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The reason for this is that we, insignificant human beings incapable of thinking and speaking about eternity in a fitting manner, may by way of comparison—which in reality is a very unequal comparison—comprehend as much of eternity as is needful for us to know. Nevertheless, in doing so we must fully divorce God from the concept of time.
Because the works of God in history follow successively one after another, we might imagine that God Himself is going through some sequence as the agent producing these works. Yet the traditional view on eternity insists that the succession is only in the things produced and not in God as the agent. There is no succession of activity in God.
Infinity is also founded upon the understanding of God’s perfection as that to which no higher degree of perfection can be added.
Oliphint states, “God freely determined to take on attributes, characteristics, and properties that he did not have, and would not have, without creation. In taking on these characteristics, we understand as well that whatever characteristics or attributes he takes on, they cannot be of the essence of who he is, nor can they be necessary to his essential identity as God.”
A temporal effect can only proceed from a temporal act of causation, and such acts can only go forth from temporal agents. Thus, God cannot act in the temporal realm without somehow existing on the same temporal ontological continuum with His creatures. Creation, accordingly, is not merely something that goes forth from God, but it is also an action that God begins to perform at some point in time.
Nothing that begins to exist can be regarded as properly divine. Divinity has no origin, limit, or measure. This has profound implications for the way we regard God’s creatorhood.
On the other hand, it does sound odd to say that God is eternally Creator. Eternalists traditionally have been quite willing to endorse the incomprehensible notion that God is immutably and eternally Creator and that God creates the world as the Eternal One.
“It is God who posits the creature, eternity which posits time, immensity which posits space, being which posits becoming, immutability which posits change. There is nothing intermediate between these two classes of categories:
It is perhaps helpful to understand the difference between the twin affirmations—that “Creator” is a relative name and denotes an absolute reality—as corresponding to the epistemic-noetic activity of the human knower on the one hand, and the ontological reality of God’s absolute being on the other. The difference lies not in a twofold manner of God’s existence—timeless and temporal, for example—but in the distinction between (1) the human manner of knowing and predicating about God and (2) God’s actual manner of existing.
the older tradition taught that creation is an eternal act of God that produces a temporal effect.
The divine act of creation is nothing other than the eternal action of God’s immutable will. Thus, there is no distinction in agency between God’s will to create and the act of creating (see Rev. 4:11).
For God did not become Creator, so that first for a long time he did not create and then afterward he did create. Rather he is the eternal Creator, and as Creator he was the Eternal One, and as the Eternal One he created. The creation therefore brought about no change in God.
suggests that God does not act in the world as the God that He is from all eternity, but as something else that He has come to be. But then this something else cannot be divine and so cannot be the proper object of our worship. If God should act in the world as the Creator who He has come to be, then we would not adore Him as divine when we worship Him as Creator. No less than true religion is at stake in the contest between theistic mutualism and classical Christian theism.
Divinity itself is identical to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Puritan William Ames makes clear that we do not maintain a generic unity among the persons, declaring, “He is said to be one not in kind, but in that perfect unity which is often called numerical and individual in creatures.”
Louis Berkhof also spotlights the difficulty of our talk about divine persons: “God is one in his essential being, but in this one being there are three persons, called, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These persons are not, however, like so many persons among men three entirely separate and distinct individuals. They are rather three modes or forms in which the divine essence exists.”
In God, there is no mixture of abstract and concrete.
without first grasping certain truths about the divine existence and essence—most importantly, divine simplicity—there is no guarantee that one’s doctrine of the trinitarian relations and persons will be necessarily monotheistic.
Without simplicity, God must be dependent on something other than His divinity for some aspects of His being, and thus He cannot be a se and independent. Without simplicity, God is open to the acquisition of being in addition to His essence and thus is not immutable. Without simplicity, it is not clear why God could not experience temporal change and thus fail to be timelessly eternal. Without simplicity, it is impossible that God be in every way infinite as there must be parts in Him, and parts by definition must be finite.
God cannot be made more compassionate toward sinners or more opposed to sin than He is from all eternity. This is because it is His nature to love, and it is His nature to detest sin. These are not mere potentialities in His nature but rather are purely actual in Him inasmuch as they are identical with His act of being.
Why must God be personal and related to others in the same way as finite persons are? Why must He undergo change in order for His love or opposition to sin to be regarded as genuine? Indeed, it would seem that the One who is unchanging, simple, and purely actual in all that He is—which is exactly what classical theism claims about God—is the One who is most profoundly vibrant and powerful in relating Himself to others.
