Open Theism: 
How much does God know and when did He know it?

Since the mid 90’s or so there has been an attack from within evangelicalism on the doctrine of God’s knowledge. It used to be that the major attacks on the fundamentals of the Gospel were instigated by the theological liberals who never accepted to Gospel. But more and more these attacks are being leveled from within our own ranks.

Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, Gregory Boyd, John Sanders, Gilbert Bilezikian, and a handful of others have been writing books suggesting that God does not know the future, because the future does not exist yet and is therefore not knowable. This view is known as open theism (also called Relational Theism, Freewill Theism, Simple Foreknowledge, Presentism, Openness and some versions of Middle Knowledge).

Open theists believe that God is surprised by some things, and had He known they were going to happen, would have done something different. Greg Boyd says God knows some things about the future – the things He has decided to do, but not most things. An example of something God does not know, according to Boyd, is how long Israel will remain disobedient (p.59).  He cites Nm.14:11 How long will this people despise me? The fact that God has to ask the question, it is argued, shows that He does not know the answer. The picture Boyd gives us seems to be of God in heaven helplessly and anxiously waiting around for Israel to repent and turn to Christ, wondering when it will happen so He can finally get on with His plan. 

Is the One who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will,
(Eph.1:11), who does whatever He pleases in the heavens and on the earth (Ps.135:6, Dan.4:35) literally wondering when and if things will fall into place?

What if Israel never does come around?  Then, according to Ro.9-11, God’s whole promise to the Patriarchs goes unfulfilled (not to mention Ro.9-11 being false). A great number of the blessings throughout the prophets in the Old Testament, which God said will certainly happen, are conditioned upon the repentance of Israel.  If Israel never repents, God would prove to be a liar.

The Open Theists explain prophecy by saying that God is simply a great guesser. Yet many of his guesses go tragically wrong.  For example, God thought Israel would repent way back in Jer.3 (Boyd, p.60).  But he was way off – off by over 2600 years so far. Those guesses, according to the Openness view, are “risks” God takes.  It’s a gamble, and God often looses.  

And the result of that is that God is plagued by regret. For example, God turned out to be wrong about Saul, and regretted making him king.  In fact, they teach that God actually regrets making mankind! God did not know man would plunge into sin, and when that happened God regretted even creating mankind (Boyd 55,56).

These people insist they are doing all this to protect God’s reputation, so He doesn’t look bad when people think about the problem of evil.  In this view evil is easy to explain – it’s something God has no control over. 

But does this view enhance God’s reputation?  Does it glorify Him? You decide. The following are the section headings of chapter 2 of Boyd’s book, God of the Possible.

“The God who faces a partially open future”
“God regrets how things turn out”
“The God who risks”
“God asks questions about the future”
“God confronts the unexpected”
“God gets frustrated”
“God tests people to know their character” (He learns information he doesn’t know from testing – he can’t see into people’s hearts)
“Divine disappointment”
 “God speaks in terms of what may or may not be”
And then this: “The glory of true divine sovereignty”

That is the Openness idea of glorious sovereignty. Not especially glorious from where I sit. A disappointed, frustrated, surprised, gambling, ignorant god; plagued with regret. It doesn’t exactly make you want to fall on your knees in worship, does it?

For those who have treasured the great and precious promise in passages like Romans 8:28, that teach that we can take comfort in all our circumstances because we know God is using them for His great purposes, according to Openness Theology, our confidence is misguided. Boyd addresses that issue on p.153 of God of the Possible: “Things can happen to us that have no overarching divine purpose.  In this view, ‘trusting in God’ provides no assurance that everything that happens to us reflects his divine purposes, for there are other agents who also have power to affect us.”

So if your argument is that according to the openness view we can’t ultimately trust God, his answer is, “That’s right – you can’t.”

Surely these writers and speakers will just get laughed off the evangelical stage…won’t they? Sadly, they have not. Open theism has been mostly rejected by the evangelical scholarly world, and so its proponents are writing popular books targeted at lay people. And sadly their teaching is being very well received by millions of Christians, who seem to have lost their will to discern. 

If you think you are safe because you don’t read books by scholars like Clark Pinnock or Greg Boyd or Donald Bloesch, what about Phillip Yancey (Disappointment with God) or John Eldredge (Wild at Heart)? Or Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, William Hasker, David Basinger, Richard Rice or Lewis Smedes? All of those writers have espoused Openness views. Gilbert Bilezikian is the resident theologian of the Willow Creek Community Church and wields tremendous power over the minds of many in evangelicalism. Christianity Today is very sympathetic to this view and gives it a constant platform.

