Open Theism and Divine Foreknowledge
John M. Frame
Open theists deny that God knows the future exhaustively. In their view, God is often ignorant about what will happen, [1] sometimes even mistaken. [2] He “expresses frustration” [3] when people do things he had not anticipated. He changes his mind when things don’t go as he had hoped. [4] In these contentions, open theists admittedly differ from “the classical view of God worked out in the western tradition” [5] that prevailed from the early church Fathers to the present with a few exceptions (such as the Socinian heresy [6] ). This classical view has been the position of all Christian theological traditions: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and all forms of Protestantism. [7] It affirms that God has complete knowledge of everything that happens in the past, present, and future. Thus open theism denies the historic Christian view of God’s omniscience. The present article will discuss the major issues in the controversy between the classical view and the open view.
Libertarianism
Why
this radical divergence from the almost universal consensus of professing
Christians? Open theists offer various reasons for their position, but the most
fundamental, in my judgment, is that the classical view is inconsistent with
human freedom in the libertarian sense. Since open theists (also called
“freewill theists”) want to affirm human freedom in this sense, they must
abandon the classical view of God’s omniscience.
A
free act in the libertarian sense
[8]
is an
act that is utterly uncaused, undetermined. It is not caused by God, nor by
anything in creation, nor even by the desires and dispositions of the one who
performs the act. Such causes may “influence” or “incline” us to a certain
choice, but they never determine a choice, if that choice is free in the
libertarian sense. At the moment of choice, on this view, we are always equally
able to choose or not to choose a particular alternative.
[9]
For this
reason, libertarian freedom is sometimes called “liberty of indifference,” for
up to the very moment of choice nothing is settled; the will is indifferent.
[10]
Now
if people are free in the libertarian sense, then human decisions are radically
unpredictable. Even God cannot know them in advance. If in 1930 God knew that I
would be writing this article in 2000, then I would not be writing it freely. I
could not avoid writing it. So if my writing is a free choice in the
libertarian sense, even God cannot have been certain of it in advance.
Libertarian freedom excludes the classical view of God’s foreknowledge.
[11]
On
this view, the future is of such a nature that it cannot be known exhaustively. So open theists claim that on their
view God is indeed omniscient, in the sense that he knows everything that can
be known. That he lacks exhaustive knowledge of the future is no more of a
limitation than his inability to make a square circle. Just as his omnipotence
enables him to do everything that can be done, so his omniscience enables him
to know everything that can be known. That includes knowledge of the past and
present, but not the future, so open theists name their view presentism.
[12]
For open theists, therefore, libertarian freedom is a fundamental premise, a standard by which all other theological statements are judged. Typically, open theists do not argue the case (such as there is) for libertarian freedom; rather, they assume it. [13] It is their presupposition. So God cannot have exhaustive knowledge of the future. Pinnock says,
However, omniscience need not mean exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events. If that were its meaning, the future would be fixed and determined, much as is the past. Total knowledge of the future would imply a fixity of events. Nothing in the future would need to be decided. It also would imply that human freedom is an illusion, that we make no difference and are not responsible. [14]
He is saying that God cannot know
the future exhaustively, because if he did we would not have libertarian
freedom.
In my view, however, libertarianism is both unscriptural and incoherent. [15] Scripture does speak of God determining the choices of human beings.
In Proverbs, the writer declares, “To man belong the plans of the heart, but from
the LORD comes the reply of the tongue… In his heart a man plans his course,
but the LORD determines his steps” (Prov. 16:1, 9).
[16]
God’s counsel, indeed, brings everything to pass: Christians are predestined to eternal life “according to the plan of
him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose
[17]
of his own will” (Eph. 1:11; compare Rom. 11:36, Lam. 3:37-38).
[18]
Open theist Gregory Boyd seeks to
mitigate the implications of the fact that Jesus predicted Judas’ betrayal
(John 6:64, 70-71, 13:18-19, 17:12). But he concedes the heart of the matter:
Scripture
elsewhere teaches that a dreadful time may come when God discerns that it is
useless to strive with a particular individual or a group of people any longer.
At this point, he withdraws his Spirit from these people, hardens their hearts,
and thus seals their destinies (e.g. Gen. 6:3; Rom. 1:24-27).
