Concept

Eternity (Divine)

Intro

When Christians say God is eternal, they do not just mean he has been around for a long time. They mean something deeper. The classical position, going back to Boethius in the 500s, is that God does not live moment by moment the way we do. He does not have a yesterday or a tomorrow. His whole life is present to him all at once. Boethius called it tota simul, "the whole at once."

A picture: imagine you are walking down a long road. You can only see where you are. The next bend is hidden, and the last bend is behind you. Now imagine a person standing on a mountain above the road. They see the whole road in one view. They are not running ahead of you; they just see all of it at the same time. Classical theology says God's relation to time is something like that, except the mountain is not part of the road at all.

Not all Christian thinkers agree. Some say God is everlasting, meaning he does exist in time and experiences a succession of moments, but without beginning or end. William Lane Craig holds a hybrid view: God was timeless before creation, then entered time when the world began.

The page lays out both views, walks the Bible passages that bear on the question (Psalm 90, 2 Peter 3, John 8:58), and shows where the doctrine matters for other apologetic questions: how God knows the future without overriding human freedom, how the Kalam argument talks about God before time, how the eternal Son of God could enter human history at a specific moment.

In full

The classical-theist doctrine that God's mode of existence transcends temporal succession. Two main accounts compete in contemporary Christian philosophical theology:

Atemporal eternity (Boethian / classical / Thomist), God is timeless. There is no temporal succession in God; God's life is tota simul ("the whole at once"). God's eternal "now" encompasses all temporal moments without itself being temporal.
Everlasting / sempiternal eternity (temporalist), God exists in time but without temporal beginning or end. God's life is genuinely temporal but everlasting; God experiences temporal succession.

The classical-theological consensus from Augustine through Anselm and Aquinas favors atemporal eternity; contemporary Christian philosophy (post-Kalam, post-mid-20th-c. analytical theology) is more divided, with William Lane Craig defending a hybrid position (timeless without creation, in time with creation), Nicholas Wolterstorff and Richard Swinburne defending sempiternal eternity, and Paul Helm + Brian Leftow defending atemporal eternity. The doctrine is load-bearing across multiple apologetic engagements: the foreknowledge-and-freedom debate (Counterfactuals of Freedom adjacency), the Kalam cosmological argument (Craig's account of God's relation to time before/with creation), the doctrine of the Incarnation (how can the eternal Son enter temporal life?), and the divine-attributes cluster (Aseity / Divine Simplicity / Privation).

The two main accounts

Atemporal eternity (Boethian / classical)

The mature classical articulation is Boethius's, Consolation of Philosophy V.6 (c. 524):

Aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, "Eternity is the complete possession all at once of unending life."

The key terms:

interminabilis vitae, "unending life" (no beginning or end)
tota simul, "the whole at once" (no temporal succession; not a series of moments but the whole of life present together)
perfecta possessio, "complete possession" (not a flow or process; a complete possession)

For Boethius (and the classical tradition that follows), God's eternity is not infinite time but the negation of time. God does not endure for an infinite duration of seconds; God's life is a single, complete, present "now" that does not divide into past, present, future. Time is an attribute of created reality; God is the creator of time and is not measured by it.

Aquinas in ST I q.10 develops the doctrine systematically:

q.10 a.1, Eternity is rightly defined by Boethius's formula.
q.10 a.2, Eternity differs in kind from time, not merely in duration. Tempus (time) involves prius et posterius (before and after); eternity does not.
q.10 a.3, God alone is eternal in the strict sense.
q.10 a.4, Eternity differs from aeviternity (the angels' mode, a sort of intermediate atemporality).

The atemporal-eternity view connects to:

Aseity (God's life is self-existent and self-sufficient; not dependent on temporal flow).
Divine simplicity (no temporal parts, since temporal parts would be a kind of composition).
Immutability (God does not change, atemporal eternity makes change impossible).
Impassibility (God does not undergo creature-imposed temporal-emotional states).

The classical attribute-cluster (eternity / simplicity / immutability / impassibility / aseity) is internally coherent on the atemporal-eternity reading.

