Someone put the question to me yesterday, ‘Does God know the future?’ I have a very poor grasp of issues like this which always seem to me to be too abstruse and speculative (I’ve never really seen the point of the open theism debate). So my first response was that the question is meaningless. What difference does it make whether God knows the future or not?
Well, what about prophecy? I am inclined to think that the future does not exist to be known by anyone: we make the future by our choices. The future is not a road down which we walk; it’s the road that we lay as we move forward, picking our way through a landscape of possibilities. Perhaps, then, God also creates a future by his choices – in important respects through interaction with us. Prophecy is possible not because God can see ahead and knows what is coming but because he makes commitments, promises, and is faithful to keep them. All we really need here is a theology of covenant.
So when Jesus prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem, for example, he does so not on the basis of advanced knowledge (though it may sound like that) but because he knows that God intends to judge the city within a generation unless there is widespread repentance (the condition is important). Given that basic assumption, anyone could have inferred the details of invasion and desolation provided in the apocalyptic discourse.
This is probably all very simplistic and naïve, but I’m curious to know what others think. What am I missing here?
Does God know the future?
One of my issues with the idea of an omnipotent deity who also is omniscient and supposedly all-merciful and all-loving, is that it really does create an unresolvable paradox on one level or another. What is the nature of God, in that light - the laissez-faire deity of a deistic bent? an adolescent sort of God who has put us all here, like bugs in a jar as it were, to be all seeing and all-knowing from completely outside our own limited frame of reference, quite possibly even loving each of us individually, but because… he “respects our freewill”, maybe? - he sits back and just lets all the bugs do whatever they want to do. Even direct discipline is not necessary, when the foundations of the Golden Rule, ‘karma’, etc., are built right in to the very physics of the universe itself…
On a more abstruse (but no less important, I think) level… the idea of a completely omniscient God raises the question of “why does anything exist in the first place? why did anything come to be? knowing all things and events in all times and places, why did he freely create, yet freely create something that would (according to the classical hermeneutics and eschatologies) “inevitably” fall away (yet somehow the fall was also “free” at the same time… hmm…), and yet in the end be raised up from the fallen condition to a greater glory… the greater glory of… the Creator himself? I guess I can only relate here on a very limited human scale, but as an artist and writer, a ‘little creator’ of sorts, my own experience has been that creating for self-aggrandizement is one of the most unfulfilling things I’ve ever known; I indulged in it earlier in my life quite a bit; now when I see that motive in myself, I try and root it out like the plague. That’s why when I hear all the “glory and honor and praise and worship forever and ever to the Lord” stuff, I find that I personally can’t relate to it at all; my own personal worst enemy is ego, so how can I relate to a Creator who wants to be stroked all the time and who - if in fact he does know all things in my future - leaves me essentially an unfree puppet of a deterministic universe that He established before time itself…. ?
Tangents aside, thats what it comes down to for me: an all-knowing God leaves humans pretty worthless and insignificant, arbitrary and unfree, in the Big Picture of the cosmos; I spent 14 years of childhood having my will stolen and my spirit crushed in the name of “christian values”, being told in the words and actions of my supposedly devout Baptist parents that I WAS insignificant and basically worthless and unimportant; if the TRUE god of heaven is that sort of being as well, a being infinite and all-expansive and all-powerful and all-knowing, who leaves us only with the deceptive neurochemical ILLUSION of freewill… then what’s the point at all? I may as well put the bullet in my head right now… y’know? david
Does God know the future?
David’s making some good and important points here - a point about prophesy that occurred to me in connection with the question ‘does God know the future’ hangs on how we understand what we mean by ‘prophesy’ (to say nothing of how we understand what we mean by ‘future’ - but more about that later perhaps).
I can’t work with the understanding of prophesy being prediction - sooth saying or fortune telling. The greatest prophets were commentators on the state of affairs and the inevitable outcome of whatever that state may be. The role of the prophet is not to predict or reveal secret plans but to perceive and pronounce - to commentate if you will, to stand and be prepared to say, ‘the king is naked’ in the place where everyone else is admiring his non existent clothes for fear of seeming ridiculous - so, whether or not God knows the future (whatever that may mean) it has no bearing on the function of the prophet and the prophetic … . where are the prophets today? Writing songs and calling themselves things like Radiohead perhaps ?
Does God know the future?
