A Pagan Inheritance?

Introductory Remarks

In 1994, Dr. Gregory Boyd authored a book of letters.  These letters were from a father to a son; the son was Greg and the letters were written to his father, the late Edward Boyd.  Greg’s father, a professed atheist, was totally turned off to Christianity.  Abuses and bad experiences in his upbringing had left a bad taste in his mouth to the ways of the church.

Greg decided to enter into a conversation with his father via letters.  His father could raise whatever questions he had and Greg would answer them.  What is captured in Greg Boyd’s book, Letters from a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father’s Questions about Christianity, is a three-year discussion/struggle between a professor of theology and his wounded, inquisitive father.  Over the course of the letters, a conversation transpires about the freedom of the will being used.  More specifically, how do we respond when the freedom of the will is abused [the story the father uses is of a girl who was raped and then murdered].

Greg’s father asks the following in his April 17^th letter to his son:

“Since God is supposedly all-knowing, why didn’t He just look ahead and see who was and wasn’t going to use freedom rightly, and then just create the good people?  We’d still have freedom, but in a world without suffering.  It strikes me as odd that God should have to take ‘risks’ [as Greg argues God does in creation] at all.  Isn’t He (in your view) in total control?”

Greg’s response to his father’s question sets the stage for this paper’s discussion.  He writes:

“In the Christian view, God knows all of reality-everything there is to know.  But to assume He knows ahead of time how every person is going to freely act assumes that each person’s free activity is already there to know-even before he freely does it!  But it’s not.  If we have been given freedom, we create the reality of our decisions by making them.  And until we make them, they don’t exist.  Thus, in my view at least. There simply isn’t anything to know until we make it there to know.  So God can’t foreknow the good or bad decisions of the people.  He creates until He creates these people and they, in turn, create their decisions.”

The word omniscience is not, strictly speaking, a biblical term. The word itself is not found in the Bible. It is a philosophical/theological word that has come into wide usage because, like the word trinity, it describes the biblical evidence. The word means to see or know all things. Greg’s response to his father is a classic understanding of an open theology’s view on the omniscience (all-knowingness) of God.  It rubs directly against the Reformed (Augustinian/Calvinist) position which claims that God knows the future exhaustively and as eternally present.

Omniscience in open theology is that God knows possibilities but partners with us in such ways that until we make decisions, the realities do not exist.  God sees them as possibilities because he chooses not to know the reality in order that he can be in relationship with us and allow us genuine free will and human responsibility.

Thus, a debate is born.  The writings of this paper join a whole host of authors and theologians who have brought their two-cents into a theological conversation that is extremely personal because it relates to the nature of God.  I claim that the Reformed understanding of God’s omniscience is rooted heavily in Greek philosophy that the Church has borrowed over the centuries and that the open theology’s understanding of God’s omniscience cuts across the tapestry of Hellenized Christian thought to reclaim the biblical witness.  Over the following pages, I will briefly lay out the Reformed understanding of God’s omniscience, a survey of Greek thinkers, early Church fathers, as well as Medieval and Reformation thinkers, and show the practical implications of what the phrase “omniscience of God” means for us today.

The Reformed Understanding of God’s Omniscience

For God, the Reformed position argues, if the doctrine of God’s omniscience is true, everything is eternally “present.”  An example comes from the writings of Francis Turretin.  Turretin was a Reformed theologian of the 17^th century who authored a defense of Calvinist theology, as presented by the Synod of Dort (1618), known as the Helvetic Consensus.  In his book, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, he discusses the doctrine of God’s omniscience under the heading of God’s intellect, will, and power:

“Concerning the intellect of God and the disquisition of his knowledge, two things must be attended to above all others: the mode and the object. The mode consists in his knowing all things perfectly, undividedly, distinctly and immutably. It is thus distinguished from human and angelic knowledge: perfectly because he knows all things by himself or by his essence (not by forms abstracted from things–as is the case with creatures–both because these are only in time with the things themselves, but the knowledge of God is eternal, and because he can have no cause out of himself).”

Turretin proceeds to affirm that God’s knowledge is undivided because it is not something acquired by “ratiocination” [reason] but is intuitive. Anthropomorphic language may appear in the Scriptures representing God as questioning or reasoning, but this is clearly the lisping of the Scriptures for our benefit. Such language is borrowed from Calvin when he writes the same in regards to language in the Bible that does not fit into his theological perspective (i.e., God’s changing His mind). God sees all things at a glance and the smallest thing does not escape him.  The Lord’s knowledge, Turretin affirms, is immutable because God never changes.

