Leibniz vs. Pagan OntoChronology (Open Theism)
An except from “Part III: Time, Being and Eternity: Time as Archetype”
Newtonian Temporality vs. Leibniz OntoChronology Contrasted against Biblical-Aionic time
The clash between Newton and Leibniz over time’s nature was a metaphysical war waged through differential equations. Where Newton envisioned time as God’s eternal sensorium, an absolute river flowing uniformly across cosmic voids, Leibniz saw a derivative illusion emerging from event sequences. This divide crystallized opposing worldviews: Newton’s universe required divine maintenance, while Leibniz’s pre-established harmony automated cosmic operations. Their 1716 correspondence via Samuel Clarke became philosophy’s trench warfare, with each axiom a fortified position.
The Leibniz-Clarke letters exposed time’s theological subtext. Clarke, channeling Newton, argued absolute time reflected divine omnipresence, a cosmic stage for God’s perpetual engagement. Leibniz countered that such dependency insulted divine craftsmanship: a perfect clockmaker doesn’t adjust gears post-creation. This theological jousting masked deeper methodological rifts. Newton’s empiricism privileged observed regularities as evidence for absolute duration, while Leibniz’s rationalism demanded time be reducible to relational logic.
While Einstein showed time’s plasticity, stretching near massive objects or at high velocities, he retained an absolute spacetime geometry. The metric tensor in general relativity acts as a quasi-absolute scaffold, dictating how matter moves while being shaped by that very matter. This reciprocal causality creates a relational absolutism: time isn’t Newton’s detached flow or sequence, but it’s not fully reducible to material relations either.
In a historical first, Newton in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), articulated a vision of time as an absolute, self-sustaining framework:
“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”
Leibniz rejected Newton's absolutes and based his critique on two principles: The principle of sufficient reason and the Identity of the Indiscernible. In his Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1715-16), Leibniz argued:
"Time is the order of successive existents... If nothing existed, there would be no time."
Kant’s dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensual and Spiritual World, was grounded in addressing the practical challenges of conceptualizing absolute space in relation to sensory perception. He writes (originally in Latin):
But the first philosophy, which contains the principles of the pure use of understanding, is metaphysical... Since, therefore, empirical principles are not to be found in Metaphysics, the concept of obstacles should not be sought in the senses, but in the very nature of the not-pure understanding.
Time is not an objective entity, real, nor is it a substance, accident, or relation. It is a subjective condition, necessary by the nature of the human mind, for coordinating any sensible data, offering a certain order and clear insight...
Those who assert that time has objective reality or conceive it as some kind of continuous flow in existence without any real basis (a most absurd notion), often follow the usage particularly of English philosophers. Or, they might view it as a real abstraction of the succession of internal states, following the usage of Leibniz and Wolff. However, the latter approach clearly exposes the falsity of the proposition by defining time in a circular and incorrect manner.
Heidegger similarly makes a metaphysical case for the truest definition of Space-time, against an Empiricist one:
Space is neither in the subject, nor is the world in space. Rather, space is "in" the world, insofar as being-in-the-world, which is constitutive for existence, has opened up space. Space is not in the subject, nor does the subject view the world "as if" it were in a space, but the ontologically well-understood "subject", the being-in, is spatial.
The Newtonian substantivalist view, time as container, renders God a passive spectator within His own creation. Leibniz counterargued in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1715-16):
“I hold space to be merely relative, as time is... I hold time to be an order of successions. For space to be an order of coexistences.”
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) transcends this dichotomy by reconceiving time as an a priori form of intuition:
“Time is not an empirical concept derived from any experience... It is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever. Space and time are pure intuitions that ground a priori the synthetic unity of the manifold of appearances.”
Space-Time as an Archetype: Newton's Materialistic Reductionist View of Time as Sequence
This replacement of Middle and Neoplatonic metaphysics seen in the Logos-Theology of the New Testament had massive implications for Western Christianity. In Scholastic Christianity, especially in Aquinas' metaphysics, God was transcendent and the First Cause and sustainer of the universe. But Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian causality (efficient, material, formal, and final causes) with Christian theology- applying Techne to God. In other words, for the first time God was "bound" by Justice, Time and other abstract concepts- a view that the Apostolic fathers and early church fathers condemned as heretical, and codified in the Nicene creed. Early theologians emphasized God's absolute immutability (unchanging nature). God was seen as completely separate from the created world, existing beyond time, space, and change. This is particularly evident in Athanasius' defense of Nicene Christianity, where he emphasizes the consubstantiality (same substance) of the Father and the Son, reflecting the eternal, unchanging nature of the divine being.
So while the Scholastics argued that God is both immanent in creation (by sustaining it) and transcendent (existing beyond it), Aquinas also described God as pure act (actus purus), meaning that God’s essence is identical to His existence- a seismic shift away from the teachings of the Apostles. God is still the Neoplatonic moved mover to Augustine, but His immanence in the world is realized through causality (i.e. Techne). Thus for the first time ever, a Christian argued that God "must" do something according to a principle outside Himself. God, then, is reduced to a Pagan god that is bound by sequence, concepts and energies.
This Scholasticism laid the foundation for movements such as Jansenism within the Catholic church, but also is wired into the foundation of Protestantism. Calvinism (like Jansenism before it), views God as bound to his nature- Justice and other abstract concepts. Likewise, various Protestant movements such as the Jehovah's Witnesses adopted this Pagan body-soul understanding view of the Scholastics, and Molenists, Armenians and Open Theists all rely on this Medieval Catholic Aristotelian metaphysics in that God "must" act through Techne (Newtonian Time, Goodness, etc). God is not fully transcendent in the Western Christian understanding, because Scholasticism collapsed the Apostolic Energy-Essence distinction and re-interpreted the Bible through this Aristotelianism. To the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox who maintain this Hellenized Jewish 1-st century understanding of Metaphysics found in the New Testament, this Catholic and Protestant denial of the absolute immutability (explicitly or implicitly) of God through the synthesis of Pagan philosophy is a foundational blasphemy that drives all other heresies found in the kaleidoscope across the 30,000 denominations of Protestantism. After the codification of Scholastic metaphysics in Vatican II, and the re-evolution of Protestantism into its current Fundamentalist form in the late 20th century, hope for unity with the East is even more of a pipe dream.
In a historical first, Newton in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), articulated a vision of time as an absolute, self-sustaining framework:
“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”
This materialistic view treats time as a physical container that persists even in a void. Time is reduced to a linear sequence of moments, each distinct and autonomous. For Newton, this absolute framework was essential to his laws of motion, which required a universal reference to define inertia and acceleration.
Theologically, Newton's God exists within time, actively sustaining the cosmos. No Christian had ever made such a claim since Arias did 1500 years previously, and Santa Claus had punched him in the face. Newton's absolute time becomes a divine sensorium-a medium through which God perceives and governs creation. This framework reflects a reductionist ethos that collapses the complexity of time into a measurable, mathematical progression.
Leibniz rejected Newton's absolutes and based his critique on two principles: The principle of sufficient reason: Every fact must have an explanation and the Identity of the Indiscernible: No two entities share all properties. In his Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1715-16), Leibniz argued:
"Time is the order of successive existents... If nothing existed, there would be no time."
