Position · 1994

Open Theism

The view that the future is partly open, so God knows it as a range of possibilities rather than as settled fact, and responds to the free choices of people.

History

Roots

The problem is ancient. If God already knows what I will choose tomorrow, can I choose otherwise? Augustine answered that God’s foreknowledge does not force anything, and Boethius added that God sees all of time at once from eternity. Thomas Aquinas built that timeless God into Classical Theism, the default for Catholic and Protestant theology alike. Jacobus Arminius and John Wesley kept exhaustive foreknowledge but denied that God’s knowing causes what he knows, which became the standard Arminian answer to Calvinism.

A minority took the harder road and denied that the future free choices of creatures can be known at all, even by God. Faustus Socinus argued this in the sixteenth century, as part of a theology the churches rejected for its denial of the Trinity. In nineteenth-century America the Methodist Lorenzo Dow McCabe made the same case from within orthodoxy in Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity (1882, Archive.org). Gregory Boyd later collected other early examples, from the fourth-century Platonist Calcidius to Adam Clarke and Billy Hibbard (“Newly Discovered Open Theists in Church History”, 2008), though some of these readings are disputed.

Causes

The modern movement started with the Seventh-day Adventist theologian Richard Rice, whose The Openness of God (1980) gave the view its name. Its argument was relational: a God who truly loves people, hears their prayers and is grieved by their sin must be affected by what they do, and so cannot have a future already fixed in every detail. At the same time, analytic philosophers of religion such as William Hasker were arguing that infallible foreknowledge and libertarian freedom cannot both be true. Hasker’s God, Time, and Knowledge (1989, Archive.org) became the philosophical backbone of the view.

Clark Pinnock had moved from Calvinism toward an Arminian position in the 1970s and kept going. His essay “God Limits His Knowledge,” in Predestination and Free Will (1986), argued that God freely chose to create a world whose future he does not exhaustively know. In 1994 Pinnock, Rice, John Sanders, Hasker and David Basinger published The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Archive.org). Published by InterVarsity Press and aimed at evangelicals, it turned a philosophers’ debate into a church fight.

Influence

The following decade produced the major statements on both sides. Sanders wrote The God Who Risks (1998, Archive.org), Boyd God of the Possible (2000, Archive.org) and Pinnock Most Moved Mover (2001, Archive.org). Critics answered with Bruce Ware’s God’s Lesser Glory (2000, Archive.org), John Frame’s No Other God (2001) and the collection Beyond the Bounds (2003), edited by John Piper, Justin Taylor and Paul Kjoss Helseth.

The arguments moved into denominations and societies. The Baptist General Conference spent the late 1990s arguing over Boyd, who taught at its Bethel College, before passing a nonbinding resolution in 2000 that open theism was contrary to its historic understanding of omniscience (Christianity Today, 2001). The Southern Baptist Convention’s revised Baptist Faith and Message (2000) added a line affirming that God’s knowledge covers the future decisions of free creatures. The Evangelical Theological Society resolved in 2001 that the Bible teaches God’s complete knowledge of the future, including free decisions, and in 2003 voted on expelling Pinnock and Sanders (see below).

Open theism never became a majority view in any large church, but it widened what evangelicals argue about. It made divine impassibility, timelessness and immutability live questions again, fed the broader “relational theology” movement, and pushed many evangelicals to defend classical attributes they had assumed without examination.

Key ideas and contributors

God knows everything that can be known. Open theists do not say God is ignorant. They say future free choices do not yet exist to be known, just as God cannot make a square circle. Omniscience means knowing all reality perfectly, and part of reality is still undecided. Boyd puts the point with a chess analogy: God is a master player who knows every possible move and is never caught out, even though he does not know which move his opponent will make (Boyd, “Open Theism: A Basic Introduction”, 2014).

Take the “repentance” texts at face value. The biblical case rests on passages where God appears to learn, change his mind or face an uncertain outcome. After Abraham’s test the angel says “now I know that you fear God” (Genesis 22:12). God regrets making humanity (Genesis 6:6) and making Saul king (1 Samuel 15:11). He relents after Moses intercedes (Exodus 32:14), adds fifteen years to Hezekiah’s life (2 Kings 20:1–6) and spares Nineveh (Jonah 3:10). He says Israel’s idolatry never entered his mind (Jeremiah 19:5) and states a general rule that his announced plans depend on how a nation responds (Jeremiah 18:7–10). Classical theism reads these texts as accommodated language; open theists ask why the less obvious reading should control.