From the writings of Turretin, we see three hallmarks of what I claim are a pagan inheritance.  First, we see language of perfection influencing God’s omniscience.  Second, there is an interpretation of God’s questioning/changing of mind as being anthropomorphic language.  Third, God’s immutability means God cannot change His mind.

The Greek Philosophical Understanding of God’s Omniscience

It is important to note as we begin this conversation that theology is never done in a vacuum.  As we examine the import of three schools of philosophic thought, we need to remember that they were attempting to piece together their world the best they knew how.  Their views are highly rational and utilized reason and the mind.  Greek thought elevated the mind above all else.  Therefore, with something as important as a conversation about the divinity, there is no other faculty of the human body more important than the rationality of the human mind.

Over the next couple of pages, I want to highlight three important people or groups; Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics.  Each of these three brought a new perspective into the theological conversation about God’s omniscience.

Plato

Plato really lays the foundation for the Greek understanding of God’s omniscience.  With Plato we see the emergence of a language of “perfection”.  By perfection, Plato was arguing that God lacks nothing and that he is not dependent on anyone or anything.  Therefore, “if he change at all he can only change for the worse” because a perfect being need not change.

This understanding of perfection carries great weight in Plato’s understanding of God’s omniscience.  Dr. John Sanders, former professor of philosophy and religion at Huntington University writes the following in a book authored by he and several other open theologians entitled, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God:

“Plato also says that God is all-knowing and all-powerful in the sense that he knows everything that is a matter of sense and knowledge and has all the power that morals and immortals can have.  Furthermore, God has these qualities “timelessly.”  It is not proper to speak of God in the past or the future, that he “was” or “will be.”  Rather, “the truth is that ‘is’ alone is properly attributed to him.”  Though Plato himself does not develop I, the idea will emerge that God’s knowledge and will could never change, as this would reflect badly on God’s timelessly perfect goodness and omniscience.”

For Plato, as Sanders exegetes, God’s omniscience is timeless.  This idea of “timelessness” coupled with his understanding of “perfection” will radically shape views of God’s omniscience for centuries to follow.  Where Scripture captures God as temporally everlasting, Plato introduces a characteristic of God as timelessly eternal.

Aristotle

Aristotle has very few writings on God for a problem with the nature of God is not really a priority for him.  Where he does write about the nature of God, he claims it [whatever it is] is an “unmoved mover.”  For the world to function as it does, it must be completely and eternally dependant on a God who moves it but is not moved due to it’s [God's] perfection.  Therefore, God is the unmoved mover.  Sanders writes:

“God is the final cause or goal of the universe.  God starts motion not because he acts as an agent but rather by simply being so beautiful and perfect that the universe desires (eros) to be like him.  And so it moves toward God-but God does not move toward the world.  If God entered into any sort of relation to the world then God would in some sense be dependant on the world, just as a master is dependant on the slave in order to be master.”

This God does not need humanity and does not desire to be in relationship.  Actually, it cannot be in relationship for relationality means dependency and change.  As Sanders notes later: “Since matter is corruptible and changeable, God is immaterial, and since to have potential is to be susceptible to change God must only have actuality [who God is].”  This God is completely unaffected by human beings and is largely a philosophical construct instead of a religious deity.

The thought of Aristotle will appear in Christian thought, especially in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.  Aristotle’s God “is a substance which is eternal and unmovable…without parts and indivisible…impassive and unalterable.”  In respect to God’s omniscience, though Aristotle does not come down clearly on this doctrine, one can deduce that Aristotle’s deity only knows itself for to receive knowledge of anything else is to limit and be dependant on something else.  This God simply “is” and, as such, is completely unaffected by humanity.

The Stoics

The Stoics enter the conversation and their dialog sounds very familiar to the traditional understanding of God’s omniscience.  The Stoics argue for a pantheistic view of creation; God is in everything.  Sanders describes God, humanity and the nature of the universe in the Stoic understanding:

“The universe is a ‘great chain of being.’  God is the eternal and uncreated One who begets out of himself the whole of being by distributing the rational sperms (logoi spermaktikoi) and then resumes them all back into himself in never-ending cycles.  The idea of procession and return to God, anticipated by Plato, is articulated by the Stoics and neo-Platonists and utilized by many Christians.”

With this view of humanity proceeding from God (and having His essence in them) and eventually returning back into God, an absolute predestination develops.  History is one, single causal system.  The Stoics even went as far as to say that it is useless to pray since what happens in your life is exactly as God providentially planned.

