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6
What exactly does this mean? In the end it means that God must respond and adapt to
surprises and to the unexpected. As Pinnock states, "God sets goals for creation and redemption
and realizes them ad hoc in history. If Plan A fails, God is ready with Plan B."
17
Thus, says
Pinnock, because of God's creation of human beings with libertarian freedom, the sovereign God
delegates power to the creature, making himself vulnerable. Sovereignty does not mean that
nothing can go contrary to God's will, but that God is able to deal with any circumstances that
may arise. As Pinnock asserts, "by his [God's] decision to create a world like ours, God showed
his willingness to take risks and to work with a history whose outcome he does not wholly
decide.
18
Hence, to a large extent, reality is "open" rather than closed. For Pinnock and other
open theists this ultimately means that "genuine novelty can appear in history which cannot be
predicted even by God. If the creature has been given the ability to decide how some things will
turn out, then it cannot be known infallibly ahead of time how they will turn out. It implies that
the future is really "open" and not available to exhaustive foreknowledge even on the part of
God."
19
This last observation leads us to our next point of discussion, namely that of the
openness view of divine omniscience.

Divine Omniscience and Human Freedom

Traditionally, Christian theologians and philosophers have sought to maintain that God has
complete and infallible knowledge of everything past, present, and future and necessarily so. As
Thomas Morris states,
Not only is God omniscient, he is necessarily omniscient ­ it is impossible that his
omniscience collapse, fail, or even waver. He is, as philosophers nowadays often say,
omniscient in every possible world. That is to say, he is actually omniscient, and there is
no possible, complete and coherent story about any way things could have gone (no
"possible world") in which God lacks this degree of cognitive excellence.
20

However, as has long been discussed in the history of theology, this view of God's omniscience
seems to generate a very thorny problem, namely, how can we possibly be thought to be free in
17
Ibid. For a further development of this theme of divine risk-taking see John Sanders', The God Who Risks.
18
Ibid., 116.
19
Clark Pinnock, "God Limits His Knowledge," in Predestination and Free Will, 150.
20
Thomas Morris, Our Idea of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 87. Morris clarifies what he means
by this on page 88. He argues that to say "God is omniscient" does not merely assert a necessity de dicto, i.e. God
knows all true propositions and none that are false, but also a necessity de re, i.e. God has perfect personal
knowledge of all things. In other words, "not only is omniscience necessary for divinity, divinity is a necessary or
essential property of any individual who has it . . . the property of being God is best thought of as a necessary or
essential property. An individual who is God does not just happen to have that status. It is not a property he could
have done without . . . Omniscience is thus not only a necessary condition of deity, it is a necessary or essential
property for any individual who is God. No literally divine person is even possibly vulnerable to ignorance."