This article is posted with permission from the publisher, the scholarly journal Bibliotheca Sacra. Please click on the attachment to view Robert B. Chisholm Jr., “ANATOMY OF AN ANTHROPOMORPHISM: DOES GOD DISCOVER FACTS?” Bibliotheca Sacra 164 (January-March 2007) 3-20.
This article reconciles God’s foreknowledge with some of the most difficult texts in the Old Tesament that can be taken to imply that God does not have exhaustive foreknowledge. Classically, Arminianism holds to God’s exhaustive foreknowledge of the future, a doctrine included in SEA’s statement of faith (see http://evangelicalarminians.org/sof) and to which SEA members must adhere. At the same time, Chisholm shows that these texts at least show that God’s knowledge is (sometimes) contingent on what people do. Though he does not draw the implications out for the Arminian/Calvinist debate, his conclusions support the Arminian view of God’s knowledge (and hence also his foreknowledge) of free human acts as contingent on those acts rather than on divine unconditional decree.