Sempiternal / everlasting eternity (temporalist)

The everlasting-eternity view holds that God exists in time but without temporal limit, no beginning, no end, but genuinely temporal. God experiences moments as past / present / future; God's life involves temporal succession. The view's principal contemporary defenders:

Nicholas Wolterstorff, "God Everlasting" (1975), the canonical contemporary defense. Wolterstorff argues that biblical narrative consistently presents God as temporally engaged with creation (God responds to prayer; God brings about future events; God grieves over Israel's apostasy). Atemporal eternity, Wolterstorff argues, cannot accommodate genuine divine response and engagement.
Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (1977; 2nd ed. 2016), defends temporal eternity from analytical-philosophical-theology premises.
William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (1989), open theist; defends temporal eternity as part of the broader open-theism package (foreknowledge-of-future-free-acts is incompatible with libertarian freedom; God is in time and the future is open).

The everlasting-eternity view's strengths:

Biblical narrative fit, biblical descriptions of God's response, grief, joy, temporal engagement read more naturally on temporal eternity than on atemporal eternity.
Philosophical-coherence, McTaggart's argument that A-series temporality (real past/present/future) entails B-series ordering creates difficulties for atemporal eternity that everlasting-eternity avoids.
Personal-analogy, God is a person in classical Christian theology; persons typically experience temporal succession.

Craig's hybrid position

William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Crossway, 2001), defends a sophisticated hybrid view:

Without creation, God is timeless (atemporal eternity).
With creation, God is temporal, God enters into temporal relations with creatures upon creating them.

Craig's motivation: the Kalam cosmological argument requires that the universe began to exist, which entails that time itself began. If God's eternity is atemporal-only, the act of creation introduces the puzzle of how an atemporal God can perform a temporal act. If God's eternity is temporal-only, the universe's beginning entails God-pre-existing-in-an-actual-infinite-past (which is precisely what Kalam argues against). Craig's hybrid: God's mode of existence shifts from atemporal to temporal at creation, a coherent middle position.

Craig's hybrid is contested:

Critics (Helm, Leftow) argue it violates divine immutability, if God's mode of existence changes from atemporal to temporal, that is a change.
Defenders argue the change is in external relation (to creation) rather than intrinsic essence, which is consistent with traditional immutability accounts (which deny intrinsic change while allowing relational change).

Biblical anchors

The biblical texts on divine eternity are theologically rich and have been read both atemporally and temporally by competent scholars:

Psalm 90:4, "For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night." Often cited for atemporal eternity (God's experience compresses millennia); Wolterstorff counters this is metaphor for divine patience and transcendent perspective, not literal atemporality.
2 Peter 3:8, "But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day." Similar interpretive disputes.
Isaiah 57:15, "For thus says the high and exalted One who lives forever, whose name is Holy..." (NASB). The Hebrew shoken ad ("dwelling forever"), classical-theist reading: God's eternity transcends temporal duration; temporalist reading: God's existence has no temporal terminus.
Revelation 1:8; 21:6; 22:13, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End." Christological ascription of eternity-titles.
Exodus 3:14, "I AM WHO I AM" (ehyeh asher ehyeh). Classical reading: God's self-existent-being transcends temporal becoming. Modal-ontological reading: God's necessary existence is an essential property.
John 8:58, "Before Abraham was born, I am" (Jesus's egō eimi). Christological self-eternity claim.
Romans 16:25-27, "according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested", temporal vocabulary but read by classical theists as kerygmatic-progress in salvation history, not as evidence God experiences time as we do.
Hebrews 13:8, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." Christological eternity-and-immutability conjunction.

Apologetic deployments

1. Foreknowledge-and-freedom

The classical problem: how can God know the future free acts of creatures without those acts being determined?