For Leibniz, time is not a substance but a relational network-a system of before-and-after connections between events. Absolute time, he argued, violates the principle of sufficient reason: if time were independent, God would have no reason to create the universe at one moment rather than another. Similarly, the identity of indiscernibles negates absolute time, since indistinguishable moments in an empty timeline would be nonsensical.
Leibniz's theology diverged sharply from the Materialism and Neo-Paganism of Newton. His Christian God, existing outside of time as the Scripture and the Apostles teach, orchestrates a pre-established harmony in which monads (metaphysical simples) interact without causal influence. Time emerges from monadic perceptions, rendering Newton's absolute framework superfluous.
Kant showed an advanced understanding of the natural sciences, including an advanced understanding of what would become quantum theory, including space-time, pushing back against the Leibniz-Wolff conceptualization (a real abstraction of the succession of internal states) and the dominant Newtonian definition (a continuous flow in existence without any real basis). Leibniz and Kant both rejected the English empiricist definition of time as a sequence of events, but Leibniz still saw it as a flow of internal states, which Kant took offense at because he saw it as too close to the materialist definition of Hume.
The origin of Kant's space-time theory in his original 1770 dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensual and Spiritual World, was not merely an abstract philosophical exploration, but was grounded in addressing the practical challenges of conceptualizing absolute space in relation to sensory perception. This is Germaine's entire project of dialectically reconciling rationalism and empiricism. This nuanced understanding of space and time as forms of human sensibility, distinct from their conceptualization in absolute terms, formed a fundamental aspect of Kant's later philosophical endeavors. He writes (originally in Latin):
But the first philosophy, which contains the principles of the pure use of understanding, is metaphysical... Since, therefore, empirical principles are not to be found in Metaphysics, the concept of obstacles should not be sought in the senses, but in the very nature of the not-pure understanding. This understanding is not from the conception of the tried, but from the innate laws of the mind (observing its actions on the occasion of experience), and hence, it is acquired. Of this kind are concepts like possibility, existence, necessity, substance, cause, etc., along with their opposites or correlatives. These concepts never enter as parts of any sensual representation and therefore cannot in any way be abstracted from it.
Time is not an objective entity, real, nor is it a substance, accident, or relation. It is a subjective condition, necessary by the nature of the human mind, for coordinating any sensible data, offering a certain order and clear insight. Both substances and accidents are coordinated in terms of simultaneity and succession only through the conception of time. Thus, the idea of time, as the principle of form, is foundational for these concepts.
Those who assert that time has objective reality or conceive it as some kind of continuous flow in existence without any real basis (a most absurd notion), often follow the usage particularly of English philosophers. Or, they might view it as a real abstraction of the succession of internal states, following the usage of Leibniz and Wolff. However, the latter approach clearly exposes the falsity of the proposition by defining time in a circular and incorrect manner. Furthermore, it egregiously ignores the concept of simultaneity, a significant aspect of time, thus disturbing all common sense usage. This is because the laws of motion are not changed according to the measure of time, namely motion, but time itself, in its own nature, demands to be determined by observing motion or any internal changes or series, completely abolishing the certainty of each of these rules.
The a priori forms of sensual experience (sense-perception) are not directly determined by sensation, but rather we always have a general sensation that belongs to sensibility in space-time. This distinction is at the heart of Kantian transcendental aesthetics. By Kant's time, Newton's ideas were already supplanting the previously dominant Leibnizian concepts, and he uncharacteristically insults the idea of time as a succession of moments as "a most absurd notion. Time is primary only in the field of phenomenology, but nothing else. Even in the purely modern scientific usage of the word, space-time is understood as an observed dimension relative to the observer. Standing on the other side of the experiments that proved the relativity of time, Kant's arguments here have aged well into modern experimental science:
Succession does not create the concept of time but rather necessitates it. Therefore, the notion of time, often acquired through experience, is poorly defined as "the series of actual entities succeeding one another." This definition is unclear because understanding 'after' requires a pre-existing concept of time. There are different times for things that exist after each other, just as there are simultaneous times for things that exist at the same time.
The idea of time is singular, not general. Every instance of time is thought of as part of one immense time. When thinking of two years, they cannot be conceptualized except in relation to each other, and if they do not immediately follow one another, there must be a certain time in between. The distinction between seasons as earlier or later cannot be defined based on some characteristic of understanding without falling into circular reasoning. The mind discerns this only through a unique perception. Moreover, every actuality is placed in time, not under a general concept as a common characteristic, but as distinct content.
Thus, the idea of time is a perception, and since it is conceived as a condition of relations in the senses before all sensation, it is not a sensual but a pure view.
Time is a continuous and lawful quantity, continuous in the changes from the beginning of the universe. It is an amount that is not reducible to the simple. Through time, only relations are thought of, without any given beings related to each other. Time, as a composition, when the whole is removed, leaves absolutely nothing. When a composition is removed from all composition, nothing at all remains; it is not reducible to simple parts. Therefore, any part of time is still time, and the entities in time are simple, that is, moments, not parts of time, but limits within which time occurs. For any given two moments in time, they succeed each other to the extent that they actually exist. Thus, a given moment in time necessitates another moment in its succession.
The law of continuity in metaphysics states that all changes are continuous, i.e., they flow, but they do not leap from one state to its opposite without a series of intermediate states. For two states that are opposed in time, there are different moments, but between any two moments, there is always some time, within which an infinite series of moments exists. In this time, a substance is not entirely in one state, nor in the other, nor in none; it exists in various states, and so on ad infinitum.
Heidegger similarly makes a metaphysical case for the truest definition of Space-time, against an Empiricist one:
Space is neither in the subject, nor is the world in space. Rather, space is "in" the world, insofar as being-in-the-world, which is constitutive for existence, has opened up space. Space is not in the subject, nor does the subject view the world "as if" it were in a space, but the ontologically well-understood "subject", the being-in, is spatial. And because existence is spatial in the way described, space appears as a priori. This title does not mean something like a prior affiliation to an initially still worldless subject that throws a space out of itself. Apriority here means: The spatiality of the prudently initially encountered can become thematic for prudence itself and the task of calculation and measurement, for example in house building and land surveying.
The Newtonian substantivalist view, time as container, renders God a passive spectator within His own creation, unable to interact contingently without violating temporal mechanics. Leibniz counterargued in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1715-16):
“I hold space to be merely relative, as time is... I hold time to be an order of successions. For space to be an order of coexistences.”
For Leibniz, time emerges relationally from monadic perceptions, a proto-phenomenological view anticipating Kant’s transcendental idealism. But Leibnizian relationalism risks reducing time to epistemic artifact, denying its objective grounding in divine concursus. Both frameworks prove theologically corrosive: Newton’s absolutism imprisons divine action; Leibniz’s phenomenalism dissolves providence into perspectival illusion.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) transcends this dichotomy by reconceiving time as an a priori form of intuition:
“Time is not an empirical concept derived from any experience... It is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever. Space and time are pure intuitions that ground a priori the synthetic unity of the manifold of appearances.”
