I'm not trying to be argumentative but could you show me the errors in Matt Slicks article on Open Theism
Sure. And I appreciate the question being asked that way.
Fair warning, this will probably be quite long.
What is Open Theism?
by
Matt Slick
December 09, 2008
5 min read
Open Theism, also called openness and the open view, is a theological position dealing with human free will and its relationship to God and the nature of the future. It is the teaching that God has granted to humanity free will and that in order for the free will to be truly free, the future free will choices of individuals cannot be known ahead of time by God.
The primary premise of Open Theism is that God is free. Every theological system starts with that premise at the beginning. Whether God remains free in their system is a different matter, but they all hold that God was free to create or not create before He did so.
In classical theology, God often becomes bound by a philosophical definition of omniscience. He must know the entire future as exhaustively settled because the system requires the future to be knowable that way.
Open Theism rejects that assumption.
God is free to create a world in which some future choices are genuinely open. If He does that, then those future choices are not yet settled facts to be known as settled facts.
The issue is that God, in His own freedom, can choose to create free creatures whose future choices are not settled until they choose.
They hold that if God knows what we are going to choose, then how can we be truly free when it is time to make those choices – since a counter choice cannot then be made by us, because it is already “known” what we are going to do. In other words, we would not actually be able to make a contrary choice to what God “knows” we will choose thus implying that we would not then be free.
This is a substantially accurate description of the problem, although some clarification is needed.
The Open Theist is not arguing that God’s knowledge causes a person to make a particular choice. Knowledge is not causation. The issue is whether an act can already be infallibly fixed as the one act that will occur while the person nevertheless remains genuinely able to do otherwise.
Suppose God has always known as an infallible fact that tomorrow I will choose A rather than B. When tomorrow arrives, can I actually choose B?
If I can choose B, then God’s prior belief that I would choose A could prove false. But if God’s belief is infallible, that is impossible. Therefore, given that infallible prior belief, I cannot choose B.
Saying that God’s knowledge did not cause my choice does not resolve the problem. The argument is not about what causes the act, but whether any contrary act remains genuinely possible.
Classical theologians have proposed various answers. Some deny that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise. Some argue that God’s past knowledge is dependent upon the future choice and therefore is not a fixed or “hard” fact about the past. Others place God outside of time. But merely saying that God knows the choice because we freely make it does not explain how we can still make a contrary choice if God’s infallible knowledge is already fixed.
The Open Theist’s answer is that a genuinely free future choice is not yet a settled fact. Before the choice is made, the reality consists of multiple possibilities. God knows those possibilities perfectly and knows every factor bearing upon them, but He does not know one possibility as the already-settled outcome when no settled outcome yet exists.
Thus, the issue is not whether God possesses enough knowledge but rather whether the future contains a definite fact corresponding to one particular free choice before that choice has been made.
In Open Theism, the future is either knowable or not knowable. For the open theists who hold that the future is knowable by God, they maintain that God voluntarily limits His knowledge of free will choices so that they can remain truly free. Other open theists maintain that the future, being nonexistent, is not knowable, even by God.
This presents a false dichotomy. Open Theism does not hold that “the future” as a whole must be either knowable or unknowable. Some future events are settled, particularly those God has determined to bring about, while genuinely free choices remain unsettled until they are made.
Nor is the position that God voluntarily refuses to know future choices that He could otherwise know. That would imply that one definite future already exists, but God chooses not to look at it. Rather, there is no settled fact yet concerning which genuinely open choice will be made.
God can know what He intends to do and can form expectations about what is likely to happen based upon what He knows. But because the future is genuinely open, events can sometimes unfold differently than He expected. That is not ignorance of an existing future fact; it is the consequence of that fact not yet existing.
Gregory Boyd, a well-known advocate of Open Theism says,
“Much of it [the future], open theists will concede, is settled ahead of time, either by God’s predestining will or by existing earthly causes, but it is not exhaustively settled ahead of time. To whatever degree the future is yet open to be decided by free agents, it is unsettled.” (Boyd, Gregory A., God of the possible, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2001, p. 15.)
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This is broadly correct.
Some future events are settled because God has determined to bring them about. Others may be settled because causes already in motion necessarily produce a particular result. But much of the future remains unsettled because free agents have not yet made their choices.
