Divine sovereignty-omniscience inerrancy, and open theism: An evaluation

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2002 by Wellum, Stephen J

In addition, given the fact that prophecies have taken place, then, given the claims of Scripture, they must necessarily come to pass and thus be true. But, once again, if one denies that God is able to know future contingents, then how does one explain how God can know that these prophecies will truly come to pass? Would it not be more consistent to affirm that God possibly has or might err on these matters? But if one were to admit that, then how would one also affirm that Scripture is an infallible and inerrant revelation on all areas that it touches, including the prophetic realm? It seems that the openness proposal faces a serious dilemma. Either reject the inerrancy of Scripture and admit that God can only give us probabilities about the future, or reject the openness proposal regarding divine omniscience for the traditional view of God's exhaustive knowledge of the future and retain the doctrine of inerrancy. At least on the surface, there seems to be no other option.

Of course, many non-evangelical theologians do not have a problem with this conclusion.58 But for many open theists who want to maintain both the doctrine of inerrancy and their view of divine omniscience, this poses a serious dilemma. Indeed, William Hacker admits quite candidly that one of the major obstacles to the acceptance of their view is that of predictive prophecy. As Hasker asks, "if God does not know what the future will be like, how can he tell us what it will be like?"59 How, then, do open theists respond? Generally, there are three responses that all center on their understanding of biblical prophecy-an understanding of which does not entail divine foreknowledge of future contingents. Let us look at each in turn to discover whether the attempt to reconcile a high view of Scripture with the openness proposal is successful or not.

First, there is a kind of conditional prophecy which does not require a detailed foreknowledge of what will actually happen since the purpose of it is to call God's people back to covenant faithfulness and repentance.60 In fact, conditional prophecy assumes that "what is foretold may not happen."61 Second, many prophecies are "predictions based on foresight drawn from existing trends and tendencies" which do not require God to have foreknowledge of future contingents in order to give us predictions.62 As Hasker reminds us, "even with our grossly inadequate knowledge of such trends and tendencies, we invest enormous amounts of energy trying to make forecasts in this way; evidently God with his perfect knowledge could do it much better."63 An example of such a prophecy is God's prediction to Moses about the hardness of Pharaoh's heart. Richard Rice suggests that "the ruler's character may have been so rigid that it was entirely predictable. God understood him will enough to know exactly what his reaction to certain situations would be."64 Third, many prophecies include things that are foreknown, because it is God's purpose or intention to bring them about irrespective of human decision. After all, God is God, and if he intends to accomplish a certain task, he does not have to foresee it before he can know about it; he can simply declare it so, and it will be accomplished. Thus, as Richard Rice explains, "if God's will is the only condition required for something to happen, if human cooperation is not involved, then God can unilaterally guarantee its fulfillment, and he can announce it ahead of time ... God can predict his own actions."65 Most of the events of redemptive history-the prediction of the incarnation, the cross, and the second coming-are all placed in this last category by open theists.66