The Eternity of God: Timeless or Everlasting?

The eternity of God is His possession of His whole life at once, without beginning, without end and, in the classical sense, without any succession of before and after. Whether that means God is timeless, or only everlasting through all of time, is now among the most disputed questions in the doctrine of God, and Scripture alone does not settle it. Below we set out the classical definition of this member of the attributes of God, the texts behind it, the case against timelessness at full strength, the rival answers of classical timelessness, the everlasting view and Craig's hybrid, and where Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) lands between them.

Key takeaways

• Eternity has two parts. For Aquinas, what is eternal has "no beginning nor end," and it "has no succession, being simultaneously whole."
• Scripture is consonant with timelessness but does not prove it. Even William Lane Craig, who rejects strict timelessness, grants that "the biblical data are not clear on the nature of divine eternity."
• The rival answers share one assumption. Classical timelessness, the everlasting view and Craig's hybrid all treat "time" as meaning the same thing for God and for us.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps both. Where the everlasting view and Craig's hybrid bring God into time to keep the relationship, it holds God's eternity whole in His own frame and our succession real in ours.

What does the eternity of God mean?

Boethius, writing in prison, gave the definition the Western church has kept. "God is eternal; in this judgment all rational beings agree," he wrote, and then: "Now, eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment." The life is endless, with no term at either end; whole, with nothing lost to the past or still waiting in the future; and possessed at a single moment, with nothing in it before or after anything else.

Thomas Aquinas built on Boethius in the Summa Theologiae. Eternity, he explains, is "known from two sources": first, because what is eternal is interminable, which is to say it "has no beginning nor end (that is, no term either way)"; secondly, "because eternity has no succession, being simultaneously whole." He grounds it in God's changelessness: "The idea of eternity follows immutability, as the idea of time follows movement." And he adds a line that only divine simplicity makes sense of: "Nor is He eternal only; but He is His own eternity."

The second part of the definition is what separates eternity from everlastingness. To be everlasting, or sempiternal, is to last through all of time without beginning or end. Boethius insisted that this is not yet eternity. Even a world that had always existed, "as Aristotle deemed of the world," would still live its life one moment at a time, and so it "is not such as rightly to be thought eternal." He concluded: "we shall follow Plato in saying that God indeed is eternal, but the world everlasting."

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Augustine said the same to God in prayer. "Your years neither go nor come; but ours both go and come," he wrote in the Confessions. "Your today is eternity." And: "You have made all time." Time is something God made, which is why the puzzle of what He was doing before creation has an answer.

Much hangs on the answer: whether God keeps promises about a future He has not reached, hears prayer as it is prayed, or has a past He can no longer touch. The hub asks the short form, whether God is outside of time; this page takes it further.

Volume One sets out the method the rest of this page relies on, and it is free to read.

Is God eternal? What Scripture says

Is God eternal? Scripture answers yes, and it answers in worship before it answers in doctrine. Moses prays:

"Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." (Psalm 90:1-2, NIV)

Two verses later he sets God's measure beside ours: "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night" (Psalm 90:4, NIV). Moses blesses Israel with the same truth: "The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms" (Deuteronomy 33:27, NIV). Isaiah calls Him "the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 40:28, NIV), and Paul gives glory to "the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God" (1 Timothy 1:17, NIV).

The psalmist contrasts God with the whole created order:

"In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded. But you remain the same, and your years will never end." (Psalm 102:25-27, NIV)

Hebrews 1:10-12 applies those words to the Son. When God names Himself to Moses, the name has no tense: "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14, NIV). And Jesus takes that name on His own lips: "'I tell you the truth,' Jesus answered, 'before Abraham was born, I am!'" (John 8:58, NIV).

Isaiah holds God's height and His nearness in one verse. He is the one "who lives forever, whose name is holy," who says, "I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit" (Isaiah 57:15, NIV). We will return to that pairing.

These texts teach that God is without beginning or end. They do not, by themselves, decide whether His life has succession. Craig says so directly: "the biblical data are not clear on the nature of divine eternity." The texts are consonant with timelessness. Where Scripture leaves the metaphysics open, the classical tradition resolves it toward the greatest conception of God, the method set out in the perfection of God.

The whole question of God and time is worked through in Volume Three.

