God and his relationship with time is something that I find very interesting. At the heart of this, are the questions, “What does God know?” and “How does He know it?” I finally finished the book entitled The God Who Risks by John Sanders, and I found it to be a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Near the end of the book, he talks about the idea of “simple foreknowledge” and offers two different views. This article will focus on these two views.
First, we should define what simple foreknowledge is. In the book, John Sanders defines it as, “prior to creation, God had a noetic big bang by which he acquired comprehensive direct vision of every single act that libertarian free creatures would actually do in this world.” It should be noted that John Sanders is a proponent for Open Theism, which is a theology that revolves around the idea of God choosing not to know the future exhaustively. I believe that Sanders wants to stay away from the idea that God knows all things exhaustively, because then it makes God out to be the author of the sins and evil that we commit. However, Sanders does agree that there are some things that God just knows and he must reconcile how God knows these things. Sanders talks about two views in his book that try to answer the question, “How does God know what He knows?” They are the Complete Simple Foreknowledge (CSF) view and Incremental Simple Foreknowledge (ISF) view.
According to Sanders, he defines CSF as “God provisioned before the creation of the world absolutely everything that will occur from beginning to end.” For example, I am an engaged man and God knew this before I even became engaged. Not only did He know I would be engaged, but He also knew when I would be engaged, who I would be engaged to, where I would be when I got engaged, and all the circumstances leading up to and surrounding my engagement. In CSF, God acquires all of this knowledge at once. Unfortunately for CSF, Sanders does not agree with it (who didn’t see that coming?) and he points out some interesting flaws in CSF. First in CSF, God does not prevision what might occur, but what must occur. Divine foreknowledge, by definition, cannot be wrong. If God knows it is going to happen like this, then it must happen how God knows it will happen. The problem with this is if God knows something is going to happen, he cannot change it…he cannot intervene in human history. Some may say that this is not a bad thing or that they are fine in believing in a God who cannot change or intervene for us; however, Sanders makes an interesting point and this is the second thing I want to focus on. Sanders says that, “If a God with CSF possess foreknowledge of his own actions, then the problem is to explain how the foreknowledge can be the basis for the actions when it already includes the actions.” He elaborates more on this point by saying, “Such a deity would then know what he is going to do before deciding what to do. God would learn of his own future actions. But that seems to imply that a script has been written and even God is captive to it. A God with CSF would be unable to plan, anticipate, or even decide – he would simply know. This seems to call the divine freedom into question, making God a prisoner of his own foreknowledge, lacking perfect freedom.” To me, this makes sense. If one holds to the idea that God has known before the beginning what we are going to do, then we must do. Just like us then, if God knows before the beginning what He is going to do, then He must do. CSF makes the idea of God’s foreknowledge greater than God Himself, because He is restricted to what He must do by His own foreknowledge. Nobody, I think, wants to say that God a prisoner of His own foreknowledge, so Sanders offers us another option, that option being ISF.
“When God is foreseeing the future he only sees parts of it at a time – not the complete whole at once as in CSF – and learns what will happen in the future incrementally or step by step.” This is how Sanders defines ISF. Think of it like this: God is watching a tape of the future and at certain points he stops the tape to interject what He wants to do. He then pushes play, and lets the tape continue to see how His creations will respond to what He has done. At another point, He stops the tape again. Based on how His creations responded, God decides what He will do and then pushes play. This metaphor I offer is extremely close to the way Sanders puts it in his book. So prior to the creation, this is how God comes to foreknow everything in human history. The benefits to ISF allow God to freely interject in history, it does not undermine God’s divine freedom, and it allows for us to have some form of freedom and decision making abilities. Still, I feel that there are questions and holes in this option. How does time progress if God is constantly stopping to interject and respond to creation? Granted, God acquires this foreknowledge before even creating; but if that is the case, how does He reach the point to create? Also, just like in CSF, it seems that God is imprisoned by His foreknowledge in this view as well. However, this view is more beneficial to having a genuine relationship with God. Still, once God knows what is going to happen, it must happen that way. If that is case, then what is God doing right now if we hold to believing in ISF? Is He just watching what He already knows?
Out of the two views, I think (as of right now) that ISF is the better option. ISF permits us to respond and to act, it takes away from God being the author of our sins and evil, and God is not totally imprisoned to His own foreknowledge. I am curious to know what other people think about these two views and what I have said. Do you agree with CSF or ISF? Why do you agree with one and not the other?