Atemporal-eternity solution. On Boethian-Thomist atemporal eternity, God does not know the future as future, God's eternal vantage encompasses all temporal moments simultaneously. From God's perspective, all moments are present; there is no "before" or "after" in divine cognition. The future is no more determined by God's atemporal knowledge than the past is determined by your present knowledge of it. Classical-theist solution to the foreknowledge-and-freedom puzzle.
Sempiternal-eternity solution. On temporal eternity, God knows the future via middle knowledge (Counterfactuals of Freedom; Molinism), counterfactual knowledge of what free creatures would do in any circumstance. Combines temporal-eternity with libertarian freedom.
Open-theism solution. Reject foreknowledge of free acts; God knows all knowable propositions, but future-free-acts are not yet propositions of determinate truth-value.

The atemporal-eternity solution dissolves the problem most cleanly; the temporalist views must engage middle knowledge or open-future commitments to preserve libertarian freedom + meaningful divine knowledge.

2. Kalam cosmological argument

The Kalam (Kalam Cosmological Argument) argues: everything that begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. Craig's atemporal-without-creation / temporal-with-creation hybrid is specifically tailored to this argument, God-as-cause exists timelessly without creation and enters temporal relations at creation. The hybrid avoids both (a) actual-infinite-past problems and (b) atemporal-eternity-with-no-relation-to-temporal-creation puzzles.

3. The doctrine of the Incarnation

How can the eternal Son of God become temporal in the Incarnation? On atemporal eternity, the Son's eternal existence is timeless; the human nature assumed in the Incarnation is temporal. The two-natures doctrine (Chalcedon 451) requires that one Person possesses both divine (atemporal) and human (temporal) natures without confusion. This is the deepest Christological metaphysical puzzle and admits multiple sophisticated solutions across the patristic-medieval-modern tradition.

On temporal eternity, the puzzle is softened, if God already experiences temporal succession, the Incarnation's temporality is less metaphysically jarring. But the strongly-traditional Chalcedonian doctrine of the immutability of the Logos in the Incarnation (the Son does not become something He was not) is stronger on atemporal eternity.

4. The classical-theism cluster

Eternity (atemporal) + Aseity + Divine Simplicity + Immutability + Impassibility + Omniscience-via-self-knowledge form the classical-theism cluster of divine attributes. The cluster is internally coherent, the classical-theism account holds together. The temporalist alternative (everlasting eternity + intrinsic divine change + responsiveness-to-creation) reshapes multiple attributes simultaneously and is closer to theistic personalism (see Classical Theism vs Theistic Personalism).

Patristic and medieval development

Augustine, Confessions XI.10-13; XII; De Civitate Dei XI.6, the classical patristic articulation. Time is a feature of creation; God's eternity is the standpoint from which all moments are equidistantly present. Augustine's famous question, "what was God doing before he created the world?", is dissolved by the doctrine of atemporal eternity: there is no "before" creation in God's mode of existence.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V.6, the canonical formulation: Aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio.
Anselm, Proslogion 18-22; Monologion 18-24, develops atemporal eternity from perfect-being theology premises.
Aquinas, ST I q.10; Summa Contra Gentiles I.15, the canonical scholastic articulation. Connects atemporal eternity to aseity, simplicity, immutability.
John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I.13-14, Eastern Orthodox systematics; atemporal eternity.

Modern philosophical engagement

Eleonore Stump + Norman Kretzmann, "Eternity" (Journal of Philosophy 78, 1981; expanded as The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas ch. 4, 1993), a sophisticated contemporary defense of atemporal eternity in the Aquinas tradition; introduces the ET-simultaneity relation (a special simultaneity-relation between atemporal and temporal entities).
Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Cornell, 1991), comprehensive defense of atemporal eternity.
Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time (Oxford UP, 1988; 2nd ed. 2010), Reformed-classical defense.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, "God Everlasting" (1975); Inquiring About God (Cambridge UP, 2010), canonical sempiternal-eternity defense.
Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford UP, 1977; 2nd ed. 2016), temporal-eternity defense.
William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity (Crossway, 2001); God, Time, and Eternity (Springer, 2001), hybrid view.
Garrett DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (Ashgate, 2004), careful evaluation of the options.