What God knows leads theological debates

Does God know everything? Does that knowledge include everything that will happen in the future?

Classic Christianity answers yes, using "omniscience" to label God's attribute of knowing everything and "foreknowledge" for his awareness of future events. The age-old belief is now under new question, creating North America's hottest theological debate of the moment.

Theology doesn't usually grab many news headlines, but this is no academic trifle. Omniscience affects everything from prayers to understandings of human suffering to the nature of the God who is worshipped.

The debate has emerged in the past 15 years with a movement called "open theism," which emphasizes God's loving interactions with people and denies that the deity knows absolutely everything about the future. This denial doesn't come from liberals but from certain evangelical Protestants.

In 2000 the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, revised its doctrinal platform, including one insert that was doubtless provoked by the "open theism" debate:

"God is all powerful and all knowing; and his perfect knowledge extends to all things, past, present, and future, including the future decisions of his free creatures."

The following year the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) aired the dispute and approved this declaration: "The Bible clearly teaches that God has complete, accurate and infallible knowledge of all events, past, present and future, including all future decisions and actions of free moral agents."

Open-theism thinkers, however, claim to be following what the Bible teaches. Indeed, two of the leading opponents of God's total omniscience are members of the ETS and thus affirm the Bible's full authority and inerrancy (freedom from errors). They are Clark Pinnock, recently retired from McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, and John Sanders of Huntington, Ind., College.

A third key advocate is Gregory Boyd, former theology professor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minn., and now senior pastor at that city's Woodland Hills Church.

Open theism has lately come under fresh attack from Mark Rathel of the Baptist College of Florida, Graceland, Fla., in an unusual series of special articles for the Florida Baptist Witness.

Advocates of God's complete knowledge -- past, present and future -- cite a series of Bible verses that portray God in those terms, while open theism leans heavily on certain other types of Bible passages.

Perhaps the most important are those where God expresses regret or even repentance about events that have occurred. For instance:

Genesis 6:6: "And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart."

1 Samuel 15:11 (words from the Lord): "I repent that I have made Saul king; for he has turned back from following me."

The open theists figure that if God had known about the sad results he would have taken a different course. Rathel responds that such passages do not say God was ignorant. Rather, they express God's moral response to free human choices.

Similarly, open theists cite Bible passages where God expresses surprise or disappointment.

For instance, in Jeremiah 7:31, God sees pagan sacrifices that burned children to death, "which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind." (See also Jeremiah 19:5 and 32:35.) Rathel says this expresses God's indignation, not his ignorance of what people might decide to do, particularly since God previously warned Israel against this very sin in biblical law centuries beforehand.

Another sort of verse has God asking questions about the future. For example, in Numbers 14:11, God asks Moses: "How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me?" Or Hosea 8:5: "How long will it be till they are pure in Israel?"

But Rathel explains such verses as rhetorical questions in which God poses challenges without implying any lack of knowledge.

Note: For a good overview of the ongoing debate, see "Divine Foreknowledge: 4 Views" with treatments by Gregory Boyd and three opponents.