Conclusions of Greek Philosophy on God’s Omniscience

It is important to note, before this paper moves on, what conclusion are drawn from the Greek philosophers.  In a world of chaos and change, Greek philosophy was looking for something-or someone-stable and reliable in the universe, free of change.  For this “thing” to be stable and reliable, it cannot change.  Therefore, a tension is created between “being” and “becoming”.  This unchanging Being, whatever it was, oversaw a very rational, logical world.

The Greek philosophers cannot be understood apart from a reactionary movement to the religious systems of their day.  The Greek gods were fickle and arbitrary in their treatment of humanity.  These gods demanded worship and were claimed to inflict punishment for lack of sacrifice and worship.  It should come as no surprise that all the above philosophers argued for a unifying principle that was not involved in the world and was removed from it to a degree.  [Even the Stoics claimed that God had determined the track of the world long before humanity was on the planet.]  The Greek philosophers will influence Christian thinkers, especially Reformed thinkers, immensely in their understanding of God’s omniscience.

The Hellenization of God’s Omniscience

The Hellenization of Christian doctrine was not necessarily a bad thing, it would not be wise nor correct to make such a blanket statement.  The problem is that the two models, a biblical witness and Greek philosophical constructs, do not cooperate in their image of God and His omniscience.  Pinnock, quoting Dr. Donald G. Bloesch, writes in regards to the difficulties associated with the Hellenization of Christianity:

“A compelling case can be made that the history of Christian thought shows the unmistakable imprint of a biblical classical synthesis in which the ontological categories of Greco-Roman philosophy have been united with the personal-dramatic categories of biblical faith.  Tertullian asked a famous question: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’  His query implied it had nothing to do with it, but the answer as concerns the doctrine of God is actually ‘much in every way.’”

Athens does have a lot to do with Jerusalem because Greek philosophy has a lot to do with the traditional understanding of God’s omniscience.

Philo

The bridge between Greek philosophy and Christianity falls on Philo.  Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C.-A.D. 45) was a Jewish thinker who desired to reconcile biblical teaching with Greek philosophy; thus he is a leading figure in the biblical-classical synthesis.

For Philo, God’s essence is essentially unknowable.  He is beyond human reason and senses.  We know He [God] exists and are certain of his activities around us (creation and providence).  Beyond these, we cannot know God.

Philo’s God is immersed in Hellenized thought.  This deity is in a sense a principle highly elevated above humanity.  Though this god has intermediary beings that relate to humanity, God, in his essence, is unknowable.  In regards to God’s foreknowledge, Philo understands there are biblical texts that show God changing his mind and repenting.

In Philo’s mind such texts are not to be taken literally; rather, they are anthropomorphisms for the benefit of the “duller folk” who cannot understand the true nature of God.  “For what greater impiety could there be than to suppose that the Unchanging changes?”  Philo leans on Numbers 23:19, which in the Septuagint reads: “God is not as man.”  Because God is not like us, he cannot change his mind.  Moreover, since God foreknows all that will happen, divine repentance is impossible.

Philo introduces a new understanding into the conversation/debate on God’s omniscience.  Language of God’s relationality is now seen as anthropomorphizing (that is, the writers are ascribing human qualities to God to help the reader understand difficult concepts).  This will drastically shape the conversation to the modern day!

Augustine

Augustine will piece all of the philosophical and theological pieces brought by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Philo together into one coherent statement on the omniscience of God that still resonates today and has traversed many centuries.  Augustine preferred stability over change and being over becoming.  Therefore, immutability and impassibility [the theological doctrine that argues that God experiences neither pleasure nor pain] are maintained.

With such an immutability, God’s knowledge and will, for Augustine, were also unchangeable.  Thomas Aquinas, the great Medieval theologian, would later write:

“Since God is outside the whole order of creation and all creatures are ordered to him and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related to God himself, whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea, inasmuch as creatures are referred to him.”

Bringing together the Platonic and Aristotelian understandings of impassibility and immutability into Christian theology, Augustine shows humanity relating with God to survive but God does not relate with humanity in the sense that He is changed by them.

In some areas, Augustine seems to believe that divine foreknowledge and human free-will do go together.  God simply sees what will happen in the future but is not the cause of those future events.  In other places, he seems to take back this concession.  As Sanders writes:

“The father had taught that God uses his foreknowledge to see who will have faith and then elects those who will…Augustine, however, rejects this belief for two reasons: his anthropology and his doctrine of God.  The sort of freedom necessary to respond positively to God was lost, he says, in the fall of Adam, so God must choose who will become believers.  Second, if God’s predestination for salvation depended on his foreknowledge of who would come to Christ, then God’s will would be dependent on humanity and would be a violation of divine immutability and impassibility.”

