If the Christian God creates time along with his creation of the universe, then God appears to be timeless ‘prior’ to creation. What implications does creation have for his relation to time? In particular, does it imply a change in that relation: Was God drawn into time with creation? Furthermore, the central Christian claim is that God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity, became incarnate in human history and interacted with people around him; these latter acts appear incontrovertibly temporal. Thus, the Incarnation seems to involve a timeless God becoming infected with temporality.
Whether a being is timeless or temporal is usually thought to be not merely one of its attributes but its very mode of existence and is something that is often thought to be held necessarily rather than contingently. Timelessness and temporality are considered to be logically complementary properties, so propositions asserting them of the same entity in the same way at the same instant are held to be contradictories and mutually exclusive.
I argue for a Bimodal God who paradoxically has the two modes of existence without contradiction. As Timeless God, he lives in the eternal present from which he is aware of all physical time at once; as Incarnate God, he is incarnate in the created universe. The reconciliation of the two modes lies in an examination of what eternality means, the personal ontology and personal identity of God, and a stage theory view of humans. In respect of his humanity, Incarnate God has the persistence conditions of humans with the result that what ostensibly look like diachronic or successive thoughts are in fact atomistic thoughts at an instant that can be accessed by Timeless God in toto at once, so that a timeless God can be incarnate without becoming infected with temporality.
