We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

How do you respond to Acts 4:27–28?
“[B]oth Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”
This passage is very close in content to Acts 2:23 (see How do you respond to Acts 2:23?). While it clearly teaches that the event of the crucifixion was predestined, it does not teach or suggest that the individuals who carried out this event were predestined to do so. God’s infinite intelligence and wise providence is demonstrated precisely in the ingenious way he balances his predetermined goals with the open-ended decisions of free agents. The magnitude of divine intelligence required to carry out this feat throughout history is incomprehensible. And this, I suggest, is one of the reasons why many find it easier to simply attribute exhaustively definite foreknowledge and/or an omni-controlling will to God. To preserve the unsurpassably exalted nature of God’s sovereignty, however, I believe we must resist this tendency and acknowledge that he faces a partly open future.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Open Theism
Verse: Acts 4
Related Reading

Greg and Paul Tag Team to Answer Your Questions
Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy answered questions submitted from Woodland Hills Church and podcasters during all three services this last Saturday and Sunday. They covered a wide range of topics so, chances are, you’ll find something here of interest to you. You can download audio or video from the three services below: Saturday evening service…

God’s Moral Immutability
Classical theologians from the fourth and fifth centuries on were very concerned with protecting their understanding of the metaphysical attributes of God—like timelessness, immutability, impassibility—by assessing biblical portraits that conflicted with these attributes to be accommodations. However, once we resolve that all our thinking about God must be anchored in the cross, our primary concern…

How do you respond to Isaiah 48:3–5?
The Lord proclaims to his idolatrous people, “The former things I declared long ago, they went out from my mouth and I made them known; then suddenly I did them and they came to pass. Because I know that you are obstinate, and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead brass, I declared…

Is speaking in tongues the initial evidence of receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit?
Pentecostals have traditionally taught that speaking in tongues is evidence that a person is filled with the Holy Spirit. Those who defend this position do so primarily on the basis of a pattern they discern in Acts. They note that when the disciples were first baptized in the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, “all…

If salvation depends on our free choice, how are we saved totally by grace?
Question: I’m an Arminian-turned-Calvinist, and the thing that turned me was the realization that if salvation hinges on whether individuals choose to be saved or not, as Arminians and Open Theists believe, then we can’t say salvation is 100% by grace. If we have to choose for or against God, then the credit for our…