Topic

Divine Foreknowledge

Whether God knows the whole future, including the free choices people have not yet made, and what that means for God’s relationship to time and change.

For most of church history the answer was settled: God knows all things, past and future, and does not change. This view, now called Classical Theism, runs from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas and the Reformers. In the 1990s Open Theism argued that the future is partly open, so God knows it as possibilities rather than settled facts. The debate is closely tied to older arguments about predestination and free will between Calvinism and Arminianism.