Section One, xvii
Foreword, xxxi


PART ONE: THE CONCEPT OF REALITY
1. On Naturalism and Supernaturalism, 1
2. On Necessity and Contingency, 3
3. On Materialism, 5
4. On Monism and Pluralism, 8
5. On Being and Becoming, 11
6. On Universals and Particulars, 13

PART TWO: THE CONCEPT OF GOD
7. On Creation, 19
8. On God as Absolute or Finite, 26
9. On Time and Eternity, 36
10. On Nominalism and Materialism, 40
11. On Natural Theology, 47

PART THREE: THE CONCEPT OF MAN
12. On the Self as a Necessary Existent, 49
13. On Original Sin, 57
14. On Salvation by Grace, 68
15. On the Freedom of the Will, 77
16. On the Atonement, 82

PART FOUR: MORMON THEOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
17. On Evil in the Christian Tradition, 91
18. On Evil and Mormon Finitism, 96
19. On the Task of Mormon Theology, 110

PART FIVE: THESES ON THE IDEA THAT GOD IS A PERSON
(Supplementary Essay)
20. On God as Philosophical Explanation, 115
21. On God as Moral Ground and Sanction, 119
22. On the Living God of Religion, 122

WORKS CITED, 141

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS

Section One, 1
Section Two, 5

A theologian, Sterling M. McMurrin (1914-96) reflected thoughtfully, tries to make sense of what a religious people believes. In this simple statement he captured a lifetime of experience and revealed the foundations of his own philosophy of religion. His 1965 book, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion, stands as the most lucid and penetrating work on the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints yet written, although he refused steadfastly to refer to himself as anything but a student of the philosophy of history. McMurrin's 1959 essay, The Philosophical Foundations of Mormon Theology, was an important precursor to the later and larger Theological Foundations, so I am especially pleased that the two are collected together in this reprint. Both works were originally published and distributed by the University of Utah Press.

When he wrote the first of these two works, The Philosophical Foundations, Sterling McMurrin was forty-five years old, a professor of philosophy, and dean of the University of Utah's College of Letters and Science. He was already a well-known and controversial figure in Utah, having established himself as a leading scholar and teacher on campus, an outspoken advocate of civil rights and education in the state, and a loyal but sometimes sharply critical member of the Mormon church. He was also rapidly becoming a national intellectual leader through his perennial teaching of summer seminars at the prestigious Aspen Institute in Colorado.

Working cooperatively during the winter of 1957-58, the four major institutions of higher learning in Utah invited McMurrin to deliver one lecture on each of their campuses about the philosophical underpinnings of the Mormon religion. He agreed and addressed large audiences at the University of Utah, Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and Weber State College. At about this time, the Ohio State University asked the LDS church to provide a lecturer on Mormonism for its religion week program. Apostle Harold B. Lee, a member of the church's governing Quorum of Twelve Apostles, fielded the request, got on the telephone, and asked McMurrin if he would accept such an invitation. The answer was "Yes." McMurrin refined his paper and read it in Columbus, Ohio. The writing was expository, presenting and analyzing the philosophical assumptions underlying Mormon thought, seeking neither to defend nor criticize it.

The University of Utah Press published McMurrin's essay as a thirty-one-page paperback in 1959. The publication, like the lectures, was well received, and it shortly became a standard, though unofficial, reference for anyone seriously investigating the philosophical underpinnings of the Mormon religion. The essay circulated widely among the church's top leaders, resulting in a congratulatory letter from church president David O. McKay—and sharp criticism from McKay's conservative second counselor, J. Reuben Clark.

McMurrin might have written more on Mormon thought at the time, but his life was soon consumed by larger issues. He spent five months during the winter of 1958 as an official envoy and educational advisor from U. S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower's State Department to the government of Iran. Shortly after his return to the United States, McMurrin accepted appointment as vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah.

In January 1961 President John F. Kennedy invited Sterling McMurrin to serve as U. S. Commissioner of Education under Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) secretary Abraham Ribicoff. At McMurrin's confirmation hearing, Senator Joseph Clark grilled him about whether he supported the racial policies of the Mormon church, which at the time prohibited black men of African descent from participation in the church's lay priesthood. "I didn't want to get into the priesthood ordination issue," he later reflected, "but I felt that the church's negative position on Africans and African-Americans, no matter what its roots, was wrong and I wanted to disassociate myself from it."1 He eschewed that policy, but remained within the church while distinguishing himself as an eloquent and determined national advocate of racial integration in the public schools. As U. S. commissioner, McMurrin also spoke widely and worked tirelessly to elevate academic expectations of students at all levels, and to increase the quality and extent of liberal education coursework required in teacher education programs.

