What Is Open Theism, and Is It Biblical?

Question 2004.

Open theism is the teaching that God does not exhaustively know the future, particularly the future free choices of human beings, because those choices do not yet exist to be known even by an omniscient God. On this view, the future is genuinely "open," not yet settled, and God discovers what happens alongside His creatures in something closer to real time, adjusting His plans and His strategy as history unfolds in ways even He could not have fully anticipated in advance. I want to explain where this idea comes from, why it has attracted a number of otherwise thoughtful evangelical theologians, and why I reject it firmly as unbiblical, while still taking seriously the genuine pastoral concern that motivates many people toward it.

This deserves a Deep Dive because this is not simply an obscure academic curiosity. It touches how we understand prophecy, prayer, providence, and the very trustworthiness of God’s promises.

Where Open Theism Comes From

Open theism emerged largely in the late twentieth century among theologians such as Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, and John Sanders, who were wrestling honestly with the problem of evil and the nature of genuine human freedom. Their concern was that classical theism’s picture of an eternally settled, exhaustively foreknowing God seemed to make human choices feel scripted rather than genuinely free, and made it harder to explain why a loving God would allow specific tragedies He had, on the traditional view, always known were coming. Open theists proposed that if God does not yet know exactly what free creatures will do, then genuine risk, genuine relationship, and genuine divine responsiveness become easier to account for.

What Open Theism Gets Right About the Danger It Is Reacting Against

I have some sympathy for the underlying concern, even though I reject the solution. A rigid, Calvinist-style determinism, in which God has eternally decreed every single event including every sin, does create real problems for understanding human responsibility and for avoiding making God the author of evil. Open theism is, in part, an overcorrection against that determinism, an attempt to protect genuine human freedom by weakening God’s knowledge rather than by rightly distinguishing, as I try to do throughout my own framework, between God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and the genuine freedom of the choices He foreknows.

Why Open Theism Fails the Test of Scripture

Scripture repeatedly grounds its claims to authority in exactly the kind of detailed knowledge of the future that open theism denies God possesses. Isaiah 46:9-10 has God declaring "the end from the beginning" as the very proof that He alone is God, something the idols cannot do. Specific messianic prophecies, the place of Christ’s birth in Micah 5:2, the manner of His death in Psalm 22, the precise details of Daniel’s prophetic timeline, were fulfilled centuries after they were spoken, in events that depended on the free choices of many individuals, kings, soldiers, and crowds, none of whom were coerced. If God did not exhaustively know those future free choices in advance, these prophecies could not have been given with the specificity Scripture actually gives them.

Cyrus, Named Before He Was Born

Perhaps the single most striking piece of predictive prophecy in the entire Old Testament, and one open theism struggles to account for, is Isaiah 45:1, where God names the Persian king Cyrus by name roughly a century and a half before Cyrus was born, and declares that this specific, named individual will decree the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s temple. This was not a vague, generic prediction that some future king somewhere would eventually help Israel. It named a specific historical figure who had not yet been conceived, let alone crowned, and described the specific policy decision he would freely make regarding a foreign people’s religious institutions. If the future free choices of individuals do not yet exist to be known, as open theism claims, this kind of prophecy becomes not just difficult but strictly impossible, since God would have had to correctly guess both the existence of a particular future person and the free political decision he would make more than a century in advance.

Boyd’s Warfare Theodicy and What It Costs

Gregory Boyd, widely regarded as one of open theism’s most articulate and thoughtful defenders, has argued at length for what he calls a warfare worldview, in which much of the suffering in the world results from a genuine, ongoing cosmic conflict whose outcome God does not fully control or foreknow in its particulars. This has real pastoral appeal, since it lets Boyd tell a grieving parent that God did not know their child’s death was coming and grieves it every bit as much as they do, offering solidarity rather than the harder question of why an all-knowing God allowed it. But the cost is severe: a God who did not see the tragedy coming cannot be fully trusted to see tomorrow’s tragedies coming either, and the comfort of "God is in control, even here, even now" is no longer available in any meaningful sense, replaced by a God who is doing His best alongside you rather than One who has already secured the ultimate outcome.

