ETERNITY

As with many issues in western philosophical theology, the historical roots of this debate go back to Christian Scripture and Greek philosophy. Tracing this issue back to these earliest sources, we discover the two main views of divine eternity in western tradition: (a) God exists forever ‘in’ time, and (b) God exists ‘outside of’ time. On either viewpoint God is eternal; the question is how we best understand this attribute. Let us call the rst viewpoint ‘everlastingness’ (sometimes called sempiternity) and the second viewpoint ‘timelessness’ or atemporal eternity. Later we will canvass some recent attempts to split the difference between these alternatives with some kind of third option. On both of these traditional understandings, God’s life is not temporally limited: God exists forever without coming into being or passing out of being. With respect to change, a timeless God cannot change in any way, while a God who is everlasting may or may not be strictly immutable. The Christian Bible presents a God who is everlasting. Psalm 90: 2 is a good example: ‘Before the mountains were born, and You gave birth to the earth and world, from eternity to eternity You are God.’ The Hebrew word for ‘eternity’ here means a long period of time (not a timeless eternity) and is often translated as ‘everlasting’ in many English Bibles. This is consistent with the narratives concerning God and Israel or the Church. For example, the prophet Isaiah (speaking for God) proclaims: ‘I the Lord, the rst and to the last of them I am He’ (Isa. 41: 4). A God who exists from the rst to the last is an everlasting Lord, not a timeless one. Again, at the opening of Scripture, even though God creates the heavens and the earth ‘in the beginning,’

Genesis 1: 1-3 says nothing at all concerning a beginning to time itself. It is plausible to understand the phrase ‘there was evening and there was morning, Day One’ as only the rst day in the week of God’s creation, not a beginning to time itself (Gen. 1: 5; see Barr 1962: 145-9). Yet another example comes from wisdom literature. Proverbs personi es Wisdom as being with God before all ages and before the beginning of the creation of the earth (Prov. 8: 22-6). However, this does not have to suggest a beginning to time itself, but only that Wisdom was with God even before the act of creation commenced. Finally, some New Testament passages speak of God’s grace or promise existing ‘before the ages began’ (Titus 1: 2), even ‘before the time of the ages’ (2 Tim. 1: 9), but language like this is an expansive way of claiming that God’s promises are eternal without prejudice to either understanding of eternity. The Greek word for ages or eternity in these New Testament passages means a very long period of time, not a timeless eternity. God in the texts of the Christian Bible (and especially the narratives) is an everlasting God, not absolutely timeless. Another way of saying this is that the God of the Bible has a history, a story, and so must be temporal to some degree. Passages like the ones we have just mentioned can be made compatible with an already established philosophical notion of divine timelessness; but they do not teach nor imply such a perspective (contra Craig 2001: 3-8). If God is everlasting, then he exists forever as a temporal being. God’s eternity is in nite, and his life is unlimited by time, yet God does undergo temporal passage from past, to present, to future. God lives with us in our history. This implies that there are episodes in God’s life which no longer exist, and equally there must be future episodes which have not yet come into being. This point is an important one in the debate concerning divine eternity. With respect to timelessness, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides was the rst in recorded history to articulate the rather dif cult concept of a being ‘beyond’ time. Philosophers debate the exact meaning of the fragments we have left from his philosophical poem, The Way of Truth (an extended meditation on Being itself, not God), but his approach was in uential. Plato picked up this notion of a complete, perfect, and unchanging eternity, applying it to the Forms. The middle Platonist philosopher Plutarch is the rst to apply this idea to God: ‘Single, he [God] has completed “always” in a single now, and that which really is in this manner only “is,” without having come into being, without being in the future, without having begun, and without being due to end’ (1936: 393B). The metaphor of God being ‘outside’ of time is dif cult to spell out with precision in literal language, but Plutarch is getting close. A timeless God has no temporal attributes, including change, becoming, past, present, or future. Such a God exists only in a kind of ‘present,’ a very different kind of ‘now’ from our temporal one: one which never changes, never becomes, is never past nor future but always a timeless presence. A timeless God has no temporal location and no temporal duration. Words indicating time can only apply to this God in a very limited and analogical sense; such sentences are not literally true. Boethius gave a famous de nition of this concept: ‘the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of unlimited life’ (Consolation of Philosophy 5. 6). A timeless God (unlike an everlasting one) lives all of his life in a timeless, unchanging presence: a

‘whole, simultaneous and perfect’ life without any episode ceasing to exist. Origen of Alexandria is the rst Christian theologian to apply this notion to God, and later Augustine developed the idea quite fully. Passing through Boethius and Anselm to Aquinas, it became the standard viewpoint in Greek and Latin philosophy and theology. To sum up: a timeless God exists in one, whole, unlimited, and complete life, which is timeless and unchanging. Temporal language for such a God cannot apply with literal predication, but must be analogous or metaphorical. God’s timeless ‘present’ is an unchanging presence throughout time and space.