God’s relationship to time according to GTP 4.5 (deep research)

Below is a “deep” research piece written by ChatGPT 4.5 using the deep research feature (this is a new feature released within 24 hours of this post). It addresses the theological and philosophical topic of God’s Eternity and His Relationship to Time, specifically within the framework of Self-Standing Givenness Ontology (SSGO), which is just a basic relational ontology (theistic personalism) supported by various primary sources hosted on robertdryer.com. The paper explores how God’s timeless eternity–traditionally understood in classical Catholic, Reformed, and Eastern Orthodox theology–can be reconciled with God’s relational interactions with the temporal world. It engages key historical figures like Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Eastern theologians, alongside contemporary philosophical debates, to articulate a nuanced vision of divine eternity.

Again, this paper draws heavily on resources and concepts from Robert M. Dryer’s relational ontology hosted and available at robertdryer.com, the paper demonstrates how SSGO uniquely integrates traditional doctrines of divine simplicity and immutability with a robust theology of relationality and self-giving love. It argues that God’s timelessness, far from restricting relationality, is actually foundational to understanding how God genuinely relates to temporal creatures without undergoing intrinsic change. The paper ultimately positions SSGO as a contemporary yet deeply classical contribution to ongoing theological discussions about eternity, relationality, and divine transcendence.

TL;DR:

Traditionally, Catholic, Reformed, and Eastern Orthodox theologians (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Lossky) have described God as timelessly eternal, existing entirely beyond temporal succession, possessing all moments simultaneously. However, modern critiques question whether such a timeless God can truly relate personally and authentically to the temporal world. The SSGO framework provided to the AI by Dryer to guide its research seeks to reconcile classical immutability and timelessness with genuine divine relationality. By reinterpreting divine eternity as an eternally active self-giving love (or donation) among the Trinity (Father, Son, Spirit), SSGO argues that timelessness is not static isolation but dynamic relational perfection. It explains God’s interaction with temporal creation as a continuous overflow of eternal love without implying change or temporal succession within God. Thus, according to SSGO, God remains classically timeless yet fully relational–intimately involved in history, responsive to creation, and consistently faithful. If this AI’s research is right it suggests that Classical theism and Theistic Personalism can be reconciled.

With that said, below’s piece is still just an academic like paper written by an AI so you’ll have to be the judge if it’s successful in its task or not.

Introduction

The nature of divine eternity — God’s relationship to time — has been a central question in classical and contemporary theology. Classical Christian tradition has generally affirmed that God is eternal in the sense of being timeless, utterly transcending the temporal succession that creatures experience . This view, rooted in Scripture’s portrayal of God as “the first and the last” and the one “before all things” (Isa. 44:6, Col. 1:17), was refined by Church Fathers and scholastics: God is without beginning or end and lacks all succession or change, possessing his life in a single eternal “now” . Yet this classical doctrine raises a puzzle: How can a God outside time relate to a world in time? Modern theologians have debated whether a truly relational God must be temporal (able to experience sequence) or whether God’s interaction with time can be understood in a timeless way. The SSGO framework (Self-Standing Givenness Ontology, developed by Robert M. Dryer) enters this discussion by seeking to reconcile God’s simplicity and immutability with genuine relationality — both within the triune Godhead and in God’s engagement with creation — without abandoning the classical insight of God’s timeless eternity. In what follows, we will expand the classical understanding of divine eternity in Western (Catholic and Reformed) and Eastern Orthodox thought, engage contemporary philosophical and theological debates about God and time, and show how the SSGO framework integrates these insights. By drawing on primary sources from Augustine and Aquinas to John Calvin, John Damascene, and modern voices, we will argue that SSGO offers a robust, theologically faithful account of divine eternity that remains coherent and viable in contemporary theology.

Divine Eternity in Classical Christian Theology

The Catholic Tradition: Timeless Eternity in Patristic and Scholastic Thought

Catholic theology, drawing from the Church Fathers and medieval Scholastics, has long conceived of God as eternally timeless — an immutable being for whom the entirety of life is possessed at once, rather than experienced in a sequence of moments. St. Augustine articulated this in his Confessions by contrasting God’s “ever-still eternity” with our temporal flux. Augustine marvels that in God “the whole is present; but no time is wholly present,” since in eternity “nothing passeth away” — all is simultaneously and unchangeably now . Time, according to Augustine, was created by God and has a beginning; therefore God, as Creator of time, is before and above all time, not bound by its flow . God’s eternality means that past and future are immediately known and present to Him in one eternal present. As Augustine puts it, to God’s knowledge “there is no past or future, but all things are present,” truly and unchangeably before His gaze . This notion became a cornerstone of Latin patristic thought on God’s eternity.

Building on such insights, the Boethian definition of eternity became classical in the West. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (6th c.) defined eternity as “the complete and simultaneous possession of unlimited life all at once” . In other words, God’s life does not stretch out in a long timeline; it is fully present in its totality at every “moment” of God’s being. Boethius distinguished this timeless eternity, which only God enjoys, from the everlasting duration of created things (which have beginning or change) . St. Thomas Aquinas embraced Boethius’s definition and gave it deeper metaphysical grounding. Aquinas taught that eternity follows from immutability: because God is “supremely immutable,” with no change or motion in His being, “it supremely belongs to Him to be eternal” . Time, in Aristotelian-Scholastic terms, is the measure of change (“the numbering of before and after in movement” ); thus where there is no change, there is no time. God, having no potential to gain or lose any perfection and “always the same” in infinite fullness, experiences no succession . Thus, Aquinas concludes, God’s duration is utterly without beginning, end, or succession — “simultaneously-whole” (totum simul) and perfect . In Thomistic theology, God is His own eternity, just as He is His own being and essence . This means God’s eternal life is not something distinct from God’s nature — God’s eternity is God’s very life, the life that is always fully itself. Aquinas and other Scholastics (e.g. St. Bonaventure, St. Anselm) consistently upheld that “before” creation, nothing existed but God; yet “before” is itself a temporal concept we use only analogically. God’s act of creation includes the creation of time itself, so that God’s eternal now encompasses and contains all times . As St. Basil of Caesarea explained, the scriptural phrase “In the beginning” (Gen. 1:1) means “in the beginning of time,” for time itself began with the world’s creation . Before time, there was only the eternal God, in whom, unlike in creation, “the beginning of time is not yet time” .

The upshot of the Catholic tradition is a rigorous conception of God’s otherness from temporal process. God does not inhabit time’s stream; He is the source and lord of time. All temporal events, from beginning to end of history, are present to God at once in His eternal perspective. This does not mean events do not occur in time or that God’s acts in history (like the Incarnation) are illusory; rather, God’s mode of existence is fundamentally different from ours . Boethius likened God’s eternity to the center of a circle, which stands at an unmoving focal point relating to all points on the circumference (the timeline) equally . Similarly, God “sees” and encompasses all moments of time without Himself being carried along it . This classical view was enshrined in Catholic orthodoxy: Lateran IV (1215) dogmatically affirmed God as “eternal” (alongside attributes like uncreated, immutable, omnipotent), and successive Catholic theologians have upheld divine timelessness as a corollary of God’s simplicity, immutability, and perfection.