I rarely say this, but “amen” ;) most definitely… and I’m not even a big Radiohead fan! now if Christianity at large can drop that ridiculous “sacred” vs. “secular” dichotomy and actually HEAR what some of the most powerfully-gifted prophets are out there saying!!
as for God and the future, another thing popped into my head after I posted that; a couple years ago I was reading Frank Tipler’s “The Physics of Immortality” (Tipler is by definition an atheist but makes one of the most interesting and compelling cases for theism, via the Anthropic Principle, that i’ve ever encountered); at one point he writes something to the effect of “unless theology becomes a branch of physics, and vice versa, religion will become increasingly obsolete and the whole world will eventually become atheist.” i can totally see this. and thats why I’m always harping on about physics, because all these theological questions are pure metaphysics, and a particular metaphysics must be a causal extension of a particular physics, and/or vice-versa. physics went through two INCREDIBLY major paradigm shifts in the last century; this either a) has incredibly drastic consequences for metaphysics and by extension religion/spirituality, and/or b) implies a FAR different metaphysical framework than what we were previously working with, depending on which end you want to look at it from. Either way, it occurred to me that “whether or not God knows the future” is just another way of asking “what type of universe do we live in”, ie. completely deterministic with only an illusion of chaos, completely ‘free’ and arbitrary with only an illusion of overarching structure, or some hybrid of both…
I opt for the hybrid, for various reasons on different fronts, but the resulting theology can only be a gnostic/evolutionary one, which by and large most Christians I talk to and have talked to are not yet ready to accept.
Gnosticism, the Word, Evolution
I do not think evolution and the Word conflict with each other. Evolution is just a scientific lense to see how we evolved from lower life forms, and the Word in Genesis being an allegorical message.
I am not sure what you mean by a gnostic/evolutionary theology. Gnosticism seems to be a dualistic religion which is almost opposite of what the early Christian church and current Christians believe. YHWH is this angry, evil demiurge that tricks humanity, the world is all evil, through gnosis you become “enlightened.” A person has some spark of light/life force in them that that YHWH demiurge feeds off like a battery. Jesus is like the serpent figure from Genesis according to gnostic literature. It seems like Gnosticism is a polemic on Christianity.
Covenant Faithfulness / divine foreknowledge / ethical decisions
Andrew, this is something that has needed to be said, and needs to be said again and again. Conversations regarding God’s knowledge of the future have been primarily about what God knows and when. This comment redirects the path somewhat.
Elanore Stump has been calling her fellow philosophers to the interface of philosophy and biblical studies for years and only some have heeded her call. Your statement above reminds me of Wright’s comment about how any attempt to understand the so-called ‘problem of evil’ without some sort of covenant theology is doomed from the start. I think the same is true regarding divne foreknowledge and human freedom.
Excellent work has been done by various philosophers. Thomas Flint impresses me on this issue the most in his Divine Providence, but even the tightest work has seemed stuck to me. The categories and terms generated by the discussion and the loud defenses of God’s sovereignty on one hand and His freedom on the other have all been very interesting. But it has all been too distracting. Your comment above might contain something that gets us back on track.
When we pray to God for guidance concerning future decisions like, “Should I take this new job offer?” or “Should I bother saying such and such to Jim?” we are doing so on the basis of our belief that God knows which of our possible choices would be best for us. On one level it suffices to say that we are appealing to his wisdom. But it is another thing altogether to say that part of his wisdom is that he knows all counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Maybe He knows what state of affairs will obtain if I choose x rather than y, and also vice versa. And maybe He knows the relationship all of this has to his desire for the future of the world.
I’m reminded of Richard B. Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament where he (if I recall correctly) states that ethical decsions need to be made in accordance with the questions, “How does this decision manifest/embody/signify new creation?”, “Does this decision conform to or carry out the self-sacrificial posture put forth by Jesus in the cross?” and “What impact will this decision have on the community?”
I think we ought to be asking these questions to God in prayer and in light of Hays’ last question, another, “In what ways are you, on the basis of your covenant faithfulness, acting in and among our local community, and what decision ought I to make in light of that and where you seem to be taking us?”
Could the kind of knowledge that the molinists say He possesses be of significance to his covenant relationships with us throughout history?
circles refusing to interlock?
One aspect of prophecy in the OT, which is very important, is the ‘warning factor’: “if you don’t correct your ways, some nasty consequences are going to soon catch up with you”.
‘Soon’ is again an important word without which the specification that false prophets should be stoned does not make any sense at all. Whatever was prophesied was expected to take place within the near future.
I do think, though that there is a qualitative difference between astute forecasting and ‘thus says the Lord”. For one thing, if God is an equal player and does not “act” in any different way, then how do we know that He can keep His promises? indeed, why would such a limited God bother to promise at all? The promise would be nothing more than just one more good or bad intention!
Of course, we would like to be able to understand how God could be active and prescient and loving and interacting with us on the basis of free will and completely in charge and calling us to account - a set of seemingly mutually exclusive propositions! But what we cannot understand simply does not give us the liberty to toss out any or all of these concepts, nor to find ways to avoid them.
The need to find one theory or one theology that seems capable of holding ‘infinitely exclusive’ concepts together in a way that makes sense to our tiny intellects is what drives us to more and more convoluted theologies & eschatologies - none of which bring us back to God’s love in Jesus.
Live to serve : Serve to live