[19]
Clearly
Judas’ decision to betray Jesus was not free in the libertarian sense. He was
not then equally able to choose either alternative. Boyd implies that many
human decisions are not free in this sense.
But
what human decisions are free in the
libertarian sense? Scripture never teaches libertarianism or even mentions it
explicitly. Libertarians do try to derive it from the biblical view of human
responsibility, but Scripture itself never does that. Judas is fully
responsible for his betrayal of Christ, though we saw above that it was not a
free act in the libertarian sense.
Nor does Scripture
ever judge anyone’s conduct, as we might expect on the libertarian view, by
showing that the conduct was uncaused.
[20]
If only
uncaused actions were morally or legally responsible, how could anyone prove
moral or legal guilt? For it is impossible to prove that any human action is uncaused.
Indeed, courts today as in biblical times rightly assume the opposite of
libertarianism: that morally responsible actions (as opposed, for example, to
accidents or insane behavior) are determined by motives. Lack of a motive
diminishes or abrogates responsibility. So libertarianism, which open theists
regard as the foundation of moral responsibility, actually destroys moral
responsibility.
[21]
These considerations show, in my view, that libertarian freedom does not exist. Therefore it provides no barrier to our confession that God knows the future exhaustively. And so important is libertarianism to the open theist position that without it, the open theist position entirely lacks credibility.
Nevertheless, we should also consider the open theist contention that Scripture itself reveals a God who is sometimes ignorant about the future. Pinnock says,
Many believe that the Bible says that God has exhaustive foreknowledge, but it does not. It says, for example, that God tested Abraham to see what he would do and after the test says through the angel, “Now I know that you fear God” (Gen. 22:12). This was a piece of information God was eager to secure. In another place Moses said that God was testing the people in order to know whether they actually love him or not (Deut. 13:3).
He also mentions Jer. 32:35 (“nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination”) and the verses in which God hopes that “perhaps” his people will listen (Jer. 26:3, Ezek. 12:3, etc.) Throughout this discussion, Pinnock returns several times to talk about the importance of libertarian freedom, to the extent that the reader is entitled to ask if Pinnock is reading these texts through a libertarian lens.
As
I indicated earlier, other open theists also discuss passages in which, on
their view, God is uncertain, changes his mind, is frustrated, discovers new
information, and so on. In this article I cannot deal exhaustively with this
list of passages, but I will suggest some principles that bear on their
interpretation:
[22]
1.
Typically, passages in which God “finds out” something occur in judicial contexts. In Gen. 3:9, God asks
Adam, “where are you?” This is not a request for information.
[23]
In this
verse God begins his judicial cross-examination. Adam’s responses will confirm
God’s indictment, and God will respond in judgment and grace. But the same
judicial context exists in other texts where God “comes down” to “find out” something. See Gen. 11:5, 18:20-21,
[24]
22:12,
Deut. 13:3, Psm. 44:21, 139:1, 23-24. When God draws near, he draws near as the
judge. He conducts a “finding of fact” by personal observation and
interrogation, then renders his verdict and sentence (often, of course,
mitigated by his mercy). So none of these passages entail divine ignorance.
2.
God’s “remembering” and “forgetting” are also judicial categories in Scripture,
because they are covenant categories. For God to “remember” his covenant simply
means for him to carry out its terms. So God “remembered” Noah and the earth’s creatures in Gen. 8:1
(compare 9:15-16, Ex. 6:5).
[25]
God’s
“forgetting” is either his delay in fulfilling the covenant’s terms (Psm. 9:18,
13:1), or his administration of the curse to covenant breakers (Jer. 23:39).
3. When God says that something “never entered my mind” (Jer. 7:31, 19:5, 32:35) he is not confessing ignorance, but describing his standards for human behavior (still another judicial point). Note the context of Jer. 7:31:
They have built the high places of Topheth in the
The
contexts of 19:5 and 32:35 are similar. “Mind” here is heart in Hebrew, often in Scripture the locus of intentions (compare 2 Chron. 7:11, Neh.