In any case, Augustine’s view elevates the immutability and impassibility of God.  Due to Adam’s fall and humanity’s sinfulness, God now has to elect.  His foreknowledge cannot be affected by a sinful human race clamoring for salvation.

With such a lofty view of foreknowledge, Augustine reads the scriptures of divine repentance as not literal but for “babes” of the faith.  It is literally impossible for God to change.  Though the “works” of God changed, His eternal will remains the same.

The Greek philosophers are very much present in the writings and thought of Augustine.  God’s impassibility means that He is not responsive to us and the relational qualities of God are an “idea”.  God’s immutability means He cannot change and is not affected by us.  God’s foreknowledge is eternally exhaustive foreknowledge and does not change because God does not change His mind or will.

What Augustine does is make the highest ontological principle a divine substance instead of a Triune Godhead.  Though his theology is counter to an open view he does allow us into a deeper conversation regarding God’s foreknowledge.  Augustine shows that how one views foreknowledge flows directly from who they view God to be.  The nature of God, as being, substance or principle, has great implications for our understanding of God’s omniscience.  Augustine also shows us the beginning of a legacy of Reformed thought.

The Ongoing Conversation

The conversation keeps going and many theologians of the Middle Ages, Reformation and Enlightenment offer a lot to the conversation.  Two important figures of this large time period are Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin.  Aquinas, a Medieval theologian, follows an Anselmian theology.  Anslem of Canterbury was a theologian who made an ontological argument for the existence of God based on a deductive argument on the most perfect being one can conceive.  The error of Anslem and Aquinas, in my mind, is that they begin their argument with a reasoned understanding of perfection and then go, deductively, into attributes that follow.  Aquinas’ theology, in a sense, resurrects Aristotelian understandings of the unmoved mover.

John Calvin, a theologian during the time of the Reformation, uses Augustine, like Luther, as a type of theological mentor.  Calvin, though he has quibbles with Scholastic theology and uses the Bible extensively in his writings, still uses neo-Platonic language of self-existent, simple, impassible and immutable.  Regarding God’s knowledge, Sanders writes:

“He understood God’s knowledge and will to be absolutely independent of the creation.  God does not look ahead and see what is going to happen, for that would make God dependent on the creatures’ decisions.  God does not decide what he will do in response to anything that the creatures do.  All that God knows and wills is not in relation to the creation but simply in relation to his own will.”

Calvin’s theology was very much shaped by his cultural worldview of kingship and dominance.  He writes that “nothing happens except what is knowingly and willingly decreed by him [God].”

The conversation continues right up to the present.  At the heart of it lies foundational questions.  In a changing world, how do we make sense of an unchanging God?  How does this God act in a temporal world in an atemporal way?  The conversation and questioning continues to come back to the tension between Hellenistic and biblical understandings of divine perfection.

God’s Nature & God’s Omniscience

The implications of this struggle between the Reformed understanding of God’s omniscience spill out into how we perceive and understand God.  Clark Pinnock writes:

“There are aspects of the synthesis [of Greek and Christian thought] that I think are positive.  The Greek ideal of perfection emerged against the background of the fickle gods of the pantheon and was a lofty concept of God relative to that context.  Syncretism is not always a bad thing but there are always dangers.  We must let the divine self-disclosure speak.  Room has to be made for the freedom of God.  The Hellenistic assumptions place God so far away from us and as high above us as possible.  They lead us to a cone-sidedly transcendent diety.  The side of God that is turned away from us predominates and the side of God that has turned toward us is diminished.  It is not wrong to exalt God’s otherness, except at the expense of divine relatedness.”

We need to be sure that as we elevate the sovereignty and perfection of God that we allow His relational side into the conversation.  The biblical witness is full of the relational attributes of God.  Yet the Hellenistic understanding of a “perfect being” has won out over this relational understanding of God in Reformed theology.  The Story of Scripture is that this God is relational.  William C. Placher in his book, Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and Scripture, writes the following:

“Amid all the inconsistencies, whether of historical detail or of the moral character of the God portrayed, does the portrait of an identity for God emerge?…One way of thinking about an identity description is that individual biblical stories may, even if untrue as to detail, function as anecdotes that reveal a person’s character-in ways that get lost, as is often the case with a good anecdote, if one tries to summarize the points of the stories in nonnarrative fashion.  The Gospel stories may do this most clearly, for they show the sort of person Jesus was, and in Jesus, God was revealing God’s own self in human form.”

Placher points out what I believe is missing in the Hellenistic understanding of God’s omniscience, what character does this being have?

