[This post first appeared at Gospel Encounter where comments can be made]
I do not remember where I first read Augustine’s comparison of foreknowledge to memory, but it stuck in my mind and I continue to find it helpful to this day. The translation below comes from Augustine: Earlier Writings (1953), edited and translated by J.H.S. Burleigh, pages 176-177.
Augustine, “On Free Will”:
If you knew in advance that such and such a man would sin, there would be no necessity for him to sin. […] Unless I am mistaken, you would not directly compel the man to sin, though you knew beforehand that he was going to sin. Nor does your prescience in itself compel him to sin even though he was certainly going to sin, as we must assume if you have real prescience.
So there is no contradiction here. Simply you know beforehand what another is going to do with his own will. Similarly God compels no man to sin, though he sees beforehand those who are going to sin by their own will.
11. Why then should he not justly punish sins which, though he had foreknowledge of them, he did not compel the sinner to commit?
Just as you apply no compulsion to past events by having them in your memory, so God by his foreknowledge does not use compulsion in the case of future events. Just as you remember your past actions, though all that you remember were not actions of your own, so God has foreknowledge of all his own actions, but is not the agent of all that he foreknows. Of evil actions he is not the agent but the just punisher.
From this you may understand with what justice God punishes sins, for he has no responsibility for the future actions of men though he knows them beforehand. If he ought not to award punishment to sinners because he knew beforehand that they would sin, he ought not to reward the righteous, because he knew equally that they would be righteous. Let us confess that it belongs to his foreknowledge to allow no future event to escape his know-ledge, and that it belongs to his justice to see that no sin goes unpunished by his judgment. For sin is committed voluntarily and not by any compulsion from his foreknowledge.
Origen similarly claimed: “For even if we should conceive of foreknowledge according to the popular understanding, it will not be because God knows that an event will occur that it happens; but, because something is going to take place it is known by God before it happens.” (Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 6-10)
And Arminius: “For a thing does not come to pass because it has been foreknown or foretold; but it is foreknown and foretold because it is yet [futura] to come to pass.” (Works, Vol. 2, “ON THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD”)
Richard Watson: “Divine foreknowledge [has] no more influence in effectuating or making certain any event, than human foreknowledge in the degree in which it may exist; there being no moral causality at all in knowledge.” (Institutes, Vol. 2)
William Burt Pope “Foreknowledge must however be carefully kept distinct from predestination: between these there is no necessary connection. […] It is not the Divine foreknowledge that conditions what takes place, but what takes place conditions the Divine foreknowledge.” (Compendium, Vol. 1)