At the same time, the tradition carefully balanced God’s transcendence with his immanence. Augustine already stressed that God is above time yet active within time: He can enter history (as in the Word becoming flesh) without ceasing to be eternal. Aquinas clarified that when Scripture speaks of God “before” or “after” or acting “in time,” these are concessions to our understanding . God’s eternal decree produces effects in time without God Himself changing. So, while God is atemporal in Himself, He freely wills temporal events and relationships. This mystery — a timeless God who can respond to temporal creatures — was accepted as a paradox of faith, ultimately rooted in God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Medieval thinkers like Boethius and Aquinas used this timeless model to solve problems like divine foreknowledge of future contingents (if God is outside time, He knows future free acts in His eternal present without impairing their freedom) . Thus, the Catholic tradition bequeaths a robust notion of eternity: God’s life is one infinite, unchanging “instant” that contains all times . This concept of eternity would also be received by other Christian traditions, albeit with some terminological variations.

The Reformed Tradition: Confessing God’s Eternity Without Succession

The Magisterial Reformation of the 16th century did not jettison the classical doctrine of God’s eternity; rather, the Reformers and their heirs strongly affirmed it, often directly echoing the Church Fathers and Scholastics. The major Reformed confessions list eternity among God’s essential attributes. For example, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) describes God as “immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible…” . Likewise, the Belgic Confession (1561) calls God “eternal” in its very first article . These confessional statements, though succinct, presuppose the shared Christian understanding: God has no beginning or end and is exalted above the flow of time.

Leading Reformed theologians explicitly taught God’s timelessness. John Calvin, while focusing more on God’s sovereignty and knowledge than on abstract metaphysics, made statements implying a strong timeless view. In his Institutes, Calvin writes that all events “always were and ever continue under [God’s] eye; to His knowledge nothing is future or past, but all things are present” . Here Calvin underscores that God’s omniscience is not constrained by temporal sequence — from God’s perspective, the whole of history lies immediately open. Calvin uses this idea to support God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and eternal predestination: because God beholds all time at once, His eternal decree is simultaneously aware of all that will come to pass . We see that for Calvin and the Reformed, as for Augustine, God’s eternity was closely tied to His sovereignty and omniscience. It was absurd, Calvin argues, to imagine God waiting on events to happen in order to know them; rather, God dwells in the everlasting now that encompasses all times .

The Reformed Scholastics of the 17th century (the generation after Calvin) articulated divine eternity with great precision. A clear example comes from Francis Turretin, a leading Reformed systematic theologian. Turretin defines God’s eternity as “infinite duration” characterized by three qualities: “(1) without beginning; (2) without end; (3) without succession” . While no Christian questioned the first two (God has neither beginning nor end), Turretin zeroes in on the third as the crucial point disputed by Socinian heretics of his day. He insists that God’s life has no successive phases and is in no way subject to the “differences” of time (past, present, future) . In Turretin’s words, “We maintain that God is free from every difference of time, and no less from succession than from beginning and end” . Thus, Turretin explicitly upholds the timeless (as opposed to merely everlasting) view of eternity. He elaborates with language directly indebted to Boethius and Aquinas: “Nothing flows away with time from the life of God as from ours. God has every moment at once whatever we have dividedly by succession of time.” In God there is no fading of the past nor uncertainty about the future; all of life’s fullness is possessed in one indivisible act. Consequently, Turretin says, we can properly apply only the present tense — “He is” — to God, whereas “He was” or “He will be” are improper strictly of God, since “nothing in Him can be past or future…His life remains always the same and immutable.” . This remarkably mirrors Aquinas’s explanation that in God there is no “was” or “will be,” only an eternal “is.” The Reformed orthodox were thus fully in line with the patristic-medieval view: eternity is an ever-abiding present without succession.

Puritan divines like Stephen Charnock continued this teaching. Charnock, in his Existence and Attributes of God, states that God “neither began nor ends” and that “though the eternity of God be one permanent state without succession, yet the Spirit of God, suiting Himself to the weakness of our conception, divides it into two parts — one past…another to come…” . In other words, Scripture speaks of God’s eternity in terms of “before” and “after” creation for our sake, even though in God’s own being there is no earlier or later . We notice here a pastoral sensitivity: Reformed writers upheld the doctrine of a timeless God, but acknowledged that our finite minds cannot fully grasp a duration with no succession. Thus, the Bible accommodates us by saying God was “before the world” and will be God “forevermore,” not to suggest God is literally bound by before and after, but to assure us of His eternal reign.

Moreover, Reformed theology linked God’s eternity to His immutability and simplicity, just as Aquinas had. Herman Bavinck, a great Reformed dogmatician of the 19th century, taught that “with God there is no distinction between past and future…all is an eternal present”, again because God is exalted above all change and becoming. Any change or succession is inconceivable in God’s essence; “He is who He is” eternally. Bavinck in fact called the notion of a temporal, changing God a “foreign idea” to Christian theism, permissible only for the creation, not the Creator. The consistency of this view from Augustine to Bavinck shows a strong continuity: Reformed thought did not discard the classical doctrine of divine timelessness, but strongly reinforced it as part of God’s infinite perfection.

One important Reformed nuance, however, is the application to God’s works of creation and providence. Reformed scholastics drew a distinction between God’s eternal decree and its temporal execution. Turretin, for instance, noted that when we speak of God’s actions as past, present, or future, “this is said not with respect to [God’s own act], but in reference to the effects and objects, which are produced in diverse times” . In God’s eternal decree, there is one single, unchanging act of will; but that one eternal act gives rise to many effects in time (the world’s history). So God’s relationship to time can be described in two ways: God’s essence and knowledge remain atemporal, but God ordains and sustains temporal events. Thus, classical Reformed theology carefully affirmed that God truly interacts with creatures in time — He speaks, he listens to prayer, he enters into covenant — yet all these temporal interactions flow from a single eternal intention, without “moving” God from one state to another. This set the stage for later Reformed discussions of how an eternal God can be relational (a question the SSGO framework will address in a new way).

In sum, the Reformed tradition’s contribution lies in reasserting divine timelessness in the context of God’s sovereignty and historical works. The Reformed confessions and theologians joined East and West in confessing God as without succession or change, possessing “an indivisible eternity [that] embraces all divisible times” . They did so, not as a philosophical curiosity, but to safeguard God’s glory: only a God who transcends time can be the ultimate Creator and Governor of all that happens in time. This insight would carry forward, even as modern Reformed thinkers engaged new challenges to the timeless view.

The Eastern Orthodox Perspective: God Beyond Time and the Eternal Communion of Persons

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, as in the West, God’s eternity has always been affirmed as an essential attribute of the divine nature. The Greek Fathers from the Cappadocians to later Byzantine theologians taught that God is uncreated, without beginning, and immutable, and therefore not subject to time. St. John of Damascus in the 8th century provides a succinct Orthodox articulation: “We…confess that God is without beginning and without end, everlasting and eternal, uncreated, unchangeable, inalterable, simple, uncompounded…” . Here “everlasting and eternal” underscore that God’s existence is not bounded by time’s beginning or end. Eastern writers often used phrases like “before the ages” and “unto the ages of ages” to describe God. The Divine Liturgy addresses God as the one who “art from everlasting.” Such language corresponds to the same idea: God’s lifetime does not start or finish; all of time is His creation.

The Eastern Fathers also explicitly recognized that time itself began with creation, a view paralleling that of Basil in the West. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa argued that concepts like “before” and “after” do not apply to God in His eternal being; they only make sense in the created order. Gregory in his Catechetical Oration explains that “all things that depend on time have a beginning” — since God has no beginning, He is outside time. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo (shared by East and West) inherently implies that time is part of the created realm, and thus the Creator exists eternally beyond time’s confines. As St. Athanasius wrote, “time is a property of changeable things, not of the immutable God.” In Eastern theology, God is often described as dwelling in the æon or age that is above ages — an eternal divine “today.” The Cappadocian Fathers (Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory Nyssa) all taught that God always is. Gregory Nazianzen put it succinctly: “He always was and always is and always will be. Or rather, He always Is, for ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are fragments of time and imperfection. But He Is forever, existing in an eternal Now.” This striking statement (from Oration 38) captures the Orthodox sense that temporal language is inadequate for God — the only proper name for God’s duration is “Is,” the eternal present. Thus, just as the West had its Boethian formula, the East also expressed God’s eternity by negating time-bound predicates and pointing to an eternal present tense that God inhabits.