The important point is that “unsettled” does not mean that a definite outcome exists but God chooses not to know it. It means that no definite outcome yet exists. There are real alternatives, and which one becomes actual remains to be decided.
But open theists would not say that God is weak or powerless. They say that God is capable of predicting and ordaining certain future events because He is capable of working in the world and bringing certain events to pass when the time is needed. Therefore, God could inspire the Old Testament writers to prophesy certain events, and then He could simply ensure that those events occurred at the right time.
This is broadly correct, but not every prophecy works the same way.
Some prophecies announce events God has determined to bring about. In those cases, He can intervene and ensure that His purpose is accomplished.
Prophecies of judgment, however, are often different. God gives them as warnings in order to provoke repentance. In that sense, He wants the prophecy to fail: He wants the people to change so that the threatened judgment will not need to occur. Nineveh is the clearest example. God announced its destruction, but when the people repented, He repented of the judgment He had said He would bring upon them.
Open Theism therefore does not require that every prophecy be an infallible description of an already-settled future. Some are declarations of what God has determined to do; others are conditional warnings intended to change what would otherwise happen.
Furthermore, open theists claim that they do not deny the omniscience of God. They, like classical theologians, state that God is indeed all-knowing. But they differ in that God can only know that which is knowable and since the future has not yet happened, it can not be exhaustively known by God. Instead, God only knows the present exhaustively, including the inclinations, desires, thoughts, and hopes of all people.
This describes some Open Theists, but not all of us.
I agree that God cannot know future free choices as settled facts before those choices are made, because no such settled facts yet exist. But I also do not assume that God automatically and exhaustively knows every present fact, including every thought, desire, and intention of every person.
Scripture repeatedly portrays God as observing, searching, testing, investigating, and thereby learning things He did not previously know. When God says, “Now I know,” the natural reading is that He has acquired knowledge through what has occurred, not that He was merely acting out a test whose result He had eternally known.
God knows everything He knows without error, and His knowledge vastly exceeds ours. But the biblical question is not whether God fits a philosophical definition of “all-knowing.” It is what Scripture actually says God knows, how He comes to know it, and whether His knowledge can increase as He interacts with His creation.
In Open Theism God can make mistakes because He does not know all things that will occur in the future.
That is not the same thing as God making a mistake.
God can truly believe that something will happen based upon the circumstances as they presently exist. But because He created men free, they can change course and act differently than He expects. When that happens, God was not wrong about any existing fact; the future act was not yet an existing fact to be known.
His prediction may therefore fail without God having made a mistake. The prophecy accurately reflected where events were headed, but free men altered the course of events before the predicted outcome occurred.
According to them, God also takes risks and adapts to the free-will choices of people. They claim biblical support for their position by citing scripture where God changes His mind (Exodus 32:14), is surprised (Isaiah 5:3–7), and tests people to see what they will do (Genesis 22:12).
This is substantially correct. God created genuinely free creatures, and that necessarily involves risk. He therefore responds and adapts to what men actually choose to do.
These passages do not merely appear to describe such interaction. Exodus says that God repented of the judgment He intended to bring upon Israel. Isaiah records God saying that He expected good grapes but received wild grapes instead. And after testing Abraham, God said, “Now I know that thou fearest God.”
The question is not whether Open Theists can find verses that sound compatible with their position. The question is why these passages should not be understood according to what they plainly say.
Finally, Open Theism tends to portray the God of orthodoxy as distant, controlling, and unyielding while promoting the God of openness as involved, adapting, loving, interacting, and caring for humanity.
The issue is not that classical Christians deny that God is loving or involved. They plainly affirm both.
The disagreement is over whether that involvement is genuine interaction. If God has eternally known and settled every event, cannot acquire knowledge, cannot change His intentions, and cannot truly respond to anything unexpected, then His apparent adapting, regretting, testing, and changing course must all be reinterpreted as accommodations to human perception.
Open Theism takes those descriptions seriously. God genuinely interacts with men, responds to their choices, changes what He intends to do when circumstances change, and can be pleased, grieved, surprised, or disappointed by what free creatures actually do.
So this is not merely an attempt to portray one God favorably and another unfavorably. It is a dispute over whether the relationship Scripture describes is real or only appears that way from our limited perspective.
Orthodox Christianity
Historic Orthodox Christianity states that God knows all things, even the entirety of the future, exhaustively. 1 John 3:20 says, “…for God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.”