Is God timeless? The case against it at its strongest

A large part of modern philosophy of religion answers no. Here is its case in its best form.

The first argument is about knowledge. The Stanford Encyclopedia puts its starting premise in one line: "If God is omniscient, then God knows what time it is." Norman Kretzmann pressed it in 1966: a God who never changes cannot know what time it is now, because what is now keeps changing, and to keep up with it He would have to change too (as one recent study sums up his argument). A. N. Prior had sharpened the point with a homely example. When a pain ends we say, "Thank goodness that's over," and what we are thankful for is not a date but the fact that the pain is past. A God with no past and no present, it seems, cannot know that.

Craig draws the conclusion. In "God, Time, and Eternity" (Reasonable Faith) he writes, "Therefore I am persuaded that if God is omniscient, He must know tensed facts and, therefore, must be in time." His second argument is about relation: "in virtue of His causal relationship to a temporal creation, God is temporal." A God who is really related to a changing world, the argument runs, must change with it at least in His relations.

The third argument is about action. The Stanford Encyclopedia asks: "How, if at all, can an unchanging God interact with the world, affect history, or respond to petitionary prayer?" The God of Scripture waits, relents, answers and acts at particular times. Nicholas Wolterstorff's "God Everlasting" (1975) argued that this God is best read as a God who lives through time with us.

R. T. Mullins has gathered these arguments into a full case. His 2016 book closes with a verdict that Paul Helm quotes in his review for the Journal of Analytic Theology: "Divine timelessness has had a long run in Church history, but it is time to bury it and move on." Mullins tests timelessness against omniscience, creation and the Incarnation, and finds that it fails on each.

Taken together, these arguments conclude that a timeless God could not know our present, answer our prayers or relate to us at all.

Timeless or everlasting? The standard answers at their strongest

Four answers stand in the field, and each sees something true.

Classical timelessness. Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas hold that God is timeless in the full sense. A God who lived through time would have a past He could no longer reach and a future He had not yet reached, and so He would lack part of His own life at every moment. That is incompatible with aseity, God's existence of Himself without need. Boethius also saw that timelessness answers the worry about foreknowledge: God does not foresee our choices but sees them, as we see what happens in front of us, and seeing does not cause. The best modern defense is Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann's account of "ET-simultaneity," which in the Stanford Encyclopedia's words "relates items in different modes of existence, one temporal, and one eternal." The strain is the relationship. If nothing in God is before or after, His answering and His waiting look like figures of speech.

The everlasting God. The temporal view, in the Stanford Encyclopedia's phrasing, is the one with which "the term 'everlasting' (or 'sempiternal')" is "mostly associated." On this view God has no beginning or end but does live through time. Its strength is that the biblical narratives can be read straight: God waits, hears and responds in sequence, as a person does. Its strain is the one Boethius named. A God whose life runs from moment to moment has already lost yesterday and does not yet have tomorrow. He would be everlasting, as Boethius said the world is, and not eternal.

Craig's hybrid. Craig proposes that "God exists timelessly without creation and temporally subsequent to creation." His intuition comes first. He insists on two truths at once: that God is, in Himself, eternal and self-sufficient, and that His relationship with His creatures is real and responsive. Both are right. The strain is the transition. As Volume Three observes, a timeless state "cannot have a 'before' it becomes temporal, because 'before' is a temporal concept." And the price of the relationship is still a change in God.

Open and process theism. Open theism holds that the future is open for God as well as for us, so that God lives through history learning how free creatures choose. Process theism goes further and makes God receive each moment of the world into His own life. Their strengths are real: freedom is honored, prayer matters, and the relationship is as real as it can be. Both pay for it with any guarantee about how the story ends, since a God who waits on the future cannot promise it.

Laid side by side, every position on the list trades a perfection for a relationship, or a relationship for a perfection.

Volume One shows where that trade comes from, and you can read it free.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer the eternity of God?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error: one term carried across two frames as though it meant the same thing in each. On eternity, classical timelessness keeps God's perfection and seems to leave the relationship unreal, while the everlasting view and Craig's hybrid bring God into time to keep the relationship. FICT refuses the trade by naming what all of them assume: that "time" must mean one thing for God and for us.

