Chapter 36

The God Beyond the Clock

Toward a Comprehensive Model of Dynamic Divine Temporality

1. A Long Journey, a Simple Thesis

We have come a long way together. Thirty-five chapters of Scripture, history, philosophy, and science now lie behind us. And the question we started with is still the question we end with: What is God's relationship to time? Is God "outside" of time, experiencing all of history in one timeless flash? Or is God "inside" of time with us, living through real moments, really responding, really acting, really loving in a genuine now?

In this final chapter, I want to pull the whole argument together. I want to state, as clearly and simply as I can, what I believe the Bible teaches, what the best philosophy supports, and what the Christian tradition — when read carefully and critically — actually allows. Then I want to sit with you, pastor to reader, friend to friend, and talk about why this matters for your life, your prayers, your grief, and your hope.

The thesis of this book has been a single sentence, though it takes many pages to unpack. Here it is one last time: God is genuinely temporal — He experiences real sequence and succession — but He is not locked into creaturely clock-time the way we are. He transcends our measured time without stepping outside of time altogether. He is the living, acting, responding, loving God of the Bible, and the biblical portrait is not a metaphor we have to translate away. It is reality. I call this view dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access, or, more simply, dynamic omnitemporality.¹

That sentence will do a lot of work in this chapter. It affirms something and denies something. It affirms that God lives in time — a genuine before and after is part of His life. It denies that God is stuck in the creature's "now," blind to the future or locked out of the past. God, I will argue, holds both of these things together, and He does so because of who He is: the triune, personal, living God whose life is not a frozen point but a living flame.

This chapter has six parts. First, I will walk back through the book's argument, chapter by chapter, so we can see the whole shape of the case. Second, I will state the author's position in full — not in pieces, but as a single coherent model. Third, I will show what this view gets right that the alternatives do not. Fourth, I will honestly name what remains uncertain. Fifth, I will answer a cluster of remaining objections that often come up at the end of such a project. Sixth, and most importantly, I will close with a pastoral reflection — because a doctrine of God that changes nothing about how we pray, how we grieve, and how we hope is a doctrine that probably is not true.

2. Retracing the Path: The Argument of the Book in Summary

Before I say anything new, let me remind you where we have been. A good book is not a collection of thirty-six disconnected essays. It is one argument told in many voices and angles. Here is that argument in brief.

Part I: Foundations (Chapters 1–3)

We began by asking why any of this matters. The doctrine of God's relationship to time is not an ivory-tower curiosity. It touches every major doctrine of the Christian faith: creation, providence, foreknowledge, the Incarnation, prayer, the problem of evil, and the intermediate state.² If God is timeless in the strict classical sense, He cannot literally respond to us, grieve over sin, or enter human history. If He is temporal in the sense of being trapped inside creaturely time, His sovereignty seems diminished. We need a model that holds both sides of the biblical witness together.

We also looked at what time is. Three main philosophical theories compete: relational (time is the order of events, favored by Augustine and Leibniz), substantival (time is a real container, favored by Newton), and causal (time is the order of causal relations, favored by Garrett DeWeese).³ We distinguished the A-theory (time flows, the present is real) from the B-theory (all moments are equally real, flow is an illusion) and leaned toward A-theory for reasons of both Scripture and common sense.⁴ Finally, we looked at the biblical language. The Hebrew olam (עוֹלָם) and the Greek aiōn (αἰών) almost never mean "timelessness." They usually mean "a long age," "an unending duration," or "the age to come." When Scripture calls God "eternal," it almost always means "everlasting," not "outside of time."⁵

Part II: The Major Views (Chapters 4–10)

Next we surveyed the options. Divine timelessness — the classical view defended today by Paul Helm, Brian Leftow, Katherin Rogers, and James Dolezal — holds that God exists in an "eternal now" with no past or future.⁶ We examined its strongest arguments: it protects God's simplicity, His perfection, His sovereignty, and His independence from creation. But we also saw the decisive problems: it cannot make sense of creation ex nihilo (a timeless God seems to exist frozen with the universe rather than prior to it), it cannot accommodate genuine divine action in history, and — most seriously — it cannot accommodate the Incarnation without turning the Son into a being who both has and lacks essential properties at the same time.⁷

We looked at William Lane Craig's hybrid view: timeless without creation, temporal with creation.⁸ I admire Craig's work enormously, and much of the argument for divine temporality "after" creation is his. But the hybrid view runs into its own problem: if God is strictly timeless sans creation, the transition from timeless to temporal is incoherent. There is no "before" the transition at which God could have decided to make it — the transition would be sudden without being later.⁹ Better to say, with Ryan Mullins and DeWeese, that God has always been temporal, because the Trinity's own life generates temporality even without creation.¹⁰

Then we looked at two "bridges too far": open theism, which denies God's exhaustive foreknowledge, and process theology, which denies God's independence from the world.¹¹ Both rightly insist on a temporal God; both go further than Scripture warrants. My position — dynamic temporality with transcendent access — keeps what is right in divine temporality without sliding into either of these dangers.

