Open Theism: What It Gets Right and Where It Overreaches
Open Theism: What It Gets Right and Where It Overreaches
Open theism is the view that God knows everything that can be known, but that the future is partly open, because the free choices creatures have yet to make are not yet there to be known, so God knows them as possibilities. It grew out of the Bible's relenting texts and the conviction that prayer changes what happens, and around the year 2000 it divided evangelical theology, with Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, Gregory Boyd and William Hasker as its leading voices. Its case is strong, its critics answer it strongly, and the Many Beings Framework offers a third way that keeps what the view was protecting and returns the settled future it gave away.
Key takeaways
- Open theism affirms omniscience and redefines the future. God knows all that is knowable; free choices not yet made are known as possibilities.
- Its case is serious. It reads the relenting and testing texts as they stand, defends libertarian freedom, and gives prayer real effect.
- Its critics press on prophecy and promise. Classical theists, Calvinists and Molinists each argue that specific foretold free acts and settled promises require God to know the future whole.
- Frame-Indexed Classical Theism offers a third way. Against both open theism and Calvinism, it holds that the future is open in the creature's frame and whole in God's, because "open" and "know" are said analogically of God and of us.
What is open theism?
Open theism is the position that God, out of love, has made His knowledge of the future and His plans for it partly conditional on what His creatures freely do. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the view puts the distinctive claim carefully: its proponents affirm that God knows all the truths that can be known, but hold that "there simply are not yet truths about what will occur in the 'open,' undetermined future." The disagreement lies in the future itself: on this view tomorrow's free choices become facts when they are made.
John Sanders calls this dynamic omniscience in his introduction to the view in the Reformed Review (2007). God knows the past and the present exhaustively. He knows the future as partly definite, where He has decided to act or where causes already fix the outcome, and partly indefinite, where free creatures have yet to decide. Its defenders therefore describe their disagreement with other freewill theists as a dispute over what is knowable, with both sides agreeing that God knows whatever is.
The rest of the package follows. On the open view God is everlasting and experiences time with us. He exercises general providence over the world, leaving room for creatures to act, and He takes real risks in doing so. He is affected by what we do, which places the view within relational theology and sets it against strong divine impassibility, the classical teaching that God cannot be acted upon or moved by creatures.
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Its defenders do not all hold the same logic of the future. The philosopher Alan Rhoda distinguishes four varieties. Some hold that God has chosen not to know future contingents. Some, such as William Hasker, hold that such truths are unknowable in principle. Some hold that statements about future free acts are neither true nor false. Gregory Boyd holds that "will" and "will not" statements about them are both false, and that "might and might not" is what is true. That last dispute, over future contingents, is where the view lives.
Where did the open view come from?
Proponents point to precursors. Calcidius in the fourth century held something close to the view, and it reappears in Socinus in the sixteenth century, in Samuel Fancourt in the eighteenth, and in nineteenth-century writers such as Adam Clarke, Jules Lequier and Lorenzo McCabe. Several twentieth-century philosophers, among them A. N. Prior, J. R. Lucas, Peter Geach and Richard Swinburne, argued for its central claim without using the name.
The name came in 1980, with Richard Rice's book The Openness of God. In 1994 five evangelical scholars, Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, published a collection under the same title, and the debate went public. Sanders's The God Who Risks (1998) set out its doctrine of providence, and Boyd's God of the Possible (2000) made its biblical case. Pinnock followed with Most Moved Mover. The replies came quickly: Bruce Ware's God's Lesser Glory (2000) and John Frame's No Other God (2001) led the Calvinist response.
The Evangelical Theological Society took the question up directly. In 2001 its members passed a resolution by about seventy percent, with eleven percent abstaining, Christianity Today reported: "We believe 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." Roger Nicole, one of the society's founding members, then brought charges against Pinnock and Sanders, arguing that their books violated the society's doctrinal statement.
The vote came at the annual meeting in Atlanta in November 2003, where expulsion required two thirds. After Pinnock revised a passage in Most Moved Mover, only 32.9 percent voted to remove him. For Sanders, 62.7 percent voted for removal, and he kept his membership by 27 votes, according to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's report. The society rejected the doctrine and retained its two best-known proponents.
What is the case for open theism?
The case begins with Scripture read as it stands. After Abraham raises the knife over Isaac, the angel of the LORD speaks:
"Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." (Genesis 22:12, NIV)
Defenders of the view ask what "now I know" means if God knew all along. God also states His own policy through Jeremiah, and the policy is conditional in both directions:
"If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it." (Jeremiah 18:7–10, NIV)
The narratives match the policy. At Sinai, after Moses pleads for Israel, "the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened" (Exodus 32:14, NIV). At Nineveh, "When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened" (Jonah 3:10, NIV). Hezekiah is told he will die, prays, and is given fifteen more years (2 Kings 20). So when someone asks whether God changes His mind, the answer on this view is yes, in response to people, while His character stays constant. Better, they argue, to let the doctrine of foreknowledge follow the text than to reread the Bible's most vivid narratives as figures of speech.