The Fallacy of Time as Sequence
Newton’s absolutism of time as mere sequenceis dead. Scientifically demonstratedRelativity’s spacetime is relational but not arbitrary, a negotiated reality between matter and geometry. Yet fragments of absolutism survive in quantum nonlocality, thermodynamic arrows, and neural timekeeping. Time is neither fully absolute nor purely relative but a layered construct: relativistic at cosmic scales, quantum-fuzzy at microscopic ones, and psychologically absolute in lived experience. The true merit lies not in choosing sides but in recognizing time as a polyphonic concept, a simultaneity of contradictory truths that physics has yet to harmonize.
Newton’s absolute time concept drew power from everyday intuition. We feel time passing uniformly, a universal metronome ticking behind phenomena, at least while awake. Leibniz’s counterargument, that this intuition conflates measurement with essence, anticipates Kant’s transcendental idealism by decades. His 1715 assertion that time is “the order of possibilities that are inconsistent but nevertheless have a connection” dissolves chronology into logical relations. The move radicalizes time’s status: not a container but a byproduct of modal conflicts. When event A prevents event B, their sequence creates time’s arrow, a view prefiguring causal set theory’s discrete spacetime.
The empirical refutation of Newtonian absolute time through the Hafele-Keating experiment of 1971 provides a remarkable vindication of the biblical-Augustinian understanding of time against the materialistic assumptions that undergirded the Open Theist heresy and its theological cousins. The experiment's demonstration that time dilation occurs exactly as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity proves that time is not the uniform, absolute flow that Newton postulated but rather a created aspect of the physical universe that can be stretched, compressed, and altered, precisely what one would expect if time is indeed part of creation rather than an independent framework constraining even the Creator. This empirical confirmation that temporal experience varies depending on physical conditions supports the biblical teaching that God can lengthen or shorten time according to His purposes, that He is not bound by temporal succession, and that the scriptural declaration that a day is as a thousand years to the Lord and a thousand years as a day reflects not poetic exaggeration but profound truth about the nature of time and God's transcendence over it. The fact that modern physics has abandoned the notion of absolute time that undergirded so much anti-biblical theology demonstrates how those who abandoned scriptural authority for supposedly scientific reasons were actually abandoning truth for error, trading the solid foundation of divine revelation for the shifting sands of provisional scientific theories.
Yet despite the scientific abandonment of absolute time and its empirical refutation, the theological damage wrought by three centuries of preferring Newtonian assumptions to biblical revelation continues to corrupt Western Christianity, particularly in Protestant circles where the implications of relativity theory for validating biblical temporality have been largely ignored or misunderstood. The persistence of Open Theism, prosperity theology, and other heresies that assume a fundamentally Newtonian conception of time reveals the extent to which anti-biblical assumptions have become embedded in Western religious consciousness, continuing to operate even after both Scripture and science have proven them false. This represents a peculiar form of spiritual blindness, where theological positions based on rejecting biblical authority in favor of outdated scientific theories continue to be defended even after those scientific theories themselves have been definitively refuted, much like the Sadducees who denied the resurrection not because of scriptural evidence but because of their prior philosophical commitments. The irony that many contemporary Christians defend theological positions that contradict both biblical revelation and current scientific understanding, while simultaneously claiming to be either biblical or rational, reveals the confused and apostate state of much modern theological discourse.
Leibniz's prescient recognition that Newton's absolute time represented a dangerous slide toward materialism and paganism has been thoroughly vindicated not only by subsequent scientific developments but more importantly by the theological apostasy that Newtonian assumptions have produced. His warning that treating time as an absolute, independent reality would inevitably lead to a denial of biblical truth about God's nature has been fulfilled in the various forms of theistic personalism that now dominate much of Protestant theology, where the God of Scripture who declares "I AM WHO I AM" from His eternal throne has been replaced with a temporal deity who learns, changes, and develops through time like a glorified human consciousness. The Leibnizian insight that "primary matter is essential to every Entelechy, and is never separated from it" points toward the need to understand the relationship between the material and the spiritual in ways that neither compromise biblical truth nor ignore legitimate scientific insights, suggesting that the solution to the problem of time and eternity lies not in subjecting God to temporal categories in violation of Scripture but in understanding how temporal existence relates to eternal being in accordance with biblical revelation.
The Leibniz-Clarke debate’s theological core resurfaces in multiverse cosmology. When physicists posit infinite bubble universes with varying physical laws, they echo Leibniz’s possible worlds, but replace divine selection with quantum fluctuation. The parallel exposes a persistent yearning: to ground cosmic variety in rational principles. Leibniz’s God, optimizing reality through combinatorial calculus, finds secular counterparts in anthropic reasoning and fitness landscapes.
Relationalism’s Achilles’ heel remains inertia. Leibniz struggled to explain why objects resist acceleration without absolute space as reference, a problem Einstein solved through spacetime curvature. But general relativity’s geodesics reintroduce absolutism through geometric necessity. The monadology’s solution, pre-established harmony between substances, feels quaint against tensor equations, yet shares their determinist core. Both frameworks sacrifice contingency to cosmic order, albeit through different mechanisms.
Quantum time dilation experiments add fuel to the relational fire, and only clear demonstrated that time is not Absolute sequence. When atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites tick faster than Earth-bound counterparts, they validate relativity’s frame-dependent time. Leibniz would hail this as empirical proof of his view, time as relation between events. Yet quantum nonlocality complicates the picture: entangled particles coordinate instantly across space-like separations, violating relativistic time ordering. The paradox suggests time’s relational nature might be emergent rather than fundamental, a statistical mirage masking deeper atemporal reality- and Quantum theory is uncovering the illusionary nature of time with every new assignment.
The dispute’s ethical dimension surfaces in temporal experience. Newtonian absolute time licenses the “block universe”, a frozen timescape where past, present, and future coexist. Leibniz’s relational flow preserves becoming’s reality, aligning better with human agency. Yet physics increasingly favors the block view, trapping us in Einstein’s four-dimensional loaf. Only quantum indeterminacy offers escape hatches, potentialities not yet baked into spacetime’s structure.
Leibniz’s relational time theory hinges on three axioms: no vacuum exists, all events interconnect, and substances mirror the universe. This trinity binds chronology to causal networks, time becomes the syntax of cosmic information exchange. When a star explodes, its light’s travel time to Earth isn’t mere duration but a constitutive element of both star and observer’s histories. The view prefigures process philosophy’s event ontology, where being is becoming. Heidegger zeros in on this aspect of Leibniz in his Marburg lecture.
Newton’s bucket argument, centrifugal forces as absolute motion proof, meets its match in general relativity. Einstein showed accelerating frames mimic gravitational effects, erasing absolute motion’s privileged status. A rotating bucket in deep space creates centrifugal force through frame-dragging, spacetime itself twists, fulfilling Mach’s relational vision. Leibniz would note this vindicates his claim that motion’s reality depends on the “fixed stars”, now recast as distant mass distributions curving spacetime.
The principle of sufficient reason’s temporal application creates paradox. If every moment must have a cause, infinite regress looms. Leibniz’s solution, a necessary being initiating the chain, smuggles absolute time through theology’s backdoor. Quantum vacuum fluctuations now offer secular alternatives, with universe beginnings needing no prior cause, a development undermining his rationalist edifice.