Part III: A Brief History (Chapters 11–15)

We then traced the story historically. Greek philosophy — especially Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus — gave the Church a powerful and attractive picture: a divine, timeless One, immutable, simple, impassible.¹² The early Fathers, especially Augustine, began to marry this Greek picture to biblical faith. Augustine's Confessions Book XI famously argues that God is outside of time altogether, a view that became dominant for centuries.¹³ Boethius gave the classical definition: eternity is "the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of unlimited life."¹⁴ Aquinas baptized the Boethian vision with great care and brilliance.¹⁵

But dissent was always there. In the modern period, Isaac Newton worried that the classical view made God too abstract; he proposed absolute time as God's "sensorium."¹⁶ In the twentieth century, Nelson Pike, Richard Swinburne, and Nicholas Wolterstorff began to dismantle the classical case, arguing that a timeless God cannot act, know "now," or relate personally to creatures.¹⁷ Today the temporal view is probably the majority analytic position among Christian philosophers, defended by Craig, DeWeese, Padgett, Hasker, Wolterstorff, and — most systematically — Ryan Mullins.¹⁸

I find it helpful to remember that this current revival of divine temporality is not a fringe innovation. It represents some of the best work in analytic philosophy of religion over the last fifty years, and it has been produced largely by deeply committed Christian scholars — Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals — working carefully within the classical tradition while pressing its questions further. When I cite Mullins, Craig, Wolterstorff, and DeWeese throughout this book, I am not pointing to outliers. I am pointing to a rapidly growing consensus that the strict classical position on divine timelessness is in serious trouble and that some version of divine temporality is the better path.

That said, I want to be careful not to overstate matters. Strict timelessness still has able defenders. Paul Helm's Eternal God is a thoughtful and sophisticated work, as are Brian Leftow's Time and Eternity and Katherin Rogers's work in perfect-being theology. Confessionally conservative Reformed theology in particular has tended to resist divine temporality, and scholars like James Dolezal have mounted energetic defenses of the classical position.^18b I take these opponents seriously. I do not think they are stupid or unfaithful. I simply think the weight of biblical, philosophical, and theological evidence points in the other direction, and I have tried in this book to give good reasons for saying so.

Part IV: The Biblical Evidence (Chapters 16–23)

The heart of the book, at least for me as a Th.D. student trained in the biblical languages, was Part IV. We did not approach Scripture to find proof-texts for a philosophical conclusion; we approached it asking, "What does the Bible actually say about God and time?"

What we found was overwhelming. God creates (Genesis 1) — and creation is a temporal sequence of divine actions ("And God said… and there was… and God saw…"). God makes covenants (Genesis 12, 15, 17; Exodus 19–24) — and covenants are temporal promises made at particular historical moments. God repents or relents (nacham, נָחַם) in response to human actions (Gen 6:6; 1 Sam 15:11, 35; Jon 3:10), and these passages cannot be explained away as mere anthropomorphism without destroying the entire moral structure of the biblical narrative.¹⁹ God knows the future with astonishing specificity (Isa 46:9–10), and He acts in history at specific times (Gal 4:4 — "in the fullness of time"). He becomes incarnate (John 1:14). He weeps (John 11:35). He grieves the Holy Spirit (Eph 4:30).

The biblical God is a God who acts, responds, feels, and enters human history. Every attempt to read the Bible consistently with strict timelessness requires a massive interpretive overhaul in which nearly every verb used of God is reinterpreted as mere accommodation. That is a very steep price to pay for a philosophical commitment Scripture nowhere demands.²⁰

Consider just how remarkable the biblical witness actually is on this point. The very first sentence of the Bible — "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen 1:1) — already contains a temporal marker. There was a beginning. And then God created. The Hebrew verb bara (בָּרָא) is an action verb, and action verbs require temporal contexts. If we say with the classical tradition that this is all accommodation, we are forced to say that the very opening words of God's self-revelation are pedagogically misleading — that God tells us He did something when really He timelessly is the whole thing. I do not think this holds up under honest reflection. Scripture begins as it continues: by presenting a God who acts in time because He really does act in time.

I find myself especially moved by the way the Old Testament narratives do not shy away from divine responsiveness. When Moses pleads for Israel after the golden calf incident, the text says, "And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people" (Exod 32:14). The Hebrew nacham means a genuine change of course in response to intercession. When Jonah preaches to Nineveh and the city repents, "God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, and God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it" (Jon 3:10). When David's kingdom is threatened and the prophet Samuel brings bad news, God sometimes relents and sometimes does not. These stories are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the fabric of salvation history. And they require — absolutely require — a God who can really interact in real time.^20b

Part V: Philosophical and Systematic Arguments (Chapters 24–32)

In Part V we took the philosophical bull by the horns. We examined the metaphysics of time — A-theory and B-theory, presentism and eternalism — and argued, with Mullins, that presentism best fits the Christian story.²¹ We developed simple foreknowledge with transcendent access as a coherent alternative to Calvinist determinism, Molinist middle knowledge, and open theism.²² We argued, following DeWeese and Mullins, that the perichoretic life of the Trinity — the eternal mutual indwelling and loving relation of Father, Son, and Spirit — itself generates a kind of divine temporality, so that God has always been in time in the sense of always experiencing real relational succession.²³

We made the case that the Incarnation is the sledgehammer that breaks the strict timelessness view. A timeless God cannot literally become incarnate, because incarnation requires entering temporal existence; and a Person who is both timelessly eternal and thirty-three years old at a particular moment seems to be a contradiction in terms.²⁴ Ryan Mullins's book God, Time, and the Incarnation pushes this argument with particular force.²⁵

We addressed divine emotions: if God genuinely grieves, rejoices, compassions, and is angered by sin — as both Scripture and my own earlier book The Heart of God argue at length — then God is temporal, because emotional responsiveness requires temporal sequence.²⁶ You cannot respond to an event unless you exist after the event.

We handled the most popular objections to divine temporality: that it contradicts Einstein's relativity (it does not — there are Neo-Lorentzian interpretations of relativity that preserve absolute simultaneity);²⁷ that it contradicts divine simplicity (classical simplicity is in trouble on independent grounds);²⁸ that it contradicts divine immutability (only strict immutability, not the qualified immutability Scripture actually teaches);²⁹ and that it collapses into open theism (it does not, because transcendent access gives God exhaustive foreknowledge without determinism).³⁰

Part VI: Special Topics and Pastoral Applications (Chapters 33–35)

Finally, Part VI brought the argument down from the mountaintop of abstraction into the valley of real life. We looked at near-death experiences — the phenomenon of patients who are clinically dead, with no measurable brain activity, yet later report conscious, lucid, and sometimes veridical experiences.³¹ One of the most consistent features of the NDE literature is the report that time is experienced differently: events are described as sequential and simultaneous at once, stretched and compressed, the so-called "life review" in which years of experience unfold in a subjective instant.³² I am careful not to claim that NDEs "prove" divine temporality; but they give us a suggestive, empirical glimpse of how temporal experience can be qualitatively different from ordinary clock-time while still involving genuine sequence. That is suggestive, given my own position that God's experience of time is qualitatively different from ours while still being temporal.