The error of the Hellenistic philosophies is that they took a reasoned understanding of perfection, as they understood it, and deduced attributes that flowed from it; i.e., immutability, impassibility, etc.  The biblical witness flips this around.  It does not define perfection as much as it exposes the character of God via His many attributes.  How might these attributes of changing of the mind, vulnerability, and relationality redefine our understanding of perfection?

Practical Implications

There are several practical implications spilling out from the debate over God’s omniscience.  I will respond to a view of them.  First, the Reformed position holds strongly that their view of God’s exhaustive foreknowledge is needed for God’s omniscience to stand.  I believe this is unfounded because, as I’ve been laying out through this entire paper, their understanding of God’s omniscience is largely rooted in pagan philosophy.  Where Hellenistic philosophy argued that God sees things as eternally “present”, Scripture presents a God who is surprised, grieved and repentant.

The Reformed position would fire back and say that this language is anthropomorphic.  I find this problematic on a few levels.  The texts used to support this argument offer us no indication that such an interpretation is warranted.  Even if they are interpreted that way, they still speak to some reality about God.  There is something relational at play that the writer wants to get across to the audience.  Furthermore, there are places where regardless of my prior explanation, anthropomorphism does not work.  When God wants to bring disaster on the Israelites, Moses intercedes and God changes his mind [Exodus 32:14].  If this is anthropomorphic language then God was deceiving Moses by lying because bringing disaster on the Israelites was never in His will.

Another argument the Reformed position makes is that the open understanding of God’s omniscience limits God.  I would turn this argument around quickly on the Reformed position.  The limiting view is the one borrowed from Hellenistic culture in which God lays out a determined route and must stick to it for His sovereignty to be maintained.  Is it not more freeing for God to have creative control of the universe and for Him to have the freedom to change, be vulnerable and take risk to be in our midst?  Limiting is to reason out philosophical boxes and place God in them.  Empowering and freeing is to allow the character of God, revealed not by reason but revelation, to redefine what “in control” and “sovereignty” really mean.

Lastly, the Reformed position argues that the open view tears at the fabric of divine trust. The God of Scripture earns His people’s trust because he is intricately and intimately involved in their struggles and joys.  Trust is not the nature of God it is a characteristic of God’s involvement with His people.  In the event of a tragedy, the Reformed position must acknowledge that it happened for a higher purpose that we are not privy to understanding.  The open view would say that free beings have the freedom to inflict great harm.  In this case, neither seem to offer great comfort at the time.  Tragedy is tragedy, need we say more?

Concluding Remarks

The debate around God’s omniscience will continue long after this paper is lost in a file folder somewhere in Ashland, OH.  Throughout it, however, I have attempted to lay out a brief historical survey of where the Reformed understanding of God’s omniscience developed and how the open view of God’s omniscience is a better model to the biblical witness.  The Hellenization of Christianity occurred at a time when Christianity was attempting to assert its God as the Universal God.  As such, it adopted some pagan philosophy to seal the deal.

Now, I think it is time for a review of our understanding of God’s omniscience.  We need to realize that such a conversation flows out of our understanding about the nature of God.  The danger of all times is forcing God to fit into our presuppositions of ideas like perfection.  The liberation is in allowing the biblical witness the freedom to speak for itself and to redefine key concepts of omniscience, omnipotence, etc.  It is only after carefully surveying the texts that we can see the shortcomings of Greek philosophy, discover afresh the treasures of Christian theology and live out in community a stronger orthodoxy.

Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica I. 1a 13.7.  Quoted in Clark Pinnock, The Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2001.

Aristotle. Metaphysics. 1073.  Quoted in Clark Pinnock and others, eds., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Augustine. City of God. 5:9-10.  Quoted in Clark Pinnock and others, eds., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Bloesch, D.G. God the Almighty: Power, Wisdom, Holiness, Love. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995, 205.  Quoted in Clark Pinnock, The Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2001).

Boyd, Gregory A. and Edward K. Boyd. Letters from a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father’s Questions about Christianity. Colorado Springs, CO: Cook Communications Ministries, 2003.

Boyd, Gregory A. and Paul R. Eddy. Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2002.

Calvin, John. The Insitutes of Christian Religion. 1.16.3.  Quoted in Clark Pinnock and others, eds., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Pinnock, Clark and others, eds. The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Placher, William C. Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and Scripture. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994.

Plato. Timaeus. 37-38.  Quoted in Clark Pinnock and others, eds., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Turretin, Francis. Institutes of Elenctic Theology. Philipsburg, New Jersey: P & R Publishing, 1997.

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