Quantum gravity’s problem of time, disappearing temporal variables in unified equations, wouldn’t surprise Leibniz. His demotion of time to derivative status aligns with Wheeler-DeWitt’s timeless wave function. Yet some physicists balk at eliminating time entirely, proving intuition’s stubborn hold. Leibniz’s lesson endures: time’s grip on thought exceeds its ontological warrant.
New Testament usage of Aion: Greek Deities and the Jewish God
The New Testament employs several distinct Greek terms for time, none of which connote the Newtonian-Materialist view of mere sequence. These are relational words that speak to experience and quality, not materialistic measurement. This linguistic pattern is inherited from the Hebrew Bible, where time is understood not as an abstract, uniform container but as a texture of events, seasons, and divine appointments. The Hebraic mind did not conceive of time as a neutral, mathematical progression, but as a series of qualitative moments defined by their content.
The Hebrew word eth (עֵת) denotes a specific point or occasion for an action. It refers to a fitting time, a moment defined by the event that occurs within it, such as "a time to be born, and a time to die" (Ecclesiastes 3:2). This is not a point on a timeline but a moment whose identity is fused with its happening. Another term, moed (מוֹעֵד), signifies an appointed season, a designated meeting time, often used for the religious festivals of Israel. This word connects temporality to divine appointment and communal memory, making time a structure of sacred and social meaning, not an empty, homogenous flow. The concept of olam (עוֹלָם) points to a long duration, an age, or a world-era, sometimes stretching into a future beyond reckoning. Yet even here, the meaning is not of an infinite sequence of seconds, but of a vast, often mysterious, stretch of existence whose character is defined by God's overarching purposes.
This Hebraic understanding of time as qualitative and event-based carried into the Hellenistic milieu of the New Testament authors, where it found expression in a new set of Greek terms. The term "chronos" (χρόνος), appearing 54 times, denotes the passage of historical periods, the ordinary succession of moments, years, and epochs. For the Hellenistic mind, chronos was time as apprehended through natural cycles, human activities, and biological processes. It was the duration between harvests, the span of pregnancies, or the cycle of religious festivals. This experiential quality is apparent in New Testament texts that reference waiting periods, life stages, or defined historical eras. Stoic philosophy, prominent in the period, treated chronos not as an independent reality but as a relational concept for measuring intervals between events. Hellenized Jewish thought adopted this understanding, associating chronos with the embodied experience of living within God's created order. In the lexicon of continental philosophy, chronos is understood as phenomenology.
Luke the Evangelist, across his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, uses chronos to convey this experiential dimension. When Luke speaks of "fulfilling time" (Luke 1:57, 2:6, 2:22), he refers to the full experience of a prophecy or an expectation reaching its natural conclusion, not merely an abstract point in a sequence. When Acts describes "chronos periods" (Acts 1:7, 3:21, 17:26), it points to seasons of divine activity experienced within human history.
Other terms carry more specific theological weight. "Kairos" (καιρός) occurs about 86 times, referring to an appointed time, a divine opportunity, or the correct moment for God's action, often with an eschatological sense of fulfillment or judgment. "Aiōn" (αἰών), appearing 128 times, signifies an age, an era, or eternity itself, drawing on Jewish apocalyptic thought that distinguished between "this age" (ho aiōn houtos) and "the age to come" (ho aiōn mellōn). "Hōra" (ὥρα), used 106 times, means hour or moment, but in John's writings, it often denotes Jesus' "hour" of glorification. "Hēmera" (ἡμέρα), appearing 389 times, means day and includes the eschatologically charged "Day of the Lord" (hēmera kyriou). These temporal terms synthesized Greek philosophical ideas with Jewish apocalyptic structures, creating a distinct understanding where time was both the experience of progression and a series of divinely appointed moments in God's redemptive plan.
This Judeo-Christian conception of time differentiates itself fundamentally from pagan temporality. In many pagan cosmologies, time manifested as a primordial, self-subsistent reality, often deified as a being like Chronos, to which even the gods were subordinate. Time operated as an independent absolute, an eternal container within which divine and cosmic dramas unfolded. The Judeo-Christian paradigm inverts this relationship. Time does not exist as a thing-in-itself but emerges as a creaturely mode of becoming within the finite world. Time began with creation as the sequential unfolding of creaturely existence. It is not an absolute container but a relational structure constituted by the succession of contingent beings and events. God did not act in a pre-existing temporal moment; the declaration "In the beginning God created" means the beginning itself is part of the created order.
The New Testament’s use of aion integrates Stoic cosmology into Jewish apocalypticism through a reworking of temporal ontology. When Paul declares Christ “the power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24), he coopts the Stoic Logos, the rational principle governing the κόσμος, while subverting its impersonal nature with incarnational particularity. This theological inversion alters aion from an abstract temporal container into an actor with messianic agency. The universe is not cold and dead but saturated with divine energies that enable rational understanding. The radicality of this move is crystallized in John’s Prologue, where the incarnate Logos “tabernacles among us” (1:14), a nomadic and living deity replacing the fixed presence of the Temple. This reimagined aion carried Hellenic baggage; the Gnostic crisis showed how easily a cosmic Christ could be dematerialized into Platonic forms.
Early Christian apologists navigated this semantic minefield. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho presents Christ as both novus aion and the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. The Arian controversies exposed the synthesis’s fragility: the debate over whether Christ is homoousios (ὁμοούσios, of the same substance) with the Father or merely homoiousios (ὁμοιούσios, of similar substance) fractured Christendom. That single iota’s difference revealed how metaphysical structures fracture under theological strain, allowing a modified Neo-Platonism to reabsorb Christian metaphysical developments back into a pagan system.
From St. Clement of Alexandria to St. Augustine, the Church Fathers defended God's absolute immutability against these pagan concepts. Augustine’s Confessions solidified this defense through a psychologized temporality. This was not a new invention but a literal reading of the temporal vocabulary in the New Testament, one that prevented the Arian error of placing God within time, like Zeus and other pagan gods. By internalizing aion as the soul’s distentio animi—memory, attention, expectation—Augustine relocated the concept of αἰών within phenomenology. This move countered the Neoplatonic view where Aion (Eternity) is the transcendent totality of being and Chronos (Time) is merely its moving image.
Pagan views on time varied, but Aristotle’s proposal in Physics, that time is a measure of change perceived sequentially by humans, was among the most developed. Augustine’s Confessions provided the definitive Christian defense against such pagan ideas by rooting time in phenomenology. This same view was later defended by the Protestant apologist Kant, who opposed the mechanistic view of Newton and English empiricists like Hume and Locke. The Leibniz-Wolff conceptualization of time as a "real" abstraction of successive internal states was a reaction to his rival Newton. The Newtonian definition was of a continuous flow in existence without any real basis, a sequence of events. Newton was the first to formalize time as pure sequence with his concept of "absolute time," a concept disproven by empirical observation in the 1971 Hafele-Keating experiment. Leibniz saw the Newtonian idea as a dangerous and nonsensical proposition, advancing his own variation.