This is an area close to my own research interests as a Th.D. student, and I have argued at length elsewhere that the veridical elements of NDEs provide meaningful support for a dualist account of human nature against the physicalism that has become popular in some corners of the conditional immortality movement. If veridical NDEs are real — if patients really can perceive events during periods when their brains are non-functional — then consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity, and some form of substance dualism must be true.^32b That is relevant to the God-and-time question because disembodied consciousness is, presumably, a different kind of temporal experience than embodied consciousness. The intermediate state is not timeless — there is still a "now" for the disembodied saint, still waiting, still longing, still communion with Christ — but it may be a qualitatively different "now" than the one we currently know.

We examined the intermediate state and substance dualism.³³ If the soul survives bodily death in a conscious state (as Luke 16, Luke 23:43, Phil 1:23, 2 Cor 5:8, and Rev 6:9–10 strongly suggest), then God is interacting personally with disembodied saints in that state — again, a fundamentally temporal form of divine engagement. The physicalist alternative, which some in the conditional immortality movement have embraced, cannot accommodate this biblical data and, I believe, purchases its cleaner anthropology at too high an exegetical cost.³⁴

The martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6:9–10 are particularly telling. They cry out, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" That cry is a temporal cry. It presupposes a waiting. It presupposes that the martyrs are conscious, that they are aware of time passing, that they are in relation to a God who is Himself active in real time, hearing their prayer, promising justice. If God were timeless and the martyrs were in some atemporal condition, this scene would make no sense. It makes perfect sense, however, on dynamic omnitemporality: God is real, present, listening, and responsive; the martyrs are alive, conscious, waiting for the consummation.

And we looked at prayer, suffering, and pastoral comfort. If God is truly in time with us — if He genuinely listens when we pray, genuinely grieves when we grieve, genuinely acts in response to what we are doing now — then the life of faith is not a rehearsed monologue in front of a frozen statue. It is a conversation with a living, responsive, loving Father who is really there, really listening, really present.³⁵

3. The Author's Position Stated in Full

With all of that as background, let me now state my position as clearly and completely as I can. I will set it out as seven theses, each with a brief explanation.

Thesis 1: God Is Genuinely Temporal

God experiences real sequence and succession. He has one thought and then another, one act and then another. He hears our prayer, then answers it. He creates the world, then sustains it. He sends His Son, then raises Him, then pours out the Spirit. These are not merely accommodations to our creaturely understanding — they are the actual structure of God's life.

I take this thesis to be required by the plain sense of Scripture, by the Incarnation, by the doctrine of divine emotions, and by the meaningfulness of divine action. As Wolterstorff argues in the Four Views volume, God's actions have a structure of succession: God remembers what He has done, responds to what we are doing, promises what He will do. That structure is temporal, full stop.³⁶ Mullins has shown at book length that the classical alternative — strict timelessness — cannot be made consistent with creation, omniscience, or the Incarnation.³⁷

Let me say a word here about what "genuinely temporal" means and does not mean. To say that God is genuinely temporal is not to say that God is caught in the flow of clock-time the way a mortal is. God does not have to wait for Thursday. He does not grow tired as the hours pass. He does not have a finite lifespan that stretches from a beginning to an end. He is not subject to the ravages that time inflicts on creaturely beings. What God's temporality means, positively, is that there is a real before and after in His experience — that He has one thought, then another; that He acts, and then the act is completed; that He creates, and after creating He sustains what He has made; that He sends His Son, and then raises Him, and then pours out His Spirit. The sequence is real. The order matters. The "and then" cannot be translated away into a single frozen eternal act without falsifying everything the Bible actually says about God's life.^37b

I want to pause here to address a concern I have heard from thoughtful readers who worry that this view somehow "demotes" God or makes Him too much like us. That is not my intention, and I think the worry rests on a confusion. When classical theists say God is timeless in order to protect His transcendence, they often assume that temporality is a creaturely limitation. But this assumption may itself be borrowed from Greek philosophy rather than Scripture. The Bible does not present temporality as a deficiency; it presents broken time — time marked by death, aging, decay, and loss — as a deficiency. The temporality of the perfect triune God, lived out in love among the Persons from all eternity, is not a limitation. It is the very form that divine life takes. To deny it is not to honor God; it is to substitute a philosophical abstraction for the living God Scripture reveals.

Thesis 2: God Is Not Bound by Creaturely Clock-Time

Although God is temporal, He is not locked into the present moment of created clock-time the way we are. God is not standing in the year 2026, staring at a horizon called "the future" that He cannot see until it arrives. He has access to every moment of created time. Past moments are not lost to Him; future moments are not hidden from Him. He can experience them, know them, and act with reference to them — though His actions and interactions occur in the present.

This is what I have called transcendent temporal access. It is not a second kind of divine eternity running parallel to temporal duration. It is a dimension of God's unique temporal experience. The creature is stuck in the "now" the way a character in a novel is stuck on whatever page is open. God is not.³⁸

Let me try another analogy, knowing that all analogies for divine attributes eventually break down. Imagine someone who has read a great novel many times. When they pick it up now, in the present moment, they are reading a particular chapter — say, Chapter Twelve. But they are not locked in Chapter Twelve the way a first-time reader is. They remember Chapter One perfectly. They know exactly what happens in Chapter Twenty. They know the shape of the whole. Their current reading of Chapter Twelve is informed by the whole work, even though the act of reading is a present-tense act.