A noteworthy aspect of Eastern theology is the distinction between God’s essence (which is utterly transcendent, beyond time and comprehension) and God’s energies or operations (through which God manifests in creation). This essence–energies distinction, clarified by St. Gregory Palamas in the 14th century, upholds that in His eternal essence, God is absolutely beyond change (and thus beyond time), but through His energies (grace, actions in the world) God can be experienced within time without compromising His transcendence. For instance, Orthodox theology says the eternal God can act in time — in miracles, in the Incarnation, in the sacraments — by His energies. These energies are often described as eternal themselves (since they are divine), yet they produce effects within temporal sequence. Thus, Orthodoxy, like Western scholasticism, insists that God does not leave eternity or undergo intrinsic change when He engages the temporal order. Instead, time is somewhat enveloped by God’s eternal power and presence. Dumitru Stăniloae, a 20th-century Orthodox theologian, emphasized that all three divine Persons coexist eternally without any temporal separation: there is “no distinction in time” between Father, Son, and Spirit . The Trinity is an eternal communion; the Father’s generation of the Son and the Spirit’s procession are not events that happened back then or one after another, but eternal realities always present in God’s life. Stăniloae stresses that the divine persons are not “torn away” from each other by any sequence — unlike human persons who relate over time, the divine hypostases coexist in a mode of existence that is simultaneously perfect and immutable. This resonates with the Greek patristic vision of perichoresis (mutual indwelling) as an eternal dance of love, always fully realized.

At the same time, Eastern Christian thought places great emphasis on the personal and relational nature of the eternal God. Far from viewing divine eternity as a static, impersonal blank, the Orthodox see it as filled with the dynamism of Trinitarian life. The tri-personal God is eternally living in the movement of love: the Father eternally gives Himself in begetting the Son; the Son eternally responds in filial love; the Spirit is the eternal bond of their communion. Some Eastern writers even speak of an eternal energy or motion in God — not a change from imperfection to perfection (as if God needed to develop), but an eternal active love. For example, St. Maximus the Confessor spoke of an eternal divine movement of love within God, which is identical with God’s unchanging nature. This hints that God’s eternity is not sterile inertia but “the fullness of His self-giving,” an idea that modern Orthodox and Catholic theologians (like Vladimir Lossky and Hans Urs von Balthasar) have echoed . Lossky famously insisted that God is personal and beyond solitude: God is “not a person confined in his own self,” but an expansive tri-personality open to include us in love . Here, “confined in himself” is rejected — God’s eternal being is outward-moving love, not narcissistic self-contemplation. This strongly personalist view ensures that while God is beyond time, he is not beyond relationship.

In essence, the Eastern Orthodox tradition concurs with Western Christianity that God’s eternity means freedom from temporal change, but it brings out with special emphasis that God’s eternal mode of existence is tri-personal communion. The eternal God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an indivisible life — “one eternal act” of being, as some theologians put it . Unlike our life, which is spread out in moments, God’s life is all one in an eternal moment, yet that moment includes the infinite plenitude of love, knowledge, and will that flows between the Persons. In Orthodoxy, to say “God is eternal” is simultaneously to say “God is Trinity.” This has practical implications: for example, the divine plan of salvation (often called the divine economia) is understood as rooted in an eternal counsel of the Trinity. It is often said that “the economy of salvation reveals the eternal Trinity” — meaning what God does in time (sending the Son, pouring out the Spirit) reflects what God is eternally (communion of Father, Son, Spirit) . This was classically phrased by St. Irenaeus and later by Karl Rahner as: “The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity.” Thus, even as God enters time in the Incarnation and fills time with His grace, these temporal missions manifest eternal processions. The Orthodox liturgy acclaims Jesus Christ as “the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, who art and wast and art to come, the eternal Lord.” The paradox of Christ — who in His divine nature is eternal and uncreated, yet in His human nature lived and died in time — became a key to understanding how the eternal God can touch temporal existence: God the Son took on a human nature and lived a temporal life without ceasing to be eternal in His divinity. This mystery of the Incarnation affirmed for the East (and the West) that time and eternity meet in Christ.

In summary, Eastern Christianity upholds the same fundamental doctrine of God’s eternity: that God’s life transcends time’s flow, having neither beginning, end, nor succession. Eastern writers describe God as ever-existing beyond the ages. Yet Orthodoxy also underscores that this eternal God is inherently relational — an eternal community of love — and that the transcendent timeless God truly operates within time for our salvation. These patristic and Byzantine insights dovetail with the Latin tradition and will prove important when we consider how to reconcile divine timelessness with divine relationality. The SSGO framework explicitly draws on such Eastern insights (e.g. Lossky, Stăniloae) to enrich its understanding of the timeless God as dynamically personal .

Debating Divine Timelessness and Temporality: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives

The classical consensus described above — that God is timelessly eternal — did not go unquestioned. Throughout history and especially in recent centuries, theologians and philosophers have grappled with whether this view is philosophically coherent and biblically faithful, and whether it adequately allows a personal relationship between God and temporal creatures. In this section we survey the major debates about divine eternity, focusing on the tension between divine timelessness and the requirements of divine relationality (such as responding, loving, or suffering with us). Engaging these debates will set the stage for the SSGO framework’s constructive proposal.

Timeless vs. Temporal Eternity: Classic Debates and Modern Challenges

In philosophical terms, two broad positions have emerged: Divine Timelessness (the classical view that God exists outside time) and Divine Temporality (the view that God exists within time, though usually everlasting through all time). Both sides agree God is eternal in the sense of without beginning or end; the disagreement is whether God experiences sequence (before/after) or not . Often the term “eternity” itself is defined differently: classical authors reserved “eternity” to mean timeless duration (opposed to “sempiternity” meaning everlasting-in-time ), whereas some modern writers use “eternity” in a more generic sense and distinguish “timeless eternity” vs “temporal eternity”. For clarity, we will speak of timelessness vs. temporality.

The timelessness view, as we have seen, holds that God has no temporal location or extension whatsoever: God does not progress from moment to moment. All of time is equally present to God’s eternal knowledge and will . This view was taken as orthodoxy by figures like Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Calvin, and the Eastern Fathers. They found it fitting because it preserves God’s immutability, simplicity, and perfection. If God could “move” along the timeline, experiencing one moment and then another, it would seem He is constantly changing — which contradicts Scriptures like “I the Lord do not change” (Mal. 3:6) and the philosophical notion of God’s perfection (a perfect being cannot gain new attributes or lose any). Moreover, timelessness elegantly solves puzzles like foreknowledge vs free will (God doesn’t fore-know as a before-and-after, He simply knows in an eternal now ) and creation (God did not “wait” an infinite time to create; rather, His eternal decree gives rise to time itself ). It also undergirds trust in providence: God is never surprised or caught off guard by events, since all history is present to Him. As C.S. Lewis famously illustrated, “His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours… all the days are ‘Now’ for Him” . This traditional view was essentially unchallenged in the mainline churches until the late medieval or early modern period.