And it seems the more explicit these authors become with their open theism views, the more popular their books become.

Philip Yancey

In Phillip Yancey’s immensely popular book Disappointment with God, he devotes an entire chapter to the idea that the summary of the book of Genesis is “God learns how to parent.” (ch.7) God’s parenting method prior to ch.12 (punishing individual sins) just didn’t work, and God finally improved His parenting technique with the decision to call Abraham.

Yancey says “Man is God’s risk” (p.60).

Speaking of the cross he says, "No one is exempt from … disappointment -- God himself was not exempt" (p. 186).

In the case of Job, God was making a "wager" with the devil about Job. God personally did not know if He was right and so He took a chance. As a matter of fact, this wager went so far, Yancey believes, that, "God 'risks' the future of the human experiment on a person's response" (p. 252). 

John Eldredge

The book Wild at Heart became a craze that dominated the evangelical landscape for years.  The book sold over 2 million copies and is still being used for Bible studies, devotionals, and men’s retreats. The book is loaded with serious errors (for a detailed review see the “Book Reviews” page on www.TreasuringGod.com  (http://treasuringgod.com/resource_library/book_reviews/). The worst of all the errors is Eldredge’s attack on God’s sovereignty. He dismisses 6000 years of orthodox belief in God’s sovereign control in a single sentence – “That can’t be true, because then God would be responsible for sin.”

Eldredge then goes on to say that “God is a person who takes immense risks” (p.30).  For example – the whole thing with Adam and Eve was a gamble where God guessed wrong and lost. “Why didn’t God warn Adam about the danger of the snake deceiving Eve?”  It was because God “believed in Adam.”  He created Adam to be “the kind of guy who would come through in a pinch” (p.50). God didn’t warn Adam because God thought Adam would protect Eve. But that whole risk backfired on God, and humanity was plunged into sin.

What about the passages in Scripture that seem to limit God’s knowledge?  

That question is addressed that at some length in my study of God in the How to Make Wise Decisions series on the book of Proverbs (tape #172), so I will comment only briefly here. 

Passages that talk about God feeling regret or asking how long Israel will be in rebellion or saying that God expected one thing to happen and something else happened are texts that give us a way to relate to God’s emotions. But they are not intended to teach about God’s eternal nature. When God says, “How long, O Israel, will you disobey?” – that is not an academic question designed to gather information God didn’t have. It is an emotional expression designed to communicate God’s sorrow over their rebellion. God wants us to understand the sorrow in His heart and so He describes it to us as being similar to the kind of pain we feel when we ask question like that.

Regarding God’s “repentance” is Gn.6:6 where the KJV says it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart, the language points not to regret over a mistake, but simply to sorrow. The word translated repented in the KJV is a broad term that sometimes means “to comfort oneself”; other times it means “to experience pain”, and other times it means “to repent of a sin.” 

Regarding God changing His mind:

Num.23:19  God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind.

1 Sam.15:29 He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind."

Ps.110:4 The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind: "You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek."

Clearly this term has a fairly wide range of meanings, since it is something that God did in Gn.6:6 and three other passages say that God never does that. So there is one sense in which God does change His mind and another kind of mind-changing that He never does. This is not an uncommon way to use language. It would be like if one day someone offered me a beer and I said, “I don’t drink,” and then 10 minutes later I said, “Where is a drinking fountain – I’m going to get a drink.” It sounds like a contradiction until you realize they are two different uses of the word.

The NIV is correct in its translation of Gn.6:6-7
The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth…-for I am grieved that I have made them."

When the Bible is speaking of God’s emotions, it will use language like that. But when there are direct statements about His nature, there are clear statements that God does not repent or regret anything.

If we interpret the Bible according to the plain, everyday use of language it is not hard for us to explain those passages that seem to suggest limitations on God’s knowledge. What is impossible, however, is for the Open Theists to explain the passages that talk about God’s sovereign control. If God has no knowledge of the future and He does not know what a person will decide, how did He manage to write the book described in Ps.139, where David says, “Every day ordained for me was written in your book before one of them came to be”? In Gn.50:20 Joseph says to his brothers, You meant it for evil but God meant it for good.  How could God mean it for good if He didn’t even know it would happen? If God didn’t know that Adam and Eve would fall into sin, why did He ordain the crucifixion of Christ before the foundation of the world? And how can God take credit for redeeming us if the whole thing with the crucifixion was just a lucky guess?

It was not any kind of guess, but rather purposeful foreknowledge.

Acts 2:23 This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

And as for the people who killed Jesus – 

Acts 4:28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.
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God has not taken any risk. Before He created anything He had a perfect plan, and He has now revealed it to us.