This verse does not say that God possesses exhaustive knowledge of every past, present, and future fact.
Just one chapter earlier, John tells believers, “But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things” (1 John 2:20, NKJV). Obviously, John was not claiming that those men were omniscient. The phrase “all things” must be understood according to its context rather than automatically expanded into exhaustive knowledge of everything imaginable.
In 1 John 3:20, John is discussing the assurance of believers when their own hearts condemn them: “For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.” God knows all that pertains to the matter, including what their own hearts may fail to recognize. Slick simply imports exhaustive omniscience into the phrase and then cites the phrase as proof of exhaustive omniscience. That is circular.
Likewise, Peter said to Jesus in John 21:17, “…You know all things; You know that I love You…”
Again, context matters.
Jesus had not asked Peter whether He knew every fact in existence. He had asked, “Do you love Me more than these?” Peter avoids directly claiming that he loves Christ more than the other disciples do. After his earlier boast that he would remain faithful even if everyone else stumbled, followed by his three denials, that reluctance is understandable.
Instead, Peter appeals to Christ’s knowledge of him: “Lord, You know all things; You know that I love You.” The second statement explains the first. Peter means that Christ knows everything relevant to the question—Peter’s heart, his failure, and his genuine affection for Him.
Slick again takes “all things” out of its immediate context and expands it into a technical claim that Christ exhaustively knows every past, present, and future fact. The passage is about whether Christ knows Peter’s love, not about defining the scope of divine omniscience.
God’s sovereignty is clearly taught in scripture, and His sovereignty is tied to His omniscience. Orthodox Christianity teaches that God is very loving, very involved, and even condescends to our level and interacts with us in a manner that we can understand. This means that we will see what appears to be instances of God changing His mind, testing, and adapting. But, this is all due to God’s working with creatures who have limited vision, short life spans, and are sinners. God must work on our level since we cannot work on His.
This paragraph assumes the very things that need to be proved.
In the NKJV, the word “sovereignty” appears only once, and it refers to Saul: “So Saul established his sovereignty over Israel” (1 Samuel 14:47). It describes the authority of a king over his kingdom. It does not mean that Saul meticulously controlled every thought, choice, and event within it.
Scripture certainly teaches that God reigns and is King, but Slick imports the Calvinist definition of sovereignty—meticulous control over everything that comes to pass—and then claims that Scripture clearly teaches it. He does the same with omniscience, assuming that it means exhaustive knowledge of an already-settled future.
The rest of the paragraph follows from those imported definitions. Since his system says that God cannot genuinely change His mind, learn through testing, or adapt to what men do, every passage saying that He does those things must be reinterpreted as an appearance accommodated to human limitations.
That is eisegesis, not exegesis. Slick is not drawing his doctrine from the text; he is reading his doctrine into the text and then using that imposed framework to explain away what the text plainly says.
Therefore we can safely reject what he says here as the outworking of his own personal theological system, rather than what scripture teaches.
God and time
The question about God’s knowledge of the future is very important because it deals with the actual definition of God’s nature in relation to the nature of the future. Is God all-knowing about the future or not? Is God existing in the future or not? Is God limited to the present or not? The answers to these questions reflect the very nature and scope of God’s existence.
These questions assume a particular philosophy of time rather than establishing it from Scripture.
God is not “existing in the future,” because the future does not yet exist. God exists now, has existed throughout the past, and will continue to exist forever as each future moment becomes present. Saying that God exists in the present does not place a limitation upon Him. The present is where existence occurs.
Scripture describes God in terms of real sequence and everlasting duration: He “was and is and is to come.” The Word “became flesh.” God remembers what He has done, acts now, and looks forward to what He will do. The Incarnation alone demonstrates real sequence: the Son was not always the Son of Man, but became flesh and remains the Man Christ Jesus.
The claim that God exists outside of time, with no past, no future, and no succession, is not biblical language. It is a philosophical framework imposed upon Scripture. Ironically, if God were truly outside of time, even words such as “foreknowledge” and “predestination” could not describe His actual experience, because there would be no “before” or “future” from His perspective.
For a fuller treatment of this issue:
Is God Outside of Time? Not according to the Bible.
The open theists are pushing a description of God that reduces God from knowing all things, past, present, and future, to not knowing all things in the future.
