Swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical orthodoxy, Helm has produced an indomitable defence of the concept of a timeless God written from a Calvinist perspective.

While admitting that God’s eternity is neither explicitly taught in Scripture nor derivable from the dubious procedure of the etymological study of key biblical words, Helm argues that the doctrine is an implication of such divine attributes as immutability. Like certain scientific concepts (e.g. the electron) it is, then, an invaluable postulate while being extremely difficult to describe or imagine. Following Boethius, Helm is able to state, however, that God is eternal in that he ‘possesses the whole of his life at once: it is not lived successively’ (p. 24).

The greater part of Helm’s book is an attempt to defend this thesis against the criticisms of fellow analytic philosophers. A number, like A.N. Prior, have argued, for example, that a timeless God would not be completely omniscient since he could not know what is happening now, but, Helm insists, by the same token an omniscient God would need also to be spatial in order to know that something is occurring here. Or even worse, an all-knowing deity would have to be me because ‘one can only know precisely what is happening to me if one is me’ (p. 75)! To avoid these awkward implications Helm prefers to concede that omniscience should be taken to mean that while God is cognizant of the temporal order of events, he does not share the temporal flow of our experience.

Against R. Swinburne et al. Helm goes on to defend the position that an eternal being can be fully personal since he can have timeless knowledge and eternal intentions, some of which bring about temporal states (the helpful analogy is offered of standing orders which are responsible for things happening without themselves being changed). Helm concludes that a ‘timeless being may not act within the universe yet it makes sense to say that such a being produces (tenseless) the universe’ (p. 69). As for the sustaining work of God, one has merely to affirm God’s timeless intention that the universe should display temporal development.

Helm accepts, with most philosophers, that divine foreknowledge and libertarian human freedom are incompatible, but he goes one step further and argues that the issue is unaffected by placing God outside time because although God would then simply know, it could still be truly said by a temporal agent that God foreknew yesterday what would happen today. Just as I could not truly say, ‘I am not talking’, but someone else could say of me, ‘He is not talking’, so while ‘foreknowledge’ is not a correct description of God’s knowledge it is a correct description of the way that timeless knowledge is recognized by a temporal agent. Determinism logically follows: ‘God’s knowledge is past, past for certain individuals in time, and so necessary for them’ (p. 105).

To preserve human autonomy some philosophers, like K. Ward and R. Swinburne, have placed God in time and limited divine omniscience to the past and present only, but Helm considers the cost is too great and the notion of divine providence is jeopardized.

Left with a timeless God and a deterministic universe, Helm tackles the issues of divine and human responsibility. Interacting with A. Flew he rejects the view that only atheist determinism can consistently hold man accountable. Man is responsible and free when he does what he wants to, that is when he acts voluntarily. Helm argues in the tradition of Augustine that although God is responsible for evil, he is not morally culpable since creaturely evil is a logically necessary condition for an overwhelming good. The analogy is offered of a toxic substance given as a medicine.

Helm goes on to apply soft-determinism to God himself who is certainly free from, for example, moral decay and weakness while also being free to follow the dictates of his nature. In fact his nature necessitates the actualization of the universe. Helm rejects the view that God has chosen between equally optimum universes on the grounds that this would reduce his final choice to an arbitrary whim.

The work concludes with a study of how eternal God may be meaningfully referred to and individuated in language.

This book is undoubtedly an intellectual tour de force which will drive readers into a reappraisal of a philosophically unfashionable theology which, however, is of a noble lineage, passing back through Jonathan Edwards, Calvin and Augustine. Helm is a lucid communicator, presenting essentially difficult ideas with remarkable clarity. His book manages to be free of jargon although perhaps he could have defined what philosophers mean by the phrase ‘Cambridge changes’ rather than just refer the reader to a book by P. Geach in which it is discussed (p. 19).

Although the book is a formidable piece of sustained argumentation, it is in the nature of philosophy that no thesis is unanswerable and it will be interesting to see how Helm’s critics respond. Some will surely question his basic assumption that absolute divine immutability is indefeasible. His main argument seems to be that for God to be sui generis he must be immutable in the sense that nothing about him could possibly change, for if it merely means that his character could not alter, as for example K. Ward maintains, then he would not be unique since a person ‘who is incorrigibly and uniformly brave … would be immutable in exactly the same sense’ (p. 87). But there seems to be a choice of two counter arguments here: either one could deny that any person could be incorrigibly brave, for no-one could withstand, say, everlasting torture or protracted treatment with mind-distorting drugs without his spirit breaking, or one could concede Helm’s point and admit that immutability, so defined, is one of God’s communicable attributes while refusing to conclude that God is therefore finite since he remains ontologically necessary and herein lies his uniqueness.

Undoubtedly others will feel dissatisfied with his treatment of divine and human responsibility, for although he succeeds in undermining Flew’s position by establishing that if atheist determinism entails human responsibility, so does theist determinism, many like myself remain unconvinced that either kind of determinism is compatible with human responsibility. The absolution of God from culpability fares little better. The toxic substance analogy would hold good for a theology involving universal salvation but, with the casualty rate that Scripture insists upon, one must draw the conclusion that God’s glorious master plan is at the expense of the individual who, therefore, does not seem to matter very much.

Some will also feel uneasy about Helm’s tendency to present the issue of freedom in a dilemma form: for example, either God’s choices are the inevitable expression of his nature, or they are mere caprice. In contrast, advocates of libertarianism want to argue that a free, responsible choice is neither wholly determined by one’s nature nor a random decision, but rather an ultimately unpredictable choice made, however, for some reason, although that reason is not itself the cause of the choice.

For those unwilling to take the determinist path, is a truncated concept of divine omniscience the only available option? Perhaps it is time to question the assumption that foreknowledge entails determinism, for what if God’s past knowledge is logically contingent upon my future act? God would then know of my act because I shall freely choose to do it, rather than his foreknowledge necessitating my choice. This thesis has been ably demonstrated in a recent book by W.L. Craig called The Only Wise God. It is a pity Helm was not able to interact with it.

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