The philosophical case is Hasker's, from The Openness of God. Suppose God believed yesterday that you will choose coffee tomorrow. His belief cannot be mistaken, and yesterday's belief is now part of the fixed past, which no one can change. It seems to follow that you cannot choose otherwise, and if freedom means the ability to choose otherwise, you are not free. The IEP entry observes that whether one accepts open theism largely depends on whether one grants that the past is fixed in this way. It also supplies the open view's answer to whether God knows the future: He knows all of it that is there to be known.
Proponents add a providential point. If God simply foresees what will happen, the IEP entry argues, He cannot use that knowledge to arrange anything differently, because what He foresees already includes His own responses. Prophecy, on their reading, falls into three kinds: announcements of what God has decided to do, conditional warnings, and forecasts drawn from His exhaustive knowledge of the present. The pastoral case follows from both. Prayer changes outcomes, and the evils of the world come from the misuse of a freedom God chose to risk.
Volume Four works through the relenting texts, answered prayer and divine emotion at length in Resolving Immutability & Interaction.
Is open theism the same as process theology?
The open view is a distinct position from process theology, though the two share two convictions: the future is partly made of possibilities, and God is affected by the world. There the agreement ends. The line falls at God's aseity, His existence from Himself alone, and at the freedom of His act of creation.
Alan Rhoda's definition of the view includes that God created the world from nothing "and can unilaterally intervene in it as he pleases," a clause he writes to exclude process theism, which denies both. Boyd adds that process thought leaves no room for creation from nothing, answered prayer, miracles or the Incarnation. As he puts it, "In Open Theism, God chooses to create a world with an open future, while in PT [process theology] God has created of necessity." On the open view God made the world freely; on the process view He made it because He had to.
What do its critics say?
Three families of critics answer the open view, and each has a strong case.
Classical theists deny that God knows the future by looking ahead from inside time. Aquinas holds that God knows contingent things "not successively … but simultaneously," because His knowledge is measured by eternity. "His glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality," he writes in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 14, a. 13), and he gives an image: "he who goes along the road, does not see those who come after him; whereas he who sees the whole road from a height, sees at once all travelling by the way." On this view God's knowledge stands outside the past that Hasker's argument needs. Classical theists also keep the impassibility of God, confessed in the Westminster Confession (1646) as "a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions." For the tradition behind this answer, see our article on Thomism.
Calvinists press Scripture and providence. John Frame, writing for The Gospel Coalition, calls openness theology "essentially a resurgence of the Socinian heresy condemned by the church in the 16th century." The texts are direct:
"Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, 'My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.'" (Isaiah 46:9–10, NIV)
"Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." (Psalm 139:16, NIV)
Jesus foretells a free act in detail: "Truly I tell you," Jesus answered, "this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times" (Matthew 26:34, NIV). Critics such as John Piper read the relenting texts as God described in human terms, with prayer as the means God ordained to bring about what He intended. A pastoral objection follows. If God cannot know what free creatures will do, His promises about the future become skilled projections, and the believer cannot finally rest on them. Our article on the sovereignty of God sets out that doctrine across the traditions.
Molinists grant the open view one of its points. The IEP entry calls Molinism "the greatest competitor to Open Theism," because it agrees that simple foresight gives God no providential control. Molinists answer with middle knowledge: God knows what every possible free creature would do in every circumstance, and chooses which world to create. That keeps libertarian freedom and meticulous providence together; our article on Molinism explains middle knowledge and the objections to it.
The open view's defenders reply that foretold acts fall under decree, condition or forecast, and that God's power and resourcefulness secure His ends without His knowing every choice along the way. Their critics answer that Peter's denial is exactly the kind of case the reply cannot cover.
Volume One takes up foreknowledge and human freedom from the ground up; download it free.
How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer open theism?
Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error. It is the Many Beings Framework's position. The open view takes the relational texts and human freedom with full seriousness, and its critics press it on prophecy and promise. Calvinism keeps the settled future and must read the relenting texts as figures; Molinism keeps it by adding a further kind of divine knowledge. FICT argues that the choice between a God whose knowledge waits on us and a future closed to our freedom is unnecessary, because "open," "know," "before" and "change his mind" are said of God and of us analogically.
The framework holds that there is one reality. In God's frame, the Absolute Metaphysical Frame, God is atemporal, simple and a se, and He knows the whole of created history in one act without succession. In the human frame, the Human Finite Frame, we are sequential, composite and contingent, and we meet that same reality one moment at a time. In our frame the future is open. Choices are undecided until they are made, alternatives are real, and prayer is offered before the outcome. The Many Beings Fallacy is treating a term such as "open" or "future" as if it meant the same thing in both frames.