Late in 1962, when Abraham Ribicoff resigned as HEW secretary to run for the U. S. Senate, McMurrin left Washington to resume his professorship at the University of Utah. Appointed E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in 1964, at age fifty, he settled in to write and teach philosophy for the rest of his career. The following year the university launched a series of four lectures which McMurrin delivered in January and February of 1965. Religion, especially Mormonism, was again his topic. With his customary flare for breadth and clarity, he treated Latter-day Saint theology in the wider frame of occidental religion, addressing in turn the four concepts of Reality, God, Man, and Evil, showing in each case what was distinctive about Mormon beliefs and what among those beliefs was reflective of the larger stream of Christian thought. These essays, with the addition of a fifth one on "The Concept of God as a Person," were published later that year by the University of Utah Press. The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion, despite its quirks and some inexplicable omissions, still stands more than a third of a century later as both the most lucid statement and knowledgeable critique of Mormon theology in print.

In his own foreword to Theological Foundations, McMurrin wrote that this book was the second in a series of five he planned to write on Mormonism. Starting with Philosophical Foundations and Theological Foundations, he hoped subsequently to write The Mormon Religion, The Mormon Church, and finally The Mormon. Unfortunately, the latter three did not come to fruition. Other duties called again. He turned down the presidency of the University of Utah, but subsequently accepted appointment as provost and, shortly thereafter, as dean of the graduate school. He held the latter post for more than a dozen years. While he authored, edited, or co-authored other works during these years, McMurrin did not return to the sustained scholarship necessary to produce the systematic Mormon series that he projected in 1965.

Theological Foundations, like its predecessor, sold well and was widely discussed. It is not easy reading, even for those who have developed some affinity for philosophical inquiry, but the determined reader has found and will find a wealth of insight. Even so, McMurrin braced himself for controversy and criticism. The storm never came. Intellectuals read books like this, and they found this one worthy of spirited debate. Those with orthodox views tended to ignore the book or, if they read it, may not have captured its subtler insights. Theological Foundations became a classic, an enduring analysis of Mormon thought, to which serious students of Mormonism continue to turn and return.

Two of the things that distinguish Mormon theology from other Christian religions, McMurrin claimed, are the notion of a finite or limited God and the escape from the Christian theological dilemma of original sin. The significance of the former is enormous, because if God is subject to natural laws like other occupants of our universe, then he or she (as McMurrin loved to say with a whimsical smile) cannot be held accountable for every natural disaster that befalls humanity, nor every moral evil we perpetrate on one another.

Further, by avoiding the doctrinal trap of original sin, the whole structure of Mormon theology became more rational. With the burdens of an omnipotent God and original sin removed, theologians have a lot less explaining to do. And all who embrace the faith are freed from painful paradoxes, thus liberating them to ascend to a higher level of religious awareness. For instance, the Atonement can be seen as a glorious uniting of the individual believer with God rather than a miraculous escape from punishment for a sin the individual did not commit. McMurrin considered these Mormon ideas truly important breakthroughs in reconciling religion and reason. Consider the following:

In Mormon thought evil is seen as a positive factor in the natural world and in human experience, and the primary meaning of human existence is found in the struggle to overcome it. It is a struggle in which the moral decisions of men make a difference, and a very genuine difference, not only in their own destinies, but for the outcome of human history and of the world. The demonic factors, whether moral or natural, are given elements of the world. Moral evil, the evil that men do, is the inevitable consequence of genuine moral freedom. Natural evil, the evil that the world does, results from the moral neutrality of the material universe. God is not ultimately responsible for either that freedom or that neutrality. They are among the elemental uncreated facts of existence. But by entering creatively into human and natural history, God struggles endlessly to extend his dominion over the blind processes of the material world and to cultivate the uses of freedom for the achievement of moral ends.2

He goes on to explain that Mormon sermons and literature too often ignore these liberating but sobering ideas and treat evil and misfortune as punishment for misdeeds.

