What Does God Know and When Does He Know It?

The Current Controversy over Divine Foreknowledge

By: Millard J. Erickson

Narrated by: Ben Hunter

Does God know the future? Or is the future unknowable to even God? Open theists believe the search for biblical answers will spark a new Revolution. Are they right? Arguing that God interacts with his creatures spontaneously, the controversial new movement known as “open theism” has called classic church theology up for reexamination. Confronting this view, classic theists maintain that God has complete foreknowledge and that open-theist arguments are unorthodox. Each view has implications for our vision of the future and of God’s dealings with humanity.

Incomplete Argumentation

Erickson does a decent job dismantling the open theist view of foreknowledge, but he doesn’t seriously develop the classical view of foreknowledge. Instead he almost takes that view of granted. As someone who agrees with Erickson in affirming the classical view, this was a disappointing omission, and it meant that Erickson did not address the claims of open theists as comprehensively as he could have. He only mentioned issues like immutability, aseity, etc. in passing or downplayed the importance of these issues in affirming God’s foreknowledge, yet these are essential in providing a strong defense of divine foreknowledge. It’s possible that such discussions could have been extraneous to Erickson’s purpose for this book, but that wasn’t clear. If his purpose was to refute open theism and affirm divine foreknowledge, he ignored *major* arguments in favor of his position.