Introduction
Introduction
Christians have traditionally understood God's omniscience to include complete knowledge of the past, present, and future. This understanding is now under fire from a movement known as Open Theism (or Openism for short). Openists hold the classic Arminian position that human beings, despite the damage done by the fall, are endowed with genuine free will (and not just some simulacrum of freedom that's compatible with causal or theological determinism), and they think of God as temporal, dynamic, venturesome, and genuinely responsive to creatures—a view that will also be acceptable to many Arminians, depending on how it is cashed out. Calvinists, of course, will reject both parts of this picture. But what should make Open Theism controversial for Christians of almost every theological stripe, whether Arminian or Calvinist, is the openists' claim about what supposedly follows from this view of man and God: that God does not have complete knowledge of the future.
Openists allow that God knows a good deal about the future. What they deny is that He knows so-called “future contingents.” A contingent event is one that doesn't have to occur; things could have turned out differently. Open theists, like other Arminians, believe that the future contains such events. In particular, human agents sometimes choose between alternative courses of action, each of which is genuinely open to the agent. According to Openism, God does not know such choices in advance. In sum, when the future can go in more than one way (and it sometimes can), God doesn't know which way it will go.
This represents a significant departure from the classical theist understanding of divine knowledge. While not, in my judgment, heretical, it is certainly heterodox. It should therefore be subjected to careful scrutiny. There is even some urgency to this task: because Openism's denial of exhaustive foreknowledge is attached to a picture of God that many find appealing, its influence is growing not only among ordinary believers but also among professional philosophers.1 The crucial arguments for Open Theism are in the end philosophical in nature; identifying and responding to these arguments will therefore occupy much of our attention. But we must also look at the case for (and against) Open Theism from Scripture and theological tradition.
As this essay appears in a book largely devoted to responding to Christianity's critics, I am in no way implying that proponents of Open Theism are not Christians! This chapter, as with other chapters in this section, responds to subbiblical perspectives on the divine nature (in this case, omniscience) that have been held both by professing Christians as well as those outside the church.