Theology Sundays: Omniscience and Omnipresence

A number of passages in the Old Testament do not give us the impression that God knows everything, even if he knows a lot. Perhaps the most striking statement in this regard is when Genesis 6:6 says that God "was sorry that He had made humanity on the earth, and it grieved Him in his heart." If God knew that humanity would become evil all along, it is scarcely possible that He would regret creating them it at some later point. Although the original author probably did not, we as Christians should take this statement as an anthroporphism, the depiction of God by way of human characteristics.

Similarly, the very idea of God getting angry is difficult from any literal standpoint. Anger as an emotion implies reaction to something that has taken place. But if God knows all things at all times, then He can gain no new information when something occurs in time. At this point some individuals might turn to the very human distinction between head knowledge and experiential knowledge. Indeed, some suggest that God became human so that He could know the human condition, experience it.

But this is a preposterous suggestion. If God created the world out of nothing, then there is no potentiality of this universe that God does not know. It is not like some person in a kitchen who might coincidentally cook something good by the most outrageous ingredients and method. We did not invent the rules of chemistry whereby ingredients combine and come to have taste.

But if God made the world out of nothing, then He made all the rules, all the chemistry. He knows at the very least every possibility of this universe, including what the Devil feels when he perpetrates evil. God knows what it feels like for a serial killer to do the most heinous acts. All these things are the logical implications of creation ex nihilo. We must therefore conclude that a great deal of the biblical language about God is metaphorical rather than literal.

But how much? Recent days have seen the rise of Open Theism, an approach to God's knowledge that claims He knows every possible sequence of events in history. Further, it claims that He could also know every actual event but only at the cost of human free will. God therefore limits Himself willfully so that humanity can have free will.

On the one hand, Open Theism is much maligned, with most of it unjustly deserved. For example, Open Theism is not process theology, which believes that God is changing and evolving along with the world. Process theology does not believe that God could know every outcome the way Open Theism does. Open Theism believes He could but chooses not to so that we can have free will.

Indeed, Open Theism simply takes much of the biblical imagery straightforwardly. When the Bible speaks of God getting angry, the Open Theist can take such words largely for what they say. A "liberal" could not be an Open Theist, because the Open Theist takes the Old Testament at its word. It is the orthodox believer who must assume that these are less than literal pictures of God.

In Genesis 3, God at least "plays dumb" about what Adam and Eve have already done. Perhaps the author of Genesis even took God's inquiries literally. But the bulk of the Bible seems to assume that God at least knows everything that happens, not least because He is everywhere present and thus can observe it.

A number of Old and New Testament passages indicate that the whole world is exposed to God's observation. In Job 26:6 we are told that "Sheol is naked before God." Psalm 139:7-12 express a very similar idea when they indicate that we cannot escape God either in heaven or Sheol or in the farthest limits of the sea. Because God's spirit is everywhere, He can see anything we do and find us even if we try to escape Him.

Of course these ideas appear in the New Testament as well. Hebrews 4:13 speaks of how the creation is naked and exposed before God's word. 1 John 3:20 says that God knows everything, which in context is a reference to what is true about our hearts--even when we are unsure what is true about our own hearts.

These passages imply that God knows everything that happens in the world. Interestingly, however, in themselves they would not necessarily imply that He knows everything about the future. To be sure, the Old Testament indicates that God knows a lot about the future. He could scarcely inspire the prophets to predict the future if He did not.

On the other hand, prophecies sometimes have a conditional characteristic as well. Jonah preaches that Ninevah will be overthrown in forty days, but the repentance of the city changes God's plan. Jonah of course understood that this was the nature of the prophecy, and this is why he fled, knowing the character of God as loving and compassionate (4:2). The Old Testament does not seem to speculate whether God knew Ninevah would repent. It depicts God interacting with the world much as humans interact with each other.

In the New Testament, God's foreknowledge is heightened first off because the prophecies of Scripture are now understood to have taken place so long in the past. In the Old Testament prophets, fulfillment followed prediction fairly straight on. Now prophecies can take on the character of things God had planned from the foundation of the world. Further, there is a much heightened sense of predestination in the New Testament, which implies divine foreknowledge.

So the Old Testament is much more amenable to the idea of Open Theism than the New Testament is. The New Testament seems to have the sense not only that God is aware of everything that takes place within the creation but also that God knows everything that will take place. This is of course the orthodox position of Christendom: God knows not only everything that has taken place but also everything that will take place. To affirm this orthodox perspective, we apparently must assume that the greater part of the way the Bible presents God's interaction with the world is anthropomorphic, at least with regard to His transcendence.

We should end with a final note on Christ's omniscience. There are some passages in John that lend themselves to seeing Jesus as all knowing. The disciples affirm that Jesus "knows all things" in John 16:30. Characteristic of John, Jesus does seem to know far more than he does in the synoptic gospels.

But the synoptics do not portray the earthly Jesus as all knowing. Thus no one knows the day or the hour of the Son of Man's return, "not even the Son" (Mark 13:32). Mark thus does not understand Jesus to have been omniscient while he was on earth.

It does not seem unorthodox to suppose that Jesus did not "access" His divine omniscience while he was on earth. Once he returned to heaven, then, we can suppose that he reassumed His omniscience as the second person of the Trinity. Of course the biblical text itself knows nothing of such concerns, a reminder that an overwhelming amount of what Christians believe comes from the orthodox traditions of Christian history rather than from the Bible itself.