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| English: By Rembrandt. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Open theism is a theological movement
that has developed within evangelical
and post-evangelical
Protestant
Christianity as a response to certain ideas related to the synthesis of Greek philosophy and
Christian theology. It is typically advanced as a biblically motivated and
philosophically consistent theology of human and divine freedom (in the
libertarian sense), with an emphasis on what this means for the content of
God's perfect foreknowledge. In short, open theism is the view that since the
fact of free choice means the future is partly a realm of possibilities, and
God's sovereignty means the future is partly a realm of determined facts, God's
omniscience entails knowing the possibilities as possibilities (as well as
their respective probabilities) and determined facts as determined facts. There
is nothing further that could be known about future events. While several
versions of traditional classical theism could picture God's knowledge of the
future as a single, fixed, trajectory, open theism would do so as a plurality
of branching possibilities.[1][2] Thus, the future as well as God's
knowledge of it is open (hence
"open" theism). Other versions of classical theism hold that God
fully determines the future, entailing that there is no free choice (the future is closed). Yet other versions of
classical theism hold that even though there is freedom of choice, God's
omniscience necessitates God foreknowing what free choices are made (God's foreknowledge is closed). Open theists hold
that these versions of classical theism are out of sync with (1) the biblical
concept of God, (2) the biblical understanding of human and divine freedom,
and/or (3) result in incoherence.
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