Sterling McMurrin claimed that the only criticism he ever heard of the book came from his friend and university colleague Sidney Angleman, who thought the book "made the Mormon religion look better than it is." McMurrin responded: "I am aware of that. I attempted to make it look as good as I possibly could because the church's leaders make it look so bad. The church doesn't do justice to its own theology."3 This light-hearted repartee revealed two bones McMurrin had to pick with the Mormon hierarchy. First, they had not (and have not) picked an apostle for at least half a century who has a serious interest or training in theology. Second, and more important, in the name of "continuing revelation," anything a church president or ranking apostle says can be canonized overnight in contemporary Mormonism. As a consequence, a systematic theology for the religion has become impossible. Neither past thought nor the structure of beliefs matters in an authoritarian church culture that is blindly obedient, perpetually busy, and heavily burdened with growth concerns.

Whether McMurrin heard them or not, Theological Foundations has had its critics. As one mutual friend said to me recently, "The book makes the church look better than it is because McMurrin chose to leave out most of the stuff he didn't like or thought was foolish." Among the obvious things he did not treat were the rationale for polygamy and the polytheism associated with the belief that in the afterlife worthy Mormons will become gods with their own worlds to govern. McMurrin argued in conversation years later that these were peculiar practices and beliefs not central to the theological structure of the church. He conceded, however, that they were and are central tenets of the religion and should not be ignored when examining the underlying assumptions of those who embrace the faith.

Another criticism of the book, of course, is that it was written by a non-believer. McMurrin's relationship with the Mormon church was especially complex. He was born and reared in the faith; he and his wife, Natalie, were married in the Salt Lake temple by then-apostle David O. McKay; and he taught in the church's seminary and institute system for nearly a decade between earning his master's degree and his doctorate. To the end of his life, he defended the Mormon church publicly and privately and maintained cordial relationships with many of its top leaders.

On the other hand, from his mid-twenties forward McMurrin sharply and publicly criticized practices and beliefs of the church that he regarded as unjust or unworthy of a noble religious culture. Toward the end of his life he described himself as a "good heretic," which he defined as someone who loved the church but could not accept all of its claims. Loving the church for McMurrin meant speaking out if he thought it was making a mistake—and speaking in its defense if he thought it was being attacked unfairly. Few critics do both as he did. He expected the church and its leaders to live up to their ideals, and he spoke and wrote fearlessly when he thought the institution failed morally, as it did in withholding priesthood ordination from black men of African descent until June 1978. The fact that women cannot be ordained became an issue with him toward the end of his life, although his advocacy of change was private—often expressed in his humor—rather than public.

Sterling McMurrin's interest in, and differences with, the Mormon church were deeply philosophical. He believed that truth is ascertained by observation and reason, not granted by authority or revealed through epiphany. He was as baffled by mystics as he was amused by the absurdities of beliefs held by the blindly faithful. Neither, he contended, had any tangible evidence to support their conclusions. Sound theology, McMurrin believed, offers the hope of rational religious thought and a reasonable way to sort things out in a world beset with moral apathy, irrationality, and fanaticism.

Two of McMurrin's humorous stories illustrate his interest in the centrality of the basic premises that people carry around in their heads about the universe. The first is about a Mormon he met while teaching for the church in Mesa, Arizona, in the early 1940s. The man told McMurrin soberly that the devil smells like a wet dog. He replied: "Now, as a matter of fact, maybe the devil does smell like a wet dog, but the evidence given by those who hold this view is really not very persuasive." In the second story, McMurrin encountered another fellow during his Mesa years who believed that the Gulf of Mexico was formed when God lifted the righteous city of Enoch into heaven. This was the man's interpretation of the story from the Book of Moses in the church's Pearl of Great Price. "Now I'd say that was a pretty good-sized city," McMurrin opined, "as big as the Gulf of Mexico." Presented with that challenge, the gentleman responded, "Well, look at the map! What else do you think could have made that great big hole?" McMurrin had a lifelong fascination with the relationship between people's underlying assumptions about the world and their working beliefs and daily behavior. Such incidents as these never failed to capture his imagination or kindle his humor.

After a formal lecture on religion at the University of Utah in 1995, McMurrin responded to a query regarding his beliefs: "Are you an atheist, and if not, why not?" He quoted Bertrand Russell, "who once responded to a similar question by saying he leaned toward atheism." Then, speaking for himself, Sterling said, "I'm on that knife edge with Russell, but I lean toward theism." In fact, McMurrin confidently described himself on more than one occasion as possessing an "essentially religious temperament." He expressed deep personal satisfaction with his religious sentiments, for him the purest form of spiritual experience. Such phenomena, he believed, are seldom if ever connected with theological conclusions or organizational religion. They are felt, not thought, and they lend richness to living.

