What is open theism?

For nearly the entire history of the church, Christians of virtually every tradition agreed that God's knowledge of the future is complete and certain, whatever their disagreements about other matters. In the late twentieth century, a group of evangelical theologians, including Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, and John Sanders, began arguing for a significantly different picture, one they called "open theism" or the "openness of God" view.

The name reflects the core claim: the future, in their view, is genuinely "open," not yet settled, not even in the mind of God, because it depends on choices free creatures have not yet made.

Open theism teaches that God knows everything that can be known, all past and present facts, and He knows the full range of possibilities for the future. What He does not know, on this view, is which specific choice a free creature will actually make, because that choice does not yet exist as a fact to be known until the creature makes it. God, in this framework, knows the future the way a brilliant chess grandmaster anticipates likely moves, with extraordinary wisdom and probability, but not with absolute certainty.

Open theists argue this preserves a stronger, more libertarian view of human free will and portrays God as a genuine relational partner who responds, adapts, and sometimes changes His plans based on what people actually decide, rather than having scripted every outcome in advance.

Advocates point to passages describing God changing His mind or expressing surprise. Genesis says God "regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (Genesis 6:6). After Abraham demonstrates his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the angel of the Lord says, "now I know that you fear God" (Genesis 22:12), which open theists read as God genuinely learning something He did not know for certain beforehand. Jonah records that when Nineveh repented, "God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it" (Jonah 3:10).

Open theists take these texts at what they consider face value, as evidence that God's knowledge and plans genuinely develop and change in real time alongside human choices, rather than being fixed from eternity.

The historic Christian position holds that God's knowledge of the future is exhaustive and certain, grounded in texts like Isaiah's declaration, "I am God, and there is no other... declaring the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:9-10), and David's confession, "even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether" (Psalm 139:4). On the classical reading, passages describing God's "regret" or changing plans use human language to describe His genuine, real-time relational response to events within history, not literal uncertainty about the future, since the same Scripture explicitly states, "God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind" (Numbers 23:19).

Open theism emerged largely within Arminian circles that already emphasized human libertarian free will, though many Arminians themselves strongly reject open theism as going too far. The view proved highly controversial; the Evangelical Theological Society debated for years whether affirming biblical inerrancy was even compatible with denying exhaustive divine foreknowledge, and several major denominations and seminaries formally rejected the position as inconsistent with historic Christian orthodoxy.

It is worth distinguishing open theism from the broader Arminian and Calvinist traditions it sits alongside. Both classical Arminians and Calvinists, despite deep disagreements over the mechanics of free will and predestination, have historically affirmed that God's knowledge of the future is complete and certain. Open theism breaks from both by denying that certainty altogether for free creaturely choices. This is why many Arminian theologians, who otherwise share open theism's emphasis on libertarian freedom, have been among its sharpest critics, insisting that limiting God's foreknowledge goes a step too far and compromises His perfection.

This is not an abstract academic dispute. How you answer it shapes your confidence in fulfilled prophecy, your assurance that God's promises for your future are certain rather than probable, and your understanding of how God can work "all things together for good" (Romans 8:28) if He does not actually know what those things will turn out to be. It is a debate about the very character and greatness of God, which is exactly why the next question examines whether open theism holds up against the full witness of Scripture.