Open theists treat our Lord’s exhaustive divine knowledge and omnipotence as if these were the same as exhaustive determination: if God knows and sees every choice, He must have caused it. Classical Christians reject that premise. Knowledge is not causation, and power is not the necessity of using it. What follows distinguishes those claims in light of Scripture and reason.
1) Knowledge Is Not Causation: Foreknowledge is an attribute of the intellect, not of the will or of power. Knowing that an event will happen is fundamentally different from causing it to happen. Moreover, just because our Lord possesses advance knowledge of the choices people will make does not mean that God forced those choices to be actualized. That knowledge is passive and is only actualized when the choices are made, making human agents the active cause.
Foreknowledge of an event does not imply direct influence or omnicausality, or absolute determination, but merely knows what other wills are doing. In other words, foreknowledge doesn’t mean absolute determination. Yet a fine point should be sharpened at this time: God not only grasps and understands what actually will happen, but also what could happen under varous possible contingencies. If God’s knowing is infinite, God knows even the potential effects of hypothetical but unactualized possibilities, just as God knows what has or will become actualized (Oden, Systematic Theology: The Living God, Vol. 1).
Oden’s view stated as an argument looks like this:
1) God knows all potential choices.
2) God knows the exact choices.
Therefore, God knows not only what is, but what possibly could be. Thus it is said that God doesn’t merely have a will, but a knowing will. Therefore God’s knowing is said to be:
1) Eternally actual, not merely possible.
2) Eternally perfect, as distinguished from a knowledge that begins, increases, decreases, or ends.
3) Complete instead of partial.
4) Both direct and immediate, instead of indirectly reflected or mediated — God knows all things simultaneously.
Therefore God doesn’t “think,” He knows (Oden).
Dr. Yocum supports Oden’s position, that God’s knowledge encompasses all possibilities, writing:
“It should be noted that God’s foreknowledge of the future is not a simple knowledge of what shall be, but a perfectly complete knowledge of all possible alternatives, if His free creatures had made other choices. One among many examples from the Bible is found in 1 Samuel, chapter 23. David and his men had gone to the walled city of Keilah and saved it from the Philistines. Saul heard of the event and determined to capture his enemy there. Upon inquiring of the Lord about this purpose of Saul, David was told that Saul would indeed come to Keilah and that the men of the city would deliver David into his hand. Here is the Bible record: “Then said David, Will the men of Keilah deliver me and my men into the hand of Saul? And the Lord said, They will deliver thee up. Then David and his men, which were about six hundred, arose and departed out of Keilah, and went whithersoever they could go. And it was told Saul that David was escaped from Keilah; and he forebare to go forth (vv. 12-13).”
If Oden is right and our Lord is fully actualized and does not “think” because He knows, and yet is said to have “made the ages” (Heb. 1:2), then according to Oden, classical Christian theology generally holds that all moments of time’s succession unfold simultaneously and at once from God’s perspective. In other words, God is at the center of a “meta-now.” If true, then God’s relationship to time is that as the Giver of time and God is completely independent of time and time itself is contingent upon the will of God.
2) The Eternal Now: With regard to the broader discussion of God and time, and the theological issues the subject broaches—such as how God foreknows—a common Calvinist and Openness objection claims that saying God foreknows because He stands over and above time does not resolve their criticisms of how God foreknows. In point of fact, however, the claim that God is over and above time, or that God’s perspective is timeless, is a great way to conceptualize how God’s foreknowledge works, if we take the time to unpack a thought experiment for our Calvinist and Open Theist friends so they can understand what we mean.
Stating that God is outside of time is useful because the statement appreciates that, apart from time, all logical ordering, the laws of physics as well as cause and effect break down because such orders are all stated with references to time, space, and sequence. Order breaks down in the absence of time because it is time itself that keeps all things from happening at once!