However, some difficulties and objections have been raised over time:

Biblical Language: The Bible, while calling God “eternal,” often depicts Him in temporal terms — speaking, reacting, even changing His mind (e.g. Genesis 6:6, “God was sorry that he made man”). Does the timeless view impose Greek philosophical concepts on the Hebrew God of Scripture? Critics like theologian Oscar Cullmann (in the 20th c.) argued that the biblical revelation presents God as working within history in sequence, and that the timeless God concept owes more to Plato than to the Bible. Classical theologians responded that many biblical descriptions are anthropomorphic (metaphorical), as John of Damascus noted: Scripture attributes things like “anger” or “regret” to God because of our human mode of understanding . These are not literal changes in God’s inner being but ways of describing His consistent will as it appears to us in time. Still, the prevalence of temporal imagery has made some modern Christians prefer saying God is everlasting (sempiternal) rather than strictly timeless, believing this does more justice to the linear narrative of salvation history.
Relational Authenticity: A major intuitive challenge is whether a timeless God can truly be personal and relational. Relationships, it is argued, involve mutual give-and-take, response, and sequence (e.g. a conversation unfolds in time; love is exchanged moment by moment). If God is outside time entirely, how can He be genuinely responsive? For instance, when we pray, doesn’t God “hear” at that moment and respond afterward? Classical theology’s answer was that God, in His eternal knowledge, eternally wills the answer to coincide with our prayer when it occurs. But to some, this feels like God is fixed in an “eternal stare,” and our sense of interaction is an illusion. Thinkers like Nicholas Wolterstorff and Richard Swinburne (contemporary philosophers of religion) have advocated that God must be temporally everlasting, experiencing duration, in order to have a real relationship with a changing world. They argue that love involves empathy and change — a God who cannot change at all could not rejoice, be angry, or show mercy in any meaningful way. The timeless God of classical theism, they charge, is too static to be the God who “weeps with those who weep” and became flesh in time.
Incarnation and Trinity: The doctrine of Christ’s Incarnation poses a puzzle: if the Son of God is eternal and immutable, what happens when the Son becomes man at a specific time? Does God enter time? Classical Chalcedonian Christology held that the divine nature of Christ remains eternal and unchanging, while the human nature experiences life in time. So God the Son as God is still timeless, but by uniting a human nature to Himself, He is present and active in time as man. This is mysterious, but was seen as consistent: the eternal Son does not cease to be eternal by assuming humanity, rather the humanity is the vehicle of His actions in time. Some modern theologians, however, like Jürgen Moltmann and others in the 20th century, thought that the Incarnation and the suffering of Christ imply that God’s life must include temporality and the capacity to suffer change (at least in the Son). They proposed that God freely chooses to undergo temporal experience out of love (what Moltmann called the “temporal suffering” of God on the cross). This is a departure from the classical impassibility doctrine, and it edges toward seeing God as temporal, at least since the Incarnation. A fully timeless God seems hard to square with the idea that “the Word became flesh” at a particular moment (John 1:14). Does that moment exist eternally for God? Or did something new happen to God? Traditional theologians answered that in God nothing new happened; the newness was in the human nature of Christ and the created world. Modern critics find this unsatisfying or overly abstract.
Philosophical Coherence: There are also technical philosophical debates about whether the notion of a timeless being knowing tensed facts (“today is 2025”) is coherent. For example, if God is outside time, can He know what time it is now for us? Classical view says God knows all temporal truths but in a single eternal act of knowing, not an ever-updating “now.” Some philosophers (like Arthur Prior or Patrick Grim) have argued this is problematic — if reality is tensed, a timeless God might miss the experience of the flowing now. Others (like Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann) have developed refined models of ET-simultaneity to explain how an eternal God can be present to temporal events (they describe God as “simultaneous with” all points of time analogously to how different times can be simultaneous from God’s perspective) . These discussions get highly technical, but it is worth noting that classical theism has not gone unexamined; it has passionate defenders in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, as well as detractors.

On the other side, the divine temporality view posits that God does experience duration sequentially. Generally, proponents still affirm God is without beginning and end (He exists at all times, stretching infinitely backward and forward), but they deny He is outside of time. Instead, God’s inner life has sequence — perhaps a perfect timeline of its own. In this view, God can genuinely have a “before” and “after” in His experiences: for instance, before creating the world God could contemplate creating, and after creation He has relationships with creatures that He did not “have” prior. Thinkers like Clark Pinnock and other “Open Theism” proponents pushed this further, saying God even learns new things as time goes on (namely, the free decisions of creatures), but more mainstream temporalists (like some process theologians and Swinburne) simply say God’s knowledge can be exhaustive of each moment as it happens, but the future is not yet real to be known. They see this as preserving real human freedom and a give-and-take relationship with God.

One classical Christian who somewhat anticipated a form of divine temporality was Isaac Newton. Newton believed absolute time flows eternally and God endures through it. In the 20th century, theologian Oscar Cullmann famously argued “the Bible is not Hellenistic: it does not view time as an illusion to be escaped but as the arena of God’s working,” thus God is best understood as everlasting through time (he pointed to the unfolding covenant history). These views, however, met with strong rebuttals from classical theists who warned that making God in time risks compromising God’s lordship over creation and implies limitation. If God is in time, then time is a sort of larger context or container for God, which clashes with the idea that time itself depends on God’s being and will . Furthermore, if God genuinely changes in knowledge or state, what happens to divine perfection? Would a “before” and “after” in God mean He was lacking something before (knowledge of an event, say) that He gains later? That seems contrary to God’s fullness. Temporalists respond that God’s changing knowledge doesn’t indicate a lack, just a different mode of knowing (He knows an event when it happens as it happens — a perfection of responsiveness, in their view).

Another distinction in these debates is between process theology and more moderate views. Process theologians (influenced by Whitehead) take a radical stance: everything, even God, is in process; God is evolving with the universe. This is far from classical theism and has been deemed incompatible with historic Christian doctrine by Catholics, Orthodox, and most Protestants. On the other hand, “open theism” (held by some evangelicals) tries to stay closer to Scripture but posits that God voluntarily does not determine or foreknow certain future free choices, hence God experiences the unfolding of history in something like real-time. Open theists still usually affirm God’s infinity in love and power, but not absolute foreknowledge. Their critics accuse them of essentially putting God in time and diminishing His sovereignty.

Within the realm of orthodox Christianity, there is a growing trend among some theologians to explore God’s temporality in the context of the Trinity and love, without fully abandoning immutability. For instance, Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg spoke of God’s history — the idea that through Christ and the Spirit, God’s own life includes a before and after (e.g., God after the Incarnation in some sense “has” a new relation to humanity internally). Moltmann even said God’s trinitarian love entails a sort of suffering change (the Father suffered the death of the Son in His own way on Good Friday, introducing “pain” into God’s experience). While these proposals were controversial, they were motivated by a desire to make God’s pathos (capacity to feel passion) more than just a metaphor. They often distinguish between God’s eternal nature (always loving, good, etc.) and the contingent ways that love is expressed in time (grieving over sin now, rejoicing later, etc.). The challenge is to articulate this without falling into logical contradiction (how can there be “now” and “later” in God at all?).

In academic philosophy of religion, figures like William Lane Craig have championed a mediating position: Craig argues that God was timeless without creation and freely chose to become temporal upon creating the world (thus, God is timeless sans creation, temporal since creation began) . This is an interesting attempt to have it both ways — upholding that God’s nature didn’t have to be in time, but once time exists, God enters into temporal relations. Critics point out this implies a change in God (from timeless to temporal), which itself is problematic. Craig responds that this “change” is not in God’s essential nature or character, but in His relational state vis-à-vis creation — a freely willed change, which an omnipotent God could do. This view is still debated; it hasn’t won over classical theists, but it shows the creativity in contemporary attempts to reconcile scripture, theological tradition, and philosophical reasoning.

