The God of Hope: An Explanation from a Covenantal Ontology by Jimmy Stephens:

Classical theism:

God is by nature timeless and it contradicts His nature to be in any sense temporal whatsoever.

Open theism:

Temporal properties possessed by God exclude any timelessness whatsoever.

(Note: both sometimes confuse perpetuality with timelessness. For something to be perpetual is for it to have no end, or even possibly no end and no beginning. But that would just mean it exists for all points in time, not that it transcends time itself.)

Imagine a book with pages. Eternality/perpetuity is to exist on all pages of the book.

Timelessness is to exist outside the book.

The covenantal view is that God is by nature timeless, but can take on a secondary temporal nature, as demonstrated by the hypostatic union. Since the incarnate Christ is both atemporal and temporal without contradiction or confusion, therefore, there is no contradiction in more generally attributing temporality to a timeless God.

All that needs hold is that:

time is created.

God enters creation.

These are both included in the same free act of divine volition.

It hardly counters God’s timeless omniscience to hope for the future. This is for two reasons.

First, Jesus, who is timeless in His divinity and temporal in His humanity can experience the psychology of humans. He knows what it is like to feel fear, terror, dread; he has felt the emotion of doubt pull on his beliefs. However, he also knew without doubting that God’s promises are perfect and indubitable. So Christ, who is God because He is the Son of God, can feel the tension of both absolute knowledge of God’s plan for the future and still feel hope in the face of dread that emotionally tugs against that knowledge.

Second, God can more generally take on creaturely properties related to psychological experiences associated with hope. This is to say that God timelessly deigns to temporally experience hope by taking onto Himself a created nature and clothing Himself in creaturely weakness. Two examples.

First, Moses persuades God to change his mind. Moses assuages God’s wrath. It is plausible that God has here experienced real persuasion, and that hope in Moses’ faith brings God real recentering on saving Israel instead of destroying them. However, this historic, temporal reality occurs because God timelessly chooses to experience it.

It would be like an author who with the full sovereignty of his authorship deigns to enter his writing and experience it on its own terms. On the one hand, the author retains his metaphysical independence from the book and at no point can the book influence or affect the author as he is beyond the world of his writing. At the same time, the author makes real relation with his story, takes on real in-world-lore properties, and so avails himself of whatever dependencies pertains to the narrative he himself is responsible for making.

God’s mind changes temporally as the effect of Moses – more radically, his hope is renewed by Moses. But God chose to do that timelessly, without being an effect of any creature, with a security in His own sovereignty that cannot be renewed because it is as unshakable as God’s self-existence.

Second – and this can be involved in just about any example, including the first – God can choose to experience not only temporality, but ignorance. Neither threatens His timelessness, His omniscience, or His immutability. This is because, once again, the self-existence of God precedes and is exactly what makes possible these weaknesses.

Because God is omniscient, immutable, and timeless, He can without changing, without dearth of knowledge, and without temporal relations, choose to enter into a world of change and time and take on for this entrance a nature subject to ignorance.

Jesus experienced ignorance. It is plausible that the Son took on ignorance for certain portions of or at certain instances of Old Testament history.

The key and profound difference between this and open theism (and to a lesser degree, classical theism), is that open theism accepts a nestorian-arian dialectic, whereas covenantal metaphysics is founded on a revelatory cosmology.

For the covenantalist, God does all that He does to reveal His glory and share it in and through the world, coming to fruition as it does in Christ.

For the open theist, God is simply another character in the world, subject to its preceding laws and forces.

For the covenantalist, God is able to predesign humanity as the throne on which true Deity rests, so that Heaven and earth are united in one Mediator who makes God literally touchable without making God reducibly or exhaustively touchable.

For the open theist, to be human is to be the victim of countless Platonic-objects or nominalist accidents that rule how God must do and think and act – because that’s just how the universe must work. So God can only reveal Himself and unite us with Himself at the behest of “Reality.”