God's relation to time is something like this — though infinitely greater, and not dependent on anything like memory in our sense. God lives in a real present, in real relationship with His creatures. But His present is informed, saturated, and in-formed by His knowledge of all other times. He knows what has been. He knows what will be. He lives now, in His unique divine now, with full access to both. And that unique kind of divine living, I submit, is exactly what Scripture portrays when it says that God is "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" (Rev 22:13).

Notice what that Revelation text says and does not say. It does not say God is outside the alphabet. It says He is the Alpha and the Omega — present at the beginning and present at the end. He bookends the whole. He holds the whole in His grasp. But the "grasp" is not a timeless frozen stare; it is the grip of the living One who is at work in every chapter of the story. That, I think, is dynamic omnitemporality in a single biblical image.

Thesis 3: God Has Always Been Temporal Because of the Trinity

Before creation — if "before" is even the right word — God was not timeless in the strict classical sense. He existed in a form of divine time generated by the intra-Trinitarian life. The Father eternally begets the Son. The Spirit eternally proceeds. Father, Son, and Spirit eternally indwell one another in perichoretic love. These are not events in created time, but they are not static, frozen states either. They are dynamic, relational, communicative realities, and that implies some form of succession or ordered life, however unlike our clock-time it may be.

DeWeese develops this line of argument in detail through his causal theory of time: where there is causal relation, there is temporal order.³⁹ Mullins makes a similar case both in The End of the Timeless God and, at greater length, in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, especially in his chapter on the Trinity.⁴⁰ I agree with them. The Trinity is not a philosophical problem for divine temporality — it is divine temporality's deepest foundation.

How should we describe pre-creation divine time? Here I counsel great humility. There was no physical universe, no clock, no measurable duration, nothing external to the divine life. The sequence was, presumably, purely intrinsic to God's own experience. I am cautious about saying much more than this. It seems to me that God deliberated, decided to create, planned redemption — and these imply a before and after. But the exact nature of that "before and after" in pre-creation divine time is genuinely beyond us.⁴¹

Thesis 4: God Has Exhaustive Foreknowledge via Transcendent Access

God knows every event, every thought, every choice that ever will occur, with absolute certainty. This foreknowledge is not derived from determining events (as Calvinism claims) or from middle knowledge of counterfactuals (as Molinism claims). It is derived from God's unique ability to access every moment of created time.

Because God transcends creaturely clock-time, the future is not closed to Him. He does not "wait and see." He sees what is in fact the case at every time. But — and this is crucial — His seeing the future does not cause the future. If tomorrow I freely choose to do X, God eternally knows I will freely choose X, because He has access to that free choice. My choice remains free. His foreknowledge remains exhaustive.⁴²

This position — often called simple foreknowledge — has been criticized for being "useless" for providence: how can God use His knowledge of the future to plan the past? I addressed this objection in Chapter 25, and the brief answer is that God does not need to "use" His knowledge in the way a creature would. For a temporal God with transcendent access, the whole of time is genuinely present to Him as He plans, acts, and responds — not because time is a block, but because God's transcendent nature is not limited as ours is.⁴³

Thesis 5: God Genuinely Interacts With Creatures in the Present

Although God has access to all of time, His primary mode of relating to us is present-tense and personal. He hears our prayers as we pray them. He grieves with us as we grieve. He delights in us as we walk with Him. The Bible's portrait of a God who acts in real time is not a pious fiction accommodated to our weakness — it is the truth.

This is the most pastorally important feature of the view. The God of dynamic omnitemporality is not a distant clockmaker who set history running and stepped back. He is not an all-seeing eye outside the block universe, watching us like frames of film. He is with us, in our moment, in our pain, in our joy, in our repentance, in our fear.⁴⁴

I want to underline how much is riding on this thesis. If God is strictly timeless, then in a serious sense He never does anything — because "doing" is a temporal concept. His "acts" are all one eternal act that we, from our temporal perspective, perceive as many acts. That may be philosophically elegant, but it is hard to square with the biblical picture of a God who decides, speaks, sends, gathers, forgives, and saves. On dynamic omnitemporality, God really does do things. He really does speak. He really does send. He really does save. The verbs are not metaphors. They are descriptions of what the living God actually does in relation to His creation.

What is more, this thesis grounds the very practice of the Christian life. Every time we pray, we are assuming God is listening in the present. Every time we repent, we are assuming God is receiving our repentance in the present. Every time we praise, we are assuming God is being honored in the present. The Christian life is drenched in the assumption that God is with us, now, in real relation. Dynamic omnitemporality ratifies that assumption theologically. Strict timelessness, whatever its philosophical appeal, seems to cut the nerve of Christian experience.

Thesis 6: God Has Never Changed a Past Event

Transcendent access does not mean God has ever reached back and altered the past. Scripture gives us no indication of such a thing, and there are good biblical, philosophical, and pastoral reasons to deny it. God sees the past perfectly, remembers it truly, can even in some limited sense "re-present" it liturgically (as in the Lord's Supper) — but He does not change what has happened.

The past is fixed. The present is the locus of action. The future — from the creature's perspective — is genuinely open, even though God Himself already knows what we will freely do.⁴⁵ This is the asymmetry of time that both Scripture and common sense uphold.

