God and Time

The eternal God has created the universe. And that universe is time-bound. How can we best understand God's relationship with our time-bound universe? For example, does God experience each moment of time in succession or are all times present to God?

How we think of God and time has implications for our understanding of the nature of time, the creation of the universe, God's knowledge of the future, God's interaction with his creation and the fullness of God's life.

In this Spectrum Multiview volume, four notable philosophers skillfully take on this difficult topic--all writing from within a Christian framework yet contending for different views. Paul Helm argues that divine eternity should be construed as astate of absolute timelessness. Alan G. Padgett maintains that God's eternity is more plausibly to be understood as relative timelessness. William Lane Craig presents a hybrid view that combines timelessness with omnitemporality. And Nicholas Wolterstorff advocates a doctrine of unqualified divine temporality.

Each essay is followed by responses from the other three contributors and a final counter-response from the original essayist, making for a lively exchange of ideas. Editor Gregory E. Ganssle provides a helpful introduction to the debate and its significance. Together these five scholars conduct readers on a stimulating and mind-stretching journey into one of the most controversial and challenging areas of theology today.

Spectrum Multiview Books offer a range of viewpoints on contested topics within Christianity, giving contributors the opportunity to present their position and also respond to others in this dynamic publishing format.

Paul Helm (1940-2025) was a teaching fellow in theology and philosophy at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. From 1993 to 2000 he taught as professor of the history and philosophy of religion at King's College, University of London. Hepublished numerous books and articles, including Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time (Oxford University Press, 1988), Belief Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Faith and Understanding (Eerdmans, 1997).

William Lane Craig (PhD, University of Birmingham, England; DTheol, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany) is professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and at Houston Baptist University. In 2016 he was named by The Best Schools as one of the fifty most influential living philosophers. Craig has authored or edited over forty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; God, Time, and Eternity; and God and Abstract Objects, as well as over 150 articles in professional publications of philosophy and theology, including The Journal of Philosophy, New Testament Studies, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and British Journal for Philosophy of Science.

Alan G. Padgett (DPhil, Oxford) is professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of God, Eternity and the Nature of Time and Science and the Study of God.

Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophy at the Yale Divinity School. He has published many books and articles, including When Justice and Peace Embrace (Eerdmans, 1983), Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 1996) as well as the seminal paper "God Everlasting" (first published in 1975). Wolterstorff's latest book is Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Greg Ganssle (PhD, Syracuse) is professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. He is the author of several books, including A Reasonable God: Engaging the New Face of Atheism and Thinking About God, andhe is the editor of God and Time.