Open theism, also called free will theism and openness theology, is the belief that God does not know all things. More specifically, God does not know the future or the free will choices that people will make. This is because God chooses either not to know these things or because the future isn't knowable.

"This movement takes its name from the fact that its adherents view much of the future as 'open' rather than closed, even to God. Much of the future, that is, is yet undecided, and hence it is unknown to God. God knows all that can be known, open theists assure us. But future free choices and actions, because they haven't happened yet, do not exist, and so God (even God) cannot know them." - Bruce Ware

The controlling belief of open theism is what is known as libertarian freedom (i.e. humans have complete free will). From this presupposition flows the understanding that God cannot know future free acts or it would violate a persons free will.


Libertarian free will: One can understand libertarian freedom according to such: "Given choices A and B, one can literally choose to do either one. No circumstances exist that are sufficient to determine one's choice; a person's choice is up to him, and if he does one of them, he could have done otherwise, or at least he could have refrained from acting at all" (Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, p. 240). Hasker takes us a little further: "Notice that the definition claims that free actions have no sufficient cause, not that they lack causes and conditions altogether (Hasker, Metaphysics, p. 32).

“Probably the most common definition says free will is the ability to make choices without any prior prejudice, inclination, or disposition.” —R.C. Sproul, Chosen By God

God does not know the future exhaustively: Open theism generally begins from the assumption that there are no truths about future contingents. A contingent truth is something that is true but didn't have to be. A contingent falsehood is something that is false but could have been true if things had been different. Contingent truths about the future are truths about what will happen that aren't necessary truths. Just as there are truths about the past that didn't have to be true, most philosophers take there to be truths about the future that are indeed true but didn't have to be true. Things could have gone differently in the process of what will lead up to them. As it happens, or rather as it will happen, that's not the path things will take. So there are truths about what we will do that aren't necessary truths but are rather contingent truths. This is the standard view among philosophers about future contingents.

Open theism revises this view in one way. It accepts the possibility that things could go one way or the other in the future, as the standard view does. It allows that there are some necessary truths about the future. It accepts that there are contingent things about the future. It just won't allow those contingent things to be true or false. If it's not necessary, they say, it must not be true either, even though truth is much weaker than necessity. Something can be true but not necessary. But for open theists, nothing about the future can be true but not necessary. The future is special somehow.

That forms the basis of the open theist's argument against foreknowledge. Once you deny that statements about future contingents can be true or false, then there simply are no truths about what free creatures will do unless those actions are necessary. There are no truths about my future except what's true of me in every possible future. With a robust sense of libertarian free will, many of our actions are free and thus could have been otherwise. Therefore, there are very few truths about my future. If there aren't such truths to know, then God cannot know them. Therefore, God only knows a very few truths about the future, things that are true in every possible future.

Open theists claim they do not deny God's omniscience, just God's foreknowledge. The argumentation go like this: Just as it doesn't threaten God's ominipotence to deny that God can make a contradiction true (because omnipotence only means being able to do anything possible), it doesn't threaten God's omniscience if his knowledge is limited to what's true (because omniscience only means knowing everything true). This is not the kind of exhaustive knowledge that most theists believe in, but it is technically speaking still omniscience. It's just that much of what traditional theists have considered to be included in omniscience isn't even true and thus isn't available for God to know.

God takes risks: This section is a stub. Please edit it to add information.

God learns: This section is a stub. Please edit it to add information.

God changes His mind: This section is a stub. Please edit it to add information.

Interpretive methods: The open theist generally applies a very literal interpretation of scripture, at least when it comes to passages about God's engagement with people in time. For instance, when it says that God relents or changes his mind, this is taken literally. The traditional view is that such statements are told from within the perspective of time as experienced by humans. Particularly if God is outside time, it can't mean what the open theist takes it to mean. Even if God knows what he will do in the future, as some more limited open theists would say (still leaving open what people will choose to do), God doesn't change his own mind, not literally.

On the other hand, open theists cannot take too literally any passage that speaks of God not changing his mind as humans do or any statements about God knowing all of our days from before we even existed. Since taking both statements literally would lead to a contradiction, open theists opt to go with the literal reading of the statements about human experience of God in narratives, while traditional theists emphasize the literal meaning of direct prophecies from God or statements in the psalms. Either view has to resolve the conflict, and each favors one variety of statement as non-literal or less literal. Open theists see the narrative statements as straightforward telling of what God does, while the prophecies and psalms are poetry, which often contains metaphor and exaggeration. On the other hand, traditional theists see the narrative statements as told from a human perspective due to their being recountings of human interactions with God in time, and if God doesn't experience those interactions the same way due to having a plan for how it would turn out, it's not surprising for it to read the way it does. Furthermore, they see the psalmic and prophetic statements as direct revelation, and most such statements are not metaphor, even if they are often expressed in poetic form. Not all such statements are poetic, either, because the prophet Samuel delivers a statement to Saul that God does not change his mind (and this in a passage that explicitly declares God to have changed his mind in the narrative portion).


Popular proponents
Gregory Boyd
John Sanders
Clark Pinnock


Mormonism: Open theism is common within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, though it is certainly not an official view. Some Mormons are very much opposed to the teaching and insist that God has complete foreknowledge of what free creatures will do. There are some beliefs open theists hold to that all Mormons would agree with, but the denial of complete foreknowledge is not one of them. It is correct to say that open theism is considered a genuine option within Mormon theology, but it is unfair to tag all Mormons with the view.

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