Thesis 7: God Is Qualified-Immutable and Genuinely Passible

God's essential character — His holiness, His love, His goodness, His wisdom, His faithfulness, His power — never changes. "I the LORD do not change" (Mal 3:6). "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows" (James 1:17). Jesus Christ is "the same yesterday and today and forever" (Heb 13:8).⁴⁶

But God's relational and emotional states genuinely change. He was angered at Israel's idolatry and then relented when Moses interceded (Exod 32:10–14). He grieved that He had made man (Gen 6:6). He rejoices over one repenting sinner (Luke 15:7). He will be moved with compassion at the sight of wandering sheep (Matt 9:36). These are not misleading anthropomorphisms. They are windows into the real emotional life of the real God, as Mullins argues in God and Emotion and David Lamb shows exegetically in The Emotions of God.⁴⁷

The distinction between God's essential nature (unchanging) and God's relational states (changing) is not a fudge. It is the pattern Scripture itself uses. "For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed" (Mal 3:6) — and yet, in the very same books of the prophets, God is described as grieving, relenting, changing His mind about disaster. The biblical writers clearly saw no tension between these two claims. What does not change is God's commitment, His character, His faithfulness, His love. What does change is how that love is expressed in particular moments, how it responds to particular human actions, how it engages with the unfolding of history.

I find it striking how often contemporary classical theists insist on strict immutability by appealing to these same Malachi and Numbers passages, while ignoring the fact that in the very same chapters and books Scripture piles up language of divine change and response. The way to handle the apparent tension is not to dismiss half the evidence. It is to recognize that Scripture is distinguishing between two kinds of unchangeableness — essential unchangeableness (God's character and nature) and relational unchangeableness (how God relates to us). God is essentially unchanging. God is relationally responsive. Both are true. Qualified immutability captures both.^47b

4. What the View Gets Right That the Alternatives Do Not

Why should we prefer dynamic omnitemporality over the alternatives? I have argued the point throughout the book; let me here collect the advantages in a single place, briefly, so the reader can see them at once.

It Preserves the Biblical Portrait

The greatest advantage of this view is that it does not require us to explain away the Bible. When Genesis says God created in six days, we do not have to interpret that as a timeless, non-sequential reality. When the Psalms say God "remembered" His covenant, we do not have to say God "always timelessly remembers" — a phrase that borders on meaningless. When Paul says, "When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son" (Gal 4:4), we can take the words at face value. Dynamic omnitemporality lets the verbs of Scripture be verbs.⁴⁸

This is no small thing. Biblical scholarship in the last century — from Oscar Cullmann to James Barr to the more recent work of scholars like John Goldingay — has repeatedly emphasized how deeply temporal, how narratival, how story-shaped the biblical presentation of God is. Biblical theology is not a set of timeless propositions but the story of God acting in covenant history with His people. A theology of God's relationship to time that cannot accommodate this narrative shape is a theology at war with Scripture's own form. I want a theology at peace with Scripture's form, and dynamic omnitemporality delivers that peace.

It Preserves Exhaustive Foreknowledge

Unlike open theism, dynamic omnitemporality affirms that God knows every future free choice with certainty. Isa 46:10 still holds: God "makes known the end from the beginning." But unlike Calvinism, this knowledge does not require that God cause every event. And unlike Molinism, it does not require the invocation of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom — entities whose truth-makers are philosophically obscure.⁴⁹

It Preserves Creation Ex Nihilo

Mullins has argued persuasively that divine timelessness cannot make sense of creation ex nihilo. If God is timeless, there is no "before" the universe for Him to have existed alone; He exists in an eternal "now" that includes all of history, which seems to collapse into eternalism and eternal creation.⁵⁰ Dynamic omnitemporality handles creation beautifully: God existed in His own triune life, then (in some genuine, though not clock-measurable, sense of "then") created. There is a real ontological and temporal priority of God over creation.

It Avoids the Problems of Strict Timelessness

Strict timelessness cannot account for God's changing relational states, cannot account for the Incarnation without Christological contradiction, cannot make sense of prayer, cannot accommodate divine emotions, and cannot coherently describe creation as a contingent act of a free agent.⁵¹ Dynamic omnitemporality avoids every one of these problems.

It Avoids the Problems of Craig's Hybrid View

Craig's hybrid view — timeless without creation, temporal with creation — has been sharply critiqued by both Mullins and DeWeese.⁵² The core problem is the incoherence of the transition: if God is strictly timeless at one "phase" and temporal at another, how did He "become" temporal? Any account of that becoming seems to require temporality on both sides of the transition. Dynamic omnitemporality dissolves the problem by denying that there ever was a strictly timeless phase. God has always been temporal in some sense, because the triune life is inherently dynamic.

It Is Consistent With Divine Passibility

The God of Scripture feels — really feels — love, joy, grief, anger, compassion. A passible God must be temporal, because emotional response requires a before and after: first the event, then the emotional response to the event. As I argued in Chapter 28, and at greater length in my book The Heart of God, divine passibility is best understood within a temporal framework.⁵³

It Is Consistent With the Incarnation

God the Son entered human history. He was born. He grew. He learned. He suffered. He died. He was raised. He ascended. He will return. These are temporal realities. A view on which God is essentially timeless cannot accommodate this without Christological contradiction — the Son cannot be both timelessly eternal and chronologically aged. Dynamic omnitemporality, by contrast, fits the Incarnation like a glove: the Son has always been temporal, and in the Incarnation He added a specifically human mode of temporality to His eternal divine life.⁵⁴

It Is Consistent With Substance Dualism and NDE Phenomena

If human beings have immaterial souls that survive bodily death in a conscious intermediate state, then God interacts with disembodied persons. That interaction is temporal. NDE research — while inconclusive as formal proof — gives us strong prima facie evidence that consciousness can exist independently of brain function, and that consciousness in such states experiences time qualitatively differently. The intermediate state is not timeless; it is temporal in a new, different way. Dynamic omnitemporality, with its insistence that there can be non-clock-time forms of temporal experience, naturally accommodates this.⁵⁵

5. What Remains Uncertain

I want to be honest with you. No model of God's relationship to time can resolve every mystery. Claiming otherwise would be a kind of intellectual arrogance unbefitting a creature trying to think about his Creator. Several real puzzles remain, and I want to name them.

