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

Open Theism Timeline
Open Theism Timeline by Tom Lukashow An argument that is frequently raised against the open view is that it is a recent innovation. Paul Eddy had discovered Calcidius, a fifth century advocate, and I and others knew of L.D. McCabe and Billy Hibbard, two 19th century advocates. But that was about it – until I…

Last Minute Preparations
We’re all busy here at ReKnew making last minute preparations for the Open2013 conference here in St. Paul, MN. It’s our first ever event of this kind and there’s a nervous energy and anticipation. I wonder if you’ll hold this up in prayer if you weren’t able to join us? We have a last minute…

The Open View and Radical Suffering
Jessica Kelley spoke at Open2013 this morning, sharing her journey with tenderness and authority. Jessica began wrestling with her view of God a couple of years ago and embraced Open Theism prior to the diagnosis and eventual death of her four-year-old son, Henry. Everyone here at the conference was profoundly affected by her story and…

What is the significance of Genesis 22:12 ?
Abraham passed God’s “test” (vs. 1) by being willing to sacrifice his son. The Lord says “…now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son…” If the classical understanding of foreknowledge is true, God’s statement “now I know” seems disingenuous. The meaning of God’s explanation for this knowledge — “since…

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…

What Does It Mean that God Hardens Hearts?
Some argue that passages which speak of God hardening human hearts (Jos 11:19-20; Ex 7:3; 10:1; Rom 9:18) demonstrate that God controls everything, including people resistant to this declared intentions. He hardens whomever he wills, they argue. He could just as easily have softened their hearts, but for his own sovereign reasons he chose not…