Some contemporary proposals have ventured the provocative idea that God might be identical with time itself, or that time could somehow constitute God’s own life or essence. This suggestion attempts to reconcile God’s relational engagement with creation by positing divine temporality as essential rather than accidental. However, classical theologians–and notably modern defenders of divine timelessness like William Lane Craig just mentioned in the last paragraph–have argued vigorously against identifying God with time. Craig, drawing on both philosophical and theological insights, maintains that equating God with time effectively reduces divine transcendence, making God subject to a dimension or framework that is fundamentally contingent upon created reality. Understood correctly, God’s relationship to time must preserve God’s absolute aseity (self-existence and independence). As Craig emphasizes, God’s timelessness sans creation protects the Creator-creation distinction, affirming God as the ontological ground and source of temporal reality rather than as a being limited or defined by it.

The SSGO framework similarly rejects the identification of God with time by affirming divine simplicity, relational immutability, and timeless self-givenness. Within SSGO, God eternally sustains all temporal moments without Himself undergoing succession or change. To assert that “God is time” would undermine both the classical Christian understanding of God’s transcendence and the metaphysical coherence of divine simplicity, introducing composition, contingency, and potentiality into God’s essence. Thus, while SSGO acknowledges God’s profound relationality toward creation, it maintains that God’s eternity is not temporal duration but the simultaneous fullness of self-giving life beyond all created measures. Admittedly, the language of “simultaneity” can itself seem problematic, as it is in fact tensed language, and it suggests a temporal analogy. However, SSGO consciously employs such analogical language—as does the broader classical tradition (e.g., Boethius, Aquinas)—precisely to affirm God’s transcendent mode of existence in terms comprehensible to temporal creatures, while explicitly clarifying that God’s eternal simultaneity transcends all temporal notions of “before” and “after.” And SSGO accomplishes this clarification through its concept of “self-standing relational modes,” which express how each divine Person fully possesses the single divine essence from a unique vantage without succession, thus providing a metaphysical foundation for understanding divine simultaneity as relationally structured, rather than temporally ordered. Whether this modality modeled as a primitive (via Benovsky) and a reasonable phenomenological horizon (via Marion) is successful is a much larger debate than we can cover in this piece, but Dryer makes inroads here: https://robertdryer.com/defending-divine-simplicity/ …

To summarize the main debate: Divine timelessness emphasizes God’s transcendence, sovereignty, and immutable perfection, but faces the task of explaining how a timeless God can engage a temporal world in a meaningful, responsive way. Divine temporality (in its various forms) emphasizes God’s immanence, relationality, and the straightforward reading of biblical actions, but struggles to preserve God’s aseity (self-existence) and immutability (does this make God too much like a creature bound by time?). There is also a semantic issue: much disagreement stems from different understandings of what “change” or “time” means when applied to God. Some nuanced positions hold that God is immutable in character and being, but mutable in relationships — for instance, Scripture says “God became man” or “God became our Father” when we are adopted, which indicates relational changes relative to creatures, though God’s own nature didn’t mutate.

In resolving these debates, many orthodox theologians today reaffirm the core of the classical view (no intrinsic change or passivity in God) while refining how we describe God’s engagement in history. They often appeal to the Creator–creature distinction: God’s way of existing is utterly different from ours. As Aquinas would say, we use analogical language. So when we say God is eternal, we mean something analogous to our idea of duration but also fundamentally different — “one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day” to Him (2 Peter 3:8). The SSGO framework arises within this context, aiming to hold the classical line (God’s simplicity and eternity) while also addressing the valid concern that God is inherently relational (as Trinity and as loving Creator). SSGO’s approach is to delve into the nature of God’s inner life and His modes of self-giving, to show that God can be eternally immutable and yet eternally active in self-giving love. In doing so, SSGO attempts to offer a more relationally rich account of timeless eternity, hopefully satisfying both the classical demands and the relational intuitions. We now turn to how SSGO integrates these insights.

Divine Eternity and God’s Relationship to Time in the SSGO Framework

Self-Standing Givenness Ontology (SSGO) is a contemporary theological framework proposed by Robert M. Dryer that strives to reconcile two poles of Christian doctrine that are often seen in tension: divine simplicity/immutability (God as one, partless, and unchanging in being) and Trinitarian relationality (God as a communion of Persons who love and relate). At its core, SSGO asserts that each divine Person is a “self-standing givenness” of the one divine essence — meaning the Father, Son, and Spirit each fully possess and give the one simple divine being from their unique relational vantage . In SSGO, the personal distinctions in God are understood as fundamental, irreducible relations of self-giving rather than parts or accidents . This innovative ontology has implications for how we understand divine eternity. Because SSGO is committed to the classical notion that God is simple and immutable (hence timeless), it builds on the tradition outlined above, but it reinterprets or reframes some aspects to highlight the living, dynamic character of the one eternal act of God.

God’s Eternity as the Fullness of Self-Giving Life: SSGO concurs with Augustine, Aquinas, and the whole classical heritage that God’s life is totum simul — an eternal “all at once” without sequential unfolding. However, SSGO emphasizes that we should not conceive this eternal life of God as static inertia; rather, it is the complete, active fullness of life. Dryer’s framework draws on thinkers like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean-Luc Marion (along with patristic ideas) to portray God’s simplicity and eternity in terms of love and gift. Balthasar, for instance, described the inner life of the Trinity as an eternal drama of love — the Father eternally generating the Son and giving Himself, the Son eternally responding, and the Spirit as the unity of their love . This “drama” is not a temporal process but an eternal reality, a “happening” that never began and will never end. SSGO integrates this idea by suggesting that what God is eternally is an act of self-giving: “each Person is the complete self-expression of God’s essence” in relational terms . Thus, eternity, for SSGO, is the mode of God’s self-giving existence. God’s eternity is not a blank infinite time-span; it is qualitatively the fullness of love and being, always active, yet always perfect . This addresses the concern that a timeless God is inert. In SSGO’s view, God’s immutability is not the immobility of a stone, but the everlasting stability of an act of love so perfect that it does not need to evolve or improve . The relations of Father, Son, Spirit are that perfect act. Dryer echoes Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) here, who famously said: “In God, person means relation. Relation…is not something superadded to the person, but is the person itself.” . In other words, the divine persons are their relations of origin (begetting, being begotten, proceeding). SSGO takes that seriously: the one eternal divine life is the perfect communion of relations. Therefore, God’s eternity can be seen as the perfect and immutable relationality — a paradoxical notion of “dynamic stillness,” if you will.

Because SSGO paints God’s eternal simplicity in this relational way, it provides a constructive answer to those who worry that timelessness negates relationality. In SSGO, relation is elevated to the heart of God’s timeless being. The framework explicitly draws from both Eastern and Western sources to bolster this point: St. Augustine’s insight that the Holy Spirit is the mutual love of Father and Son, the Eastern Father’s view of perichoresis, and Ratzinger’s modern restatement that the persons are subsisting relations . By affirming that each Person fully possesses the divine nature and is fully relative to the others (nothing “in God” except what is in relation), SSGO safeguards simplicity (no parts, only relations of one essence) and suggests an eternal liveliness. Notably, Vladimir Lossky’s vision of God as an unbounded personal communion open to humanity resonates in SSGO: Lossky insisted that God’s simplicity is not monolithic solitude but triunity, and SSGO concurs . The line “not a person confined in his own self” — originally Lossky’s phrase — is adopted in SSGO to underscore that the simple God is inherently outgoing in love. This eternal self-giving within God then becomes the basis for understanding creation and time.