This is not an argument. It merely assumes that God must know every past, present, and future fact exhaustively, and then describes any disagreement with that assumption as a “reduction” of God.
But the future does not yet exist as a completed collection of facts. Saying that God does not know unsettled future choices as settled facts does not diminish His knowledge; it denies that there are settled facts there to be known.
Nor does Scripture teach that God automatically knows every present fact without observation, investigation, or testing. It portrays Him gaining knowledge as He interacts with His creation.
Open Theism is not reducing the God described in Scripture. It is rejecting a philosophical definition of God that Slick has assumed and then mistaken for biblical orthodoxy.
God’s omnipresence is also in jeopardy in Open Theism, since some open theists deny the existence of the future and thereby deny the omnipresence of God in the future.
This objection confuses time with space. The future is not a presently existing location in which God must already be present. God exists now and will exist in every future moment when that moment actually comes into existence.
It also assumes the classical definition of omnipresence rather than establishing it from Scripture. Open Theism does not require God to be spread throughout every place at every moment, as though He lacked the freedom to be absent. God is omnipresent in the sense that He can be wherever He wants to be, whenever He wants to be there. No place is inaccessible to Him, but neither is He compelled by sheer necessity to occupy a place where He does not wish to be.
Therefore, denying that God is presently “in the future” no more jeopardizes His omnipresence than denying that He is presently inside a place that does not yet exist. Once again, Slick defines a divine attribute philosophically and then treats disagreement with that definition as a denial of God.
Conclusion
My opinion is that openness is a dangerous teaching that undermines the sovereignty, majesty, infinitude, knowledge, existence, and glory of God and exalts the nature and condition of man’s own free will.
This conclusion amounts to little more than an emotional denunciation.
Slick has not demonstrated that Open Theism undermines any of these attributes. He has defined sovereignty, knowledge, omnipresence, and the nature of God according to his own theological framework, and then declared that anyone who rejects those definitions is diminishing God.
Nor does recognizing human freedom “exalt” man over God. God freely chose to create men with the ability to act contrary to His desires and expectations. Affirming the freedom God gave them exalts God’s freedom as Creator; it does not diminish Him.
The only thing tempering this paragraph is that Slick identifies it as his opinion. That is appropriate, because the accusations listed here have been asserted, not established.
Though the open theists will undoubtedly say it does no such thing, it goes without saying that the God of Open Theism is not as knowledgeable or as ever-present as the God of orthodoxy.
It does not “go without saying.” It requires proof, and Slick has not supplied any.
The God of Open Theism is not less knowledgeable because He does not know nonexistent future choices as though they were already existing facts. Nor is God less present because He is not presently located in a future that does not yet exist. Those conclusions follow only if Slick’s definitions of knowledge, presence, and time are assumed in advance.
This reflects a broader problem that often appears in theology through the idea of God as a “Maximally Great Being.” God is defined by assigning Him the greatest conceivable degree of certain abstract attributes: exhaustive knowledge of every future event, necessary presence everywhere and at every time, absolute immutability, and so forth. Any view that rejects those philosophical definitions is then treated as presenting a lesser God.
But the question is not which conception sounds greatest in the abstract. The question is which conception accurately describes the God revealed in Scripture. God is not an abstraction constructed by maximizing philosophical properties. His nature and attributes must be understood according to what He has actually revealed about Himself.
Calling Slick’s conception “the God of orthodoxy” therefore begs the question. He has compared Open Theism against a philosophical standard he already assumes to be maximal and then declared it inferior by definition. That is not an argument from Scripture.
Thank You Judge Rightly. I'm really tryng to understand the Openness position. I don't understand how God cannot be totally omniscient.
Perhaps it would help to set aside the “omni-” and “im-” terminology for a moment.
Those words are theological summaries, and their meaning depends entirely upon how they are defined. If “omniscient” is defined in advance as exhaustively knowing every detail of an already-settled future, then Open Theism will naturally sound like a denial of omniscience. But that definition is precisely what is being questioned.
Instead, begin with the God Scripture actually reveals: living, personal, relational, good, and loving. He speaks, listens, responds, tests, learns, rejoices, grieves, changes His mind, and works with men according to what they actually do.
The question is not whether God measures up to a philosophical definition of “total omniscience.” The question is whether our definitions accurately describe the living God revealed in Scripture.