Open Theism and the Trustworthiness of God’s Promises

Every promise in Scripture about the future, the certainty of Christ’s return, the guarantee of final resurrection, the assurance that God’s purposes for history will be accomplished, depends on God actually knowing how the intervening free choices of billions of people will unfold. If God’s knowledge of the future is genuinely open and incomplete, as open theism claims, then His promises about that future are, at best, His current best estimate rather than a certainty grounded in exhaustive knowledge. I do not think that is a minor qualification. It changes the entire character of biblical hope, from resting in a God who has already seen the end from the beginning to trusting a God who is hoping, along with us, that things turn out the way He has promised.

The Peter and Judas Problem

Jesus told Peter exactly how many times he would deny Him and exactly when the rooster would crow, in Luke 22:34, a prediction fulfilled to the letter through Peter’s own free, culpable, and grieved choice. Judas’s betrayal was foretold centuries earlier in the Psalms and referenced by Jesus as fulfilling Scripture, yet Judas acted freely and remains fully responsible for his sin. Open theism cannot easily account for this kind of precise predictive foreknowledge of specific individual free choices without either denying the genuine freedom of the choice or denying the accuracy of the prophecy, and Scripture will not let us deny either.

The Difference Between Simple Foreknowledge and Middle Knowledge

Theologians working within a broadly Arminian or Molinist framework have proposed a further refinement worth mentioning here: middle knowledge, the idea that God knows not only everything that will actually happen but also everything that would happen under any possible set of circumstances, including counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. This is a distinct position from both open theism and hard determinism, and while I hold my views with appropriate care on the finer points of this debate, I find middle knowledge a genuinely useful category for thinking through how God’s exhaustive knowledge and human freedom relate. What all these classical positions share, against open theism specifically, is the conviction that God’s knowledge of the future, however it is philosophically modelled, is complete rather than developing, settled rather than genuinely open.

Distinguishing Foreknowledge From Determinism

The mistake open theism makes, in my view, is assuming that if God knows a choice in advance, that choice cannot really be free, so the only way to protect freedom is to remove the knowledge. But foreknowledge is not the same thing as causation. I know, with complete certainty, what I chose to have for breakfast yesterday, and that knowledge did not cause my choice; it simply reflects an accurate record of a free act. God’s knowledge of the future operates on a similar logic, except that His vantage point is not bound by time the way mine is. He does not learn the future by watching it unfold from within it; He knows it exhaustively and eternally, in a manner appropriate to His own timeless nature, without that knowledge being the cause of what it knows.

Open Theism’s Reading of Divine Regret

Open theists often point to passages where God appears to regret a decision, such as Genesis 6:6, where God is grieved that He made man on the earth, or 1 Samuel 15:11, where God regrets making Saul king, as evidence that God did not foresee how these situations would unfold. I read these texts differently. Scripture regularly describes God in emotionally rich, genuinely anthropomorphic language that communicates real divine response without requiring ignorance of the future. A judge can righteously grieve a criminal’s choices while having accurately anticipated, based on that person’s established character, that they were likely to offend again. God’s grief over human sin is a genuine, personal response to the moral horror of what people freely do, not evidence that the outcome caught Him by surprise. Reading every expression of divine emotion as proof of open theism requires flattening a rich, poetic, deeply personal vocabulary into a single wooden inference it was never meant to bear.

Why the Stakes of This Debate Are Pastoral, Not Just Academic

I want to end this section by being honest about why I think this debate matters beyond the seminar room. When a believer is facing a diagnosis, a bereavement, or a season of prolonged suffering, the question of whether God actually knew this was coming, and remains fully capable of working it toward a purposeful end, is not an abstract philosophical curiosity. It is the difference between praying to a God who has already secured the outcome and is inviting you into a story whose ending He has seen, and hoping alongside a God who is discovering the plot at the same pace you are. I want to offer people the first kind of comfort, because I believe it is the comfort Scripture actually offers, grounded in a God whose knowledge of your future, however uncertain it feels from where you sit, has never once been incomplete.