Kant mocked this Newtonian idea as "silly," recognizing it as a capitulation to an atheistic materialism. He correctly identified that post-Newtonian English empiricism and Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics had created a rationalistic conception of time that stood against the Christian phenomenological one. This shift moved ontology onto a flat, rationalistic, anti-metaphysical path. Leibniz stands as a critical node in this dispute over the biblical concept of aeonic time versus the materialist re-interpretation of the concept by Scholastic-Enlightenment philosophers. This materialistic ontochronology is still present in late 20th-century Anglophonic Protestantism and the modernist-empiricist strain of atheism. It has an asymmetrical presence in philosophies like Open Theism and other internet-based Gnostic ideas that revert Protestantism to a pre-Judeo-Christian paganism denying the dogma of God’s absolute immutability. All these theologies developed from the conflict between Protestants and their offspring, rationalistic-materialistic anti-theists. Modern internet-Protestantism and modern materialist philosophies receive their ontochronology from this Newton-Leibniz regression.
The logic of Open Theism depends entirely on the presupposition that Newton's definition of time is correct. It operates on the unexamined assumption that time is an absolute, objective, and uniform sequence that flows forward, and that all beings, divine or otherwise, are subject to its passage. This structure forces a false dilemma: either God is disconnected from this temporal flow and thus unrelational and static, or He is relational and must therefore be within the temporal flow, experiencing sequence, learning, and reacting. The entire theological system is an attempt to resolve a problem created by its own faulty physics. By accepting a 17th-century mechanical model of the universe, Open Theism is compelled to modify the biblical doctrine of God to fit its anachronistic cosmology.
This system's failure is not just theological; it is scientific. The very concept of absolute time that underpins the Open Theist argument was rendered obsolete by twentieth-century physics. The experimental confirmation of relativity, which showed that time is not a universal constant but is relative to the observer's motion and gravitational field, dismantles the physical premise of their theology. Open Theism constructs a deity who is limited by a temporal structure that has been proven not to exist. The system defends a God made in the image of a debunked scientific model. The irony is that in its attempt to appear intellectually modern and philosophically coherent, it anchors its entire argument to a pre-relativistic, mechanical view of reality that is neither biblically sound nor scientifically current.
The intersection of temporal metaphysics and theological anthropology exposes a division in Western thought between Hellenic cyclicality and Abrahamic linearity. When the New Testament authors appropriated aion, they weaponized pagan temporality against itself. This semantic hijacking created a theological singularity: Yahweh became both immanent in historical progression (kairos) and transcendent over cyclical recurrence (chronos). This destabilized pagan fatalism, where the Moirai spun indifferent destinies, by positing a God who authors time while remaining unbound by its rhythms. Because of Western Christianity’s re-appropriation of pagan metaphysics, the question of how God can be above time and also act in time becomes a problem. If God inhabits eternity (aionios), can He engage mutable creation without becoming entangled in time’s flux?
Einstein’s spacetime continuum, with its relativistic simultaneity, challenges the Newtonian stage upon which divine omniscience once comfortably observed. Quantum indeterminacy further complicates the matter. Open theism’s solution, divine self-limitation, displaces the paradox. By making God temporally responsive, it resurrects Zeus-like caprice under a Protestant veneer. The result is a theological schizophrenia: a deity simultaneously sovereign and surprised, omnipotent yet improvising. This dissonance mirrors the aion dilemma, an unstable alloy of Greek and Hebrew temporalities that satisfies neither logic nor piety. The Protestant Reformation’s assault on divine immutability, amplified by post-Enlightenment atheism, completed this de-Hellenization project. Luther’s emphasis on God’s passionate engagement with history paved the way for Feuerbach’s projection thesis. If God evolves alongside creation, as process theology claims, the distinction between Yahweh and Hegel’s Weltgeist blurs. Nietzsche saw this coming: the “death of God” was not about atheism’s triumph but about theology’s failure to maintain conceptual coherence.
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The Development of Jewish Monotheism and Divine Immutability
Jehovah’s Witnesses say that Jesus is not God. Open Theists take it one step further by saying God is not God.
Low-church Protestantism is deeply rooted in the Materialism of the Enlightenment. The Jehovah's Witness and the Open Theist views are classic examples of modern-day Arianism. By reducing God’s knowledge to temporal finitude, the demotes the divine from the Mithraic/Neoplatonic Aion (transcendent ground) to a mere agent within Chronos, a deity who "learns" and "reacts," thus replicating the impotence of pagan time gods. To worship a God who cannot guarantee eschatological victory (Revelation 21:6) is to resurrect the inert Aion, a cosmic clockwork without a craftsman. The Christian innovation, and Nicaea’s triumph over Arianism, was to resolve this paradox through the homoousion: a God who remains transcendent (Aion) yet incarnate (Chronos), securing both divine sovereignty and historical contingency.
While surrounding pagan cultures posited a multiplicity of deities whose essences were bound to natural phenomena and temporal processes, Jewish thought advanced toward a radical unification of the divine as the Absolute Unconditioned. This transition from polytheistic multiplicity to monotheistic unity constituted not merely a numerical reduction but an ontological transformation of the divine concept.
The pagan deities existed as finite determinations within the world-system, subject to the vicissitudes of becoming and the constraints of temporality. In contrast, the God of Israel emerged as the transcendent ground of all determinate being, not a highest entity among entities, but rather the infinite wellspring of all finite existence. This ontological discontinuity between Creator and creation established divine immutability as a necessary correlate of perfect being.
Divine immutability within Jewish thought does not signify mere static persistence but rather represents the self-identity of absolute perfection. Unlike pagan deities whose being fluctuated between potentiality and actuality, the God of Israel exists as pure actuality (actus purus), transcending all contingent determinations.
Hence, questions like “How can God do anything outside of Sequence?” becomes an entirely nonsensical question. This immutability constitutes not a limitation but the fullness (and transcendence) of Being, for any change would necessarily entail either an increase in perfection (impossible for that which is already perfect) or a decrease (contradicting divine necessity).
How can God act in time if He does not experience sequence? Because He is God. By definition, there is no higher power- the Unmoved Mover does not need Techne to act. There is simply no "how". The question itself is blasphemous as it assumes Pagan presuppositions
The Judeo-Christian conception of time differentiates itself fundamentally from pagan temporality. In pagan cosmologies, time frequently manifested as a primordial, self-subsistent reality, often deified (Chronos, Kala), to which even the gods were subordinate. Time operated as an independent absolute, an eternal container within which divine and cosmic dramas unfolded.
The Judeo-Christian paradigm inverts this relationship. Time does not exist as a thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) but emerges as a creaturely mode of becoming within the finite world. Time began with creation as the sequential unfolding of creaturely existence. It represents not an absolute container but a relational framework constituted by the succession of contingent beings and events.
Within this framework, temporality manifests as an experiential phenomenon rather than an objective absolute. Sequence represents not an independent reality but the mode through which finite consciousness apprehends change. Time thus operates as a transcendental form of intuition (to employ Kantian terminology) through which created beings necessarily experience the world's becoming, while not constituting an absolute framework independent of creaturely perception.
God does not "act in time" as though entering temporarily into the temporal stream, for this would subordinate divine being to creaturely becoming. Rather, God acts from the eternal now (nunc stans) of divine existence, enthroned in Uncreated Light beyond all temporal determination.