The Precise Nature of Pre-Creation Divine Time

I have argued that God has always been temporal in some sense because of the Trinity's perichoretic life. But what is pre-creation divine time? There was no physical universe, no clock, no external reference. The sequence must have been purely intrinsic — successive states of divine experience, perhaps successive acts of divine will, successive loving exchanges among the Persons. Beyond that, I genuinely do not know what more to say, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to know more than that.

Mullins speculates more confidently here than I do, suggesting various structures that pre-creation divine time might have had.⁵⁶ DeWeese also offers some positive characterization.⁵⁷ I appreciate their work, but I think the appropriate posture is humility. We have Scripture's emphatic witness that God is eternal, that He existed before creation, and that He is triune. Beyond that, we are speculating about the interior life of the infinite God with only brief biblical hints to guide us.

The Mechanism of Transcendent Access

How, exactly, does God transcend creaturely clock-time without stepping outside of time altogether? I have offered suggestive analogies — consciousness experiencing time non-linearly (as in NDEs), a novelist's relation to her book's timeline, a dimension of divine experience that is temporal in a different way than ours. But these are analogies, not mechanisms. How God's infinite nature relates to temporal reality is, in the end, mysterious.

I find this no more troubling than the mystery of divine omnipresence (how can God be fully and wholly present at every place?) or divine omniscience (how can God know all truths without being overwhelmed?). Divine attributes, rightly understood, are always a mix of clarity and mystery. The clarity is enough for faith; the mystery keeps us humble.⁵⁸

The Infinite Past Question

If God has always been temporal, does God have an infinite past? DeWeese and some others argue yes: the divine life stretches back infinitely, and this is not a problem because divine time is not a quantitative sequence subject to the paradoxes of the infinite.⁵⁹ Craig famously denies the possibility of an actual infinite and thus rejects an infinite divine past.⁶⁰ This is part of why Craig prefers his hybrid view: if God cannot have an infinite past, and God must have existed "before" creation, God must have been timeless at that point.

I find the Craigian argument against the actual infinite philosophically interesting but theologically less than decisive. God's life is not a sequence of discrete countable events; it is continuous, qualitatively rich, and may not be subject to the paradoxes Craig raises against Hilbert's Hotel. But I admit this is contested territory and I hold my position here more tentatively than I do the main theses.⁶¹

The Relation to Contemporary Physics

Einstein's special relativity seems to suggest, on some interpretations, a B-theory block universe in which all moments are equally real and simultaneity is relative to observer. If B-theory is true, much of my argument is in trouble. I discussed this in Chapter 31; my provisional answer is that Neo-Lorentzian interpretations of relativity (which preserve absolute simultaneity via a privileged frame undetectable by experiment) are philosophically viable and theologically congenial.⁶² But physics and theology are a fast-moving conversation, and I do not pretend to have spoken the last word here.

The Question of Open Futures and Contingency

How, exactly, is the future "open" from the creature's perspective while being "known" from God's perspective? I have argued that transcendent access resolves the puzzle — God knows because He has access, not because He has determined. But the relation between determinism, freedom, and foreknowledge is one of the oldest and hardest problems in philosophical theology, and I do not claim to have solved it. I have, I think, shown that it is not as hopeless as some make out. But mystery remains.⁶³

6. Remaining Objections

Before I close, let me address four objections I often hear at the end of presentations like this one.

"But Isn't This Just Open Theism Dressed Up?"

No. Open theism denies exhaustive foreknowledge. My view affirms it. Open theism says God does not know the future because the future is metaphysically not-yet-real. My view says God knows the future because He has unique transcendent access that creatures lack. An open theist and I look identical on Thesis 1 (God is temporal) and different on Thesis 4 (God has exhaustive foreknowledge). That is not a minor difference. It is the difference between a view that most of historic Christianity can recognize as orthodox and one that many Christians have (rightly or wrongly) judged heretical.⁶⁴

"Isn't This Just Restating the B-Theory?"

No. The B-theory holds that all moments are equally real and that temporal becoming is an illusion. I reject both claims. On my view, only the present is fully real (presentism), temporal becoming is a genuine feature of reality, and God's transcendent access to other times does not entail that other times are equally real now. God's access is like the access of memory and anticipation, only perfect — not like the access of a spectator to frames of a film already laid out. The past is past; the future has not yet happened; but God knows both.⁶⁵

"Isn't Timelessness Tradition, and Temporality Innovation?"

The historical claim is true but more nuanced than is often realized. Strict Boethian timelessness became the majority view in the medieval West, largely through the influence of Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas. But the biblical witness was always closer to temporality — as Oscar Cullmann, James Barr, and other twentieth-century biblical scholars demonstrated.⁶⁶ The Eastern Fathers (especially Irenaeus and the Cappadocians) were more dynamic in their portraits of God. And even in the medieval West, Duns Scotus and others pushed back against the strongest classical views.⁶⁷

The real tradition of Christian theology is the tradition of reading Scripture carefully and following it wherever it leads. If the Bible teaches a temporal God, then reclaiming divine temporality is not innovation but reformation — a return to the sources. That, I believe, is the right way to understand the current revival of divine temporality in Christian philosophy and theology.

"What About Divine Simplicity?"

Classical divine simplicity, in its strictest Thomistic form, entails divine timelessness: a purely simple being cannot have temporal parts or successive states. If I reject strict simplicity, I can affirm temporality; if I affirm strict simplicity, I must affirm timelessness. I do indeed reject strict simplicity, for reasons developed in Chapter 30 and at length by Mullins.⁶⁸ Classical simplicity faces independent problems — modal collapse, inability to distinguish attributes, incoherence with the Trinity — that are severe enough to warrant rejection on their own merits. I still affirm that God is simple in a weaker sense: His nature is unified, not composed of separable parts, and He is not a being made up of accidental properties. But I deny the identity of all divine attributes with one another and with the divine essence.