Creation and Temporal Interaction as an Overflow of Eternity: If God is so completely full in His eternal triune life, why did God create a temporal world at all? Classical theology often answers: out of sheer grace and love, not compulsion. SSGO agrees and adds a relational ontology nuance: because God’s very being is self-giving love, creation can be seen as an overflow or extension of that self-giving — not in a necessitated way (God freely wills creation), but as something not alien to God’s nature. SSGO, following hints from Balthasar and others, entertains the idea that “creation is structured relationally because it comes from a relational God” . Time, then, as the dimension of mutable creation, is itself a sort of gift from the eternal God — a moving image of eternity, as Platonists would say. SSGO can affirm, with classical doctrine, that time begins with creation (upholding Basil and Augustine). But SSGO goes further to imply that created time has meaning because it reflects, in a finite way, the infinite life of God. For example, we experience love in moments and growth, whereas God is love immutable — yet those moments participate analogically in the eternal Love. Edward Holloway, a 20th-century Catholic thinker, once said that God’s eternity is like an eternal explosion of love, and creation in time is the “splash” of that explosion. While SSGO doesn’t use that metaphor exactly, it similarly sees creation’s temporality as intended to mirror and lead back to God’s eternity (this is akin to the concept of analogía entis, the analogy of being, something SSGO engages with thinkers like Erich Przywara ).

Crucially, SSGO maintains God’s changelessness in Himself even as He relates to the changing world. It appropriates the classical idea (explicit in Turretin and Aquinas) that when we speak of God’s actions in time, the change is in the creature, not in God . Yet SSGO translates this into relational terms: God’s eternal resolve of love includes all the particular ways He will interact with creatures. Since God’s eternal act of being already contains the disposition “to be Creator, to be Redeemer,” etc., God does not undergo a new state when those events happen; we undergo new states in relation to God. SSGO sees the divine will as singular and eternal, but with many “relational horizons” — a term Dryer uses to indicate that God’s one act can be viewed under different relations (creator-to-creature, redeemer-to-sinner, sanctifier-to-saint, etc.) without compromising its unity . These relational horizons are analogous to what scholastics called relations of reason, but SSGO gives them a more robust ontological status (in line with its concept of “modes” of givenness). In effect, SSGO argues that God’s eternity is richly structured by relationships, though those relationships are eternally in God’s self-knowledge and will.

So, when the world changes from one moment to the next, God eternally intended that at what we call “t1” He would do X and at “t2” He would do Y. There is no new decision in God at t2; what is new is simply the occurrence in the creature. This affirms immutability, yet also affirms real interaction — because the temporal effect is genuinely new and God is really “doing something” at that moment (from our perspective). SSGO’s unique contribution is to describe this not just in terms of God’s will, but in terms of God’s self-giving presence. Each moment of a creature’s existence is sustained by God’s eternal self-giving (a bit like how medievals spoke of God’s continuous creation or concurrence). The framework could be seen as expanding on St. Paul’s statement “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) — every moment of time exists because it is held within the eternal act of God. Dryer’s notes even allude to Romans 11:36, “from Him and through Him and to Him are all things,” as a declaration of God as source, sustainer, and goal (which implies God encompasses all temporal process in His eternal scope) .

Reconciling Immutability with a Responsive God: One of the tests for any doctrine of God and time is: can it make sense of God’s responsiveness (answering prayers, reacting with wrath or mercy to human actions) without portraying God as literally changing His mind or being caught in time? SSGO addresses this by its concept of “primitives” or fundamental relations in God. Borrowing an idea from metaphysician Jiri Benovsky, SSGO treats the distinct personhoods/relations as metaphysical primitives — fundamental realities that aren’t composed of something more basic. This means the relation of, say, Creator to creature is not a new property that accumulates in God when creatures exist; rather, God’s act of creation is grounded in the fundamental identity of God as self-giving love. God eternally knows Himself as capable of creating and loving creatures; if He freely chooses to create, that choice and its outcomes are all within the single eternal act. In SSGO’s Thomistic-friendly terms, God’s esse (act of being) is undivided, but we can conceptually distinguish God’s relationship to different effects. This is consistent with Aquinas’s doctrine of God’s relations to creatures being real to the creature but only logically (not really) in God. SSGO reframes that by saying: God eternally includes the logical possibility of these relations in His perfect self-knowledge — and when actualized, the change is external.

To put it more simply: from our side, God appears to relate differently at different times (anger at sin, then forgiveness, etc.), but SSGO would say on the God-side, there is one eternal attitude: Holy Love. That Holy Love has different facets or “relational faces” towards righteousness or sin. When a sinner repents, God’s eternal Holy Love, which always included merciful forgiveness as one of its facets, is now experienced under that facet. This is analogous to sunlight: the sun shines constantly, but as a prism turns, different colors appear without the sun itself changing. God’s eternal love and justice are constant; our changing state “turns the prism” so to speak, and we experience now wrath, now mercy, from the one light. SSGO’s heavy emphasis on relational ontology strengthens this analogy because it holds that the relations are not secondary effects but flow from who God eternally is. God is eternally the Lover-of-humankind (a frequent Eastern title for God) and eternally the Hater-of-sin in the sense that within His immutable goodness is the stance of yes to good, no to evil. Therefore, God can genuinely “feel” wrath at t1 and compassion at t2 relative to us, without any mutation in His eternal character. The patristic and scholastic tradition taught this in principle; SSGO reinforces it by a more explicit account of how relationality is grounded in eternity.

The “One Eternal Act” — Integrating Trinity, Creation, and Redemption: An important concept that emerges from classical theism and is embraced by SSGO is the idea of God’s one eternal act. This means that God’s knowing, willing, and being are not separate things or sequential; they are one simple act identical with God’s essence. SSGO agrees and identifies that one act with the act of triune self-giving. Now, in that singular act, God knows all possibles, chooses this particular history, and loves creatures with the very same love that is His essence. So, the eternal act includes everything: God’s knowledge of Himself, knowledge of creatures, will to create, will to save, etc., all as one reality. SSGO provides a vivid description: “the indivisible eternity of God embraces all divisible times, not coextensively or formally, but eminently and indivisibly” — a quote it takes from Turretin to affirm that God’s unity is not threatened by containing multiplicity in an eminent (higher) way. SSGO would say all distinctions (like many moments in time, or many acts of God) exist within God analogous to how multiple effects can come from a single cause without that cause splitting. A useful image here is from C.S. Lewis: he likened God’s writing of history to an author writing a novel. The author stands outside the novel’s timeline; the characters experience chapter 1, then 2, etc., but the author in one act of creation has the entire plot in mind. SSGO would tweak that: God is not just an author, but also an actor in the story (in Christ) and the sustainer of the story’s existence at every moment. Still, the analogy holds that God’s eternity “surrounds” the whole story.

