Arminians detest the doctrine of predestination as presented by Calvinists. Since the word itself is Biblical, Arminians are forced to define the term in a manner consonant with their assumptions. In order to do that, they must recast the traditional doctrines related to God’s knowledge.
Most of us have no problem saying that God knows all things; but this has vexed most Arminians. Many evangelical thinkers are promoting what is called “free will theism” or “the openness of God” theism.
Such is the direct result of Arminian theology pushed to its logical tendencies. 5 Gregory Boyd, who himself is an Arminian, has argued that “Arminian theologians have not generally followed through the logic of their insight into the nature of creaturely freedom to its logical (and biblical) conclusions.” 6 Their view is astounding.
They, the Arminians who are Freewill Theists, are not willing to concede that God knows all things, at least not in the traditional sense. For example, Clark Pinnock argues that “omniscience need not mean exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events. if that were its meaning, the future would be fixed and determined, as is the past.” 7 For them, the idea of foreknowledge "requires only that we define the scope of foreknowledge with care. In some respects the future is knowable, in others it is not. God knows a great deal about what will happen.
He knows everything that will ever happen as the direct result of factors that already exist. He knows infallibly the content of his own future actions, to the extent that they are not related to human choices. All that God does not know is the content of future free decisions, and this is because decisions are not there to know until they occur."
8 The problem with Rice’s seemingly harmless formulation is that the whole future, as envisioned by this explanation, is filled with nothing but numerous human decisions. In order for God to know even two seconds into the future, God must know the decisions of the first second which He is not permitted to know (or, as they argue, He chose not to know).
If He does not know it, then how can He know His own future actions when they are dependent upon the free acts of man? Thus God in fact does not know the future at all because He does not know our decisions nor His responses to them. Rice is even more adamant in another book: “Not even God knows the future in all its details. Some parts remain indefinite until they actually occur, and so they can’t be known in advance.”
9 This sort of formulation is gaining ground among some evangelicals.
This would quite naturally lead to the notion of “divine learning.” Namely, God must learn as the future unfolds. May it never be said that He infallibly knows all things. In fact, without much shame, they virtually concede in some measure that God is surprised. “God is not startled and is never struck dumb as the future unfolds, but an element of surprise embraces the divine knowledge just as it does ours even when we think our predictive powers are at their height. Were you a god, would you not find it dull to fix the future irrevocably from eternity?”
10 That last question typifies and exposes their theological tendency, namely, God created in the image of man. In response, I ask, “What does it matter if I should be bored? How does my own boredom determine the nature of God’s knowledge? And in what real sense do we have any predictive powers? Isn’t God’s predictive power the sheer evidence of His majestic divinity?” Yet Rice’s assumption admits this central thesis: God is merely a superhuman being.
John Sanders’s thesis is more subtle but also just as destructive. He argues that the nature of the relationship necessitates risks and therefore God’s providence is a risk of a sort. He states that God is “amazingly creative” and enters into a risk relationship with human beings.
“In the God-human relationship God sometimes decides alone what will happen; at other times God modifies his plans in order to accommodate the choices, actions and desires of his creatures.”
11 God, in effect, reacts to our decisions and actions. But that is Sanders’s point, God takes risks. He further explains that when God created the world, He had a “great chance of success and little possibility of failure while concomitantly having a … high amount of risk in the sense that it matters deeply to God how things go.”
12 He says that sin was possible, but not plausible because God took a risk. Sanders is aware that our sensibilities would be “shocked” with this sort of formulation. But a God of risk taking (unaware of what the future infallibly holds) is for Sanders the most relational picture of God. In essence, his view could be summed up by these words: “But God sovereignly decides not to control each and every event, and some things go contrary to what God intends and may not turn out completely as God desires. Hence, God takes risks in creating this sort of world.”
13 Let us be frank, God is a big God and He can take all these mishaps; the risk is something He is big enough to take. 14 But what about that maverick atom that might destroy my health, is He actively involved? I hope so; no, I know so, the Bible tells me so. 15
For the Arminians, the fundamental belief in man’s freedom must be retained at all cost. Omniscience is denied (and thus the doctrine of Middle Knowledge is readily held by many so as to take omniscience seriously).
16 This denial of omniscience is not held by all Arminians. Samuel Wakefield almost sounds like a Calvinist in his defense of God’s omniscience, and he is well acquainted with the philosophical “problems” associated with the notion of necessary future contingent acts of human beings.
Rev. Mark Herzer
J.