The Open View is that it is GOD's wisdom that results in GOD knowing every possible outcome of any situation.
Knowledge without power is weak. Power without knowledge is dangerous.
Wisdom is a function of knowledge.
Open theists (
unsettled theists— versus their common label
settled theists of their opponents—admit God learns. God accretes knowlege. God's knowledge is discursive. Further, God can get it wrong, albeit, recover very, very, quickly. In other words, just like our own knowledge.
One of the questions asked from the internet in the second debate was one I submitted and was graciously accepted by Rev. Enyart to offer up in the debate:
If God is continually learning, then was the God of Abraham less knowledgeable than God is right now?
Mr. Duffy's answer was essentially that God just has more
information. He is just as smart now as he was then. This was weak and obviously not fully considered. In the first case, possessing a great deal of information is not much of use if one is not able to learn from it. Hence, the more information learned, the more one
knows.
In the second case, if one knows more, one will act and do differently based upon that knowledge, if the person is indeed in possession of wisdom, for the very word,
wisdom, means the soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment.
In the third case, knowledge is not mere accretion of facts. For example, God’s
knowledge, can be defined as that perfection of God whereby God, in an entirely unique manner, knows Himself and all things possible and actual in one eternal and most simple act (see, 1 Samuel 2:3; Job 12:13; Psalms 94:9, 147:4; Isaiah 29:15, 40:27,28).
God’s
knowledge differs from that of man on several different points. God’s knowledge is intuitive, not demonstrative or discursive. As such His knowledge is innate and immediate, not resulting from observation or from a process or reasoning. Since God is a perfect being, His knowledge is also simultaneous and not successive, so that God sees things
equally vividly in their totality, and not piecemeal (discursively) one after another. God’s knowledge is complete and fully conscious, while our knowledge is always partial, often indistinct, and frequently failing to rise into the clear light of consciousness.
God’s
necessary knowledge (knowledge not determined by an action of divine will) is that knowledge God has of Himself and of all things possible, a knowledge that rests on the consciousness of His omnipotence. The
free knowledge of God is the knowledge He has of all things
actual—of things that existed in the past, the present, or will exist in the future. This knowledge is founded on God’s infinite knowledge of His own all-comprehensive and unchangeable eternal purpose. We refer to it as
free knowledge because it is determined by a concurrent act of the will. One may also see it referred to as
scienta visionis, knowledge of vision.
The extent of God’s knowledge is all-comprehensive—God is
omniscient. He knows all things as they actually come to pass, past, present, and future and knows them in their real relations. God also knows what is
possible and what is
actual; all things that might occur under certain circumstances are present to God’s mind. The Scriptures speak of God’s perfect knowledge, Job 37:16, that He looks into man’s hearts, 1 Samuel 16:7; 1 Chronicles 28:9,17; Psalms 139:1-4; Jeremiah 17:10, that God observes our ways, Deuteronomy 2:7; Job 23:10, 24:23, 31:4; Psalms 1:6, 119:168, that God knows the place of their habitation, Psalms 33:13, and the days of our lives, Psalms 37:18.
Then there is God’s
foreknowledge of the free actions of persons, and therefore of conditional events. We can all understand how God can foreknow things when necessity is paramount, but some find it difficult to conceive of God having previous knowledge of the actions which freely originated by man. But scriptures teach us of God’s foreknowledge of contingent events: 1 Samuel 23:10-13; 2 Kings 13:19; Psalms 81:14,15; Isaiah 42:9, 48:18; Jeremiah 2:2-3, 38:17-20; Ezekiel 3:6; Matthew 11:21. And the Scriptures teach us of the freedom of man. Moreover, the Scriptures also do not permit us to deny God’s foreknowledge and man’s freedom. Obviously we have an apparent problem here and I fully admit that the Scriptures do not fully explain the situation. Nevertheless, we can make an approach to a solution.
God has
decreed all things, and has decreed them
with their
causes and
conditions in the exact order in which all things come to pass. God’s foreknowledge of future things and also of contingent events rests on His
decree. This solves the problem as far as the foreknowledge of God is concerned. But, then we must ask,
is God’s predetermination of things consistent with the free will of mankind? This question seems to be a stumbling block for not a few, especially open theists.
I would answer the question,
no,
if the freedom of the will is regarded as
arbitrariness, but also answer that this
arbitrariness conception of the freedom of mankind is unwarranted.
