Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07034. Predestination and foreknowledge are two words that make many Christians flinch, and the flinching usually has more to do with what they have heard about the words than with what the Bible does with them. Predestination sounds like fatalism. Foreknowledge sounds like a divine spreadsheet. Neither impression survives an honest look at the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5037. Free will is one of those subjects where philosophers tie knots, theologians draw swords, and ordinary believers quietly wonder what they are allowed to think. So let me say at the outset where I stand: yes, we have free will, because the Bible everywhere treats human beings as responsible persons whose choices are…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2058. Middle knowledge, in Latin scientia media, is the theological concept sitting at the very centre of Molinism, the framework I looked at in a companion article on this site. Middle knowledge refers to God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2057. What Molinism teaches has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades, and it deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment rather than a caricature in either direction. It is a framework developed to explain how God can know and providentially work through history with certainty while human beings retain…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02033 The question has a sharp edge to it. If God knew before the world was made exactly what every person would ever choose, in every circumstance, across all of time — then in what meaningful sense are those choices really free? When you sat down this morning and decided what to have for…