In D&C 130:7, a common "proof-text" by many Latter-day Saints in favour of divine timelessness as well as exhaustive foreknowledge, we read that "[angels] reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord."
I recently re-read this text as part of my daily scripture reading, and I noticed that (1) we are not told about the nature of the future that is "before the Lord"--that is, we are not told if this future is "exhaustive" (in the traditional sense) or contingent (the Open Theistic perspective) and (2) a problem with "absolutising" this passage to support divine timelessness and/or exhaustive foreknowledge is that it would mean that God Himself does not have, in and of himself, divine foreknowledge (not just of the future, but the past and then-present), but receives it passively from an outside source. Such would be problematic, to say the least, of God's power and abilities.
I recently re-read this text as part of my daily scripture reading, and I noticed that (1) we are not told about the nature of the future that is "before the Lord"--that is, we are not told if this future is "exhaustive" (in the traditional sense) or contingent (the Open Theistic perspective) and (2) a problem with "absolutising" this passage to support divine timelessness and/or exhaustive foreknowledge is that it would mean that God Himself does not have, in and of himself, divine foreknowledge (not just of the future, but the past and then-present), but receives it passively from an outside source. Such would be problematic, to say the least, of God's power and abilities.
Some Latter-day Saints have argued that Joseph Smith elsewhere taught the traditional view that God exists in an "eternal now" based on the following comment in the Times and Seasons, vol. 3 no 12, p. 760:
The great Jehovah contemplated the whole of the events connected with the earth, pertaining to the plan of salvation, before it rolled into existence, or over the "morning stars sung together for joy," the past, the present and the future, were, and are with him one eternal now; he knew of the fall of Adam, the iniquities of the antedeluvians, of the depth of iniquity that would be connected with the human family; their weakness and strength, their power and glory, apostasies, their crimes, and their righteousness, and iniquity; he comprehended the fall of man, and their redemption; he knew the plan of salvation, and pointed it out; he was acquainted with the situation of all nations; and with their destiny; he ordered all things according to the council of his own will, he knows the situation of both the living, and the dead, and has made ample provision for their redemption, according to their several circumstance and the laws of the kingdom of God, whether in this world, or in the world to come.
Blake Ostler in his 2001 book, The Attributes of God (Greg Kofford Books), pp. 152-53 commented on this passage, showing that Joseph Smith did not teach an eternal now, as well as some of the logical absurdities of God being “timeless”:
At first blush this statement appears to say precisely that all things past, present and future as with God one eternal now. Such a reading supports a conclusion that God is timeless in precisely the way intended by Boethius. However, a closer reading shows that this cannot be the case. Reading this to say that God is timeless so that temporal designations of "before and after" do not apply to God is inconsistent with the statements that Jehovah contemplated these events "before" the morning stars (i.e., the sons of God in the heavenly council) sang for joy. Thus, we must look for another interpretation to make sense of the context of the statement. The entire context is describing the plan of salvation and how God preplanned and made provision for salvation of the dead by providing the doctrine of baptism for the dead. A more consistent reading of this statement is that in the deliberations leading to the plan of salvation, God considered all of the possibilities that were likely to occur. In his contemplation, God considered all things past, present and future and he made provisions for all possibilities that could befall the human family in adopting his plan. For example, he contemplated the fall of Adam and knew that it could occur. If it did occur, then God planned to provide a Savior to redeem mortals from the fall.
If read to indicate that God is timeless, it is hard to make sense of the notion that God was once a man as the Book of Mormon unambiguously asserts (1 Ne. 19:7-10; Mos. 13:34; 15:1-2) or that God progresses in any manner as Joseph Smith asserted in the King Follett discourse delivered in Nauvoo in 1844. For if God is timeless, then there was no real time prior to which God became man nor could there be an interval during which he experienced mortality and again became divine. Indeed, the view that the past and the future are just as real as the present leads to a clear absurdity: in the same moment of reality in the eternal now (EN) Washington is both crossing the Delaware and already dead! If God sees simultaneously with his gaze that the Apollo 11 astronauts are walking on the moon, then it follows that Washington's crossing of the Delaware is simultaneous in time with the Apollo 11 astronauts walking on the moon--for if a is simultaneous with b, and b, is simultaneous with c, then the law of transitivity requires that a is simultaneous with c (a=b, b=c, therefore a=c).