What Open Theism Means for the Nature of Scripture Itself

There is a further difficulty worth naming: if open theism is correct, then a significant portion of predictive prophecy in Scripture becomes, at the moment it was written, either an educated guess dressed up as certain revelation or a statement that was true when written but could, in principle, have failed to come to pass had free agents chosen differently. Neither option sits comfortably with the doctrine of inspiration I hold, which affirms that Scripture is God-breathed and without error in everything it teaches, including its predictive content. If a prophecy could genuinely have failed because the future was not yet settled when it was given, the prophecy was never actually a certain word from God in the first place, only a highly probable estimate, which is not the category Scripture itself claims for its own predictive material.

What Genuine Divine Self-Limitation Looks Like

There is a category open theists are reaching for that does have biblical warrant, just not the one they have chosen. God has indeed limited Himself in certain respects, not in His knowledge, but in how He exercises His power, by creating beings with genuine freedom and choosing not to override that freedom except in specific, purposeful ways. That self-limitation is an expression of God’s character and His commitment to real relationship, not a gap in His knowledge or a limitation forced on Him from outside. He knows exhaustively what will happen; He has chosen, for reasons rooted in love, not to control everything that happens.

What Open Theism’s Popularity Reveals About Modern Discomfort With Mystery

Part of what has made open theism attractive in recent decades is a broader modern discomfort with unresolved tension and mystery. Classical theism has always held foreknowledge and freedom together without claiming to fully explain the mechanism by which both are simultaneously true, trusting that God’s own mode of existing outside time makes this coherent even where our finite minds cannot fully trace the logic. Open theism offers a tidier system by simply removing one side of the tension. I understand the appeal of tidiness. But Scripture does not always hand us tidy systems, and I would rather hold a genuine, biblically grounded mystery than resolve it by quietly editing away one of the very truths Scripture insists on holding together.

Where Open Theism Sits Among Evangelical Views

It is worth noting that open theism remains a minority position even among the broader evangelical scholars who have engaged it seriously, and several prominent proponents have faced significant pushback from within their own denominations and institutions precisely because the view sits so uneasily alongside historic evangelical confessions of God’s exhaustive foreknowledge. I raise this not as an argument from popularity, since truth is not decided by a show of hands, but to note that the concerns I have raised here are not idiosyncratic to my own dispensational framework. They reflect a broad, longstanding evangelical consensus that open theism, whatever its pastoral motivations, moves outside the boundaries of what Scripture will allow us to say about God’s knowledge of the future.

So, now what?

If you have encountered open theism, whether through a book, a podcast, or a well-meaning friend trying to solve the problem of evil, I would encourage you to hold onto the concern behind it, the desire to protect real human freedom and a genuinely relational God, while rejecting the solution itself. The God of Scripture is not discovering your future alongside you. He has already seen the end from the beginning, and every promise He has made to you rests on the fact that nothing about your future, however uncertain it feels to you sitting where you are today, is uncertain to Him at all.

For Further Study

Millard Erickson has written extensively, carefully, and critically on open theism from a mainstream evangelical position, and his work remains one of the clearest theological rebuttals available. Charles Ryrie’s treatment of the attributes of God in Basic Theology lays out the classical doctrine of divine omniscience that open theism departs from, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology provides the wider dispensational framework within which exhaustive divine foreknowledge and genuine human freedom are held together without contradiction. J. Dwight Pentecost’s detailed exegetical work on Old Testament prophecy is also well worth consulting for readers wanting to see, in careful and sustained detail, the sheer cumulative weight of fulfilled predictive prophecy that open theism’s account of divine knowledge has to somehow explain away or reinterpret, book after book, prophecy after prophecy, across the whole span of the Old Testament witness.

Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done.

Isaiah 46:9-10