7:5). God is saying here that the horrible human sacrifice of Topheth is
utterly contrary to his holy standards. God was not at all ignorant of these
practices or of the danger that
4. Some passages do say that God changes his mind in response to circumstances. Often Scripture says that God “relents” from a judgment he had planned, or regrets a course of action he had taken [26] (Gen. 6:6, 18:16-33, Ex. 32:9-14, 1 Sam. 15:35, Joel 2:13-14, Amos 7:1-6, Jonah 4:1-2). Paradoxically, however, this divine changeability is part of God’s unchangeable covenant purpose. [27] God says to Jeremiah,
If at any time I announce that a nation or
kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned
repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I
had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to
be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me,
then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it. (Jer. 18:7-10)
This
principle means that many prophecies
[28]
are conditional. The nature of their fulfillment depends on human responses.
This conclusion, in itself, is congenial to open
theists. But what this implies is simply that God does not intend such
conditional prophecies to be revelations of his unchanging purpose. Contrary to
open theists, God does have an unchanging purpose, described in Eph. 1:11 and
other texts noted earlier. That purpose is unchanging, but it ordains change,
including the divine relentings mentioned in the above passages. God has
decreed eternally that many of his purposes will be accomplished through
created means, including intercessory prayer and the responses of people to
conditional prophecies.
5. There are some ways in which God does
experience change when he enters the temporal world. The incarnation of Christ
is the clearest example, mysterious as it is. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature
(Luke 2:52) even though he was omniscient (John 2:24-25, 16:30, 21:17). He
responded to events: rejoicing at this, angry at that. At one time he is
rested, at another weary. He is born in
But in a sense, God always experiences change of
this kind when he is present in the world. When God met Moses in the burning
bush, he said one thing, then another. When God acts in the world, in
providence and redemption, his actions are temporally successive. He does one
thing, then something else. He does what is appropriate in each situation, responding
to one situation one way, to another another way. This is, as open theists
emphasize, a kind of change.
Those who defend God’s changelessness against
open theism sometimes describe these temporal successions as “anthropomorphic.”
Of course in one sense everything we say about God is anthropomorphic, because
we are using human language. But I don’t think the term anthropomorphic quite captures this temporal involvement of God in
history. Anthropomorphic suggests
that God does not really act in a
temporally successive way. But in Scripture, God is really present in history,
doing one thing, then another.
[29]
The error of open theism is not in claiming that
God’s actions in history are temporal and responsive, or even that in the
temporal world there is a kind of “give and take” between God and his
creatures. Open theists err, rather, in denying that in addition to God’s
immanence in the world he also exists transcendently, governing everything in
the world by his comprehensive decree.
So God is both fully omniscient and responsive to creatures. We may be
grateful to the open theists for showing how pervasive in Scripture is the
theme of divine responsiveness. But our conclusion should not be to deny God’s
exhaustive sovereignty and foreknowledge. Rather, we should see him as even
more sovereign than we had thought before: ruling not only from a timeless
transcendent realm, but also as temporally omnipresent, existing in and with
all the changing events of nature and history, using the give and take of history
to accomplish his unchangeable eternal purpose, ruling immanently as the Lord.
God’s Exhaustive Knowledge of the Future
We have seen, therefore, that the
divine responsiveness noted in Scripture does not refute belief in God’s
eternal decree and exhaustive foreknowledge. But does Scripture give positive
testimony to God’s exhaustive foreknowledge?
Scripture typically shows us God’s knowledge of
the future by the phenomenon of prophecy. One aspect of prophecy is the
prediction of future events. Indeed, one test of a true prophet is that his
predictions must come true (Deut. 18:22). In Isaiah, God challenges the gods of
the other nations to foretell the future, knowing that only he is able to do
this (Isa. 41:21-23, 42:9, 43:9-12, 44:7, 46:10, 48:3-7).
Open theists agree that there is a predictive
element in prophecy, but they insist that this predictive element does not
imply that God has exhaustive foreknowledge. To show this, they enumerate three
types of prophecy:
A prophecy may express God’s intention to do
something in the future irrespective of creaturely decision. If God’s will is
the only condition required for something to happen, if human cooperation is
not involved, then God can unilaterally guarantee its fulfillment, and he can
announce it ahead of time…
A prophecy may also express God’s knowledge that
something will happen because the necessary conditions for it have been
fulfilled and nothing could conceivably prevent it. But the time God foretold
Pharaoh’s behavior to Moses, the ruler’s character may have been so rigid that
it was entirely predictable…
A prophecy may also express what God intends to
do if certain conditions obtain.
