Explore the debate over God's foreknowledge and human freedom, and why historic theology affirms God knows the future exhaustively.
Quick Summary
Open theism is a theological view proposing that the future is not fully determined or knowable, even by God, in order to preserve human free will. It suggests God knows all possibilities but not future free choices as settled facts. However, historic Christianity rejects this, affirming God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and sovereignty over time (Psalm 139:4, Isaiah 46:10) as compatible with relationship.
Open theism arises from a genuine theological concern: how can human freedom be real if God already knows the future in exhaustive detail? To protect human responsibility, this view proposes that the future is not yet fully knowable, even by God. God knows everything that can be known, but future free choices do not yet exist as facts, so they cannot be objects of knowledge.
In this way, open theism seeks to preserve freedom by redefining the scope of divine knowledge. The cost of this move, however, is a radical reshaping of what Scripture means when it speaks of God’s omniscience, sovereignty, and faithfulness.
At its core, the debate is not about whether God is relational or responsive. Scripture clearly presents Him as both. The real question is whether God’s relational engagement requires a limitation in His knowledge of what is to come. Open theism answers yes. Historic Christian theology answers no, insisting that God’s perfect knowledge and genuine relationship with His creatures are not mutually exclusive.
Open theism and the reshaping of divine knowledge
Open theism claims biblical support from passages in which God appears to regret, reconsider, or respond to human actions. Genesis 6:6 speaks of God grieving over human wickedness. Genesis 22:12 records God saying to Abraham, “Now I know that you fear God,” after Abraham’s obedience. Exodus 32:14 describes the Lord relenting from the disaster announced against Israel. Jonah 3:10 shows God turning from judgment when Nineveh repents. Read superficially, these texts can seem to portray God as discovering new information or revising His plans.
Yet Scripture consistently uses human language to describe divine action. This is not because God is limited, but because finite creatures can only grasp divine reality through relational and experiential categories. When God “changes His mind,” the change is not in His eternal knowledge but in His historical action toward people whose own posture has changed. The relationship is dynamic, even though God’s understanding of it is not.
This becomes clear when these passages are read alongside texts that explicitly affirm God’s comprehensive knowledge. Psalm 139:4 declares, “Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely, O LORD.” Verse 16 continues by affirming that all the days of a person’s life are known before any of them come to be. These statements are not poetic exaggerations that contradict narrative passages. They articulate the underlying reality that makes those narratives intelligible. God’s interaction with humanity unfolds in time, but His knowledge is not bound by time.
The prophetic witness of Scripture presses this point even further. The Old Testament contains detailed promises concerning the coming of Christ, His suffering, His death, and His kingdom. These are not general predictions but specific historical claims.
If the future were fundamentally open and unknowable, such prophecy would become theological speculation rather than divine promise. Likewise, the assurance of eternal salvation would lose its foundation. A God who does not know the future exhaustively cannot finally guarantee what He has pledged.
Open theism therefore does not merely adjust how God knows. It alters who God is. It replaces the biblical vision of a God who stands sovereign over time with a God who moves within time in a way structurally similar to His creatures. The difference becomes one of degree rather than kind.
Divine foreknowledge, human freedom, and biblical coherence
The central assumption of open theism is that knowing the future makes human freedom impossible. But this confuses knowledge with causation. To know an event is not to cause it. God’s foreknowledge does not coerce human decisions any more than human memory coerces past actions. Scripture never treats divine knowledge as a force that overrides the will. It treats it as the perfect comprehension of what free creatures will in fact choose.
Psalm 139 does not present divine knowledge as threatening human agency. It presents it as the ground of trust. God knows every word before it is spoken not because He controls speech mechanically, but because His knowledge is infinite. The same logic underlies the biblical confidence in redemption. God’s promises do not rest on probability but on certainty. This is why Scripture can speak so boldly about salvation. “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” is not fatalism. It is security.
The New Testament strengthens this pattern. Hebrews 11:6 insists that faith is essential precisely because God is God. Faith does not complete what God lacks. It rests in what God already is. If God were waiting to see how the future unfolds, faith would be reduced to optimism. Instead, faith is confidence in a God whose purposes cannot fail.
