For yesterday and to-day and to-morrow have no existence...

For yesterday and to-day and to-morrow have no existence, except in time; but thou, although nothing exist without thee, nevertheless dost not exist in space or time, but all things exist in thee. For nothing contains thee, but thou containest all. (1962, 71) For the medieval philosophers, whatever is in time is bounded by it; it cannot stop the process of change and of time; so, it is subject to time not its master. (Helm, 2007) Therefore, God must be timeless.

As for the modern philosophers of religion, their approach is radically different from the medieval philosophers. These philosophers oppose the classical view of eternity, saying that a timeless being cannot be God of religion, especially ‘the Christian God’. (Davies, 1983, 11) According to many of them, God, in scripture, is described as a loving, suffering, redeeming being, in brief, an acting being.

But if God is unchangeable and immutable he cannot do such activities; thus, a being that is not changeable cannot be an agent. Hence, it is necessary to ascribe change and temporal properties to God and God must be temporal. What does God’s being temporal mean? Almost all of modern philosophers of religion answer this question in different ways. For example, Swinburne, one of the leading defender of divine temporality, holds that eternity means to have an everlasting life in time.

He says that God exists throughout all periods of time; God exists now, he has existed at each period of past time and he will exist at each period of future time. (1994, 137) God exists in time but there is no beginning or end for Him; so ‘a being who is both backwardly and forwardly eternal we may term an eternal being.’ (1993, 218) Similarly, Wolterstorff maintains that God exits in time and he does have a history like the creature.

(2001, 211) Although modern philosophers of religion have relatively different views on the nature of divine temporality, they all share the same opinion: God cannot be a timeless being. As it is seen, there are mainly two views about the nature of divine eternity: divine timelessness and divine temporality. But we see that there is also a third way which is held by William Lane Craig. Craig has a distinguished place among modern religious philosophers.

According to him, God is neither timeless nor temporal; God’s life has two stages: the first is timeless and the second is temporal. It seems that, as we shall see below, the turning point in his view of eternity is creation.