Divine Eternity
Dr. James Dolezal is professor of theology at Cairn University in Langhorne, PA and a Credo Fellow who has written this piece on God’s relationship to time. This is an excerpt of the original article, which you can read in full here in the St. Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology.
Introduction
Does God exist in time or independently of it? Is he timelessly eternal, or does his life pass through an everlasting succession of moments? Most Christians agree that God transcends time in some fashion, but how, exactly? Such questions have spawned a vast and complex literature in both the Christian and ancient Greek traditions. There are no signs that interest in the questions of divine eternity is abating, or that theologians and philosophers are closer to reaching a consensus. Yet how one answers questions about God’s relation to time has profound implications for understanding the nature of one’s relationship to God and of his to his creatures (see also God and Philosophy of Time).
The Greek term for eternal, aiōn, originally denoted the spinal marrow ‘which was held to be in a special way the vehicle of a creature’s life’ (Kneale 1969: 223; see also Wilberding 2016: 15–16). From this notion of life-fluid, the term evolved to indicate a thing’s lifetime and then to connote a maximal span of life as ‘ever’ and ‘always’. In this sense, sempiternity or everlastingness appears closer to the original meaning than does atemporality or timelessness. Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE), responding to Parmenides’ metaphysical monism, began a transformation of the term to signify that which is outside the order of becoming and which is thus immutable. The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (204/205–270 CE) and the Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430) furthered the transformation of the term’s meaning into strict atemporality or timelessness. While adherents to divine timelessness generally agree that God is eternal (see Gowen 1987), with many insisting that atemporality is proper to the notion of eternity itself, adherents to divine temporalism disagree amongst themselves, with some regarding sempiternity or temporality as a subspecies of divine eternity (Davis 1983: 8; Melamed 2016b: 1–2; Deng 2023) and others concurring with the classical atemporalists in refusing to acknowledge God’s successive, everlasting duration as a version of divine eternity in any sense (Wolterstorff 2010). In this article, the view that God is unchanging and timelessly eternal will be indicated by the term ‘atemporal’ while the view that God undergoes changes and thus exists and lives through a succession of moments will be indicated by the terms ‘sempiternal’ and ‘temporal’. Christian adherents to divine temporality do not hold that God had an absolute beginning of existence, and some even deny that all time necessarily requires a substratum of change. Christian atemporalists and sempiternalists alike maintain that God is without beginning or end.
This article considers the major positions on divine eternity – atemporalism and sempiternity – by examining their basic claims, rationale, and biblical support. Several contemporary challenges to the traditional Augustinian and Thomistic teaching will be examined, together with some responses by recent advocates of the atemporalist position.
Atemporal eternity
Belief in the perfect fulness of divine being, God’s primal causality, and absolute divine immutability tend to motivate commitment to the classical doctrine of God’s atemporal eternity. An entity whose life passes through successive moments, it is claimed, is a mixture of being and becoming. As such, it would seem that it is not able to sufficiently ground its own existence or activity, since it would depend on whatever supplied it with newness of being and actuality. Neither, consequently, can it ultimately ground the existence of the world as its Creator and Sustainer. A mutable and temporal being depends on something not identical with itself to supply that which it comes to be or possess through a process of change. Classical atemporalist theologians reject this view of God and insist instead that God’s life is ‘all at once’. His engagement with the world does not move him into new states of thought or activity.
2.1Ancient Greeks on eternity
Key elements of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic doctrines lie in the background of the traditional Christian atemporalist view. Plato famously stated that the creator and father of the of the universe sought to make the world eternal so far as possible. As it is impossible to bestow eternity in its fulness on a creature, he made it ‘a moving image of eternity […] moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity’ (Timaeus 37d4–6; Plato. 1963: 1167). The unity of divine being, which is eternity, stands apart from the realm of motion and becoming as its perfect source and exemplar. Past and future cannot properly be predicated of an eternal being:
[F]or we say that it ‘was’, or ‘is’, or ‘will be’, but the truth is that ‘is’ alone is properly attributed to it, and that the ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same forever cannot become older or younger by time. (Timaeus 38a1–4; Plato. 1963: 1167)
It should be noted that Plato’s view does not necessarily result in a notion of eternity that is extradurational. Self-identical sameness is the key to distinguishing eternity from time (Wilberding 2016: 23–31). Plato says time is that which ‘revolves according to a law of number’ (Timaeus 38a1–4; 1963: 1167). For him, ‘[t]ime consists […] of cycles, or cosmic units, and it is unending. In this way too it is like eternity; since it cannot be eternal it exists in everlasting succession’ (Callahan 1948: 191–192).
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) relates time to movement and concludes that the first mover must be unmoved since he is the good which moves all other things as their final cause. Being the ultimate and most perfect good, God has a perfect knowledge and enjoyment of himself. This means that life belongs to him since the actuality of thought is life: ‘God’s essential actuality is life most good and eternal […] for this is God’ (Metaphysics XII, 172b26–31; Aristotle. 1984: 1695, original emphasis). Per Aristotle, everything in motion is moved towards the good and undergoes change as it seeks to attain the good – the good is that which all seek. It is necessary that the final cause and first mover of this process of change, the good itself, not be a part of the process. Otherwise, he would be susceptible to the causal influence of some still more ultimate good. This would disqualify him as the unmoved mover and first cause of motion.
