Problems with Divine Timelessness
There are some very severe problems with the view that God is
timeless. Mormons cannot adopt the view that God is timeless for the simple and
dispositive reason that spirit is essentially material and God the Father is corporeal.
Any material being has spatial position and thus is located within time-space.
Indeed, God is contemporaneous with all spatial positions, or everywhere
present. If our idea of time entails a number of consecutive temporal
positions, then even a perfected body must relate to time. Because material is
uncreated, it follows that space-time is an external feature of the material
universe. Both spirit and matter are described as material states of affairs in
Mormon thought, and therefore spirit also occupies space and move in
spatio-temporal dimensions.
A second reason for rejecting timeless eternity applies to
both Judeo-Christianity in general and Mormonism in particular. For the
biblical God is conceived as a distinctly personal being who can univocally be
described in human terms such as caring, judging, forgiving, responding,
planning, deciding, deliberating, remembering, anticipating, freely choosing
and so on. Yet none of these acts is consistent with the notion of an atemporal
God, for all of these actions entail a succession of time, either in the sense of
taking time to perform (such as deliberation) or in requiring a temporal
viewpoint as a requisite performance (such as remembering or anticipating .For
example, all of the scriptures reviewed in the discussion of contingent
omniscience indicate that God had not fully determined what course of action he
would take in interaction with humans who may nor may not repent. A God who
interacts in such ways with free beings cannot timelessly implement his will
with regard to them. Rather, the implementation of his will must await the time
of their actual decision to be determined. Indeed, the very notion of deciding
which action to undertake makes no sense if there is no time prior to the time
at which the decision is already determined. “Deciding” essentially involves determining
a course of action which was not previously determined.
. . .
A third reason for rejecting divine timelessness is peculiar to
Christianity, for Jesus Christ is the preeminent instance of an actual person
who reveals God in time. I will argue that the notion of a timeless God cannot
be resolved by either the traditional “two nature” or the “kenotic” theories of
christology. I will merely summarize the argument here. The kenotic view
asserts that there was a time when God emptied himself of divinity and became
mortal. After his death, Christ again took upon himself a fullness of divinity.
The problems for timelessness on the kenotic view is that an atemporal entity
itself enters time and becomes temporal. Of course, the notion that an entity
becomes temporal entails that the being is in fact temporal, for it can clary
be affirmed that the being existed before it became mortal. There is no
coherent concept of becoming temporal if it means that there was “a time before
becoming temporal” at which the begin was timeless. If at any time an entity will
exist in time, it follows that there is necessarily a succession of states of
affairs for such an entity. For one thing, it is clear that any being that
undergoes such change is mutable, and a mutable being is not atemporal. A being
who exists at time will always have the property of having existed at that time
and so temporal predicates will apply to it. Thus, any entity which is temporal
at any time cannot become or cease to be temporal if it continues to exist.
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes
of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001), 344-45, 346