[30]
I agree that in Scripture there are
prophecies of all these kinds. I discussed conditional prophecies earlier, and
of course I concede that God can announce his own actions independent of
creaturely decision.
[31]
The second kind of prophecy that Rice mentions ought to be troubling to open
theists, because (as I mentioned earlier in regard to Boyd’s interpretation of
Judas) it suggests that some human decisions (Pharaoh’s, in the quote from
Rice) are morally responsible even though they are clearly not free in the
libertarian sense. It is odd to see open theists speaking of “necessary
conditions” for someone’s behavior and using terms like “rigid” and “entirely
predictable”—deterministic language, in support of a libertarian view of
things! Of course, for open theists, Pharaoh and Judas harden themselves before
their hardening becomes irreversible, that is, before God hardens them.
Nevertheless, even the open theists must admit that, once the hardening has
taken place, God holds these people responsible for actions they could not have
avoided.
I believe, however, that, besides
prophecies of these kinds, there are others that (1) do not merely state divine intentions but
depend for their fulfillment on human choices, (2) imply that God’s decision
determines those human choices, and (3) are not merely conditional.
Consider, as examples, the early
prophecies of the history of God’s people, given by God to Noah (Gen. 9:26-27),
Abraham (Gen. 15:13-16), Isaac (Gen. 27:27-29, 39-40), Jacob (Gen. 49:1-28,
Balaam (Num. 23-24), and Moses (Deut. 32:1-43, 33:1-29). Here God announces
(categorically, not conditionally), many centuries ahead of time, the character
and history of the patriarchs and their descendants. These prophecies
anticipate countless free decisions of human beings, long before any had the
opportunity to form their own character.
In 1 Sam. 10:1-7, the prophet Samuel
tells King Saul that after he leaves Samuel he will meet three men, and later a
group of prophets. Samuel tells him precisely what the three men will be
carrying and the events of the trip. Clearly here God through Samuel
anticipates in detail the free decisions of the unnamed men and prophets, as
well as the events of the journey. Compare a similarly detailed account of an
enemy’s war movements in Jer. 37:6-11.
In 1 Kings 13:1-4, God through a
prophet tells the wicked King Jeroboam that God will later raise up a faithful
king, Josiah by name. This prophecy occurs three hundred years before the
actual birth of King Josiah. Compare references in Isa. 44:28-45:13 to the
Persian King Cyrus over a hundred years before Cyrus’s birth.
[32]
Many marriages, many combinations of sperm and egg, many human decisions are
necessary in order for these precise individuals to be conceived, born, raised
to the throne, and to fulfill these prophecies. These texts assume that God
knows how all these contingencies will be fulfilled. The same is true of Jer.
1:5, in which God knows Jeremiah before he is in the womb and appoints him as a
prophet. Compare also the conversation between Elisha and the Syrian Hazael in
2 Kings 8:12, and the detailed future chronology in Dan. 9:20-27 of the affairs
of empires and the coming of the Messiah.
Scripture is not unclear as to how
God gets this extraordinary knowledge. God knows, as I said earlier, because he
controls all the events of nature and history by his own wise plan. God has
made everything according to his wisdom (Psm. 104:24), and he works out
everything in conformity with the purpose of his will (Eph. 1:11). Therefore,
God knows all about the starry heavens (Gen. 155, Psm. 147:4, Isa. 40:26, Jer.
33:22) and about the tiniest details of the natural world (Psm. 50:10-11, 56:8,
Matt. 10:30). “God knows” is an oath-like utterance (2 Cor. 11:11, 12:2-3) that
certifies the truth of human words on the presupposition that God’s knowledge
is exhaustive, universal, and infallible. God’s knowledge is absolute
knowledge, a perfection; so it elicits religious praise (Psm. 139:17-18, Isa.
40:28, Rom. 11:33-36).
So God “knows everything” (1 John
3:20). And,
Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Heb. 4:13).
Does that knowledge include exhaustive knowledge of the future? Given the inadequacy of the open theist arguments, the strong emphasis in Scripture on God’s unique knowledge of the future, and the biblical teaching that God’s plan encompasses all of history, we must say yes.