God knows everything—but not everyone experiences this as good news. Depending on who you are, your experiences in life, and your relationship with authority figures, the doctrine of divine omniscience may feel more threatening than comforting. For many, this doctrine raises questions about their security before God and God’s concern for their suffering. These concerns have led some theologians to reevaluate the doctrine altogether. The removal of omniscience, however, does not resolve these anxieties; it only relocates them and introduces new problems of its own.
The Pastoral Tension
Suffering always raises theological questions. Most of us know them well: Where is God? What is He doing? Why is He allowing this? Will He help? Does He care? Am I being punished? A host of questions like these plague our faith in seasons of prolonged sorrow. The doctrine of divine omniscience is often especially difficult to wrestle with in these moments. It tells us that God knew about this suffering, foresaw it, and still allowed it to come to us. In such instances, God’s all-knowingness can feel like passivity at best, or cruelty at its worst. Divine omniscience thus confronts sufferers with a haunting question: How can God be loving and yet allow such evil to touch our lives? For many sufferers, this is how divine omniscience is experienced—even if Scripture presents a very different vision of God’s knowing.
The Theological Response
In light of this tension, and out of a genuine desire to help hurting people, some theologians have developed conceptions of God in which He does not have exhaustive knowledge of the future. The idea is that if God is as surprised as we are by the onset of suffering, then He shares in the risk and tragedy of a world with genuine freedom. We do not need to feel disappointed or angry with Him for not stopping what He did not fully foresee; rather, we can go to Him and weep with Him about it. The hope is that this will alleviate some of the unnecessary spiritual distress experienced by sufferers. God did not cause your suffering, did not know it would occur in advance, and therefore did not prevent it. Again, the intent is to remove a specific kind of hurt and sense of betrayal that sufferers feel when they consider God’s involvement in their hardship.
Various theologies have developed versions of this idea. Some view God Himself as a being in development—one who is deeply impacted by the world and does not exercise unilateral control over it (Process Theology). Others take the view that God purposefully limits His divine foreknowledge in order to allow for complete human autonomy and freedom. The future free actions of human beings, it is argued, cannot be exhaustively known. Thus, God knows all that can be known, but even He does not know our future choices (Open Theism). Each, in its own way, presents a God whose knowledge of the future is limited or revised in the hope of offering comfort in heartache. God cares deeply about what we experience, and in these models He responds to suffering in real time rather than governing it through exhaustive foreknowledge.
The Evaluation
What do we make of this proposed solution? It certainly seeks to offer comfort and to remove the question of God’s culpability in our pain. It presents us with a God who stands in solidarity with us in sorrow—one who is surprised as we are surprised, grieved as we are grieved, and deeply concerned for what we are experiencing. Because He did not know this suffering would occur, we are invited to come to Him without the emotional barriers of anger, betrayal, or disappointment, and to receive His comfort freely. It is not difficult to see why such views hold real appeal for pastors and spiritual counselors. They promise relational closeness with God and seek to alleviate the emotional distress that certain interpretations of divine omniscience can create in seasons of suffering. These perspectives, however, present us with a number of significant challenges. Revised views of omniscience introduce hermeneutical, pastoral, and theological problems that must be carefully considered.
Let’s start with the hermeneutical problems. Since Scripture is our authority, interpretations of God that do not correspond to the totality of the Bible’s teaching should be a concern for us. There are, without question, passages of Scripture that do seem to suggest that God doesn’t know the future, or is surprised by outcomes (Gen. 6:5-6; 1 Sam. 15:10-11; Gen. 22:12; Deut. 8:2; Jer. 3; Isa. 5:2-4; just to name a few). Open Theists are right to insist that Scripture should be taken at face value. We should read all of the Bible seriously and not domesticate its various claims by abstract theology. However, reading Scripture “plainly” does not mean flattening all divine descriptions into literal metaphysical claims. Scripture itself invites us to read certain depictions of God analogically. So, when Scripture says that God “remembered” no one thinks that God actually forgot something and had to recall it (ex: Exodus 2:24); we understand such statements are anthropomorphic in nature. The hermeneutical question, then, is not whether we take these texts seriously, but how Scripture itself teaches us to take them. The Bible interprets itself, and the broader canonical witness gives us strong reasons to read many of these commonly cited texts analogically rather than as literal claims about the limits of God’s knowledge.
Open Theism also presents us with pastoral problems. One of the pastoral strengths of the Open view of God is that it seeks to avoid making God complicit in our suffering. God did not know this particular suffering would occur and therefore did not prevent it. Yet Open Theists also affirm that some aspects of the future are settled and ordered by God. They hold to a mix of a settled and open future. In some cases, even what happens to particular individuals is understood to be divinely determined: Joseph’s rise to power (Gen. 50:20), Pharaoh’s hardened heart (Ex. 7:3–4), Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Dan. 2), Cyrus’s appointment (Isa. 44:28), the number of David’s days (Ps. 139:16), the crucifixion of Christ (Acts 2:23), and Judas’s destruction (John 17:12).
This raises a painful and deeply personal question for sufferers: if God can sometimes intervene to determine certain outcomes for certain people, why did He not intervene here? Why was this suffering allowed to unfold when God has shown Himself able to shape history in other moments? The pastoral problem Open Theism seeks to avoid is not removed; it is simply postponed—and it eventually returns with the same emotional weight.
Finally, Open Theism leaves us with some real theological problems. For starters, the God of Open Theism often seems far less powerful than the God described in Scripture. He can come across as a God who makes educated guesses at times, is competent at cleaning up messes, and is able to adapt and adjust His plans as history unfolds. In addition, the way Open Theism reads Scripture presents God as one who can be frustrated and even annoyed with people. This does not sound like the God who is described as all-powerful and as one whom no one can successfully oppose (Ps. 115:3; Dan. 4:35). This version of God does not match the biblical descriptions of God’s strength, wisdom, and glory.
Secondly, this version of God does not actually resolve the sovereignty/responsibility debate in theology. One of the advantages touted by Open Theists is that if God does not know the future free decisions of humans, then He is not responsible for the evil that occurs. Yet on this view, God willingly limits His foreknowledge in order to grant humans libertarian freedom. This means that God willingly accepts the risk of the kind of wickedness and evil our world has seen—and that victims have endured. We may say that God did not cause such evil, but we are still left with the troubling reality that He permitted it. Open Theism explains this in terms of God’s commitment to genuine human freedom, but that explanation will rarely feel like comfort to those who have suffered grave injustice. The problem of divine sovereignty and human responsibility is not removed; it persists in a different form.
It’s true that divine omniscience does not feel comforting to all. Sufferers especially are troubled by the reality that God exhaustively knows the future and yet permits it all the same. Alternative theologies attempt to resolve this tension by redefining omniscience, but within classical theism divine omniscience can actually become a profound therapeutic resource for those who suffer. That’s what we will explore in our final post on this topic.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 