incarnation as a timeless condition of the Son that happened to manifest at one point in time. It portrays it as something that happened: "when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law" (Gal 4:4). The language of "sending," "being born," "coming" pervades the New Testament. Hebrews speaks of "the days of his flesh" (Heb 5:7), clearly distinguishing His earthly life from what came before. John's prologue says the Word "became" flesh (egeneto, aorist tense — a punctiliar, past event). If the Son has always been eternally incarnate, what does "became" mean?⁴²

Holland makes this point well. The biblical data describing the Incarnation "universally use the language of time and change... The passages in question describe a state of affairs in which God the Son — the Word — existed in a state un-joined to human nature and human flesh; and then there was a specific action taken by the Son to assume human nature and a specific human body; which resulted in a new state of affairs which is God the Son living in the Incarnate state in perpetuity. The temporal implications of the statements in these passages are unavoidable."⁴³ Leftow's view requires us to treat all this temporal language as metaphor or accommodation, which puts a heavy exegetical burden on the atemporalist that, in my judgment, cannot be met.

Objection 3: Stump and Kretzmann's ET-Simultaneity Model

Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, in their influential 1981 article "Eternity," proposed a notion of "eternal-temporal simultaneity" (ET-simultaneity) to explain how a timeless God can be related to temporal events. On their view, two events can be simultaneous in a special sense — ET-simultaneous — if one is in eternity and the other is in time, and they are "metaphysically present" to each other. God timelessly sees and relates to every temporal event as though it were present, without Himself becoming temporal.⁴⁴

I engaged this model more fully in Chapter 6, where I argued (with Mullins and Craig) that ET-simultaneity does not really work as a coherent notion of simultaneity.⁴⁵ But here, in the context of the Incarnation, I want to highlight a specific problem. Stump and Kretzmann, in order to defend timelessness, end up saying things like "the second person eternally has two natures." This is an attempt to avoid the charge that timelessness is incompatible with the Incarnation. But as Thomas Senor points out, this move actually violates the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation, because the classical view holds that the Son took on human nature at a particular moment, not from all eternity.⁴⁶ The Nicene Creed confesses that the Son was "incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary." That is a specific historical event, not a timeless condition.

So the Stump-Kretzmann model either collapses into Leftow's eternally-incarnate view (with all its problems) or fails to preserve the timelessness it was meant to save. Either way, it does not rescue the atemporalist.

Objection 4: God's "Eternal Present" Contains All Temporal Events

Some classical theists argue that God's "eternal present" is a kind of super-present that contains all temporal events — past, present, and future — simultaneously. So God the Son, from His eternal present, is "simultaneously" (in some special sense) present at the birth of Christ, at the cross, and at the resurrection. This is a variant of the Boethian tradition, championed in different ways by Helm, Leftow, and others.⁴⁷

Even granting (for the sake of argument) that such a super-present can be coherently described, it does not solve our problem. The question is not just whether God is "present" at these events. The question is whether God the Son is the subject of the temporal experiences of Jesus — whether He grew, whether He suffered, whether He learned. A "super-present" mode of presence to events is still a mode of external relation. It is not the same as being the embodied first-person subject of a human life. When I am present at my son's birthday party, I am related to it, but I do not experience it the way he does. For the Incarnation to be genuine, God the Son needs to have been the first-person experiencer of Jesus's human life. And that experience was temporal.

The Temporalist Solution

Having worked through these arguments, I want to lay out, positively, what I take to be the right model of God and the Incarnation. Rather than trying to fit the Incarnation into the categories of classical timelessness, we should let the Incarnation reshape our understanding of divine eternity.

The temporalist solution, in its simplest form, is this: God the Son is genuinely temporal, experiencing real sequence and succession in His divine life. This is not a claim that God became temporal at the Incarnation. It is a claim that God has always been temporal — that time, in some form, is woven into the very life of the Trinity (as I argued in Chapter 26). On this view, the Incarnation is not a timeless being stepping into time; it is an already-temporal divine Person entering creaturely, measurable, physical time in a new mode. God the Son, who had always existed in the rich temporality of the divine life, stepped into the much narrower channel of human, embodied, first-century Jewish time.⁴⁸

This view has several tremendous advantages. Let me sketch five.

First, it makes sense of the biblical language. When John says "the Word became flesh," we can take this at face value. A temporal God can genuinely undergo a transition from a non-incarnate state to an incarnate state. The Word was not flesh; then, at a specific moment (roughly 5–4 BC, in the womb of Mary), He became flesh. This is a real change in the relational life of God the Son — and we do not have to treat the word "became" as a metaphor.