Open theism commits that fallacy in its most sympathetic form. Because the future is open for us, it concludes that the future must be open for God. Its description of the future is accurate. The error lies in the next step, where a truth about how creatures meet the future becomes a claim about what God knows. Scripture itself holds both reports within a single chapter. God says of Saul:
"I regret that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions." (1 Samuel 15:11, NIV)
Eighteen verses later, Samuel says:
"He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a human being, that he should change his mind." (1 Samuel 15:29, NIV)
Both are true. The first reports God's one act as it meets Saul's disobedience in sequence. The second states what God is. Exodus 32:14 and Jonah 3:10 keep their full force as true reports, and Isaiah 46:10 keeps its full force as a statement about God.
God's knowledge of our choices corresponds to what we freely do; the knowing is God's own act, and it lays no necessity on the choice. Prayer is a real cause of what happens: had the believer not prayed, the outcome God eternally knows would have been different, and God remains unchanged. And the promises are settled, because the one act that knows the end also sustains it. The same indexing applies to divine emotion. God's love, grief and wrath are real and held whole, without passion or succession, and the creature meets them in sequence. Strict impassibility and the open view's passibility share a single mistake, reading "emotion" univocally.
Critics will push back. Defenders of the open view will say a timeless God cannot respond to anyone. A Calvinist may ask whether this is analogy with a new label. Anyone may ask what would falsify it. The framework's answer is that the index is set by the natures of God and man before any dilemma is considered, that it says in advance which terms carry their frame (time, possibility, agency, value) and which keep one meaning in both (identity, logic, arithmetic), and that it fails if a classical dilemma turns out to involve no such term carried across frames. Volume One makes that argument in full, and the statement of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism sets out its conclusions in one place.
Volume One carries the argument from its foundations to the Many Beings Fallacy, each step shown; get your free copy.
How the positions compare
Each position below protects something real, and each pays for it somewhere.
| Position | The future | How God knows it | What it protects | What it pays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open theism (Pinnock, Sanders, Boyd, Hasker) | Partly settled, partly possibility | As it is: definite as definite, possible as possible | The relenting texts read as they stand; libertarian freedom; effective prayer | Specific foretold free acts; settled promises |
| Classical and Calvinist theism (Aquinas, Frame, Ware) | Settled | Whole, from eternity or by decree | Prophecy, providence, divine perfection | The relenting texts become figures of speech |
| Molinism | Settled | By middle knowledge and decree | Libertarian freedom with meticulous providence | An extra kind of knowledge that needs grounding |
| Frame-Indexed Classical Theism | Open in the human frame, whole in God's | In one atemporal act, as correspondence | Every text as a true report; freedom; prayer; settled promises | Fails if a classical dilemma involves no frame-sensitive term |
Frequently asked questions
Is open theism heresy?
Many evangelical critics say so, or close to it: the Calvinist theologian John Frame calls it a resurgence of Socinianism, and the Evangelical Theological Society's 2001 resolution affirmed God's infallible knowledge of all future free decisions. The same society declined in 2003 to expel Pinnock or Sanders. The Many Beings Framework holds that the view errs about God's knowledge while defending real goods.
Does God know the future?
Classical theists, Calvinists and Molinists answer that God knows the future exhaustively, including every free choice. Open theists answer that God knows all of the future that is there to be known, and knows free choices not yet made as possibilities. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that God knows the whole of history in one act from eternity, while in the human frame the future remains open and our choices remain our own.
Does God change His mind?
Exodus 32:14 says the LORD relented, and 1 Samuel 15:29 says He does not change His mind. The open view reads the first literally and the second as a statement about God's character. Calvinists read the first as human description. The framework reads both as true: God's one unchanging act, met by creatures in sequence, is truly reported as relenting. Volume Four treats the relenting texts in full.
Is open theism the same as Arminianism?
Open theists belong to the same freewill family as Arminians and Wesleyans, sharing libertarian freedom and God's responsiveness to prayer. Sanders notes that most freewill theists hold that God simply foreknows every future choice, and that the majority have held God to be timelessly eternal. The open view parts company on those two points, holding that God is everlasting within time and that the future contains possibilities God knows as possibilities.
Isn't frame-indexing just relativism?
Relativism makes truth vary with the one who holds it. The framework holds that there is one reality, that God's frame is its ground, and that the human frame is a real, bounded mode of access to that same reality. When Scripture says God relented and that He does not change His mind, both reports are true of one reality, and natures fix the difference between the frames before any observer has an opinion.
Where to go from here
The open view read the creature's frame correctly. The future does meet us as possibility, our choices are ours, and prayer is answered in time. Its mistake was to make that description the measure of God's knowledge, and the settled promises were lost with it. Read the same texts with each term indexed to its frame and both reports stand, the relenting and the changeless, as true of one reality.
Volume One, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma, lays the foundation and is free to download. Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, carries the framework into divine repentance, answered prayer and divine emotion, the ground on which the open view makes its case. Volume Three, Resolving Time and Eternity, treats divine eternity, human temporality and future contingents. The rest of the series takes the same rule through evil, infinity and providence.