Consider, if you will, that God declares of Himself that He is the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. What do we suppose that means? From the discipline of physics we can readily conceptualize a thought experiment in which the entire curtain of time, space, and dimensions is folded into a mathematical point, and that point is labeled as God’s omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent-omnicreative perspective (“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last,” Rev. 22:13; cf. Rev. 1:8; 1:11; 21:6). From this thought experiment we can conceptualize how God can know everything merely as a function of His unique perspective, and not because He must first do something such as foreordain or predestiningly decree events. From this standpoint God does not look “forward” into a future that does not yet exist for Him; rather, He observes every moment—past, present, and future—simultaneously.
Watching free choices that, from our perspective, remain in our future is no more determining than watching a friend choose something in the present moment. Your observation does not determine their action; rather, their actions ground your observation. It is likewise the same for God’s omni-perspective.
This is to say that classical Christians believe that God does not look “forward” into the future to see what we will do tomorrow. Instead, God observes all moments of time—past, present, and future—simultaneously in an eternal “now.” As such, stating that God is “outside time” is not an evasion; it is a way of describing how exhaustive foreknowledge can exist without predetermining events.
3) Omnipotence Does Not Mean Causation: Omnipotence means having the power to do anything that is logically possible. It does not mean exercising every power at all times. In other words, omnipotence means having the capacity for all power, not the exhaustion of all causation. Confusing the two is a logical category error, because omnipotence defines what an agent can do, not what that agent must do.
Rightly framed, omnipotence has three parts:
1. Capacity, not exhaustive exercise. Omnipotence is infinite active power. God need not actualize every possibility He could actualize. That He leaves some things undone is not a limit on His power; it is a function of His will and wisdom. A power that had to be used at every moment would be less free, not more perfect.
2. Logical possibility, not “anything we can say.” Square circles, undoing the past as past, God ceasing to be God, or God making a rock so big that He cannot move it* are not “things.” They are verbal contradictions. Power is ordered to being. Non-being and self-contradiction are not objects of power.
3. Primary causality that establishes secondary causality. Classical theism rejects two extremes: deism (God winds the world up and steps away) and occasionalism (created things have no real causal power of their own, and God directly causes every event in the universe). God creates, conserves, and concurs with created agents. Creatures are real causes in their own order; God is the first cause of their being and of their acting. His power is shown more, not less, by making a world that has its own causal integrity and by delegating real free agency.
What this rules out
* Omnipotence is not omnicausation. God’s ability to “do all possible things” that are logically possible does not mean that God “causes every subatomic event and every choice as their only real agent.”
* Omnipotence is not the power to do the logically impossible or the morally evil (God cannot sin, and this inability to sin is a sign of perfect power, not a limitation of it).
* It is not a requirement that God micromanage rather than govern through created natures, covenants, and (in the biblical picture) other wills.
True omnipotence includes the power to delegate authority and to create a universe that possesses its own internal causal integrity. We see our Creator delegating power throughout the Bible: beginning with Adam, continuing through the covenantal partnerships, and extending to the spiritual hierarchy in which God rules alongside a cosmic council of spiritual beings rather than acting as a singular micromanager. With a nod to the late Dr. Michael Heiser’s work, we see the Heavenly Council in:
The Causal Hand-off: In 1 Kings 22, God asks His Heavenly Council how to entice King Ahab into battle. Various spirits offer suggestions, and God approves one spirit’s plan, delegating the execution of the task to that entity. Whatever one makes of the deception involved, the heavenly scene shows God governing through other agents rather than immediately causing the outcome alone.
The Deuteronomy 32 Worldview: Heiser’s reading of Deuteronomy 32:8 implies that God divided the nations according to the number of the “sons of God,” delegating regional authority to spiritual entities (who later rebelled, becoming the “gods” of the nations).
Ultimately, omnipotence is defined by infinite active capacity governed by divine will and wisdom, not by the forced actualization of every possibility.
Eric Landstrom
* As a personal note, the “God and the Big Rock Argument” has amused me for decades.
