In this chapter, we will review the work of several Christian thinkers who explored these themes, often at considerable length, not that long ago. Their efforts show that the central issues that concern open theists have occupied thoughtful people for quite some time, a number of whom, though lacking formal theological training, developed impressive arguments for their convictions.
JACOBUS ARMINIUS
For many people, Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) was an essential figure, perhaps the essential figure in the history of “free will theism.” In reaction to Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, Arminius maintained that one’s salvation requires a positive personal response to God’s gracious invitation. Since we are free to accept or reject God’s invitation, God’s will is not all-determining. God allows the creatures to make decisions and contribute to the ongoing course of events.
Like many free will theists, Arminius accepted God’s absolute foreknowledge, but he admitted that he did not have a good explanation for it. “The knowledge of God,” he states, “is eternal, immutable and infinite, and . . . extends to all things, both necessary and contingent. . . . But I do not understand the mode in which He knows future contingencies and especially those which belong to the free-will of creatures.”1
Arminius had his own suggestions for resolving this dilemma, and other free will theists have theirs as well, from middle knowledge to simple foreknowledge. Those who espouse “open theism” dissolve the dilemma by maintaining that future free decisions are logically unknowable, or “not there to be known.” So the fact that God’s (fore)knowledge does not include them does not, in any way, detract from divine omniscience. God still knows all there is to know. But this is getting ahead of our story. Our purpose in this chapter is to look at some of the figures whose ideas anticipated open theism and preceded its emergence as a distinct theological development.
ADAM CLARKE
There are precedents for open theism in the writings of several nineteenth-century figures. One was Adam Clarke (1760–1832), an English Methodist theologian, whose six-volume commentary on the New Testament exerted a significant influence on Bible students for two centuries.
Clarke appends some thoughts on “that awful subject, the foreknowledge of God” to his comments on Acts 2. To summarize Clarke’s argument, God ordains that certain creatures have freedom, their free actions and decisions are therefore contingent, and God’s knowledge of these contingencies is itself contingent. If creatures are not genuinely free, “then God is the only operator” and “all created beings are only instruments.” “By contingent,” Clarke asserts, “I mean such things as the infinite wisdom of God has thought proper to poise in the possibility of being or not being. . . . [They] are such possibilities, amid the succession of events, as the infinite wisdom of God has left to the creatures to determine.”2
Without contingency, there would be no free agency, and that would leave God as the sole actor, making him “the author of all the evil and sin that are in the world.” If God predetermines everything, and his determinations are all necessarily right, then nothing the creatures do is wrong. This would mean that “sin is no more sin” and distinctions such as “vice and virtue, praise and blame, merit and demerit, guilt and innocence, are at once confounded, and all distinctions of this kind confounded with them.” The contingency that creaturely freedom involves provides a basis for moral responsibility. There is a distinction, then, within God’s decisions regarding creation. God “has ordained some things as absolutely certain; these he knows as absolutely certain. He has ordained other things as contingent; these he knows as contingent.”
The contingency that creaturely freedom and moral responsibility necessarily require has important implications for divine foreknowledge. God’s knowledge of contingencies must itself be contingent. “It would be absurd to say that he foreknows a thing as only contingent which he has made absolutely certain. And it would be as absurd to say the he foreknows a thing to be absolutely certain which in his own eternal counsel he has made contingent.”
Though Clarke insists that there is a difference between God’s knowledge of necessities and his knowledge of contingencies, he seems to collapse the two with his view of divine eternity. Strictly speaking, he argues, God does not have foreknowledge, because nothing is either past or future to God. Since God exists in eternity, “he is equally everywhere,” in both the past and the future. Indeed, he “exists in one infinite, indivisible, and eternal NOW.” As a result, God sees the future as clearly as he sees the past. God may not decide everything that happens, but God knows everything that happens. So, from God’s perspective, there is nothing indefinite about the future. As William M. King observed, Clarke “flirted with a denial of absolute prescience in his Commentary on Acts,” but ultimately shied away from it.3
LORENZO McCABE
Another nineteenth-century Methodist who addressed the topic of divine foreknowledge—and was not reluctant to deny it—was Lorenzo Dow McCabe (1817–1897), author of two books on the subject.4 In Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity, McCabe, for years a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, discusses no fewer than fifteen reasons for this thesis, ranging from “the necessity of things,” through “the divine perfection,” “the utility of prayer,” “a satisfactory theodicy,” and “a universal atonement,” among other things, to “the reality of time.”