Second, it preserves the communicatio idiomatum without contradiction. God the Son, who is already temporal, can have the human temporal experiences attributed to Him simpliciter without creating logical problems. "God died on the cross" is true because the one Person, God the Son, had an embodied human life in which He experienced death. No contradiction between timelessness and temporality, because there is no timelessness at stake.

Third, it makes genuine embodiment possible. A temporal divine mind can satisfy all five conditions of embodiment. It can feel the succession of sensations, feel the body's inner states, move the body through basic acts, perceive the world from the body's perspective, and be emotionally affected by the body's condition. There is no barrier to real incarnation.

Fourth, it makes sense of the de se beliefs of Jesus. If God the Son is temporal, He can genuinely share the first-person beliefs of Jesus. "I am suffering on the cross" can truly be God the Son's belief, because He — in His embodied human life — is genuinely suffering. "I am ignorant of the day of the second coming" is compatible with the Son having limited His knowledge in some way during the Incarnation (whether through a kenotic self-limitation or through a two-minds framework that allows the human mind to have genuine cognitive limits). In either case, the one Person, God the Son, has the relevant de se beliefs.

Fifth, it preserves orthodox Trinitarianism. The Son is not eternally subordinate, because His incarnate subordination is a genuine economic condescension that happened at a particular point in history — not an eternal feature of His being. Before the Incarnation, the Son enjoyed the full glory of intra-Trinitarian communion as an equal Person with the Father and Spirit. At a particular moment, He took on the form of a servant. This is exactly what Paul says in Philippians 2:6–7: "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men."⁴⁹

What About the Other Persons of the Trinity?

Here is a question that often comes up at this point: if God the Son becomes temporal in the Incarnation, what about the Father and the Spirit? Are they temporal too? And if only the Son is temporal, does that break the doctrine of homoousios — the teaching that the three Persons share the same essence?

This is an important question, and I want to answer it directly. My view is that all three Persons of the Trinity are temporal, and always have been. The Trinity's life of mutual love, as I argued in Chapter 26, is inherently dynamic: the Father eternally generates the Son, the Son eternally loves the Father, the Spirit eternally proceeds from and unites them. These relations are not frozen; they are living, flowing, mutually responsive. Time, in some form, is the medium of personal life — and God is supremely personal.⁵⁰

If all three Persons are temporal, then the Incarnation does not involve any homoousios violation. The Son does not switch from being timeless to being temporal at the Incarnation; He was always temporal, as were the Father and Spirit. What is new in the Incarnation is not the Son's temporality but His embodiment — His entrance into creaturely, embodied, human time. The Father and Spirit are also temporal, but they are not incarnate. Only the Son has taken a human nature into personal union with Himself.

Thomas Senor, writing from a temporalist perspective, once suggested that perhaps only the Son is temporal while the Father and Spirit remain atemporal. But Mullins rightly objects that this would undermine homoousios: if the three Persons do not share the same essential properties (including temporal mode), they do not share the same essence.⁵¹ On my view, we avoid this problem by affirming that all three Persons are temporal from all eternity — and that the Incarnation is about embodiment, not about a timeless Person "becoming" temporal.

The Revelatory Dimension: Jesus Shows Us What God Is Like

I want to close this chapter by reflecting on a theme that Holland develops beautifully in God, Time, and the Incarnation. The Incarnation is not just a theological puzzle to be solved; it is a divine self-revelation. Jesus is, in Paul's words, "the image of the invisible God" (Col 1:15) and "the firstborn of all creation." He is, in the writer of Hebrews' words, "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature" (Heb 1:3). John says, "No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known" (John 1:18). Jesus says of Himself, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).⁵²

These texts make a strong and breathtaking claim: in Jesus, we see God. Not just "a picture of God suitable for human minds," but God Himself, made visible. So if we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. And when we look at Jesus, what do we see?

