ABSTRACT
In the second half of the 20th century, analytic philosophy of religion was born. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, philosophers such as Nelson Pike, Anthony Kenny, Basil Mitchell, Antony Flew, A. N. Prior, Kai Nielsen, William Alston, and Alvin Plantinga wrote on topics related to the serious, philosophical study of religious claims. Among the specifi c theological issues discussed was God’s relationship to time. Should God be considered to be “outside of time” (whatever, precisely, that might mean)? This had been the view of nearly all infl uential Christian thinkers from the Patristics through the Reformers, and continues to be the dominant view in more traditional theological circles. Or should time be understood as a bedrock feature of reality which even a being than which none greater is possible must simply take as a given? It is fair to say that analytic philosophers of religion were in agreement: timelessness might be fi ne for Platonic forms but not for a being with genuine causal powers, much less for a being who interacts with the temporal world and reveals himself to human beings.
