God's Knowledge: Part 1

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 important insight into God's knowledge which can be grounded in Groundhog Day. If we agree that God does not learn then cogitate on this conundrum for a moment - How did God foreknow those whom he would predestine, call, justify, and glorify in Romans 8:29-30?

This quandary is harder to quash than first appears. In the next post we will consider some of the bewildering elements of foreknowledge, but for now it must be acknowledged that God's foreknowledge cannot be pictured in such a way that God is seen to be gaining knowledge like Phil Connors. Theologian Louis Berkhof defines God's knowledge like this:
The knowledge of God differs in some important points from that of men. ... His knowledge is not, like ours, obtained from without. It is a knowledge that is characterized by absolute perfection. As such it is intuitive rather than demonstrative or discursive. It is innate and immediate. and does not result from observation or from a process of reasoning. Being perfect, it is also simultaneous and not successive, so that He sees things at once in their totality, and not piecemeal one after another.
Pay special attention to some of those descriptions - God's knowledge is immediate, perfect, and simultaneous. Herein our dilemma is found - If God's knowledge is immediate, perfect, and simultaneous then how he foreknows is an incredibly important question which is frequently overlooked.

Most American Christians would attempt to answer the question posed above regarding how God foreknew those he would predestine by saying, "God looked down the corridors of time and saw what choice we would make and then predestined according to our choice." 

Now do you see the connection to Groundhog Day? The "corridors of time" answer means that God learns because he has to look and see what we do. This means the "corridors of time" answer completely denies that God knows everything immediately, perfectly, and simultaneously. This means the "corridors of time" view is incoherent if God is truly omniscient as Christians have confessed down through the centuries. 

Either God is omniscient and his knowledge is immediate, perfect, and simultaneous, or you are left with having to step beyond the bounds of orthodoxy and deny or limit the omniscience of God's knowledge. This is called being on the horns of a dilemma. 

Middle Knowledge: (Only for the Uber Nerds, all others can skip this section) 

Perhaps there are some fellow philosophical plebeians reading this who believe the theory of so-called middle knowledge is the escape hatch we need to be free from this dilemma. I have addressed this barmy position previously, but will repeat some of that critique here. 

 One of the most well know advocates of middle knowledge is Dr. William Lane Craig who demonstrated the limitation it puts on God in a blog post back in 2011. To be sure, Dr. Craig is a brilliant philosopher and a Christian brother who longs to honor the Lord with his life and ministry. I do not make these comments to belittle him but to call out what I perceive to be a deep inconsistency in his theology. In that blog post Craig unwittingly placed a massive limitation on God when he wrote, "The counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which confront Him are outside His control. He has to play with the hand He has been dealt."

Let me translate, Craig is declaring that there are things "outside" of God's "control" and so God must play "the hand He has been dealt." Hoping to be free from the horns of the dilemma, Craig begins to unwind the doctrine of God by making God dependent on the mysterious, cosmic card dealer. As with those who seek to limit God's knowledge this should not be an option for biblically faithful Christians. So much for middle knowledge. 

The Uncomfortable Reality of Omniscience

We can summarize the dilemma as follows:
  1. God is omniscient - he knows all things immediately, perfectly, simultaneously
  2. Because God is omniscient his "foreknowledge" cannot include any idea of his gaining knowledge
  3. Therefore, God's "foreknowledge" necessarily excludes any idea of "looking down the corridors of time" so as to see what choices people would make

Has the dilemma thoroughly knotted your innards yet? Friends, that is a good thing! And it's not a good thing because I happen to like being the guy who pulls the grenade pin and then runs away. Rather, this is a good thing because it is in these moments when we as the creatures are experiencing a bit more of what it means to stand in awe of our Creator. Don't run from that feeling, press in to every bit of it. Let it lead you to worship the God who has condescended in unimaginable ways so that we might begin to catch a glimpse of his greatness, glory, and majesty.
The next post in this series will probe the topic of foreknowledge more deeply so that we can start to piece together what Romans 8:29-30 means. In the meantime here is a cud for you to chew on - pay special attention to the fact that "foreknowledge" includes the element of time (i.e. knowing before). But Christians also confess that God is omnipresent, the one who exists everywhere and in every time. So what does it mean for God who exists everywhere and every time to "foreknow"?

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