Paul Helm

In recent years the doctrine that God exists in a timeless eternity has achieved something of the status of philosophical heterodoxy, if not of downright heresy. The arguments against the idea of God's timeless eternity come from two sources. The first of these is Professor Kneale's paper ‘Time and Eternity in Theology’ in which, alluding to the famous definition of eternity by Boethius as ‘the complete possession of eternal life at once’ Professor Kneale confesses ‘I can attach no meaning to the word “life” unless I am allowed to suppose that what has life acts… life must at least involve some incidents in time and if, like Boethius, we suppose the life in question to be intelligent, then it must involve also awareness of the passage of time’

In Part One Paul Helm provides a general discussion of these themes, seeking both to contextualize the debate and to engage with contemporary philosophical discussion of the relation between faith, reason and understanding. Part Two contains five case studies that illustrate the work of seminal figures in the tradition. They include treatments of Augustine on time and creation, Anselm on the ontological argument and the necessity of the atonement, Jonathan Edwards on the nature of personal identity and John Calvin and the ’sensus divinitatis’, focusing on the way in which Calvin has been appealed to by contemporary reformed epistemology

In thinking about God's relation to the world philosophical theologians have taken two lines of thought. In some cases these two views have been held side by side, in others separately. The first has been to conceive of God as existing timelessly, or outside time, and as contemplating the world in one timeless creative gaze. 1 As has often been pointed out, this view is subject to the difficulty of making sense of a temporal order of events in a tenseless mode. God may know that e is earlier than f . But A. N. Prior has forcefully argued that if God's knowledge is outside time this restricts what God knows to those truths that are themselves timeless. The idea of something's being over , or going to happen , or happening now cannot fall within the knowledge of God if he exists timelessly. To replace the indexical words such as ‘now’ and ‘then’ with dates and definite descriptions of places will not suffice because what we know when we know that e is over but f is not is not simply that e is before f. 2