By integrating this with Trinity, SSGO echoes a startling but beautiful idea found in some modern theologians (like Balthasar and Rahner): the climax of God’s self-revelation in time — the Cross and Resurrection of Christ — reflects eternal truths about God. Balthasar dared to suggest an “eternal super-kenosis” in the Trinity: the Father eternally pours Himself out, akin to how the Son poured Himself out on the cross . SSGO carefully approaches such ideas, noting that we must not project suffering or change into God improperly. But it welcomes the intuition that what God does in time manifests who God is eternally . For example, the self-sacrificial love Jesus shows is not a new trait; it is the temporal showing-forth of the Father’s eternal self-giving to the Son and their love which is the Spirit. So the temporal mission of the Son and Spirit are grounded in the eternal processions. SSGO explicitly operationalizes Rahner’s rule that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, by providing a conceptual schema (self-givenness modes) wherein this is true without making God need creation . In SSGO, God did not need to create to be relational; He is already relational. But because He is relational, creation and redemption are fitting expressions of His being. Thus, God’s eternal act includes the resolve: “I will be the God who creates and saves.” We can say in eternity God is Creator (by decision, not by nature — classical theology distinguishes attributes ad intra vs ad extra, but in God that distinction is only logical). The First Vatican Council taught that God’s decision to create is eternal (not a decision He “came to” after not intending to create). SSGO aligns with this: the world is freely created, but that free decree resides in God’s eternal will, not as a change.

Therefore, in SSGO’s picture, God’s relationship to time is one of sovereign authorship and permeation. God is not in time, but time is in God (in God’s eternity, as a determined dimension of the world He sustains). This coheres with St. Paul’s statement that all things are “to Him” (finding their completion in His eternity). It also resonates with St. Augustine’s famous reflection: “All of time, both past and future, is created and issues from that which is always present [the eternal]; and Thy years neither come nor go, whereas ours come and go” . Augustine realized that from God’s high vantage, He can “utter” the whole timeline; SSGO adds that God’s utterance is intensely personal (the Word, the Logos is the one through whom all ages were made, Heb. 1:2).

Contemporary Viability and Coherence: By grounding itself in venerable sources and extending their logic, SSGO offers a model of divine eternity that is both traditional and fresh. Its coherence lies in maintaining clear ontological distinctions: God’s being vs. created being, eternity vs. time, unchanging essence vs. changing relationships (on the creature’s side) — these map to what classical theology guarded (Creator/creature distinction, primary/secondary causality, etc.). Where SSGO innovates is in language and conceptuality: it recasts static-sounding metaphysics into relational metaphysics. This is actually a trend in recent theology: an emphasis on persons, relations, and communion as key metaphysical categories (influenced by Eastern theologians and personalist philosophy). SSGO, however, is careful to stay metaphysically robust — it isn’t saying God’s essence evaporates into pure relational flux (that would be heretical process theology). Instead, it says the one simple essence eternally exists in three relational “modes” (Dryer uses mode in a specific sense, akin to how medievals spoke of subsistent relations or how one might speak of “modes of subsistence” of the Trinity) . Because these modes are eternal and not successive, God’s life is one simultaneous, immutable act. In defending divine simplicity against accusations that it is incompatible with the Trinity, SSGO actually strengthens the case for timelessness: if the multiplicity of Persons doesn’t compromise God’s unity, neither does the multiplicity of God’s acts in history — all are unified in the simple God. Dryer even asks in SSGO, can this approach meet Thomistic concerns to avoid turning the Persons into parts or properties? The answer proposed is yes: by treating the personal distinctions as primitive, underived facets of the one being, we avoid composition in God . This strategy shows how Trinity and eternity are intertwined: the tripersonal life is the content of eternity, and eternity is the mode of the tripersonal life.

One might raise a counterargument: Does SSGO really differ from classical theism, or is it just rephrasing it? For instance, classical Thomists might say, “We’ve always known God’s one act is love; what does SSGO add?” SSGO’s value-added is in explicating how each Person is that one act in a distinct way and how that yields a model for God-world relations. It gives a framework to articulate (with perhaps greater conceptual clarity for modern minds) things like how God’s knowledge can be immutable yet relational. By using the concept of “relational horizons” and “self-givenness,” SSGO provides a conceptual bridge between personalist language and scholastic precision. This makes the doctrine of eternity more accessible in contemporary dialogue, where people might accept “God is love” more readily than “God is actus purus (pure act)”. SSGO basically says: God as pure act is pure love, and pure love is inherently self-communicative (hence triune and creative). Thus, SSGO remains completely faithful to the classical attributes (immutability, simplicity, etc.) but encases them in love. This helps respond to another counterargument: some feminist or process theologians who critique the classical God as an unmoved tyrant. SSGO can reply that God, even as “unmoved” in His fullness, is not indifferent — He is “unchangeably moved” by love for the other (within the Trinity and towards creation). This odd phrasing can be justified: God’s movement of love is an eternal constant, not a changeable mood. So the Cross, for example, doesn’t change God’s love; it expresses it. This perspective satisfies the heartfelt concern that “if God cannot suffer, can He really love?” by saying God doesn’t suffer change, but He eternally encompasses all the pain necessary to love — proven by the fact that the Son in time bore our sufferings.

Finally, in terms of contemporary viability, SSGO connects with movements like ressourcement (return to patristic sources) and East-West ecumenical dialogue. It quotes Eastern theologians (Lossky, Staniloae) to show that properly understood, East and West agree on divine eternity and simplicity . Lossky was critical of some Western formulations, fearing they made God too abstract; SSGO answers that by a more relational formulation without abandoning the substance of the doctrine . Likewise, modern Catholic thought (e.g. Balthasar, Ratzinger) has been bringing personalist and trinitarian emphasis into classical dogma; SSGO stands in that trajectory, demonstrating that one can be thoroughly orthodox and yet speak in a fresh voice that engages current philosophical ideas (like Benovsky’s metametaphysics, Marion’s phenomenology of gift ).

In conclusion, SSGO’s account of divine eternity is one of immutable, simultaneity-full life that is intrinsically relational and self-giving. God’s relationship to time, then, is not that He is a prisoner of time (as in process thought), nor that He is a rigid unmoved observer (a caricature of classical theism), but rather God is the eternal source, sustainer, and goal of time — deeply involved in every moment by giving it being, directing it toward its fulfillment, and inserting Himself (in the Person of the Son) into its flow out of love, all without surrendering the prerogatives of eternity. SSGO effectively upholds that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8) — capturing both His eternity (“forever the same”) and His active presence in yesterday and today (through the Incarnation and ongoing work). By integrating Scriptural, patristic, and philosophical insights, SSGO demonstrates a coherent framework where God’s eternity is the foundation of God’s true intimacy with the temporal world. Far from being an obstacle to relationship, God’s eternity is what guarantees that His love and purpose for us never change even as He engages our changing lives. This synthesis offered by SSGO stands as a promising contribution to contemporary theology: it invites us to behold God’s eternity not as a cold concept but as the mystery of the Eternal One who is communion and who embraces all times in His immutable love.

Conclusion

The classical Christian understanding of divine eternity — that God transcends time, possessing His life in one eternal now — emerges from a rich tapestry of biblical reflection and philosophical reasoning. Catholic, Reformed, and Eastern Orthodox theologians through the ages have together affirmed that God is eternal, without beginning or end, and without shadow of change or succession . We have seen how Augustine described God’s “everstanding” present, Aquinas defined eternity in relation to God’s immutability, the Reformers echoed that there is “no past or future” for God’s knowledge , and the Eastern Fathers confessed God as the timeless “One who Is.” This consensus upholds divine eternity as a hallmark of the classical theism that undergirds Christian orthodoxy. At the same time, we have traced the contours of the modern debate, where the timeless God was questioned in light of relational dynamics and temporal history. Some have argued for a temporal God to safeguard His ability to love and respond, while others have defended timelessness as essential to God’s deity.