Our freedom is not something indeterminate, hanging in the air that can be swung arbitrarily in either direction. Our freedom is rooted in our nature, connected to our instincts and emotions, determined by our intellectual considerations and by our characters. If we conceive of our freedom as
reasonable self-determination, then we have
no sufficient justification for saying that our freedom is inconsistent with divine foreknowledge.
Freedom is not arbitrariness. There is in all our actions a
why for acting—a reason which decides action. The truly free person is not the uncertain, incalculable person, but the person who decides action.
In other words, freedom has its laws—spiritual laws—and the omniscient God knows what these laws are. Even having said this, I admit that there is an element of mystery that remains, but that mystery in no way gives a warrant to deny God’s exhaustive foreknowledge or our self-determination. In fact, whether Arminian, open theist, or Calvinist, we must recognize that on the one hand God asks all to repent, yet we know if God has predestined repentance, then why would God ask? Here we see the will of God in two divided senses,
preceptive (commands, expectations, precepts) and
decretive (what cannot
not be), much like our own two divided senses of our will, wherein we may have
expectations of some thing, yet we truly want something else even more, forestalling the expectations, precepts, commands, for the sake of what we actually desire and will, what we volitionally do.
For example, Calvinists, Arminians, and open theists affirm these two senses of the will of God when they ponder deeply 1 Timothy 2:4. All of us can say that God wills for all to be saved. But when queried
why all are not saved we all answer that God is volitionally wills something more than saving each and every person. We should all affirm
God has no unfulfilled desires. After all, Scripture says God accomplishes all His pleasure (Isaiah 46:10); He works all things after the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11). Nothing can ever frustrate Him in an ultimate sense. Given this, statements in Scripture that may
appear to imply God has unfulfilled desires cannot mean what they are claimed to mean. Some other sense must be made from these passages that are in accord with what Scripture has made plain in its teachings (didactic passages), such as Isaiah 46:10 and Ephesians 2:11. Enter these two senses of the will of God just discussed. The
preceptive will of God is what God has commanded for all persons,
precepts that we are to live by and be governed by. Our duty. The
decretive will of God, is actually what God volitionally wills. This is what
will means, the mind
choosing. This must be the case, for if God actually volitionally willed that all would be saved, then all would be saved. Obviously, not all are saved, hence, the will of God in this matter, properly understood, cannot mean what others will claim it to mean.
The open theist has no possible proper answer to my previously submitted question. They may think they have an answer, "it is just information", and prepare some nice word salad to obfuscate the underlying issues. But the fact remains, that if God continues to learn day by day, minute by minute, second by second, who is to say He will not learn something new that will upend what has been promised? The openist will retort, God is true to His nature, so we need not worry. If that is the case, then why does God need to learn anything at all? Well, they may say, God's newfound information may take the suffering of others in a different direction, lessening it somewhat, or eliminating it altogether. This then makes God the master chess player, outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting His autonomous creatures. God is working the numbers, the probabilities, staying way ahead in His moves against his opponents, creatures that do things before God knows what they have done. The humanistic parallels and analogies at work here describing God should give any reasoned person pause. Does anyone want to align with the thinking of some of the recent proponents of open theism:
“Today it is easier to invite people to find fulfillment in a dynamic, personal God than it would be to ask them to find it in a deity who is immutable and self-enclosed. Modern thinking has more room for a God who is personal (even tripersonal) than it does for a God as absolute substance. We ought to be grateful for those features of modern culture, which make it easier to recover the biblical witness.”
“We are making peace with the culture of modernity.” Src: The Openness of God. Pinnock, p. 107
The fact is that the open theist's charges (Greek! Philosophy!) against classical theism are not new. In fact they are a repetition of
liberal theology. Open theists are parroting the liberal theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These claims originated in nineteenth century Germany, and were connected to Ferdinand Christian Baur (1869) and August Neander (1850). They were picked up later by Albrecht Ritschl (1889). The exposition of these claims that resurrected them all over again came from Alfred (Adolph) von Harnack (1930) published as “
What is Christianity?” Walter Bauer (1960) further developed Harnack’s thesis.
In open theists like Pinnock, Boyd, Sanders, et al., we see the real motivation of open theism:
mixing a theological system with contemporary culture which appeals to our modern world.
AMR