7. A Pastoral and Devotional Reflection

I have written thirty-six chapters now, and I am aware that most of them have been dense with philosophy, exegesis, and argument. But the Bible is not written primarily to philosophers. It is written to people who suffer, pray, die, and hope. So I want to finish not with another argument but with a pastoral reflection on what all this means for the life of faith.

When You Pray, Someone Is Listening

I remember the first time I really understood this. I was a young seminarian kneeling by my bed after a hard day, and I had been taught in class that God is timeless and immutable in the classical sense — that He cannot really "hear" a prayer, because He has eternally already "heard" it, and cannot really "respond," because His one eternal act encompasses all responses. I tried to pray, and I found I could not. The God I had been taught to believe in was too abstract to pray to.

Then I began reading Mullins, DeWeese, Wolterstorff, and Craig, and I began to understand that this abstract God was not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is the God who heard Hannah weeping at Shiloh (1 Sam 1:10) and gave her a son. He is the God who heard the cry of Israel in Egypt (Exod 3:7) and came down to deliver them. He is the God of whom Jesus said, "Your Father knows what you need before you ask him" (Matt 6:8) — not because He has timelessly already answered, but because He is a real Father who is really there, really listening, really acting.

If dynamic omnitemporality is true, then when you pray, someone is actually listening in the real sense of that word. Not watching frames of film from outside. Not eternally rehearsing a response already given. Listening. Really listening. Really attending. Really present. Really loving.⁶⁹

When You Grieve, Someone Is Grieving With You

A few years ago I stood at a funeral where a friend of mine buried her teenage son. In that moment, what she needed was not a philosophical theology. She needed to know that God was with her — not watching from a distance, not timelessly acknowledging her sorrow, but with her, grieving in the real sense of that word, right there in the pew next to her.

That is exactly the kind of God Scripture gives us. Isaiah 63:9 says of God and ancient Israel, "In all their affliction he was afflicted." Jesus wept at Lazarus's tomb (John 11:35), and the Greek verb (edakrysen, ἐδάκρυσεν) does not mean "timelessly acknowledged sorrow." It means wept — actual tears, actual present grief. And Jesus, remember, is God with us.

Dynamic omnitemporality lets us take these texts at face value. God really does grieve with those who grieve. Not because He is finite or overwhelmed, but because He is love, and love — the kind of love that Scripture ascribes to God — is not possible without real emotional responsiveness to the beloved.⁷⁰

When You Sin, Someone Is Actually Forgiving

Some Christian traditions have taught that God timelessly forgives — that forgiveness was eternally, atemporally given in one divine act. There is something beautiful about this. But it also feels thin. When I confess my sin and ask for mercy, I want to know that at that moment, in real time, God is turning His face to me, hearing my confession, responding with grace.

That is what 1 John 1:9 promises: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." The verbs are present and future. He will forgive. He will purify. These are real actions that occur when we confess — not timeless decrees that merely seem to occur when we notice them. Dynamic omnitemporality lets the verbs be verbs.

When You Die, Someone Will Be Waiting

This is the deepest pastoral implication for me, given my own research into NDEs and the intermediate state. If substance dualism is true, and if death is not annihilation but transition, then the moment your body dies, you will find yourself in a new mode of temporal existence — conscious, aware, and (if you are in Christ) in the immediate presence of the Lord. "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). "Absent from the body, at home with the Lord" (2 Cor 5:8 paraphrase).

And the Lord you meet will not be a timeless block but the living, temporal, relational God we have been discussing. He will speak with you. He will welcome you. He will, in the apocalyptic image of Revelation 7:17 and 21:4, wipe every tear from your eye — a temporal action performed by a temporal God on a temporal creature in a new mode of temporal life.⁷¹

The NDE literature does not prove the intermediate state, but it is consistent with it in striking ways. So many people who have been briefly on the other side report the same things: overwhelming love, perfect welcome, a being of light, a sense of life-review in which one's entire life is present simultaneously and sequentially at once.⁷² If this is a glimpse of reality, it is suggestive that the temporal experience on the other side is qualitatively different from ours, but still temporal, still sequential in some sense, still a genuine conversation with a living Lord.

When Christ Returns, He Will Really Come

The Book of Revelation ends not with a timeless flash but with a coming. "Surely I am coming soon" (Rev 22:20). "Behold, he is coming with the clouds" (Rev 1:7). The Christian hope is not absorption into an eternal now but the literal, bodily, temporal return of the Lord Jesus Christ to a renewed creation.

The new heavens and new earth are not a timeless static monument; they are a new creation, with trees whose leaves heal the nations and rivers flowing from the throne of the Lamb (Rev 22:1–2). God's eternity is not the absence of time but the sanctification of it. The problem with our present time is not that it is temporal but that it is broken — marred by sin, death, and decay. What awaits us is not timelessness but redeemed time: time without sorrow, time without ending, time with God.⁷³

When You Wait, Someone Is With You in the Waiting

One of the hardest things about being a creature in time is the waiting. We wait for healing. We wait for answers to prayer. We wait for prodigal children to come home. We wait for justice. We wait for reunion with loved ones we have buried. We wait for Christ to return. And the waiting itself can be a form of agony.

If God is strictly timeless, there is something odd about saying He is "with us in the waiting," because He is not, from His own vantage, waiting for anything. But on dynamic omnitemporality, God genuinely walks with us through time. He is with us in the now, and the next now, and the next. He does not experience the same kind of anxious waiting we do — He knows what is coming — but He is present as we wait, moment by moment. He does not abandon us to the clock.

