A Reflection on Open Theism

There is currently a theological point of view  known as “open theism” or “openness theology” going around certain parts of the Christian church. This has caused a lot of debate in the Body of Christ, and I must confess that I come down on the side of finding open theism incompatible with my own theological perspective. So, what is open theism? According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it is the following:

Open Theism is the thesis that, because God loves us and desires that we freely choose to reciprocate His love, He has made His knowledge of, and plans for, the future conditional upon our actions. Though omniscient, God does not know what we will freely do in the future. Though omnipotent, He has chosen to invite us to freely collaborate with Him in governing and developing His creation, thereby also allowing us the freedom to thwart His hopes for us. God desires that each of us freely enter into a loving and dynamic personal relationship with Him, and He has therefore left it open to us to choose for or against His will.

 While Open Theists affirm that God knows all the truths that can be known, they claim that there simply are not yet truths about what will occur in the “open,” undetermined future. Alternatively, there are such contingent truths, but these truths cannot be known by anyone, including God.

Now, many have written eloquent refutations of this theology using the scriptures to affirm God’s sovereignty and omniscience. But none that I have read have done what I believe to be the crucial component in this debate and that is to discuss God’s relationship to time and space. You see, if God is the pre-existent, uncreated creator, who was and is before there was a creation, then He exists independent of time and space. He existed before time and space came into being—before He spoke them into existence.

That being the case, although in His omnipresence, He certainly permeates the time-space continuum, He is not stuck in linear time in the sense that He has not yet experienced the future. Living in the eternal now, outside of time and space, He sees—more than that, experiences—all of the human history at once—like watching a parade from the Goodyear blimp, seeing the beginning and end and everything in between from a point outside of it. In that sense, God does not merely “know” the future, He is already there. 

Now, to the point of God knowing the future having the effect of somehow negating or even limiting our free will, in my opinion, that is a not only a non-sequitur, but also arbitrary and specious. Without getting into a whole discussion of compatibilist freedom vs. libertarian freedom, it seems to me that mankind never did have completely free will. Rather, we humans have only the freedom that our capacities and circumstances afford us. To be sure, God has given us the most important freedom of all, that is, the freedom to respond to His love by loving Him back—or not. But we do not possess the freedom (or capacity) to violate natural law or the limitations of time and space. Even our social environment, to some degree, limits our freedom of choice. 

In my book, Maximum Possible Life, I talk about how the three persons of the god-head decided they wanted to have some beings to pour the over-abundant love that they have for each other onto, beings that they could adore like they adore one another and who could respond to that love by adoring them back, not because they had to, but because they had come to know each of the three persons of this triune, God who made them and had come to understand their goodness and power and majesty and the intensity of their love for them and, thus, had come to the ineluctable conclusion that adoring them back was the only sensible response. 

And so, they created mankind. And because being able to choose to love God back requires the possibility of an “or not,” humanity had to be endowed with free will. But, the most significant aspect of that freedom of will, as I have mentioned, is the freedom to choose to love or reject our Creator and His will for our lives. But God knowing what choice we would make in that regard in no ways limits our freedom to make it. And actually, the notion that God needs to limit His knowledge of the future for us to be truly free to make that choice makes God seem pretty weak and mankind more potent than we are. 

Do you see God as not smart enough or powerful enough to of know every choice every human in all of history will ever make and work all of that together for our good and to accomplish His eternal purposes? Do you see God as having been taken by surprise by the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden and needing to scurry to come up with a plan B, the Cross? That is not the all-knowing, all-powerful God I serve. I believe that in His incredible genius and awesome power, He conceived of everything that would ever happen including our choices, and spoke all of time and space complete into existence in an instant. 

In the end, I seems to me that open theism promotes an exaggerated view of the importance and power of human beings and a wimpy view of God. The triune God that I see in the Scripture is one who can do anything except deny His own nature. That is the awesome God that I serve.