Genesis 1:1 proclaims that God created the heavens and the earth at a moment in time before which nothing material existed. But how well does a coherent notion of God’s timeless eternity comport with this settled understanding of God’s instantaneous cosmic creativity?

If God is eternally timeless, then all of his actions must also occur timelessly. But this entails that the universe could not really have a temporal beginning. Paul Helm, an enthusiastic advocate of timeless eternity, agrees that, according to the notion of timelessness, “there need be no temporal first moment of creation, and so the universe need not have begun (temporally) to exist, for from the divine standpoint, the universe is eternal, even though it exists contingently” (God and Time: Four Views, 49). Therefore, although the universe is contingent upon God, “there need be no moment at which the temporal world springs into being” (Helm, 49).

Helm dismisses the need for a temporal beginning of creation, preferring to speak in terms of its eternal contingency:

If the universe is beginningless, without a first event, it does not follow from this that it is not contingent; and if it is contingent, then it has a cause, although not a temporal cause, but someone on whom it depends for its existence (50).

Thus, to maintain a consistent notion of divine timeless eternity, we may only think of God as the atemporal source of an eternally contingent universe, not as the immediate temporal cause of an instantaneously created one. As a result, rather than use the language of time to explicate God’s relationship to the creation, Helm argues that “it is better…to say that God has a timelessly eternal relationship with the temporal world, but a relationship that is nevertheless contingent” (49). He concludes that “there was no time when the Creator was not, any more than there was a time when the creation was not. And yet the Creator exists ‘before’ the creation” (52).

Unfortunately, Helm’s position flies in face of the biblical data. A major reason for this is that the view of time that he must assume in order to remain consistent is a static one. Within philosophy, the static theory of time maintains that all facts, episodes, and events within the "history" of the universe exist timelessly. As opposed to the dynamic theory of time, which holds that tensed time (that is, past, present, or future) is a real property of the universe, the static theory asserts that all facts exist simultaneously and without tense (that is, timelessly).

According to the dynamic theory, the past exists no longer and the future does not yet exist. The static theory, on the other hand, claims that all facts, events, and episodes exist concurrently without duration or change in ontological status. Facts or events never really go out of existence or come into being. They always exist, and only seem to us to disappear into the “past” or to appear in the “future.” If the static view is true, then our empirical experience of “time passing” is false. 

Therefore, Helm may claim that the universe is eternal yet contingent only within a static theory of time. If God has no temporal relationship with world, that is, if both he and his act of creation are timeless, then all facts must exist simultaneously and timelessly as well. This means that the Son of God would be eternally incarnate. This is exactly what Helm claims when he argues that “if God the Son is timelessly eternal and yet incarnate in Jesus Christ, there is no time in his existence when he was not incarnate” (54). He adds that “there is no preexistent Christ with a life history independent of and prior to the incarnation. There is no time when the eternal God was not Jesus of Nazareth” (54). 

Helm concludes with the astonishing assertion that “there is no time at which the Son of God exists in a preincarnate form” (50). Helm’s conclusion is problematic given the biblical claim that the Word was with God in the beginning and subsequently became flesh. Worse yet, it would seem that Christ would still be incarnate on the cross, since the crucifixion is a timeless event, existing in an “eternal present,” for which the designation of “past” is illusory. If this is true, then arguably, we are still in our sins, since Christ’s work is eternally unfinished! (J. Oliver Buswell, A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, 47)

Furthermore, a static view of time threatens our doctrine of God’s omniscience. If God is timelessly eternal and all facts exist timelessly, then God could only know that fact or event A exists prior to fact or event B, but could not know that either fact or event exists or is happening “now.” God could only know, for instance, that it rains on October third, 2005. He could not know that it is “now” raining or that it had rained “then,” since these are tensed facts.

As Christian philosopher William Lane Craig asserts, if God truly exists in a timelessly eternal present in which a single day lasts forever to him, “then God would not only be grossly mistaken, since today only lasts 24 hours, but worse He would not even know what day in the history of the world really is present, since they would all run together in His experience.” Such a low view of God’s knowledge and foreknowledge is surely inconsistent with the biblical witness. 

Given these insurmountable doctrinal difficulties with the idea of God’s timelessness, is there another option? Craig offers us one:

By virtue of his creating a temporal world, God comes into a relation with that world the moment it springs into being. Thus, even if it is not the case that God is temporal prior to his creation of the world, he undergoes an extrinsic change at the moment of creation which draws him into time in virtue of his real relation to the world (God and Time: Four View, 65).

In addition:

Given a dynamic theory of time, it follows from God’s creative activity in the temporal world and his complete knowledge of it that God is temporal. God quite literally exists now. Since God never begins to exist nor ever ceases to exist, it follows that God is omnitemporal. He exists at every time that ever exists (141).

Hence, without experiencing any internal change, God enters time at creation and continues to exist fully present at every moment in time throughout the history of the world. I believe that this view, called “Omnitemporality,” offers an explanation of God’s relationship to time that comports much better with our view of a God who is both transcendent and immanent, who is both sovereign in creation and omniscient, who “in the fullness of time” entered into human experience and “dwelt among us,” and who has gone before us to prepare a place for us to dwell with him for time eternal.

Blessings,

Arnie Gentile

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