At the same time, McMurrin regarded the universe as disinterested in the presence of human life on earth or in the plight of individual human beings. He believed whole-heartedly, however, that the moral commitments of individuals and the ethical foundations of societies bear heavily on the balance between human happiness and suffering. As social institutions beyond the family, he believed, religion and education are chiefly accountable for cultivating the moral tenor of our lives. He had the highest respect for people with sincere religious beliefs and commitments, although he did not accept religion as the only basis for individual or social morality. Whatever powers one's internal gyroscope, McMurrin sincerely believed that "doing what is right or good simply because we choose to do so—without thought of reward or punishment—that is morality."

In the end, Sterling McMurrin's profound intellectual interest in theology stood rather independent of his own experience of religion. He knew the philosophy and theology of Mormonism, and of Christianity, better than any of his Latter-day Saint contemporaries, although he did not accept the basic premise on which they rested—that the universe is watching out for human beings. For him, churches were not true or false because they are fundamentally human creations with all the quirks and flaws associated with every human organization. But he thought some religions were better than others, and he found much good, as well as much that could be improved, in his own. He spent the better part of six decades studying it, debating it, criticizing it, and loving it. All the while, his own religious life remained independent, private, and satisfying. What he doubted rationally, he seemed to live instinctively.

I am pleased that a new generation of Latter-day Saints and non-Mormon scholars of the religion will continue to have the privilege of reading McMurrin's Foundations essays and pondering their meaning. To us he offered a challenge:

The primary task of theology is the reconciliation of the revelation to the culture, to make what is taken on faith as the word of God meaningful in the light of accepted science and philosophy. Mormon theology has in the past pursued this task with some consistency and at times with intellectual strength, and certainly with a stubborn independence and indifference to criticism from traditional thought. Today, much of that strength is gone as Mormonism suffers the impact of religious and social conservatism, as the Mormon mind, in the general pattern of contemporary religion, yields to the seductions of irrationalism.4

This book should make it clear once again that Sterling McMurrin exhibited the courage he admired in others. Perhaps his words will inspire a new generation of thinkers willing to undertake the difficult tasks he relished—schooling religion with reason, and reason with compassion.

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NOTES.

1. Sterling M. McMurrin and L. Jackson Newell, Matters of Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996), 262.
2. Sterling M. McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1965), 96-97.
3. McMurrin and Newell, Matters of Conscience, 212.
4. McMurrin, Theological Foundations, 110-11.

The most interesting thing about Mormon theology is that it incorporates a liberal doctrine of man and a radically unorthodox concept of God within the general framework of historic Christian fundamentalism. This anomaly marks the distinctive character of the theology and sets its basic problems. It provides the Mormon religion with intellectual foundations which are compatible with its biblical literalism yet support its humanistic temper. This has far-reaching implications, for, while it strengthens the naturalistic and pragmatic propensities of the Mormon people without weakening their ties to Christian origins, it must inevitably produce fundamental tensions in the intellectual life of the Church, tensions arising ultimately from the basic conflict of the Greek and Hebrew components of the culture.

The intention of this essay is to exhibit the distinctive character of Mormon theology that resides especially in the finitistic concept of God and the denial of the traditional doctrines of original sin and salvation by grace. It is based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Utah in January and February of 1965. These were an extension of a paper titled "The Distinctive Character of Mormon Theology" read before The Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in 1959. The supplementary essay, "Theses on the Idea that God is a Person," is a lecture delivered on the Great Issues Forum of the University of Utah in February 1965.

It is not my purpose here to present a systematic statement of Mormon doctrine or either to justify or criticize it. Rather I have composed a comparative commentary that is intended simply to differentiate Mormon doctrine from the classical Christian theology as that is set forth by the major theologians or expressed in certain of the historic symbols of the Christian faith. I am aware that my highly selective references to Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish doctrines and ideas can lead all too easily to distorted conceptions of those religions and their theologies. I would like to assure my readers, therefore, that my comparisons are solely in the interest of facilitating an understanding of Mormonism. I would also remind them of the great complexity and richness of historic and contemporary theology that cannot even be acknowledged in such a brief paper. Among the ideas that importantly characterize Mormon theology, I find nothing that is exclusive to it. I have made no effort here to describe the historical sources and connections of those ideas.

