Position · 400

Classical Theism

The view that God is eternal, unchanging and simple, and knows all things, including every future free choice, with complete certainty.

Augustine set out its main lines, and Thomas Aquinas gave it its fullest form in the thirteenth century. It appears in the confessions of the Reformation, such as the Westminster Confession (1646), and in the First Vatican Council’s teaching on God (1870). Holders see it as the faithful reading of Scripture’s witness to a God who does not change and who declares the end from the beginning. It became contested in the 1990s, when Open Theism argued that it owed more to Greek philosophy than to the Bible’s picture of a God who responds to people.