In other words, human perception is bound by Time, but not God. God does not "act" in time or space- there are no Arche for the Transcendent God. The Christian God does not “need” to do anything, nor “must He do anything, nor does Divine Action need a medium. God does not need a "How". He would not be God if he did. God acts, enthroned in Uncreated Light, and human perception, bound by the material four dimensions of spacetime phenomenon, perceives that action manifesting in a specific time and place. But God did not “act” through Time in any way except from our limited perception.
Divine action proceeds not as temporal sequence but as an eternal emanation from God's unchanging will. The temporal manifestation of divine action represents not God's entrance into time but rather the finite perception of eternal action. Created consciousness, bound within the four-dimensional framework of spacetime, necessarily apprehends divine action as temporally and spatially determined.
The person is healed at 6pm on a Friday. But God did not Act within this framework; Rather God acted, and humans perceived it within a phenomenological framework. The temporal-spatial determination belongs not to the divine act itself but to its creaturely reception.
If God does not know the future because the future does not exist yet, that presumes that first of all the future is a “thing” that actually exists. In reality the future is just present plus some motion; an entirely new reality does not come into being every new second.
Open theism is a heretical system developed to win arguments with Atheists on the internet, and cheaply get around the question of Theodicy. It is a cheap solution to “solve” Theodicy from a Theological system not coherent or organized enough to hold dogmas in any organized fashion. It adopts Atheism to “disprove” Atheism. The cowardly argument is that evil happens because God is not able to stop it, because He is limited and a part of Creation.
Open theism’s appeal lies partly its therapeutic resonance as it renders sin unimportant and repentence unnecessary. By making God a fellow sufferer, a cosmic therapist processing trauma alongside us, it sacralizes the West’s therapeutic culture. Boyd’s God of the Possible reads like a self-help manual, transforming prayer into divine co-regulation. This emotional pragmatism, however, guts theology’s intellectual core. A God who discovers possibilities alongside His creatures can’t guarantee eschatological victory, hope becomes wishful thinking with a celestial pen pal.
Moltmann’s The Crucified God epitomizes this trajectory. By making divine suffering theology’s center, he inverts classical transcendence. God becomes a Hegelian work-in-progress, His perfection dependent on creation’s completion. The maneuver’s political intentions, solidarity with the oppressed, noble, but its metaphysical consequences dire. A God who needs history to achieve self-actualization is no God at all, just another activist with better PR.
Process theology’s mathematical pretensions compound the issue. Whitehead’s “actual occasions” and “eternal objects” create a metaphysical algebra where God solves cosmic equations in real time. The framework’s aesthetic elegance, akin to Ptolemaic epicycles, masks its explanatory emptiness. When prayer becomes “luring through persuasive aims,” we’ve exchanged communion for celestial nudging.
The neo-pagan parallel intensifies in ritual practice. Emergent church services, with their labyrinth walks and yoga-inspired “praise movements”, resemble Eleusinian mysteries more than any early liturgy. This aesthetic paganism, marketed as ancient-future worship, reflects theology’s conceptual exhaustion. When substance falters, style fills the vacuum.
Open theism’s ethical consequences prove equally problematic. If God doesn’t know future free acts, moral absolutes dissolve into situational flux. Harris’ The Moral Landscape, a utilitarian vision where “well-being” replaces divine command, awaits in the wings. The Decalogue becomes a menu of suggestions from an underinformed deity, a parent guessing what’s best as the house burns.
The movement’s internal contradictions mirror quantum paradoxes. Just as Schrödinger’s cat exists in superposition, open theism’s God is simultaneously omniscient (regarding present) and ignorant (of future). This epistemic duality satisfies neither classical logic nor religious experience. Worshiping a partially blind deity, bound by something greater that He, is neither the Jewish or Christian faith. It is the faith of Zeus and Poseidon.
By demoting God’s knowledge, open theism resurrects the subordinationist Arian heresy in epistemological garb. The Council of Nicaea’s verdict, “very God of very God”, becomes a hollow formula, its metaphysical content evacuated.
To argue that God is “within Time” is to commit Arianism.
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Open Theism as Neo-Arianism Subordinationism: The Binding of the Jewish God
The early Christians did not see God being both outside of time and acting within it as a contradiction, because the church rejected unchristianized pagan metaphysics. The conceptual world of the pagans was populated by deities who were themselves subject to a higher, impersonal fate and bound within the cycles of cosmic time. These gods were powerful actors within the existing order, but not its transcendent source. The Judeo-Christian revelation presented a different reality entirely, one in which time itself is a created dimension, a feature of the contingent world brought into being by a God who is uncreated, unchanging, and uncontained. The New Testament’s adaptation of aion, for example in the phrase "the ages were formed" (tous aiōnas katērtisthai) in Hebrews 11:3, radicalizes this structure by assigning agency to time through Christ’s incarnation. The Logos does not merely govern aion as a static principle but enters it, collapsing the Hellenic divide between eternal stasis and temporal flux. Christ becomes the actor within and lord over the aiones (ages), fulfilling Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man receiving dominion. This act does not subordinate God to time; it demonstrates God’s sovereign mastery over the temporal order He created.
Christ becomes the actor within and lord over the aiones (ages), fulfilling Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man receiving dominion (7:14).
Hence, the earliest Christian creeds asserted the Biblical view that God is outside of Time as a repudiation of Arianism against the Judeo-Christian view that God is Immutable and influenced and bound by absolutely nothing, unlike the Pagan gods. Arianism, in positing the Son as a creature made in time, reintroduced a pagan metaphysical structure into Christian thought. A created Son, however exalted, is a being subordinate to the category of temporality, a demiurge who occupies a place within the cosmic hierarchy rather than standing outside it as its author. The Nicene declaration that the Son is homoousios (of the same substance) with the Father was a direct refutation of this temporal subordination. It was a metaphysical claim with temporal consequences: if the Son is of the same eternal, uncreated essence as the Father, then He too is outside of time. This has remained the teachings of the Eastern Churches, as they reject the Paganism of the Medieval-Aristotelian re-interpretation of Augustine via Materialists like Descartes and Newton, and cling to the teachings of the Apostles, passed to the Saints once and for all time. The Eastern articulation of the essence-energies distinction provided a way to understand how the unchanging God could act within the changing world without His essence becoming subject to change, a subtlety lost in later Western scholasticism.
Protestantism’s iconoclastic zeal, amplified by atheist materialism, has produced a stripped-down deity, theological minimalism masquerading as theological purity, a move towards a flat non-participatory materialism. The Reformation's rejection of the sacramental system, where matter was understood to be a vehicle for divine grace, desacralized the created order. This left a universe composed of two starkly separated realities: the hidden, transcendent God and the interior, subjective experience of the believer. Nature became a neutral, disenchanted mechanism. Luther’s "Deus Absconditus" (hidden God) eventually gives birth to Dawkins’ “delusion,” both rejecting mediated divinity. This strange alliance, Reformation theology and New Atheism, shares a common enemy: participation in the biblical logos (divine immanence) perceived as superstition. The New Atheist finds it easy to attack a God who has already been rendered absent from the world, leaving only a set of abstract propositions to be debated.
