Open Theology Q & A

Q: Hi there. I'm an 18-year old Christian with a really complicated question that I am sure has been asked before. If God knows everything...then he knows that no matter what "Jim" is going to Hell. That is, he will never accept Christ. Before Jim was even born, God knew Jim would end up in Hell. I guess my question is...why let Jim even be born if he's gonna end up in Hell? Does the Bible provide an answer to this? Thank you so much and God Bless...

A: Let me give a simple answer to your question, and then give you an attached paper that might help. There are four points to the answer.

1. God does indeed know everything before hand, including whether “Jim” is going to Heaven or Hell before Jim was even born. 1 John 3:20; Isaiah 46:10; Psalm 139:16; Romans 9:10-23; 8:29; Ephesians 1:4; ~Proverbs 5:21; 15:3

2. God could have made us all robots, with no capability to be able to choose to disobey God. However, God so valued our ability to choose to love Him, that God did not make us this way. As Francis Schaeffer said, we can do things that make God sad. Ezekiel 8; Mt 23:37-39

3. God does not delight in the death of the wicked, but rather desires that they turn from their wickedness & live. Ezekiel 18:23,32; 33:11; 2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 2:4-5; Matthew 18:14

4. So God did not coerce us, but gave us a choice. But could we really have a choice, since God already knew of our choice? The following illustration shows this.

Suppose you read in a history book that George Washington crossed the Delaware River. When you read this, did your knowledge force George Washington to cross the Delaware? - of course not. Now suppose you could go back in a time machine to a period before George Washington was born, and you brought the history book with you. Then would you somehow be forcing George Washington to make his choice? -of course not. Likewise, God knowing what we will do does not coerce us to do it, nor relieve us of the responsibility for our actions.

This is probably one of the heaviest topics to discuss in Christianity. I have more material that discusses this, but read over what I attached first, and let me know if you have any questions.

Q: I was researching on your site when I came across the question below on the page you titled "Open Theology Q&A":

I was delighted to see the question there because it was precisely the one I have been troubled with for the past several weeks, and because from the rest of the site I expected a substantive response. Instead I found a short answer and a reference to an "attached paper" which was nowhere linked on the page. That is why I'm emailing now - first, to find out how to view the paper mentioned, and secondly, to expand on the question.
   The expansion of the question (and what the original person may have been really wanting to know) is not whether the Bible says we have the ability to choose or whether God knows everything beforehand. The brief points you mentioned are pretty well agreed upon among those Christians who are not far over in the Calvinist wing. The underlying question is, if these things are the case, is God good? By "good" I mean something like "the kind of person who would not willingly cause another person harm just for his own advantage." Given that God has known eternity from eternity and knew who would end up in heaven and hell, why did he create the people that would end up in hell? What is the good in creating a being whose end is eternal torment?
   I once personally asked Norm Geisler that question. No doubt he was pressed for time, but I found the answer he gave me unsatisfying. He said, from God's perspective, "it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." If the end of the unsaved were to be annihilation rather than hell, I could accept that. But if he ever loved them in the first place (or loved their potentialities, before they were created) why would he cause them to be born knowing that, like in Judas' case, it would have been better for them if they had never been born?
   The Calvinist answer to the original question has at least the advantage of being unambiguous: God saves those who he chooses to save, in order to bring himself glory by so doing; and God damns those who he chooses to damn, in order to bring himself glory by so doing. It also has the advantage of being well-supported by Romans 9:10-24. But whether we consider that God knows people's choices ahead of time or that God is the one who makes the final decision, I have to ask in what substantive way can we say that God is good when he could have prevented people from experiencing eternal damnation and chose not to?
   Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely, _______
A: I am sorry the link was not working; attached is the paper I was referring to. However, the paper does not answer your expansion of the question. It is a very good question, and I will add it to my site.

Perhaps as Norm Geisler said, “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a good way to put it. But your question still remains, “why is this so?”

We have not been given a direct answer in the Bible. However, pondering the fatherhood of God, and looking at what the Bible does say, I think we can arrive at a theory that explains things and is not incompatible with the Bible.

But first let’s ask a simple question, why do couples have kids? Kids are expensive, kids can break your heart, and kids may or may not choose to love you when they grow up. One thing is certain though: at some point in their lives they will bring you some heartache, if not from making wrong choices at least from getting hurt. And then when they are grown up, they might turn out fine, or they might turn out unhappy and wicked, and even hurting others. Prospective parents already know all this, so why do people still have kids? Perhaps the answer we give for parents is similar to the answer for why the Father chose to create us. We judge that it is worth the cost, its worth the risk, to have children that love us. We do not want our children to turn out bad, but if they do despite our persuasion otherwise, we will let them live their chosen destiny, rather than locking them in a closet all their lives.

There is one big difference though between human parents and God though. Parents “risk” having kids not knowing in advance how they will grow up. God, according to classical Christian theology, knows with absolute certainty how each of his “kids” will turn out before they were even created. If a couple, thinking of having four kids, were told that the first two would be great and the last two would live bad, horrible lives, then they might decide to just have two kids. On the other hand, if the couple were told that two kids would turn out fine and two would turn out bad, but they did not know which ones, they might still have all four kids for the sake of the two that would turn out fine. Without knowing which was which, they would choose to either have all the kids or none at all. So was God’s situation analogous to the first choice or the “all or nothing” choice? And if it was the “all or nothing choice” then why?

Now open theology would say it is more like the “all or nothing” choice because God never knows how each individual “kid” will turn out until the end. But that is going too far from Psalm 139:16: “All the days ordained for me were written your book before one of them came to be.” But instead of the open theology view, we could still have the “all or nothing choice” if God foreknew how they turned out only after He unchangeably chose to create them.

Now we do not know the details of how foreknowledge and predestination interact in the mind of a timeless God, but in both places where these two terms are used together in the Bible relating to people, foreknowledge is mentioned first (Rom 8:29; 1 Peter 1:2). Even if there were no “clock” of absolute time in Heaven, there could still be sequence time, where some things happen in an order (either a linear sequence or a network).

The Bible indicates that God not only knows the future (Isaiah 41:22-23) but He knows in advance every single day of your life according to Ps 139:16. So God knows every single thing that will actually happen. However, the Bible is silent about God knowing every “what-if”. It is not contradictory to the Bible to speculate that God would choose to create a person and then (in sequence) know everything about them, rather than know everything about hypothetical, non-existent people who would never be created. If someone were to reject God, and so God “uncreated” them before time began, then they never would have made that choice would they?

So, open theology says God chose to create all and only know how each would turn out WHEN THEY DIE.

My view, which does not contradict Psalm 119:16, says God chose to create all and only foreknew how each would turn out AFTER HE UNCHANGEABLY CHOSE TO CREATE THEM.