Classical theism places God wholly outside time, living all of time "at once." But the things the believer's God does (knowing what is happening now, responding to a prayer, acting at a moment) all need a before and an after. Placing God outside time keeps the word "eternal" but removes what makes those acts possible.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine eternity assembles three reinforcing claims. God is *aeternus* in the strict Boethian sense: *interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio*, the simultaneous and complete possession of unbounded life (Boethius, (524) 1969), V.6. God is atemporal: outside time, with no before, no after, no succession in the divine being itself (Augustine of Hippo, (397–400) 1991), XI; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.10; (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981). On the most developed contemporary refinement, the eternal life stands in eternal–temporal (ET) simultaneity with every temporal moment alike, with the eternal *now* equally adjacent to every creaturely *now* (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); (Leftow, Brian, 1991); (Rogers, Katherin A., 2000); (Helm, Paul, 2010).

The competing tradition (divine sempiternity, everlastingness, omnitemporality) keeps God within time but extends the divine duration without limit (Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975); (Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 2001); (William Hasker, 1989); (Mullins, R. T., 2016); (Craig, William Lane, 2001); (William Lane Craig, 2001). Craig combines the everlasting position with A-theoretic tense-realism (the tensed view on which the *now* is ontologically privileged and time genuinely passes) and with the Kalām cosmological argument's reliance on a temporal beginning of the universe ("The Kalam Cosmological Argument" in *The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology* (William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, 2009)); the chapter's engagement with the Kalām's premise that the universe began to exist runs at [§5.1.2](<5.1.2 Cosmological Argument.md>), where the Kalām cosmological argument is engaged directly, and at Chapter 7, where the structure of the cosmological *beginning* is examined directly. Each move tries to keep eternity from being a feature borrowed from time, with one party preserving transcendence by removing the temporal conditions and the other preserving relation by retaining them.

Hartshorne's dipolar theism (Charles Hartshorne, 1948); (Hartshorne, Charles, 1984) proposes a third line: God's abstract pole (the invariant, necessary, essential nature) is atemporal and immutable in the Boethian sense; God's concrete pole (the cumulative, responsive actuality in which God genuinely experiences and responds to creaturely events) is temporal, successive, and grows with the world's creative advance. The dipolar account is designed to buy classical atemporality for the essential register while preserving genuine temporal responsiveness for the relational register. Q3 (whether duration is coherent without extent) presses the abstract pole. Q4 (whether sempiternity preserves transcendence) presses the concrete pole. Whether the bifurcation itself can be held together is pressed against dipolar theism generally at [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>), where the abstract/concrete pole-relation is shown to be a directed crossing obtaining only within T, S, and Φ.

In its sharpest classical formulation, the doctrine asks for a life whose unboundedness is preserved by removing every dimension along which duration could be tracked.

*What cannot be answered.* Six questions ask of divine eternity what the doctrine, in the form structural reasoning can take up, leaves unanswered. The six pressures run one at the level of the predicate itself, five at the level of the conditions eternity-talk runs on.

**Q1.** *When is a timeless life possessed all at once?* The Boethian formula is the most enduring formulation in the tradition, and it bears more argumentative weight than its length suggests. *Tota simul* (wholly at once) is the move under pressure. Possession-at-once requires a possessor and a possessed; if the possessed is unbounded life, the life in question must have temporal extent, since unboundedness is the modifier of an extent. The eternal *tota simul* possesses an extended life all at once, which is not yet a coherent description until we ask what the *at* anchors. The Boethian defender's primary reply is that the dilemma misreads the doctrine: eternity is not a quasi-temporal manifold but a *sui generis* mode of being whose *at* is not a temporal index. The reply is genuinely available, and the present reading does not insist on a temporal reading of *aeternitas*. The concern reformulates. Even granting the *sui generis* mode, the doctrine wants the eternal life to be in operative cognitive and causal contact with temporal events: to know creatures, to act in history, to respond to prayer, to sustain in being from moment to moment. Each of those predicates requires a determinate asymmetric relation between the eternal pole and the temporal event. If the *at* of eternity supplies that relation, eternity has structural content of its own; if it does not, the *tota simul* preserves co-presence at the cost of losing the operative predicates the doctrine wants the co-presence to carry. Leftow (Leftow, Brian, 1991) develops the most careful contemporary defense; the present reading is that the formula succeeds at marking what the doctrine wants and does not, on either disambiguation, supply the structural relations the predicates downstream require. A parallel concern attaches to the doctrine's principal alternative formulation. The Augustinian–Thomistic phrasing of divine timelessness as *being outside time* (Augustine, *Confessions* XI; ST I.10) trades on a predicate whose ordinary content is spatial-positional: to be *outside* X is to be at a location not enclosed by X, with the relation running along S. The doctrine wants *outside* to do non-spatial work; the classical reply, that the term is meant analogically rather than literally, preserves the verbal gesture by emptying the relation of the structure that gave the term its content. *Outside X* requires X to be a region, the subject to be not-in-the-region, and the not-in relation to track containment; when X is time and the subject is non-temporal, the analogical use preserves the verbal form and reduces the substantive content to *not-temporal*, which is the predicate the formulation was supposed to non-vacuously specify. The objection that *outside* has unproblematic non-spatial uses — outside the set, outside the law, outside the genus — is granted; the point does not rest on the spatial etymology. Take the strongest such reading, on which *outside time* asserts a determinate content: that the divine being is a member of no temporal order and bears no temporal property intrinsically. That reading is not vacuous, but its content is purely privative, and the privation is the difficulty rather than its avoidance. A being that bears no temporal property intrinsically stands in no intrinsic before-and-after relation. Classical eternalists can nevertheless posit extrinsic relations to temporally ordered events and tenseless knowledge of their locations. The burden is to explain indexical knowledge and responsive agency without importing intrinsic succession, not to assume that every such relation is intrinsic. So the contentful reading of *outside* does not escape the first horn; it reaches it by another line: the spatial reading empties the relation of structure, while the privative reading keeps the relation contentful only as a denial, and a denial supplies none of what the downstream predicates run on — that supply is the burden the extrinsic-relations account still owes. *Tota simul* and *outside time* are the doctrine's two principal verbal moves: the first preserves co-presence at the cost of the asymmetric relations the doctrine wants the co-presence to carry; the second preserves transcendence at the cost of the structural relation *outside* implicitly relies on.