Not surprisingly, McCabe focused on the issue of divine foreknowledge, the topic that gives rise to the most persistent challenges to open theism. Like open theists a century later, he drew on the resources of philosophy, scriptural exegesis, and religious experience to support his concept of divine nescience.5 As a Methodist, McCabe affirmed the reality of human freedom, and he insisted that free actions are of necessity contingent. But it is precisely on this point that freedom and the traditional view of divine foreknowledge come into conflict. How could contingent events be known before they occur? Absolute divine foreknowledge excludes all contingency. It “makes every event of the future just as absolutely certain as does the doctrine of unconditional predestination which declares there is a causal necessity.”6 Indeed, “if God proposes to deal with us on the principle of contingency, our future choices ought to be as truly contingent in his mind as they are contingent in ours.”7
It was not just that absolute foreknowledge conflicts with human freedom that bothered McCabe. Even more upsetting was the picture of God as a timelessly omniscient being. Remove all notion of contingency from God, and we are left with a God who is “immovably fixed,” locked in “the iceberg of indifference,” in short, a God who is not, in any meaningful sense, a personal, or “personic,” being.8
What makes the concept of absolute foreknowledge so objectionable, then, is what it takes away from God. It robs God of an entire range of positive experiences, including delight, enjoyment, curiosity, love, novelty, surprise and wonder, the thrill of “new thoughts, new desires, purposes and plans.”9 And it prevents God from sharing and suffering in the moral struggles of humanity.10
Unlike the immutable deity of Christian tradition, a truly personal being is one who can deliberate and make decisions, one whose actions are necessarily “successive and hence separable and distinguishable in duration.”11 In other words, a truly personal God is one whose experience involves temporality. God’s relation to creation is a changing process, and since God’s activity is a temporal one, God himself is “in time.”12 Unless God undergoes actual development in his relation to the contingent world, we cannot describe him as having free will and as a center of personal consciousness. So, the traditional defense of divine foreknowledge, resting as it does on notions of divine immutability and timelessness, is unacceptable.
Another problem with the traditional view is its failure to do justice to biblical accounts of God, in particular, descriptions of conditional prophecies, such as those of Jeremiah. It seems clear from such passages that God does not know what decisions human beings will make in the future and that God’s experience registers those decisions only when they occur. Indeed, they show that “the conduct of men perpetually changes God’s feelings and modifies his treatment of them.”13
Finally, absolute foreknowledge and the attendant notion of divine timelessness conflict with the value of prayer. If God is timeless, how could prayer make sense? How could it have the slightest influence on God’s “thoughts, feelings, purposes and volitions”?14
McCabe insisted that his revisionary ideas do not detract from God’s essential qualities. For one thing, he found a parallel between omnipotence and omniscience. Just as omnipotence is “circumscribed by the possible,” “omniscience must be limited to the knowable,” and this excludes future contingencies.15 For another, he described the interactive relationship between God and creation as a “voluntary self-limitation,” a choice for God, not a necessity.16 And perhaps most significantly, he distinguishes between God’s “subjective” and “objective” lives. In God’s objective life, that is, “his life, experience, interest, and enjoyment,” is necessarily contingent, while his subjective life is eternal and “may not be a process of becoming and of passing away.”17
When it comes to God’s relation to the world, this view of God brings with it an open-ended view of history and an interactive view of divine providence. For McCabe, creation was a “pure venture” on God’s part, a great and fair experiment. While God’s purposes must ultimately prevail, just how this will happen is “unfixed, undetermined, and therefore uncertain.”18 Moreover, the fulfillment of these purposes requires human cooperation; it is not something God can determine unilaterally. What God ultimately wants is a kingdom of “co-creators, co-causes, co-originators, and co-eternal with himself in the realm of the contingent.”19
In defending his view of God, McCabe exhibits the conviction of later open theists that it takes nothing away from God for us to reject absolute foreknowledge and embrace divine temporality. Instead, it significantly enriches and enlarges our picture of God. The view that God is actively engaged in the world, responding and reacting to the actions and decisions of humans, provides us a far more personal picture of God than the one that absolute foreknowledge requires.
Yet, however interesting McCabe’s views are in light of our concerns today, they had little influence on his contemporaries and went largely unnoticed. But even so, his formulations provide an interesting precedent for later reflections on the nature of God. As William King concluded, “With the limited theological and exegetical resources at his disposal, [McCabe] was still able to articulate a doctrine of God that was somewhat ahead of its time.”20
In another study, David Alstad Tiessen finds in McCabe’s work a nineteenth-century Wesleyan precedent for open theism. The two views share a commitment to the primacy of scriptural revelation, an emphasis on God’s concrete personality, a distinction between God’s unchanging nature and his experience and action, along with simila...