The cross itself demonstrates the problem with open theism. The crucifixion is presented in Scripture as both the result of human sin and the fulfillment of divine intention. Human agents acted freely and yet God’s saving purpose was not placed at risk. This union of sovereignty and freedom is not explained in mechanical terms, but it is consistently affirmed. Any theology that dissolves this tension by limiting God’s knowledge sacrifices the biblical portrait of God’s majesty.
Open theism seeks to protect human freedom, but it does so by weakening divine sovereignty. Classical determinism protects sovereignty, but it can flatten human responsibility. Scripture refuses both reductions. It maintains a living tension: God knows all things exhaustively, and human beings act meaningfully and responsibly. This tension is not a logical defect but a theological depth.
In the end, open theism fails not because it values relationship, but because it misunderstands what makes divine relationship possible. God can engage genuinely with His creatures precisely because He is not limited as they are. His responsiveness does not arise from uncertainty but from sovereignty. His love does not depend on discovering what will happen, but on eternally knowing and faithfully guiding history toward its appointed end.
To limit God’s knowledge in order to save human freedom is to misunderstand both. True freedom does not require a blind future, and true divinity does not require ignorance. The God of Scripture is neither a detached observer nor a constrained participant. He is the Lord of time, who knows the end from the beginning and yet walks with His people in every moment of their unfolding story.
schoolTheological & Historical Analysis
Frequently Asked Questions
Scholarly examination of the primary theological, historical, and biblical inquiries addressed in this guide.
What is "Open Theism" (the Open View of God), and what primary premise does it assert?
Open Theism (also known as the "Free Will Theism" or the "Openness of God"), formulated in the late twentieth century by theologians such as Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, and Gregory Boyd, is a theological model that redefines divine omniscience and sovereignty to prioritize libertarian human free will. Its core premise is that the future is not exhaustively settled or predetermined, and therefore cannot be exhaustively known even by God. Open theists argue that the future consists partly of actualities and partly of possibilities; while God knows all past and present events exhaustively and foresees all possibilities, future free human choices do not yet exist as facts and are therefore logically unknowable.
How does Open Theism interpret biblical passages that speak of God "relenting" or "changing His mind"?
Open theists place heavy hermeneutical weight upon biblical narrative passages where God is described as testing individuals to see what they will do (e.g., Genesis 22:12), expressing sorrow over human actions (e.g., Genesis 6:6), or "relenting" / changing His announced course of judgment (e.g., Exodus 32:14; Jonah 3:10). Open theists interpret these texts with literalistic realism, arguing that God experiences genuine surprise, adapts to human decisions in real-time, takes moral risks, and learns new information as history unfolds.
How does classical and Reformed biblical orthodoxy refute Open Theism’s view of divine foreknowledge?
Historic Christian orthodoxy rejects Open Theism as an unbiblical departure from classical theism, citing unequivocal scriptural testimony regarding God’s exhaustive, infallible knowledge of all future events: in Isaiah 46:9–10, Yahweh declares His unique deity precisely through exhaustive foreknowledge: "declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done"; in Psalm 139:4, 16, David confesses: "in Your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them"; and Jesus foreknew with exact specificity Peter’s three denials (Matthew 26:34) and Judas’ betrayal (John 6:70–71). Passages describing God "relenting" are understood as anthropopathisms—condescending covenantal language describing how God's immutable justice relates dynamically to changing human postures, not changes in God’s eternal knowledge or being (Numbers 23:19; Malachi 3:6).
What dangerous theological consequences arise if Open Theism is embraced?
Embracing Open Theism severely undermines core Christian doctrines: Eschatological Uncertainty (if God does not know future free choices, He cannot guarantee the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom or the fulfillment of prophecy); Divine Infallibility (it portrays God as an anxious cosmic gambler who makes predictive mistakes and experiences regret); and Pastoral Assurance (in times of catastrophe, open theism cannot offer the comfort of Romans 8:28, since tragic events occur outside of God’s sovereign foresight). The Christian’s peace rests in the biblical truth that our sovereign Lord rules time from eternity.
