Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (Spectrum Multiview Books)
Overview
The question of the nature of God’s foreknowledge and how that relates to human freedom has been pondered and debated by Christian theologians at least since the time of Augustine. And the issue will not go away.
More recently, the terms of the debate have shifted, and the issue has taken on new urgency with the theological proposal known as the openness of God. This view maintains that God’s knowledge, while perfect, is limited regarding the future inasmuch as the future is “open” and not settled. Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views provides a venue for well-known proponents of four distinct views of divine foreknowledge to present their cases.
Gregory A. Boyd of Bethel College presents the open-theism view, David Hunt of Whittier College weighs in on the simple-foreknowledge view, William Lane Craig of Talbot School of Theology takes the middle-knowledge view, and Paul Helm of Regent College, Vancouver, presents the Augustinian-Calvinist view.
All four respond to each of the other essayists, noting points of agreement and disagreement. Editors James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy introduce the contemporary debate and also offer a conclusion that helps you evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of each view. The result is a unique opportunity to grapple with the issues and arguments and frame your own understanding of this important debate.
Top Highlights
“For whether God is timeless or everlasting throughout time, in neither case are there truths that are unknown to God until some moment at which he discovers them. As an omniscient being, God must know every truth there is and so can never exist in a state of ignorance. Rather the ‘when’ mentioned above refers to the point in the logical order concerning God’s creative decree at which God has counterfactual knowledge.” (Pages 120–121)
“The issue, as classically stated, is whether divine omniscience, as far as it is concerned with the future, is logically consistent with human freedom, where this is understood in an incompatibilist sense.1 The endless discussions of this issue have been motivated by the underlying assumption that a person can be held responsible only for those actions that are incompatibilistically free.” (Page 161)
“Divine sovereignty and human accountability before God—these are two of the fixed points. When we are faced with problems about the consistency of these concepts, it is tempting to modify one or both of them. But we must make every effort to avoid such a course of action. Scripture holds them together, it even speaks of them in the same breath, and so must we. For if Scripture teaches them in this way, they must each be true and so together be consistent, even though it may be difficult for us to grasp this now.” (Pages 166–167)
“The only conclusions justified by this episode are that God possesses perfect knowledge of the past and present and that some of the future is settled, either by present circumstances (Peter’s character) or by God’s sovereign design.” (Page 21)
- Title: Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views
- Authors: James K. Beilby, Paul Rhodes Eddy
- Series: Spectrum Multiview Books
- Publisher: IVP Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2001
- Logos Release Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: God › Omniscience; Free will and determinism
- ISBNs: 9780830874934, 9780830826520, 0830826521, 0830874933
- Resource ID: LLS:DVNFRKNWLDGFVWS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T23:26:09Z