Into this ongoing discussion, the SSGO framework offers a revitalizing integration. By drawing deeply from the classical tradition (Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Calvin, Damascene, and more) and engaging contemporary insights (personalist philosophy, metaphysics of relation), SSGO shows that we need not choose between a God who is eternal and a God who is relational. It elucidates how God’s very eternality is the condition for the most profound relationality: within God’s triune life and towards creation. In SSGO’s vision, God’s eternity is not an abstract emptiness of time, but “the perfect integration of relational life” — the infinite fullness of love that no change can augment or diminish. Precisely because God’s love is eternal and unchanging, God can enter every changing situation of ours without loss or alteration, holding us in being and steering history to its consummation. The eternal God can thus be nearer to us than we are to ourselves, “before” us in every moment, calling each of those moments into existence from His inexhaustible “Now.”

We find, then, that the SSGO framework is highly coherent with and indeed a development of the classical doctrine of divine eternity. It provides the systematic rigor and depth of argumentation expected in the classical tradition — carefully avoiding contradictions like any hint of mutability in God — while also addressing the heartfelt spiritual intuition that God is a living God, rich in relationships. By synthesizing historical and modern perspectives, SSGO demonstrates that the doctrine of divine eternity is not a fossilized dogma, but a living truth that can speak to contemporary concerns. It reassures us that the God who is “the same forever” is also the God who can truly be “with us” in time (Emmanuel), and that these are not at odds. In a time when some fear that a timeless God is too aloof and others fear a changing God is not truly God, SSGO points us back to the wisdom of the classical thinkers: eternity, properly understood, is the guarantor of God’s faithfulness and the wellspring of hope. For a God who holds all times together can reliably bring His promises to fulfillment and can be intimately present to each moment of our lives without being overcome by our changing winds. As Boethius implied and SSGO echoes, God possesses “interminable life whole and perfect all at once” — and it is precisely in virtue of that fact that we, temporal creatures, can trust Him with our lives and our destinies. His eternal Logos entered our time so that we temporal beings might be raised to eternal life.

In conclusion, an academically rigorous yet pastorally meaningful doctrine of divine eternity emerges: God is timelessly eternal, and this eternity is filled with triune love and freely embraces temporal creation. The Catholic, Reformed, and Eastern traditions each contribute vital threads to this tapestry — from precise definitions to doxological proclamations — and the SSGO framework weaves them together, enriching the discussion with its focus on relational ontology. The end result is a portrait of the God of classical Christianity that remains fully intact in His transcendence even as we appreciate more deeply His immanent grace. This God “inhabits eternity” (Isa. 57:15) and also dwells with the contrite heart — not in different modes or parts, but one single God whose eternity is the home of His compassion. In the marriage of immutability and love lies the mystery of the God we worship. As theology continues to grapple with the relationship of God to time, the recovery of these integrated insights provides a sure foundation for orthodoxy and a springboard for further reflection. The SSGO framework, in fidelity to the classical heritage and responsive to contemporary questions, stands as a compelling witness that the doctrine of divine eternity is as relevant and awe-inspiring in today’s theological landscape as it ever was: it safeguards the truth that “from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God” (Ps. 90:2), and that this everlasting God is our refuge in every generation.

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Bibliography

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions, Book XI. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1. Edited by Philip Schaff. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887. (See especially Confessions XI, ch. 11-13 for Augustine’s discussion on time and eternity .)

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 10: “The Eternity of God.” Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1911. (Aquinas defines eternity as “simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life,” quoting Boethius , and explains that eternity follows from God’s immutability .)

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, Prose 6. ca. 524. (Boethius’ classic definition: “Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of illimitable life all at once” .)

John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book I. ca. 8th cent. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 9. (John Damascene enumerates God’s attributes as “without beginning and without end, eternal, unchangeable…” , affirming the Eastern view of God’s eternity and immutability.)

Basil of Caesarea. Hexaemeron (The Six Days of Creation), Homily I. ca. 370. (Basil notes that “In the beginning God created” means “in the beginning of time,” since time began with creation . He stresses that “the beginning of time is not yet time,” highlighting God’s transcendence over time.)

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 38: On the Theophany (Nativity). ca. 380. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 7. (Gregory remarks that God “always is,” and terms like “was” or “will be” do not properly apply to the eternal God, for He is beyond time’s divisions.)

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, ch.21. 1559 (Latin), trans. Henry Beveridge. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008. (Calvin asserts God’s comprehensive foreknowledge: all things are “under His eye” and “to His knowledge nothing is future or past, but all things are present” , implying God’s atemporal perspective.)

Turretin, Francis. Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. 1, Second Topic, Q. 8 “Is God Eternal?”. 1670s. Trans. James T. Dennison Jr. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992. (Turretin systematically defines eternity as without beginning, end, or succession . He states God is “free from succession” and that in God “nothing flows away with time… [He] has every moment at once” . Turretin’s articulation of an eternal present strongly echoes Boethius/Aquinas and became a standard in Reformed scholasticism.)

Charnock, Stephen. The Existence and Attributes of God. 1680s (published posthumously 1699). (Charnock describes God’s eternity as “one permanent state, without succession,” divided into “two parts” (past and future) only in our conception . This pastoral presentation reinforces that God’s eternity encompasses all ages as one.)

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama, Vol. V: The Last Act. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983. (Balthasar develops the idea of the trinitarian life as an eternal interplay of love — the “theodrama” in God Himself — and connects it to the Paschal mystery. While not directly cited above, Balthasar’s influence is reflected in the discussion of an “eternal drama of love” in God .)

Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI). Introduction to Christianity. 2nd ed. (German 1968). Trans. J. R. Foster. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. (Ratzinger famously stated “In God, person means relation” , articulating that the divine persons are constituted by relations of origin. This work influenced the relational emphasis in modern Catholic trinitarian theology, drawn upon by SSGO.)

Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Trans. Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957. (Lossky emphasizes the personal, trinitarian nature of the Godhead. He insists that God is not a solitary monad but a communion of persons; the quote “not a person confined in his own self, but an expansive tri-personality open to include us in love” encapsulates his approach to divine personalism.)

Staniloae, Dumitru. The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 1: Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God. (Original Romanian 1970s; Eng. trans. 1994 by Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer). Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press. (Staniloae discusses God’s eternal triune relationships and notes “no distinction in time” between the divine persons . He upholds that all temporal missions reflect eternal relations, an idea utilized in the above discussion.)

Mullins, R. T. The End of the Timeless God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. (A contemporary work arguing against divine timelessness. While not cited directly above, Mullins represents the analytic philosophy wing critiquing the classical view. SSGO’s framework can be seen as a response that attempts to answer some of Mullins’ and others’ concerns while preserving timelessness.)

Craig, William Lane. Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001. (Craig contends that God is timeless sans creation and temporal with creation, a hybrid view. The above text references Craig’s idea in passing as an example of contemporary models. This book gives Craig’s full argument for that position.)

Helm, Paul. Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. (Helm defends the traditional timeless view in dialogue with contemporary philosophy. He would align with much of the classical perspective outlined, reinforcing that God’s timeless eternity is biblically and philosophically cogent.)

Dryer, Robert M. Self-Standing Givenness Ontology (unpublished manuscripts and blog posts), 2024-2025. (These sources, referenced as “RobertDryer.com” in the citations etc., contain Dryer’s outline of SSGO, including discussions on divine simplicity, the Trinity as self-givenness, and responses to objections. They synthesize many of the above primary sources into the SSGO framework and were used to inform the integration of SSGO in this paper.)

The above bibliography includes primary theological sources as well as a few significant modern works for context. All classical citations are given in translation and standard editions. Chicago style footnotes were employed in-text (using bracketed citations per formatting guidelines), and full bibliographic entries are provided here for each source.