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Eternal God: A Study of God without Time
By Paul Helm
Oxford University Press, 1989. 230 pp. $49.95.

Paul Helm, Reader in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, has written a cautious and judicious book in defense of the idea that God exists in a timeless eternity. With a clear sympathy for classical theism, Helm argues for a "time-free" eternity whereby "God sustains no temporal relations with human time." Timelessness, according to Helm, is not a separate attribute of God but the singular mode of possessing attributes that distinguishes God from the created world.

In the first chapter, Helm offers a very valuable counter to the now time-worn charge that eternity is a Greek importation, foreign to and distortive of the biblical account of God. The Bible itself decides neither for nor against God's timelessness, since the reflective contexts necessary for commenting on such a question are absent from the Bible. Genetic questions concerning whether the Bible teaches the eternity of God should be replaced, accordingly, with adequacy questions. Is the concept of timelessness helpful in making sense of the biblical account of God and answering controversial questions arising from it that the biblical writers themselves did not address?

The rest of the book amounts to a response to adequacy questions of this sort. Helm carefully rebuts arguments by contemporary analytical philosophers of religion (among them Nelson Pike, Anthony Kenny, A. N. Prior, and Anthony Flew), who charge that the notion of God's timelessness is incompatible with God's relation with individuals in time, with the idea of God as a person, or with traditional divine attributes like omniscience and claims for human responsibility. Helm effectively argues, against the more immediate charges of incoherence, that critics of God's eternity (and even some defenders like Stump and Kretzmann) do not take seriously enough the timeless character of God's existence; and he does a fine job giving sense to personality ascriptions (like those of memory and purposeful action) without suggesting that God is in time. Arguments against God's timelessness that are based upon propositions with indexical reference are turned by Helm against God's spacelessness, as well, for the purpose of bringing theists unhappy with the conclusion that God is in space to reconsider similar arguments for a

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God in time. Helm admits that arguments based on indexicals do create problems for claims of a timeless God's omniscience, but be contends the limitations of omniscience resulting from these arguments are not very serious. In any case, those who claim that God is in time face parallel difficulties; and those affirming a timeless God retain the advantage of a more traditional claim of divine omniscience-a timeless God is still able to know the future whatever problems there may be with indexicals.

Only a notion of God's timeless eternity is compatible with traditional ascriptions of simplicity and immutability to God; and such a notion raises problems for God's freedom to no greater extent than a notion of God in time. Helm argues that the notion of eternity does not succeed in reconciling God's omniscience with human free will of a libertarian sort, but maintains that this is not necessarily to be lamented. Upholding a proper notion of God's omniscience at the cost of libertarian free will does not entail a logical determinism; it presents no more problems for claims of human responsibility than a general compatibilist understanding of determinism and free will; and it makes God no more responsible for evil than would be the case if libertarian free will were admitted. Finally, Helm proposes to solve certain alleged perplexities concerning our ability to refer to God. Reference to God is fixed by a knowledge of God's empirically manifest and contingent properties, while the meaning of "God" is given by "the set of individual essential properties that God has."

Eternal God will probably be of most interest to those already familiar with contemporary analytical philosophy of religion, but it will also serve as a fine introduction to the discussion. Although commonplaces of this literature are not always reviewed, the uninitiated reader will come away from the book with a good grasp of such matters as "ET-simultaneity," the distinction between "real" and "merely Cambridge" changes, and debates about the unknowability of the future.

The book suffers a bit, however, from indirection. Helm's own arguments are almost exclusively directed against criticisms of the notion of God's eternity. The critic's arguments are inconclusive or their results are not as devastating as they might appear; the alternative of a God in time is in no better position to fend off the analyst's perplexities; something must be wrong with the critic's arguments (at least we hope so if we are classical theists) because they prove too much (e.g., that God is finite). Although Helm does at times make a start at a more direct argument for God's timeless existence (it has certain positive advantages, he wants to argue), for the most part he seems satisfied with a purely "reactive" or defensive posture. Certainly, as Helm suggests in one place, a direct argument for God's eternity would hold only for the sense of that notion the argument specifies and to that extent would prove inconclusive. But Helm often must work with his own understanding of "timelessness" (and a whole host of other notions), in any case, simply to combat his opponents' arguments. It is to Paul Helm's great credit that such a strategy is as successful as it is in the task of rebuttal.

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His understanding of eternity is very far from idiosyncratic and the defensive arguments he makes with it are usually quite rigorous and thoroughgoing. Such success in defense leaves this reader wishing, however, that he had used the same notions and turned the same logical acumen to the construction of a more positive case.

Kathryn Tanner
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut