Growing In Grace

Foreknow is defined by dictionary.com as: "to know beforehand." Notice how the definition is completely bound up with the idea of time - knowing "before." In the last post we thought about how God's knowledge is immediate, perfect, and simultaneous - which is to say that God's knowledge is not bound by time. God is both outside of time and the one who inhabits every moment of time. That is what it means for him to be omnipresent - he is always in all times and places. Herein we find the rub - If God's knowledge is immediate, perfect and simultaneous, and he is in all times and places then he doesn't actually have FOREknowledge, he just has knowledge. The great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck put it like this: Strictly speaking, it is a mistake to speak of divine foreknowledge; there is only one knowledge of God. With him there are no “distinctions of time.” For what is foreknowledge if not knowledge of future events? But can anything be future

How Does God Know All Things?  All orthodox Christians affirm the omniscience of God - his exhaustive knowledge of all things past, present and future. We could say that God is the All-knowing Knower Who Knowingly Knows.  But in order to avoid the mistakes of fortune cookie theology we need to think a bit more about what it means for God to be omniscient or all-knowing. For example, how does God know all things? One way to answer that question is to say that God knows all things because he learned them - he has been around for so long that he just knows everything. Bill Murray pondered this picture of God in his movie "Groundhog Day" where his character Phil Connors repeated the day so many times that he came to know everything about that day and how it would unfold. He says that maybe God knows everything because he has just been around long enough to have learned everything. Historical Christianity will rightly deny this as a possibility. However, there is an import