Mormon theology is a modern Pelagianism in a Puritan religion. Mormonism is a Judaic-like community religion grounded in the Puritan moral doctrine that the vocation of man is to create the kingdom of God. Its fundamentalism is rooted in the biblical literalism native to American religion. Its heresy is the denial of the dogma of original sin, a heresy that exhibits both the disintegration of modern Protestantism and the impact of nineteenth-century liberalism on the character of American sectarianism.

The repetition of ideas in this essay has resulted from the relative independence of the original lectures.

University of Utah, 1965
Sterling M. McMurrin

In its rejection of the classical concept of God as eternal, Mormonism is a most radical digression from traditional theism. This is perhaps its most important departure from familiar Christian orthodoxy, for it would be difficult to overestimate the importance to theology of the doctrine that God is a temporal being. It is not uncommon, of course, for the term "eternal" to be employed with the meaning of "everlasting," without end, or more especially without beginning or end. It has this connotation in typical Mormon discourse, where it carries as well the notion of ultimate worth. In technical metaphysics, however, eternity commonly means "timelessness," not in the sense of endless time but rather as indicating the non-reality of time as the succession of past, present, and future. In classical theism the idea of God's eternity is not that time is unreal for God but rather that, as eternal, God embraces the totality of time. Time is God's creation and therefore he is not subject to it. He transcends it.

Although Jewish theology, especially in late antiquity, became importantly involved with the concept of eternity, the typical descriptions of God occurring in the Old Testament are clearly temporalistic in character. More than anything else, God is described as a "living God," a divine person, a sovereign moral will who exists in time with a genuine past and a genuine future and projects his moral purposes in the human history that issues from the tension of the divine will with the freedom of man. God as highest reality is a living, dynamic, purposing being whose vitality is revealed in the processes of the natural world, in the moral decisions of men, and in the progressive movement of history.

The dominant trend in classical Greek metaphysics, in contrast, was impersonalistic rather than personalistic, intellectualistic rather than voluntaristic, and toward conceptions of ultimate reality as essentially static (being) rather than dynamic (becoming). In Platonism especially, the chief Hellenic influence on early Christian thought, the ultimately real, the intelligible world that is thought but not perceived, is motionless, timeless being—timeless because time can be defined only in terms of motion, and a world without motion, change, or process is therefore necessarily eternal. The story of classical Christian theology is in large part the story of a progressive attempt to describe the living, dynamic, temporal, personal God of the Hebrew religion by descriptions initially fashioned for the static, timeless, ultimate being of Greek metaphysics, a venture occasioned first by the conjunction of Greek and Hebraic culture in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds and one that inevitably built profound tensions into not only the Christian theology but as well into the whole structure of Christian culture.

In his effort to reconcile Greek metaphysics with biblical theology, Philo argued that "the great Cause of all things does not exist in time, nor at all in place, but he is superior to both time and place. . . .God is the creator of time also. . . so that there is nothing future to God, who has the very boundaries of time subject to him;. . .and in eternity nothing is past and nothing is future, but everything is present only."27

In the Eleventh Book of the Confessions, one of the most brilliant of all treatises on the nature of time, St. Augustine, in answer to the question: What was God doing before the creation of the world? described the eternity of God by asserting that God is the Lord of time, its creator, and that therefore there was no "before" the creation. For God there is neither past nor future, for "in the Eternal nothing passeth away, but . . . the whole is present." St. Thomas Aquinas defended the definition of the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius that "Eternity is the simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life" by arguing that in eternity there is no temporal succession. "The notion of eternity follows immutability, as the notion of time follows movement. . . .Hence, as God is supremely immutable, it supremely belongs to Him to be eternal." Aquinas argued that the temporal descriptions of God given in the Bible are not denials of his eternity but are employed "because His eternity includes all times. . . ."28 "God. . .is entirely above the order of time. He is at the peak of eternity, surmounting everything all at once. Thence the stream of time can be seen in one simple glance."29

Orthodox Protestantism typically accepts a similar conception of God's eternity. In commenting on the nature of God's foreknowledge, for instance, Calvin states, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, "When we attribute foreknowledge to God, we mean that all things always were, and perpetually remain, under his eyes, so that to his knowledge there is nothing future or past, but all things are present. And they are present in such a way that he not only conceives them through ideas, as we have before us those things which our minds remember, but he truly looks upon them and discerns them as things placed before him."30