The assault on divine immutability begins openly with Luther’s "theologia crucis". By locating God’s revelation in Christ’s suffering rather than metaphysical glory, he dynamized divine nature. While orthodox in its christological intent, this focus on divine pathos introduced a narrative of change and becoming into the life of God that later thinkers would systematize. Hegel later systematized this move: God’s being becomes becoming, His perfection dependent on historical dialectic. The Absolute Spirit requires the conflict and progression of human history to achieve its own self-consciousness. God is no longer the unchanging ground of history but its evolving product. Marx completed the inversion, the divine as ideological projection of material conditions. The entire Hegelian system of a self-actualizing Spirit is revealed as a mystified account of humanity's own historical development.
Nietzsche’s madman declares God’s death not from atheism but from theology’s suicide. The intellectual honesty demanded by the Christian conscience, turned upon Christianity itself, found the foundations wanting. When Feuerbach reduces God to human ideals, he merely explicates what Protestant subjectivism implied. If the primary locus of religious truth is the inner world of the human subject, then it is a short path to concluding that the object of that truth is a projection of the subject itself. The trajectory is clear: from Luther’s existential encounter to Schleiermacher’s “feeling of absolute dependence” to Tillich’s “ground of being”, each step evacuates divine personhood. The living God of Abraham is replaced by an abstract principle, an emotional state, or a metaphysical function.
Contemporary atheism thrives on this evacuated transcendence. When Harris dismisses God as “incoherent,” he attacks a straw deity, the omni-properties caricature inherited from scholasticism. This is the God of the philosophers, a bundle of abstract perfections (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence) whose logical compatibility is endlessly debated. The New Atheists’ triumph stems from theology’s failure to articulate a God beyond being/nonbeing binaries. The God who is a being among other beings, even the supreme one, is a God who can be argued out of existence.
Process theology’s attempted rescue backfires. By making God temporal, it cedes the metaphysical battlefield. It accepts the premise of its opponents that a relational God must be a temporal God. Hartshorne’s dipolar theism, God as necessary in abstract nature, contingent in concrete states, succeeds only in proving divinity’s redundancy. The necessary pole is an impersonal abstraction, while the contingent pole is merely the aggregate of the world's experiences. This God does not create the world; He experiences it along with us. If God needs the world for actualization, why posit Him at all? The system offers a deity who is a fellow traveler, not the sovereign creator.
Quantum theology’s emergence, attempts to reconcile divine action with indeterminacy, illustrates the desperation. Polkinghorne’s “ontological openness” suggests God acts through quantum gaps. This is a modern iteration of the "God of the gaps" argument, locating divine agency in the ever-shrinking pockets of scientific ignorance. The approach fails twice over: it reduces providence to subatomic tweaking and ignores decoherence’s macroscopic determinism; the noose of “God of the gaps” narrowing. Such a God is not the lord of creation but a cosmic tinkerer, whose field of action is defined and limited by the current state of physics.
This dialectal decay started with Protestantism, and always ends in Atheism.
Augustine's Biblical Temporality: The Authoritative Christian View
To understand the full significance of Leibniz's intervention in the history of Western ontochronology, we must first grasp how Augustine's treatment of time in his Confessions represents not merely one philosophical option among others but the definitive articulation of the biblical understanding of temporality that emerges directly from Scripture's revelation of God's nature and His relationship to creation. Augustine's profound meditation on the nature of time, emerging from his famous question "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know," represents the philosophical elaboration of what Scripture reveals when God declares "I AM WHO I AM" to Moses, the eternal, self-existent nature of the God who inhabits eternity, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. The Augustinian understanding that time exists only in the distention of the soul, a psychological and phenomenological reality that depends entirely on consciousness for its being, directly reflects the biblical teaching that God created time along with the heavens and the earth, that before the foundation of the world there was only God in His eternal trinity, and that the temporal order is a created reality that will one day pass away while God remains unchanged. This is not philosophical speculation imposed upon Scripture but the necessary conclusion from biblical revelation about God's immutable nature, His foreknowledge of all events, and His sovereign governance of history from a perspective that transcends temporal succession.
Augustine's phenomenological approach to time arose directly from his meditation on biblical texts that reveal God's eternal nature, particularly passages where Scripture speaks of God's knowledge of the end from the beginning, His declaration of things that are not yet as though they were, and the profound truth that a thousand years are as a day to the Lord and a day as a thousand years. His response to the pagan critique, that time itself is a created reality, coming into existence with the creation of mutable beings capable of change and therefore of temporal experience, represents the philosophical articulation of what Genesis reveals when it declares "In the beginning God created," indicating that the beginning itself is part of what God created, not a temporal moment in which God acted but the very inauguration of temporality through divine creative action. This understanding preserves the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo against all pagan alternatives that would require time to exist independently of God's creative will, whether as an eternal framework within which God operates or as a co-eternal principle alongside God. The Augustinian synthesis thus stands as the authoritative Christian position not because it represents superior philosophical reasoning but because it alone adequately accounts for what Scripture reveals about God's relationship to time: that He is the Ancient of Days who nevertheless acts in history, the Eternal One who became flesh and dwelt among us without abandoning His divine immutability, the Alpha and Omega who encompasses all of history while transcending temporal limitation.
The biblical foundation of Augustine's temporal phenomenology becomes even clearer when we examine how Scripture consistently presents God's relationship to time in terms that require His absolute transcendence over temporal succession while maintaining His genuine interaction with temporal creation. When Isaiah declares that God “inhabits eternity”, when the Psalms proclaim that before the mountains were brought forth or the earth was formed, from everlasting to everlasting He is God, when Jesus declares "before Abraham was, I AM," Scripture is not engaging in poetic hyperbole but revealing fundamental truths about the divine nature that require precisely the kind of sophisticated temporal metaphysics that Augustine articulated.
The biblical revelation that God knows the end from the beginning, that He works all things according to the counsel of His will established before the foundation of the world, that nothing takes Him by surprise or thwarts His eternal purposes, all require that God exist in a manner that transcends temporal succession while remaining capable of genuine interaction with temporal creatures. This is why Augustine's view represents not merely one theological option among others but the philosophical articulation of biblical revelation against the Paganism which Augustine intimately knew and spent a lifetime arguing against: any view that subjects God to temporal succession, that makes Him wait to see what will happen, that introduces potentiality or change into the divine nature, fundamentally contradicts what Scripture reveals about God's perfection, immutability, and sovereign governance of creation.
The implications of this biblical-Augustinian understanding of time extend throughout the entire structure of Christian doctrine, providing the necessary foundation for understanding the Trinity (where the eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit occur in God's eternal nature, not in temporal sequence), the Incarnation (where the eternal Word assumes human nature without abandoning divine immutability), providence (where God governs all events from an eternal perspective that encompasses past, present, and future in a single act of divine comprehension), and eschatology (where God's promises are certain because He sees their fulfillment from His eternal perspective, not because He predicts future events from within time). The coherence of biblical revelation depends on maintaining this Augustinian understanding: if God exists within time, subject to temporal succession, then He cannot truly know the future with certainty, cannot make unconditional promises, cannot be immutable and perfect, cannot be the God whom Scripture reveals. This is why the Augustinian position gained universal acceptance throughout the church, being embraced by Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant traditions alike as the necessary philosophical articulation of biblical truth, maintained consistently from the patristic period through the medieval era and the Reformation until its first serious challenge came not from better biblical exegesis or theological insight but from the mechanical physics of Isaac Newton.