We see a Person who prays — who pours out His soul to the Father in real, responsive communication. We see a Person who weeps at the tomb of His friend Lazarus (John 11:35). We see a Person who is moved with compassion for the crowds (Matt 9:36). We see a Person who learns obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8), who grows in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man (Luke 2:52). We see a Person who experiences genuine temptation in the wilderness, real anguish in Gethsemane, real abandonment on the cross. We see, in short, a God who is deeply and genuinely involved in time, in relationships, in response, in real emotional engagement with the world.⁵³

If Jesus is the revelation of what God is like, then we have to reckon seriously with the temporal, responsive, relational character of Jesus's life. The classical picture of a timeless, impassible, unchanging God seems very far from the Jesus we meet in the Gospels. And that is not an accident. The biblical portrait of God — throughout the Old and New Testaments — is always a portrait of a living, acting, responding, relational God. The timeless God of classical philosophical theology owes more to Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus than to the scriptures of Israel and the church.⁵⁴

I want to be clear that this is not an attack on the great classical theologians. Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Helm have each contributed indispensable insights to the theology of God. But I think that, on this particular question — the question of God's relationship to time — they were working within a set of assumptions borrowed from Greek philosophy that turn out to be in tension with the biblical portrait of God, and especially with the Incarnation. When we take the Incarnation as our starting point — when we let Jesus set the theological agenda — the picture that emerges is one of a God who is richly, dynamically, personally temporal.

Conclusion: The Incarnation as the Decisive Argument

Let me summarize where we have come. I began by stating the thesis of this chapter: a strictly timeless God cannot truly become flesh, because "becoming" requires a before and an after — and a being that exists in a timeless "eternal now" has neither. I then walked through the Chalcedonian framework and the classical strategies — especially the two-minds view combined with the qua move — for holding timelessness and the Incarnation together. And I argued that these strategies face at least five decisive problems:

First, the qua move collapses when combined with the communicatio idiomatum: if Christ is atemporal qua divine and temporal qua human, and if the communicatio idiomatum is true, then Christ (the one Person) is both atemporal and temporal simpliciter — which is a contradiction.

Second, the combination of two-minds Christology with divine timelessness produces a version of Christ's two "minds" so different from each other that they effectively become two persons, falling into Nestorianism.

Third, a timeless mind cannot satisfy the basic conditions for embodiment — cannot feel sensations, feel the body's inner states, perceive the world through the body, or be affected by the body — which means a timeless God cannot become incarnate in the biblical sense.

Fourth, a timeless God cannot share the de se beliefs of Jesus (beliefs about His own hunger, suffering, ignorance, and limitation) and so cannot be identified as the same Person as Jesus — yet another route into Nestorianism.

Fifth, when combined with four-dimensional eternalism, timelessness produces an eternally subordinate Son and a modal collapse, wrecking orthodox Trinitarianism.

I then considered and responded to several atemporalist objections — appeals to mystery, Leftow's eternal-incarnation view, the Stump-Kretzmann ET-simultaneity model, and the "eternal present" strategy — and argued that none of them rescues the classical view. Finally, I sketched the positive temporalist alternative: God the Son has always been temporal, sharing in the rich dynamic life of the Trinity, and at a specific moment in creaturely history He entered our creaturely time in a new mode, taking a human nature into personal union with Himself.

The beauty of the temporalist solution is not merely that it avoids the contradictions. The beauty of it is that it lets us take Scripture at face value. When Paul says "when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son" (Gal 4:4), we can believe him literally. When John says "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14), we can believe him literally. When the author of Hebrews speaks of "the days of his flesh" (Heb 5:7), we can believe him literally. We do not have to translate every temporal verb into some timeless equivalent. We do not have to claim that "became" really means "timelessly is" or that "sent forth" really means "eternally has been." We can read the Bible the way the biblical writers meant it to be read.

And the even greater beauty is this: the God who took on flesh is a God who really, truly, personally enters our world, our time, our lives. He is not observing us from some frozen eternal now; He is walking with us, suffering with us, rejoicing with us, grieving with us, in real time. Paul prayed to this temporal God. Peter cried out to this temporal God on the sea. Mary Magdalene met this temporal God in the garden on Easter morning. And we, too, meet this temporal God in the real unfolding of our own lives. The God who became flesh is the God who still comes to us — moment by moment, day by day, year by year — in the ongoing rhythm of a real relationship.

That is the God I find in the pages of Scripture. That is the God I meet in prayer. That is the God I want to commend to every reader of this book. And it is the Incarnation — the scandalous, beautiful, concrete event of God-made-flesh in Jesus of Nazareth — that stands at the center of my case.

As Richard Holland beautifully summarizes the argument, a proper theological method will let the Incarnation serve as a "control belief" for our reflection on God and time — the fixed center around which everything else has to orient.⁵⁵ When we let the Incarnation do this work, the classical atemporal model does not survive the test. The doctrine of God that fits the Incarnation is a doctrine of a God who is genuinely, richly, personally temporal — a God who can, and does, step into time, not as a contradiction of His nature, but as an expression of who He always was.

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Everything hangs on whether we take that sentence seriously. I believe we should.