**Q2.** *By what shared time is a timeless life simultaneous with a temporal one?* Stump and Kretzmann (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981) define ET-simultaneity as a *sui generis* relation between eternal and temporal entities: the eternal life is simultaneous with every temporal moment without itself being temporal, and without the temporal moments thereby being simultaneous with one another. The relation does the structural work the doctrine asks of it: keeps eternal causation, eternal knowing, and eternal love in operative contact with temporal events without temporalizing the eternal pole. The concern is not that *simultaneous with* must mean clock-simultaneity. The defender is right that ET-simultaneity is a defined technical relation, not the ordinary relation. The concern reformulates: a defined technical relation is operatively contentful only insofar as it preserves the asymmetric structure the believer's reports require. The believer's prayer at 3 PM Tuesday was offered after their morning confession and before their evening weeping; the asymmetry is part of what the prayer is. ET-simultaneity can preserve the prayer's place in the creaturely temporal order without reproducing that succession intrinsically in God. The challenge is whether one timeless act can explain different responses to differently located events while remaining simple and unchanged. Leftow's (Leftow, Brian, 1991) formal development sharpens the position, and Mullins (Mullins, R. T., 2016) presses the sustained published case against ET-simultaneity — that the relation either collapses into a temporal mode or fails to secure the asymmetric contact it was introduced to provide; the question the present reading presses is which disambiguation the doctrine takes, not whether the technical relation is well-defined.

**Q3.** *How long is a life that takes no time?* Boethius keeps *life* in the formula. Creaturely life has duration, while the classical doctrine proposes a non-successive mode of life; the coherence of that analogical extension is what must be tested. Aquinas (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.10 takes the further step of identifying divine eternity with divine being itself, so that God's being and God's life are the same eternal *now* without succession or extension. The doctrine preserves divine immutability by removing every dimension along which duration could be tracked. The concern here is that what remains is a *now* with no internal differentiation: not the eternal life of a being but the bare instant of an event. An unextended instant is not an everlasting duration. But the eternalist does not identify eternity with a temporal instant; the proposal is a distinct mode of existence, which faces a relation and content burden rather than this simple limiting-case objection. Stump (Stump, Eleonore, 2003) and Helm (Helm, Paul, 2010) defend the position by treating *now* as analogically rather than univocally applied, and the move is genuinely available; the cost is that the predicate the doctrine wanted (life in its fullest form) now attaches to a mode that has yet to show it can host the conditions life requires.

**Q4.** *How does endless time put a being beyond time?* Wolterstorff (Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975), Hasker (William Hasker, 1989), and Mullins (Mullins, R. T., 2016) develop the alternative tradition: God is everlasting, not timeless. God exists through time, with infinite duration, and the divine being is genuinely affected by, and responsive to, what occurs at each temporal moment. The position preserves the relational vocabulary the doctrine performs ([§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>) takes this up directly) at the cost of placing God within the temporal manifold the classical doctrine had placed God beyond. The concern here is parallel to those raised in [§6.3.3](<6.3.3 Immutability.md>) and [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>): a being within time has temporally located acts and knowledge. This revises strict atemporality but need not surrender every form of transcendence or ultimacy; it shifts the burden to aseity and temporal dependence. The two positions (timeless and everlasting) are best read as the doctrine splitting along a structural incompatibility, with each branch keeping one half of what the unified doctrine had wanted.