The Newtonian Revolution and the Betrayal of Biblical Temporality
The introduction of Newton's concept of absolute time in the Principia Mathematica represents nothing less than a direct assault on biblical revelation, reinstating a fundamentally pagan conception of time as an independent, objective reality that exists apart from both consciousness and divine will, thereby subjecting even God Himself to temporal constraints that Scripture explicitly denies. Newton's famous declaration that "absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external" stands in direct and irreconcilable opposition not merely to Augustinian philosophy but to the biblical revelation that time is part of creation, subject to God's sovereign will, capable of being shortened or lengthened according to divine purposes, and destined ultimately to cease when God creates new heavens and a new earth where temporal succession gives way to eternal life. This transformation was not merely a scientific or mathematical convenience but represented a profound metaphysical revolution with devastating theological consequences, effectively denying the biblical teaching that God transcends time and replacing it with a pagan cosmology where time functions as an independent reality to which even God must conform. The Newtonian conception effectively resurrects the ancient pagan notion of time as a primordial force or container within which all existence, including divine existence, must operate, precisely the view that Scripture refutes when it reveals God as the one who was, and is, and is to come, the eternal I AM who created time itself as part of the cosmic order.
Leibniz immediately recognized the anti-biblical implications of Newton's absolutist conception of time, understanding that it effectively denied fundamental scriptural truths about God's nature and His relationship to creation. His correspondence with Samuel Clarke reveals the depth of his concern about how absolute time would corrupt Christian theology, particularly its tendency to make God subject to temporal succession and therefore mutable, directly contradicting the biblical declaration that God does not change like shifting shadows, that He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Leibniz's alternative proposal, that time is merely the order of successive existences, a relational property that emerges from the comparison of different states rather than an independent substantial reality, represented an attempt to preserve biblical truth while accommodating the mathematical requirements of the new physics. Yet even this compromise position, by treating time as a "real abstraction" based on the succession of internal states within monads, inadvertently conceded ground to the anti-biblical worldview by accepting that temporal succession possessed some form of objective reality independent of divine perception, a concession that would prove fatal to maintaining the full authority of scriptural revelation concerning God's eternal nature and His sovereign transcendence over all created reality, including time itself.
The practical consequences of accepting Newtonian absolute time for biblical Christianity became increasingly apparent throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as theologians struggled to reconcile clear scriptural teaching with the new scientific worldview that seemed to require God to exist and act within a temporal framework He did not create and could not transcend. The emergence of Deism, with its conception of God as a divine watchmaker who creates the universe and then allows it to run according to its own temporal laws without further intervention, represents a direct consequence of accepting the Newtonian framework over biblical revelation, as does the later development of process theology and Open Theism, both of which explicitly reject the biblical teaching of divine timelessness in favor of a God who experiences temporal succession and therefore changes in response to temporal events. These theological innovations, while presented as attempts to make Christianity more philosophically coherent or religiously satisfying, actually represent a fundamental rejection of biblical authority, accepting the premise of pagan philosophy and Newtonian physics that time is a fundamental category of reality to which even God must conform, rather than accepting Scripture's clear teaching that God created time, transcends time, and will ultimately bring time to an end when His purposes are complete.
The Open Theist and Molinism Heresy: Arianism's Modern Assault on Biblical Theology
Open Theism, as championed by contemporary theologians like William Lane Craig and popularized through works like Lee Strobel's “apologetic” (crypto-Atheistic) writings, represents the complete abandonment of biblical Christianity in favor of a neo-Arian heresy that explicitly denies scriptural revelation about God's nature, subjecting Him to temporal succession and thereby denying His perfection, immutability, and sovereign foreknowledge. And this is all done in order to win arguments on the argument; to win a battle, and surrender the war. The easiest way to defend Christianity, William Lane Craig discovered, is to simply change it when it becomes intellectually convenient.
This theological position, while marketed as a solution to the problem of evil and a vindication of human freedom, actually represents a direct rejection of numerous biblical passages that declare God's exhaustive foreknowledge, His unchanging nature, and His eternal perspective that encompasses all of history. The Open Theist argument that God experiences genuine surprise at human choices, that He learns and adapts His plans in response to unforeseen developments, directly contradicts Scripture's declaration that God's understanding is infinite, that nothing is hidden from His sight, that He declares the end from the beginning and His purposes will surely stand. This represents not merely a minor theological adjustment but a fundamental denial of biblical authority, replacing the God of Scripture who says "I the Lord do not change" with a deity who must wait to see what tomorrow will bring, who hopes for certain outcomes but cannot guarantee them, who makes predictions that may fail to materialize, in other words, a false god who bears no resemblance to the Almighty revealed in Scripture.
The deeply materialistic and anti-biblical nature of Open Theist arguments becomes apparent when we examine how they consistently prioritize philosophical assumptions derived from Newtonian physics over clear scriptural teaching. Open Theists argue that unless God experiences temporal succession, He cannot genuinely respond to prayer, cannot truly love, and cannot meaningfully interact with temporal creatures, arguments that implicitly deny Scripture's teaching that God's ways are higher than our ways, that His thoughts are not our thoughts, and that He can accomplish all these things from His eternal perspective without being subject to temporal limitations. When Open Theists claim that biblical passages speaking of God changing His mind or experiencing regret must be taken literally while passages declaring His immutability and exhaustive foreknowledge must be reinterpreted as anthropomorphisms, they reveal their fundamental commitment to a philosophical system derived from materialistic assumptions rather than to the authority of Scripture and the teachings of the Apostles, interpreted according to the analogy of faith. The claim that God must be temporal to be relational essentially reduces the biblical God to a Zeus-like deity, powerful but not omnipotent, knowledgeable but not omniscient, differing from pagan gods only in degree rather than in the infinite qualitative distinction that Scripture maintains between the Creator and His creation.
The connection between Open Theism and the broader apostasy from biblical Christianity becomes even clearer when we consider its relationship to other contemporary movements that similarly abandon scriptural authority in favor of materialist philosophy. The prosperity gospel's notion that faith can manipulate God into dispensing material blessings, the charismatic movement's reduction of the Holy Spirit to a force that produces physical manifestations, and certain hyper-Calvinist distortions that make God the author of evil all share with Open Theism a common foundation in denying the biblical distinction between God's eternal nature and His temporal effects. These movements, despite their apparent theological differences, all represent variations on the theme of rejecting biblical revelation in favor of a naturalistic worldview that subjects God to the same temporal-material categories as creation. The inability of these movements to maintain the biblical teaching that God is Immutable, that He “inhabits eternity”, that He is absolutely transcendent while remaining immanently involved with creation, reveals their fundamental departure from scriptural Christianity in favor of a paganized religion that retains Christian vocabulary while denying Christian truth.
Who needs Atheist Apologists, when you have Protestants with an internet connection?