It does not. A being's nature fixes how it takes in reality, and God's nature and ours differ in kind. In God's own frame, time is the whole of created history possessed at once. Volume Three calls this eternity "in the classical sense (tota simul): the whole possessed at once, with no succession internal to it." That is Boethius's definition kept without remainder. In our finite frame, time is a real succession. The past is fixed, the future is open, and the present is real. That flow, Volume Three insists, "is not a subjective illusion; it is a structural necessity of finitude," the true mode in which a finite mind takes in a world it cannot hold all at once.

The two descriptions do not compete, because they are not said in the same sense. God's eternity is not a very long time placed alongside ours. It is the frame in which every moment of ours is present together, and it contains our frame without being one more position inside it. God acts in one eternal act, and the creature receives that act as a sequence. As Volume Three puts it, the sequence is "located in the effects and not in the act." White light passing through a prism comes out as a spread of colours, one after another, without the light itself turning red and then blue.

Scripture speaks the same way. Isaiah's God lives "in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite." Paul speaks of one grace given eternally and received in history:

"This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." (2 Timothy 1:9-10, NIV)

The grace is given before time, and its appearing happens in time.

This completes Craig's intuition. God is eternal in Himself, and His relationship with us is real, and no phase change in God is needed to have both. The view of time as a fixed whole has its own page on eternalism, and the statement of FICT sets the position out in one place.

Volume Three, Resolving Time & Eternity, works out the eternity of God chapter by chapter.

Five objections to the eternity of God, answered

We have run thousands of simulated attacks against Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, drawn from academic and peer-reviewed sources. Five of them bear directly on the eternity of God, pressed from the everlasting view, from Craig's hybrid and from the defenders and critics of classical timelessness.

Does a timeless God know what time it is now?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The attack comes from Prior, Kretzmann and Craig, and John Perry's 1979 work on what he called the essential indexical gives it its strongest form. Knowing that "the meeting is at noon on Tuesday" is not the same as knowing that "the meeting is now." Someone can know every dated fact and still not know which moment is the present. If God is timeless, the objection runs, He knows every dated fact about the world but never the bare "now," and so there is something He does not know.

The defense grants that the "now" is real knowledge. A traveler who realises his station is this one learns something, and it changes what he does next. What the defense denies is that this knowledge is the same for every knower. Its content exists only for someone standing inside the sequence. God knows every creature's "now" exhaustively, because He is the one who holds each of them in being. The puzzle of two knowers who know every fact yet not which of them they are arises for peers, each occupying one position among many. God is not one position among many. He holds every position, so there is no "which one am I" left over for Him to learn. Volume Three puts it in two sentences: "We know 'Now' by being localized within it. He knows 'Now' by perfectly sustaining it." The question of how He knows all things is taken further on is God omniscient.

If God never changes, can He really answer prayer?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

Mullins presses a dilemma here. To answer a prayer is to do something because the creature asked. That seems to be a new act on God's part, one that depends on the creature's prior act. If God is timeless and does not change, He cannot do anything new, and so He cannot literally respond. The classical theist must then either let God change or admit that God's "answers" are only a way of speaking.

The defense keeps the relationship real and locates the change exactly. God does not learn, grow or change. Yet, as Volume Three puts it, "His relationship with His creatures is still real, and what changes within it is the creature, which receives His one act as a sequence." God wills the prayer and its answer together in one eternal act, and the prayer has real weight in that act: had it not been prayed, that answer would not have been given. What is new is new in our history, where the prayer comes first and the answer after. Nothing is new in God. Prayer is a real cause without God having to change His mind, and Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, works this out in full.

Can a timeless God be patient, or delay?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

This objection runs in the spirit of Craig's temporal view. Scripture says God is patient. Peter answers those who doubt Christ's return by saying, "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9, NIV). But delaying is something done in time. To hold back judgment until later, God must have a "later." A timeless God, the objection concludes, cannot be patient at all.

The defense reads the passage in its setting. Peter is answering scoffers who ask, "Where is this 'coming' he promised?" (2 Peter 3:4, NIV). The slowness they complain of is measured on their timeline. And before Peter speaks of patience, he sets that timeline beside God's: "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8, NIV). The "delay" is real, and it is a fact about the creaturely sequence: judgment comes later in history than the scoffers expected. It is not a change in God, who knows and wills in one act. God's patience is His eternal will that history should hold room for repentance.