**Q5.** *How does a theory of time deliver a being out of time?* Recent defenses of divine atemporality (Leftow, Brian, 1991); (Leftow, Brian, 2012); (Helm, Paul, 2010) sometimes appeal to the B-theory of time: the tenseless view on which all moments are equally real and the *now* is indexical rather than ontologically privileged. On the B-theory, the move from divine atemporality to divine simultaneity-with-every-moment becomes more tractable: the eternal pole stands in tenseless relation to a tenselessly extended manifold, and the modal asymmetry the A-theory introduces is set aside. The concern here is that the B-theory does not remove temporal structure; it relocates it. Tenseless before-and-after relations are still T, and a being eternally adjacent to a tenseless manifold is still a being whose adjacency requires the manifold to be the manifold it is. Craig's A-theoretic objection presses the dilemma from the other side: if tense is fundamental rather than indexical, divine atemporality has to stand in tenseless relation to a manifold whose primary facts are tensed, and the doctrine's reach for B-theoretic support trades one structural cost (the tenseless adjacency the eternal pole still requires) for another (the disjunction between the eternal pole's tenseless relations and the temporal pole's tensed facts), with the cost on the A-theoretic side sharper than the doctrine's B-theoretic refinements register (Craig, William Lane, 2001). The B-theory clarifies the doctrine without dissolving the structural difficulty. T's standing on either A- or B-theory is taken up at [§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>); the present concern is that whichever theory of time is correct, eternity-talk presupposes the structure rather than transcends it.

**Q6.** *What does "unchanging" add to a being with no time in which to change?* The classical bundle ties eternity tightly to immutability: God is eternal because God does not change, and God does not change because God is eternal. Mullins (Mullins, R. T., 2016) presses the dependency from the inside: the doctrines do not require each other in the form the tradition holds them, and a more relaxed immutability (God's character does not change, though God's relations to creatures do) can survive without strict atemporality. The concern this section adds is that the relaxation removes the motivation for the strongest atemporalist moves: if God can change in some respects, the question why God cannot change in temporal respects becomes a question about which respects rather than about temporality as such. The doctrine of strict atemporality, on the present reading, is the doctrine of strict immutability under a different name, and the contemporary moves that loosen one have already loosened the other.

*What is required.* What the six pressures jointly surface is what *eternal* actually runs on. The Boethian formula keeps *life* in it, and life is the modifier of an extent; remove every dimension along which extent can be tracked, and there is nothing for the modifier to modify. The relational predicates the doctrine asks the eternal life to carry (knowing creatures, acting in history, responding to prayer, sustaining in being from moment to moment) each require an ordering between not-yet and now without which the verbs lack determinate content. *Simultaneous with* is a relation, and a defined technical relation is operatively contentful only insofar as it preserves the asymmetric structure the believer's reports turn on. A temporal moment with no extent is not an everlasting duration, while a proposed timeless mode must be assessed on its own relational semantics. The B-theory clarifies the doctrine without dissolving the difficulty: tenseless before-and-after relations are still T, and a being eternally adjacent to a tenseless manifold is still a being whose adjacency requires the manifold to be the manifold it is. And the classical bundle of eternity-with-immutability does not survive its own loosening: the tradition has held the doctrines as if they entailed each other, and the contemporary moves that relax one have already relaxed the other. Temporal relations structure creaturely events and every everlasting model. A timeless model must explain its contact with that order. This does not by itself identify eternity with T's modal status.

*What is inverted.* The inversion relocates durational continuity and presence-throughout to T. Strict timeless eternity remains a rival proposal whose coherence depends on its account of relation to temporal life. The English *eternal* comes through Old French *éternel* from the Latin *aeternus*, formed on *aevum*: *age*, *lifetime*, *span*; the sense the word carries is durational, presence-throughout. (The further scholastic reading that hears in it *of every age* is lexically contested: *aeviternitas* names the angelic *aevum*, a mode between time and eternity technically distinct from the Boethian *aeternitas*; and the inversion does not rest on it.) The classical tradition reaches for a life that is *interminabilis*, unbounded, and names Nature. Nature has no terminus because it is the condition for there being termini at all. It has the *tota simul* the Boethian formula reaches for, in the only sense the formula can be made to bear: every moment is a moment of the same medium, with Nature present at each as the condition of the moment's being a moment. Presence-throughout is not a duration the divine life possesses but the structural status of T: the condition under which there is any moment to be present at, with no age outside it from which *every* could be a partial quantification. The classical predicate, read against the structure that hosts the predicating, has been naming Nature's durational status under a name the tradition has assigned to a being beyond it.


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← [6.3.1 Necessity](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>) | [6.3.3 Immutability](<6.3.3 Immutability.md>) →
