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.
What is Open Theism?
Open Theism is the view that God chose to create a world that included free agents, and thus a world where possibilities are real. The future is pre-settled, to whatever degree God wants to pre-settle it and to whatever degree the inevitable consequences of the choices of created agents have pre-settled it. But the future is also open to whatever degree agents are free to resolve possibilities into actualities by their own choices.
In the open view, God knows everything perfectly, including the future. But since the future is partly comprised of possibilities, God knows it as partly comprised of possibilities.
This doesn’t in any way take away God’s sovereignty, for in the open view, God has unlimited intelligence. While beings with limited intelligence are more prepared for certainties than possibilities (because the more possibilities they have to anticipate, the thinner they have to spread their intelligence), the infinitely intelligent God is just as prepared for each and every future possibility as he is a certainty. Whatever comes to pass, God has been anticipating that very event from the foundation of the world as though it had to occur. It’s just that in the open view, God is so smart, it didn’t.
People sometimes worry that if the future isn’t foreknown as exhaustively settled, God can’t promise to bring good out of evil or defeat evil altogether in the end. Without knowing it, however, people who worry in this way are insulting God’s intelligence. If we trust that God’s intelligence is unlimited, we can remain confident that whatever comes to pass, however evil, God has been from the foundation of the world setting up a plan to respond to it. And we can affirm this without having to suggest that evil was originally part of his plan.
The open view has many positive implications for believers. It allows us to affirm that evil is not in any sense part of God’s plan for our lives, even though he perfectly anticipates it and can promise to redeem good out of it. It also means that our lives really make a difference. In the open view people have genuine “say-so” in what comes to pass. Things really depend on what humans do, including whether or not people pray.
For more on this, see G. Boyd, God of the Possible (Baker, 2000).
Category: Q&A
Tags: Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Open Theism What it is and is not
Related Reading
What is the significance of Jeremiah 26:19?
“Did [Hezekiah] not fear the Lord and entreat the favor of the Lord, and did not the Lord change his mind about the disaster that he had pronounced against [Israel]?” As in 2 Kings 20:1–6 and Isaiah 38:1–5, if the future is exhaustive settled, it seems God could not have been forthright when he told…
What is the right way to interpret Revelation?
Few biblical topics have captured the imagination of contemporary evangelicals like the book of Revelation. The recent unprecedented success of the Left Behind series is evidence of this popular fascination. Many evangelicals don’t realize that the futuristic interpretation of Revelation advocated in this popular series is only one of several interpretations evangelicals espouse. Here’s the…
Who Rules Governments? God or Satan? Part 2
In the previous post, I raised the question of how we reconcile the fact that the Bible depicts both God and Satan as the ruler of nations, and I discussed some classical ways this has been understood. In this post I want to offer a cross-centered approach to this classical conundrum that provides us with…
How do you respond to Isaiah 46:9–11?
The Lord says, “I am God, and there is none other; I am God, and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying ‘My purpose shall stand, and I will fulfill my intention.’” To distinguish himself from the dead idols Israel was…
What is the significance of Esther 4:14?
The wise Mordecai encourages Esther to bravely risk her life by pleading the case of the Jews before King Xerxes, saying, “…if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come…
Isn’t Faith Inherently Irrational?
Is Faith Inherently Irrational? Many people seem to assume that faith is giving credence to things that don’t make much sense and for which there is little or no evidence. Take the doctrine of the Incarnation, for example. This is the traditional Christian teaching that Jesus is “fully God and fully human.” Now, to many…