Love requires risk. Sanders argued that in creating free persons capable of love, God took a real risk: he wanted a relationship, and relationships can fail (The God Who Risks). God is sovereign because he governs a world he does not micromanage, the way a wise parent does. This lets open theists say that horrific evil is not part of God’s plan. Boyd developed that point into a theodicy in which much evil comes from free creatures, human and angelic, and is opposed by God, not willed by him.

Prayer and history matter to God. If the future is open, petitionary prayer can change what happens, and God’s responses to people are genuine responses. Pinnock’s Most Moved Mover framed this as a correction of the Greek-influenced God of classical theology, who cannot be moved by anything creatures do.

The future is not wholly open. God can still promise and predict. He knows what he himself will do, can read character well enough to forecast choices, and has the power to bring his plans about. Open theists explain fulfilled prophecy through these three means, not through simply seeing the future.

The philosophical argument. Hasker’s case runs: if God has always believed that I will do X, and God’s beliefs cannot be wrong, and the past cannot now be changed, then I cannot refrain from X, so I am not free. Open theists add that the rival views do not help God govern. Simple foreknowledge of a fixed future gives him nothing to act on, and Molinism, which credits God with knowing what any free creature would do in any situation, faces the objection that nothing makes those facts true (Rissler, “Open Theism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, secondary).

Key controversies

Is this Scripture’s God? The main objection is biblical. Critics point to texts where God claims knowledge of the future as proof he is God (Isaiah 46:9–10), says all a person’s days were written before one existed (Psalm 139:16), and foretells specific free acts, such as Peter’s threefold denial (Matthew 26:34) and the crucifixion by “lawless men” according to God’s plan (Acts 2:23). They also note that the same chapter in which God regrets making Saul king says he “will not lie or have regret” (1 Samuel 15:29). Ware’s God’s Lesser Glory and Frame’s essay “Open Theism and Divine Foreknowledge” (2001) press this case from a Reformed position. Open theists reply that most prophecies are conditional or rest on God’s own intentions, and that Peter’s denial was predictable from his character.

Inerrancy and the ETS. The sharpest institutional fight turned on prophecy. If God can predict something that then fails to happen because free creatures choose otherwise, critics argued, Scripture contains false predictions, which conflicts with Biblical Inerrancy. Roger Nicole brought charges against Pinnock and Sanders in the Evangelical Theological Society (Baptist Press via SBTS, 2003). In 2003 the membership voted: Pinnock agreed to revise a passage in Most Moved Mover on unfulfilled prophecy, and a majority voted to keep him. Sanders kept his position and also stayed, but only because the vote to expel him fell short of the two-thirds required (IEP, above, says the charges were not sustained “just barely” in his case): 388 members, or 62.7 percent, voted to expel him, against 219, or 32.9 percent, for Pinnock (Baptist Press via SBTS). Sanders lost his post at Huntington College the next year, when its trustees dismissed him in November 2004 (Wikipedia, “John E. Sanders”, secondary).

Diminished sovereignty and comfort. Pastoral critics argue that a God who does not know the future cannot guarantee that all things work together for good, and that the suffering believer is left with a God who is doing his best. Piper and the Beyond the Bounds authors made this a question of whether open theism stays within evangelical bounds. Open theists answer that they gain a God who did not plan the suffering, and that God’s resourcefulness, not a fixed script, is what secures his final victory.

Not process theology. Critics often link open theism with process theism, which also has a changing, responsive God. Open theists reject the comparison. They hold that God created from nothing, could have created no world at all, limits himself freely and can act in power whenever he chooses, which process theologians deny. The two sides tested their differences in Searching for an Adequate God (2000), edited by John B. Cobb and Pinnock.

Arminian objections. Many Arminians reject open theism too, holding with Arminius and Wesley that God foreknows free acts without causing them. Open theists answer that simple foreknowledge gives no providential advantage, since God cannot use knowledge of what will certainly happen to change it. That argument has made open theism a pressure point inside Arminian theology as much as against Calvinism.

Which open theism? Defenders disagree among themselves. Some say statements about future free acts are neither true nor false yet; Boyd holds that “will” and “will not” statements are both false while “might and might not” is true; others, including Hasker, hold that such statements have truth values God cannot know. Philosophers such as Alan Rhoda have mapped these variants, and the choice affects how the view handles prophecy.

What remains unresolved

The disagreement comes down to which texts interpret which. Open theists read God’s regret, testing and changed plans as describing God as he is, and treat the predictive texts as limited cases. Classical theists read the predictive texts as describing God as he is, and treat the rest as language suited to human understanding. Behind that sits a philosophical question neither side has settled: whether foreknowledge of a free act is even possible. If it is, open theism loses its main motive; if it is not, the classical view has to show how God’s knowledge and human freedom fit together.