 A very different approach to explaining God’s knowledge of the contingent future involves suggesting that God exists outside of time altogether. This would mean that God does not foreknow the future, strictly speaking, since foreknowledge is knowledge of an event that is possessed at a moment in time that occurs earlier than the moment in time at which the foreknown event occurs. Instead, the idea is that God knows all events from the perspective of timeless eternity. (For further elaboration and defense of this view, see Stump and Kretzmann 1987, Helm 1988, and Leftow 1991.) Many theists have adopted this view throughout the centuries, including the highly influential medieval theologian  St. Thomas Aquinas  (1225–1274). One of the earliest Christian theologians to defend this approach was Boethius (480–524 C.E.), who wrote in The Consolation of Philosophy that “[Since] God has a condition of ever-present eternity, His knowledge, which passes over every change of time, embracing infinite lengths of past and future, views in its own direct comprehension everything as though it were taking place in the present” (Boethius Consolation, 117).