As for time, Aristotle maintains that it is the measure of motion by numbering the distinction of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Time is continuous because the motion it measures, a body passing through a spatial magnitude, is continuous, but this does not mean ‘that time is to be confounded with motion or magnitude. For time is characterized primarily by the fact that it numbers motion according to prior and posterior’ (Callahan 1948: 194; see also Jocelyn 1961; Elders 1997: 92).
It is the Platonists of late antiquity who first appear to articulate a notion of eternity as durationlessness (Wilberding 2016: 32). Plotinus says the life of ‘the god’ – the Intellect or Real Being – that produces the world is himself eternity. If one can think of a temporal being’s life all at once, compressing together, as it were, the fragmentary bits of otherness and activity, one will begin to approach the notion of eternity. The life of eternity would not be a ‘life that goes from one thing to another but is always the selfsame without extension or interval’. From this it follows, Plotinus says, that:
one sees eternity in seeing a life that abides in the same, and always has the all present to it, not now this, and then again that, but all things at once, and not now some things, and then again others, but a partless completion, as if they were all together in a point [… Eternity] is something which abides in the same in itself and does not change at all but is always in the present, because nothing of it has passed away, nor again is there anything to come into being, but that which it is, it is. (Enneads III.7.3; Plotinus. 1967: 303, 305)
This is a unity of absolute simplicity. Nothing comes to or flows away from such a being. In this perfect unity of life, it is uniquely able to impose unity on lower beings, even if they possess such unity in a less perfect manner, as a life scattered over a duration of time.
Plotinus’ understanding of time focuses on the concept of life. He seeks a metaphysically existing time, something more substantial that Aristotle’s notion of time as a numbering relation. For Plotinus, the eternal Soul produces the world of succession though there is no succession within the Soul itself. Callahan explains:
Time is the life of soul, not in itself, but only considered insofar as it is the principle of life and motion for the universe. Time hovers, as it were, between soul and the universe, and has in it prior and posterior only in the sense that the life communicated by soul to the sensible world is received continuously by this lower world and translated into motion, the best manifestation of this continuous communication of life being the uniform motion of the heaven. (Callahan 1948: 120)
This fits nicely within Plotinus’ emanation scheme of causality, in which everything in the hierarchy of being stands in causal dependency to that which is above it. Nevertheless, Plotinus does not explain what bridges the life of the Soul to the world of nature. Unlike the Christians who followed him, he has no doctrine of creation to account for the causal connection between eternity and time.
2.2Augustine and God’s priority over time
Augustine of Hippo appropriates insights from the Greek philosophers and weds them to his Christian doctrine of creation. While he rejects the philosophers’ notion that time and the world of movement are bidirectional everlasting realities, he endorses their fundamental claims regarding God’s simplicity, perfection, and immutability (see Von Jess 1975; Rogers 1996). As Creator of the world, God is prior to it. Yet this cannot be a temporal priority since all temporality exists within the world itself, comprised as it is of mutable creatures whose motion time measures (West 2001; Ravicz 1959: 542–543; Callahan 1948: 150). Consequently, it is not legitimate to ask what God was doing when the world was not:
If […] there was no time before heaven and earth came to be, how can anyone ask what you were doing then? There was no such thing as ‘then’ when there was no time. (Confessions XI, 13; Augustine of Hippo. 1997: 294–295)
Perhaps one of the more surprising implications of this is that God must be eternally creating: ‘There was therefore never any time when you had not made anything, because you made time itself’ (Confessions XI, 14: Augustine of Hippo. 1997: 295; see also Quinn 1999: 319; Wilberding 2016: 46). God did not move from idleness to suddenly conceiving the idea of creation as though his will were causally changed (City of God XI, 4; Augustine of Hippo. 1950: 347–349). Willing to create, which just is God’s act of creating, is not a novel activity that emerges from a preceding period of rest. Rather, as atemporal, God is both at rest and wholly active, the beatitude of rest following from his eternal inner activity. ‘In His leisure’, Augustine states, ‘is no laziness, indolence, or inactivity; as in His work is no labour, effort, industry. He can act while He reposes, and repose while He acts’ (City of God XII, 17; Augustine of Hippo. 1950: 400). Given this active life of rest, Augustine says to God:
Your years do not come and go. […] Your years are a single day, and this day of yours is not a daily occurrence, but a simple ‘Today’, because your Today does not give way to tomorrow, nor follow yesterday. Your Today is eternity. (Confessions XI, 13; Augustine of Hippo. 1997: 295)
God’s life is a dynamic ‘standing now’. His immutable ‘today’ means that the world would not be coeternal with him even if it had no beginning and were bidirectionally everlasting, since it would still be marked by change and the passage of successive moments while God’s eternity transcends such vicissitudes (Callahan 1948: 182).
Read the entire article at St. Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology.
James E. Dolezal
James E. Dolezal is professor of theology at Cairn University in Langhorne, PA, and visiting professor of theology at International Reformed Baptist Seminary in Mansfield, TX. He is the author of God without Parts (Pickwick, 2011) and All That Is in God (Reformation Heritage, 2017). He is a contributor to Divine Impassibility: Four Views of God’s Emotions and Suffering (IVP, 2019), Classical Theism: New Essays on the Metaphysics of God (Routledge, 2023), and to the T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (forthcoming). He resides in the Philadelphia suburbs with his wife and children.
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