Is "simultaneous" the wrong word for eternity?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

Stump and Kretzmann defended timelessness by proposing a special relation, "ET-simultaneity," between eternity and each moment of time. Critics replied that this is a category mistake. Simultaneity means "at the same time," and a timeless God is at no time. A defender of Stump and Kretzmann can turn the charge around. Any account that says God grasps all of time "at once" is using the same word. If it is a category mistake for them, it is a category mistake for everyone who says it.

The defense agrees that no clock is shared, and it defines the word. "At once" here means Boethius's tota simul: the whole possessed without succession. It describes God's life as one undivided act with nothing before or after in it, and it does not mean that God and Tuesday occupy the same moment. Volume Three makes the point where the thesis is defined: eternity is "the whole possessed at once, with no succession internal to it, and not a species of sequence." Stump and Kretzmann saw rightly that all of time is present to God. Their word, which relates a timeless term to a temporal one as though the two shared a measure, invited the objection. The concept they reached for is the classical one, and it survives once the word is used in its own sense.

Does a timeless act of creation make the world necessary?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

This objection is also Mullins's. If God is simple and timeless, He does not have one act now and another later. He has one act, and that act just is God. God exists necessarily, so His act is necessary. But that act is the act of creating this world. So this world exists necessarily, and God could not have refrained from creating it, nor created any other. This is the modal collapse argument in its timeless form.

The defense follows Aquinas and goes one step further. Aquinas had already said that God's "willing things apart from Himself is not absolutely necessary," and that "From the fact that God wills from eternity whatever He wills, it does not follow that He wills it necessarily; except by supposition" (Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, a. 3). Volume Four explains why. Necessity, it argues, "attaches to the act itself, taken in itself." The phrase "the act of creating this world" picks out that one act by way of what it produces, and necessity does not pass through a description of that kind. The difference between God creating this world and God creating another is "located wholly in the created term." The world is contingent, and creation is free, as the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo has long held.

Each of these objections is met in full across the series.

Frequently asked questions

Is God eternal?

Yes. God has no beginning and no end: "from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (Psalm 90:2, NIV). In the classical sense He is also without succession. Boethius defined eternity as "the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment," and Aquinas taught that God is not only eternal but "His own eternity."

Is God timeless or everlasting?

Classical theists answer that God is timeless; the everlasting view holds that He lives through time without beginning or end; Craig holds that He is timeless without creation and temporal since. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers that God is timeless in His own frame, possessing all of time at once, while the succession He creates is fully real in ours. The everlasting view protects the relationship, and the timeless view protects God's fullness of life. FICT keeps both, because the two descriptions answer to two different frames.

Did God have a beginning?

No. To be eternal is to have no beginning. Whatever begins to exist depends on something before it, and God depends on nothing. That is His aseity. Augustine adds that time itself is something God made: "You have made all time; and before all times You are." There was no time before God for Him to begin in.

Will we be timeless in eternity?

No. The eternal life promised to believers is endless life with God, not God's own mode of life. Aquinas distinguished three measures of duration: eternity, which belongs to God alone; aeviternity, which he calls "the mean between them both"; and time. Volume Three holds that the redeemed live in everlasting, decay-free succession, never becoming timeless. Sequence is healed of decay, not abolished. Their joy grows without end, a hope the beatific vision page explores.

If God sees all of time at once, is the future already fixed?

No. God's knowledge of a free choice rests on the choice, not the choice on the knowledge, as our seeing someone sit does not make them sit. Boethius made that point fifteen centuries ago. Certainty in God's frame is not necessity in ours. The full reply is on theological fatalism, and whether God can know the future without fixing it has its own page. God's eternity leaves our freedom intact, since the One who knows a choice is not the one who makes it.

Where to go from here

The eternal God is no less near for being eternal. A God who lived through time as we do would keep our past only in memory, as we do, and meet our future only when it arrived. The God who possesses all of time at once holds every moment of our lives in the present of His knowing, the moments we have lost and the ones we fear alike. That is what Moses meant by calling Him our dwelling place "throughout all generations."

Volume One sets out the method behind every page in this series, and it is yours free. The series carries it into evil, time, changelessness and infinity.