18
for our fellowship, it still must be asked how he will decide how best to respond to our prayers.
This situation is complicated further by the fact that the God of open theism can
and at times does make mistakes in his beliefs about the future. Since he cannot know future
free decisions with certainty, every belief he has about the future (including his belief about what
would be the best response to my prayer) is potentially fallible. Once free decisions are made by
humans, God's beliefs about the future may well prove to be mistaken. Open theists often point
to texts like Jer 3:6-7; 19-20 and 32:35 to argue that this does at times happen.
37
And in
addition, God may reassess what he has previously done and decide that it was not best (as with
the creation of humanity in Gen 6:6 and God's making Saul king in 1 Sam 15:11).
38
The point is
that given all this, what God believes to be the best answer to my prayer may not in fact turn out
to be best. Basinger admits this explicitly,
Since God does not necessarily know exactly what will happen in the future, it is always
possible that even that which God in his unparalleled wisdom believes to be the best
course of action at any given time may not produce the anticipated results in the long
found in The God Who Risks, 63-64, 271. These texts are examined in considerable detail in
my Ph.D. dissertation. See Steven C. Roy, How Much Does God Foreknow? An
Evangelical Assessment of the Doctrine of the Extent of the Foreknowledge of God in Light
of the Teaching of Open Theism (Ph.D. diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2001),
chapter 5.
37
See Boyd, God of the Possible, 60, 119; Sanders, The God Who Risks, 132, 205.
38
See Roy, How Much Does God Foreknow?, chapter 5.