Open theism
Open theism is a minority Christian position holding that God does not know the future free choices of creatures — not because God is limited, but because future free choices are not the kind of thing that exist to be known in advance.
Open theism emerged as a distinct position in the late twentieth century, associated with philosophers and theologians like Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, William Hasker, and John Sanders. It tries to preserve genuine creaturely freedom without the metaphysical gymnastics of Molinism (middle knowledge) or the determinist implications of classical Calvinism. The move is to deny that there are yet-to-be-made free choices sitting out there waiting for God to know them. The future is open — genuinely not-yet-settled — and God's omniscience consists in knowing everything that exists to be known, which does not include future free contingencies.
On this view, God is maximally intelligent and knows all actual facts, all necessary truths, all creaturely probabilities, and every free choice the moment it is made. What God does not have is advance knowledge of which way a free choice will go before it is made, because there is no fact of the matter until the choice is made. This is a smaller departure from traditional omniscience than it looks: God's knowledge is still complete, it is just a complete knowledge of a temporally dynamic reality.
The position solves several long-standing problems in classical theism. It dissolves the tension between foreknowledge and freedom (no foreknowledge, no tension). It makes divine responsiveness to prayer and changing circumstances coherent (God genuinely reacts, because there is something new to react to). And it takes the biblical language of divine regret and accommodation more literally than classical theism can.
It also pays real costs. It cuts against the traditional doctrine of divine immutability, and it forces a rethinking of how prophecy works. Critics within mainstream Christianity have accused open theists of limiting God's power or denying his eternity. Defenders reply that they are preserving a different, deeper, and more scriptural picture of God — one who is genuinely relational, temporally engaged, and not a static metaphysical abstraction.
For a secular reader, open theism is worth understanding because it shows that the tension between divine foreknowledge and human freedom is taken seriously inside the Christian tradition itself, not just by outside critics. It is also a reminder that "classical theism" is a specific philosophical position with real alternatives, not the only way to be a theist.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Foreknowledge and Free Will
- Clark Pinnock et al., The Openness of God (1994)
Related terms
- MolinismMolinism is the sixteenth-century Jesuit framework developed by Luis de Molina that tries to reconcile divine foreknowledge with libertarian creaturely freedom through a doctrine of divine "middle knowledge" — God's knowledge of what every free creature would do in every possible circumstance.
- Classical theismClassical theism is the philosophical picture of God developed by Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, and al-Ghazali — a God who is simple, immutable, atemporal, impassible, and omnipotent, and whose existence is identical to his essence.
- Theological compatibilismTheological compatibilism is the position that divine foreknowledge or predestination is compatible with genuine creaturely free will — distinct from philosophical compatibilism, which addresses the compatibility of free will with natural determinism.