Scripture repeatedly commands us to wait on the Lord, and the promises associated with waiting are almost always temporal ones: "Yet those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint" (Isa 40:31). This is not a promise of escape from time. It is a promise of strength within time — strength that comes because the God of time is with us in time.

When You Wonder If God Sees, He Sees Now

When life is hard, it is easy to wonder if God sees what is happening. "Does God know what I am going through?" "Has He forgotten?" The psalms are full of such cries, and so is our own experience of faith.

On dynamic omnitemporality, God's knowledge of our situation is not a distant, detached, timeless scanning of the universe from outside. He sees us now, in this moment, with full knowledge and full love. When Hagar was cast out in the wilderness and named God "El Roi" — "the God who sees" (Gen 16:13) — she was not claiming an abstract metaphysical theorem. She was testifying to a concrete experience: God saw her in her distress, in that moment, and came to her aid. This is the God we have.^73b

8. A Word to My Fellow Travelers

This book has been written for thoughtful Christians wrestling with deep questions. I want to close with a personal word to different kinds of readers.

To the pastor: if you have been preaching a God whose forgiveness and grace and love are "timeless" in the strict classical sense, I want to invite you to reconsider. Your people need a God who really hears, really responds, really loves. That God is the God of Scripture. Preach Him.

To the scholar: if you have been trained in the classical tradition and inherited strict timelessness as unquestionable orthodoxy, I want to invite you to revisit the primary sources. Read Mullins. Read DeWeese. Read Wolterstorff. Read Padgett. Read Craig. The case for divine temporality is much stronger than the classical textbooks suggest, and the classical case has serious internal problems. You do not have to leave orthodox Christianity to embrace divine temporality. Much of orthodox Christianity, biblically read, seems to require it.

To the open theist: I share much of your desire to protect the biblical portrait of a dynamic, responsive God. But I think you go too far when you deny exhaustive foreknowledge, and I do not think you need to. Transcendent access gives you everything you want — genuine divine response, genuine libertarian freedom, genuine divine emotion — without requiring the cost of a partially-ignorant God. You can have the dynamic God of Scripture without losing the omniscient God of Scripture. Consider the view I have sketched here.

To the process theologian: I honor your emphasis on God's relatedness and emotional depth. But your account buys these at the price of God's aseity and sovereignty, which I cannot surrender. Dynamic omnitemporality gives you a genuinely related, genuinely feeling, genuinely responsive God — a God who, like yours, is in time and changes in His relational states — but a God who is also fully sovereign, fully independent of creation, fully capable of creating ex nihilo and bringing history to its consummation. You can have a truly relational God without the costs of process metaphysics.

To the physicalist who rejects the intermediate state: I have argued in my earlier work that substance dualism is the more biblically faithful position. If you are persuaded by that argument, you will see that the God who meets us in the intermediate state must be a temporal God — one capable of interacting personally with disembodied saints until the resurrection. This is not a peripheral issue. It is part of the basic structure of Christian hope.⁷⁴

To the ordinary Christian who picked up this book out of curiosity: I hope you have felt that this is not just an academic exercise. What you believe about God's relationship to time will shape how you pray, how you grieve, how you think about the future, how you read your Bible, and how you face your own death. I believe — with all my heart — that the God of Scripture is a God who is really here, really listening, really loving, really with us. Not a distant timeless abstraction. A living Father who is closer than your breath.

9. A Concluding Confession

I close with a confession. Theology is hard. The question of God's relationship to time is one of the hardest questions theology asks. I have done my best in these pages to offer an answer that is biblically faithful, philosophically coherent, historically informed, and pastorally satisfying. But I know my answer is partial. I know there are brilliant minds who will disagree. I know I have not said the last word on this — and no human being ever will.

What I believe I have offered is this: the most defensible account of the biblical portrait of God, the account that best integrates Scripture with the best philosophy and the deepest pastoral needs. Dynamic omnitemporality — God as genuinely temporal, not bound by creaturely clock-time, triune in His eternal life, present with us in the now, aware of all that has been and will be. The God beyond the clock, but also the God with us.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of the living — not of the dead (Matt 22:32). He is not a frozen statue in the pantheon of abstract perfections. He is a living, loving, acting, responding, rejoicing, grieving, saving Father who entered our time in the person of His Son and will return in His own time to bring all things to their consummation.

This is the God I know. This is the God I pray to. This is the God I have tried to describe in these thirty-six chapters. And if I have succeeded in even some small way in pointing beyond my own finite words to Him, then the years of writing have been well spent.

Come, Lord Jesus.

10. Epilogue: A Prayer

Let me give the last word not to an argument, but to a prayer. It is the prayer I have prayed, in one form or another, many nights while writing this book, and it is the prayer I offer now as I hand the book into your hands.

Living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who was and is and is to come —

You are not locked behind glass. You are not a timeless abstraction. You are the God who walked in the garden in the cool of the day, who called Abraham to leave his country, who wrestled with Jacob until dawn, who heard the groaning of slaves in Egypt and came down to deliver them. You are the God who took flesh and was born, who grew and learned and ate and drank and wept and died and rose and ascended. You are the God of whom the Apostle writes, "He is not far from each one of us."

Teach me to pray to You as the One You are — the living One, the acting One, the responding One, the loving One. Forgive me for every philosophy I have ever let obscure Your face. Forgive me for ever thinking of You as less real, less personal, less present than Scripture shows You to be.

And when my own time ends, when the clock of my body finally stops, let me find myself not alone in silence, but welcomed by You into the time that has no ending — the time You have prepared for those who love You, where every tear is wiped away and every grief is answered and every moment is filled with Your unchanging, always-new love.

In the name of Jesus Christ, who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.

Soli Deo gloria.