A Tale of Two Timelessness by Jimmy Stephens

Two things:

First, Platonic timelessness involves no personal exchange whatsoever. It is “dead.” It contradicts that Yahweh is a living God, metaphorically pictured time and again by fire.

God is alive. He is Triune, and the Trinity is a community of infinite love – experience without change, exchange without moments, where God’s space is Himself and His vision is always new.

Second, Platonic timelessness presupposes time. It’s purely negative. One defines Platonic timelessness as an abstract precondition for temporality, and so can only exist as something that provides explanatorily for temporality, and is therefore is united by temporal objects by the world as a whole.

Imagine that a force in my world is “the Force.” And the force is a luminous field of spiritual life that binds all living things that propels them in some moral direction. As such, it cannot be understood except as a principle of the cosmos. It “belongs” to the fantasy world of Star Wars – no Star Wars, no “Force.”

God’s timelessness is not mere abstract negation or underlying feature.

It is a word for differentiating His life from the life experienced in creation.

Take away the universe and you do not affect God’s timelessness – because it is just a negative word for His pure livingness.

A key mistake of some classical theism is falling into apophatic theology. If all we can say are abstract negations about God, then we cannot say anything.

All the negations presuppose a more powerful positive side.

God is immutable because He already possess all that He knows as power and interaction in and of Himself.

God is impassible because He already has full Triune joy in Himself.

God is omnipresent because the concept of physical space analogizes God’s inherent presentness to Himself.

So all negations presuppose the majesty that is the God who doesn’t need the negations, but which negations need Him to make that which can be differentiated from Him in the first place.