The idea of eternity is a difficult concept, and, although it is related in the classical theology to the common doctrine that God, as the creator of space, is not subject to space, being in a sense everywhere in general by virtue of being nowhere in particular, it has commonly been neglected by orthodox religious believers. They have usually failed to perceive that also by their theology, God, being "nowhen" in particular, is "everywhen" in general. There is no more fundamental problem in Christian theology than the relation of the eternal to the temporal, of God to the world and to the temporally contained human soul. It is, of course, a theological commonplace in Christianity that Christ is the intersection of time with eternity, for, according to the traditional theology, in him the eternal God entered the domain of time to give meaning to human experience and human history. It is also a commonplace, derived especially from Christianity's ties with the temporally oriented Hebrew Bible, that God is in some way involved with man in the historical process, that his purposes are actualized and at least partially realized in time. But this serves simply to accentuate the theological problem of the relation of an eternal being, who is the creator of time and therefore not subject to it, to the time which he has created and which is the location of all his other creatures.

Now Mormonism has always assumed the naive concept of space and time as contexts for whatever is real. Accordingly, it denies eternity in the sense of timelessness, describing God as subject to both time and space. God is both somewhere and sometime, a view that has always widely prevailed in popular religion and that is central to the Mormon conception that God is a material being. The doctrine of God's temporality is the most radical facet of Mormon finitism and certainly the most important, for by its very nature temporality involves process, as the concept of time can have meaning only as a measure or context for events. God is placed therefore not above or without, but within the ongoing processes of the universe. The ultimate immutability of reality is thereby denied, and world history, human history, human effort, human achievement, and human freedom take on a new meaning, for the future is real and unique, not merely from the perspective of men, but as well from the perspective of God. On such a theory it should be impossible to bring men to subservience by the Spinozistic demand that they deny the verdict of their own experience by viewing themselves, their struggles, and their tragedies under the aspect of eternity, from the standpoint of an eternal God for whom there can be neither struggle nor tragedy. Rather, here God himself has the perspective of time, and whatever is in the world and whatever proceeds in the world is real for him genuinely and in its temporal process. The Mormon theologians seem generally to be unaware of the far-reaching implications of this distinctive facet of their theology, even though the Mormon religion is conducive to a highly sensitized temporal consciousness, as evidenced in the historical awareness that characterizes the Mormon mind and habit. Indeed, at times they even betray the high possibilities of their own theology by describing God as subject to eternal, immutable "principles" that are external to him, even though this relegates the divine personality to something less than the highest order of reality. They should find inspiration in Alfred North Whitehead s prophecy that "that religion will conquer which can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness incarnate in the passage of temporal fact."31

A notable attempt to resolve the eternity—time problem for Christian theology is Professor Paul Tillich's treatment of the issue in his Systematic Theology.32 By its very nature, insists Tillich, eternity includes time. To call God eternal and yet affirm that he is a living God means that God includes temporality and is related to the modes of time.

It would be a serious error to suppose that the classical Christian doctrine was a denial of human history. On the contrary, it set the Hebrew time—history consciousness in firm opposition to the Greek and Roman conception of the cyclical nature of time that described history as turning indefinitely upon itself in an endless series of time cycles, a theory commonly accepted in the non-Semitic world and found in Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and the Stoics. This classical denial of history was finally overthrown by St. Augustine's City of God, which was a declaration of a temporal movement of human history from a beginning to an end, a process never to be repeated. The Hebrew conception of the world's beginning made it possible to conceive of an end, and with a beginning and an end there was a definite direction in the movement of history, a direction determined by the purposes or providence of God. But for Christianity, the historical process was nevertheless contained within the framework of eternity, and the numerous issues relating to the tensions of time and eternity were therefore inevitable.
_______________
NOTES.

27. Philo Judaeus, op. cit., pp. 289, 348-49.
28. St. Thomas Aquinas, The "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, literally trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns, Oates, & Washbourne, Ltd., 1920), I, q. 10, a. 1, 2.
29. St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle: On Interpretation, completed by Cajetan, trans. Jean T. Oesterle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962), Bk. I, Lesson XIV, sec. 20.
30. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles from the 1559 Latin text (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1961), Bk. III, chap. XXI, 5.
31. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), I, 274-76.
32. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1933), p. 41.