Open Theism means God is Ignorant

The problem of evil in religion and philosophy presses upon our minds frequently. For some, it is used as an excuse to reject the God of scripture. For others it is a motivating force to alter or freelance the scriptures and develop concepts of God more marketable in our current culture. And some professing Christians are carried about with a wind of doctrine called ‘Open Theism’ (OT) as they attempt to make things look better for God in this fallen world or "evangelize". By open they mean that God who knows everything cannot know the future because it is open or contingent and doesn’t yet exist. This is yoked with the teaching of libertarian free will for God’s created agents, to the degree that God is entirely ‘hands off’. Thus, there is no divine persuasion (as here Hos.11:4, 2:14, 23, Jer.31:3, Rom.9:23-7, 10:19) or predetermination (like here 2 Chr.36:22-3, Ezr.1:1-2, Isa.44:28, 45:1) and thus no necessity of action and therefore divine ignorance (nescience) regarding the future. The ‘therefore’ means this is supposed to follow logically. The corollary of the fallacy is that if God were to know the future, then ‘therefore’ there could be no freedom of will for his creatures. And the final ‘therefore’ is that God has no prior knowledge of and thus no responsibility for evil in the world. God is off the hook once they introduce uncertainty into the divine mind. It might help if you think of OT as someone who is reacting to Calvinism and positioning themselves as its theological polar opposite. A book about Divine Nescience by one L. D. McCabe is recommended by propagators of OT to attempt to forge these links into a logical chain. We will quote from it to represent the arguments.

To begin with, we note that OT is founded upon the idea that foreknowledge necessarily destroys free will. “No logician has ever been able to reconcile future contingencies with absolute prescience.” (Pg 157) If this is not proven there is no basis for OT. Although when you lower the scope of your goal by defining it as true by definition and engage in these types of linguistic shenanigans, you don’t really need to write extensively to justify it. Nonetheless, God’s omniscience in OT cannot apply to the future they say, because the future is non-existent. And the only way God could

know it is if he makes it happen directly. Ironically, OT while overreacting to Calvinism, lets Calvinists define the terms of their debate. "As to pure contingencies prior to their creation he [God] may have theories, ideals, fancies, possibilities or probabilities, but cannot have certain knowledge. Relative to them there is absolutely nothing that is knowable. "If there could be contingencies it would be impossible for God to foreknow them," is the uniform testimony of all leading Calvinists. "Without decree," says Jonathan Edwards, "foreknowledge could not exist." "There can be no certainty that does not depend upon the divine purpose," says Dr. Hodge. They all concede the incapacity of Omniscience to foreknow the certain existence of a thing that might or might not be, a thing that might or might not come to pass. Of contingencies, we affirm, God can have no knowledge until from the realm of the possible a free being originates their conception and determines to actualize those conceptions into entities. It is only from that moment that a contingency becomes a knowable thing." pg.12-3 Under this misapprehension OT as Calvinists define foreknow and elect and predestinate as the same concept. (Rom. 8:29;1 Pet. 1:2) Under the other misapprehension OT defines foreknow as without meaning since there is no future to foreknow. There could only be God’s present knowledge of his plan for the future. This is not foreknowledge but forward planning. McCabe displays a confused view of foreknowledge, as is further demonstrated here: “No ruler ought to be angry with a subject before he has violated his law. But prescience makes God sit in judgment on me, sentence me, adjust my punishment, arrange for my endless abode in perdition with Satan, long before I committed the least offense against his law. How absurd a ruler who can find it in his heart to be angry with one before that one has felt a rebellious emotion! If I am the creator of my own moral character it is cruel in God to regard me as hateful before my character is such.” (pg.35) God can foreknow our sin and not be angry until we actualize it; just as he can foreknow our obedience and not reward us until it occurs. (Gen.15:16, Dan.8:23, Dt.31:29, Isa.10:12, Jer.25:12) Jesus foreknew Judas would betray him and yet called him his friend. (John 6:70-71, 13:11, 18, Mk.14:21, Mt.26:50) Jesus foreknew Peter would deny him and yet spake of his conversion after. (Mt.26:34, Mk.14:30, Lk.22:31-34)

Think of the dichotomy being expressed here as the ‘necessary realm’ is God in his eternal state where everything is instantly and eternally known by him apart from any divine deliberation as in a process of thinking or succession of moments involving time and cause and effect (e.g., an eternal purpose- Eph.3:11). Whereas the ‘contingent realm’ would be new ideas and intentions emerge into existence from somewhere in minds like a thought generator (as Ezk.38:10). They are then deliberated upon and concluded in purposes, plans and intentions in time under laws of cause and effect. The idea is that if God exists in this necessary realm, he is not free to act but he is liberated by inviting him into the contingent realm of OT. There is a false dilemma being imported here; instead, perhaps God inhabits eternity in the necessary realm and also manifests himself in time and creation to freely interact with free agents. Yes, it is this in fact.

McCabe explains further, "In the realm of necessities God can have no new thoughts, desires, purposes' or plans. But freedom in an infinite being implies that contingent things' may certainly be brought into existence. In the realms of the contingent... he must necessarily have new thoughts, new desires, purposes and plans." (Pg.10) "The eternity to come will unfold contingencies which are not and cannot now be in the divine consciousness. Such possibilities are necessary to the perfection of God..."(pg.11-2) Why? Because the “perfections of God's personal character, as well as his perfections as a Moral Governor of free accountable beings, most strongly indicate as the correct view that very many of his volitions are formed and known by him only when the demand for them arrives.” “For," says Dr. Bledsoe, "if foreknowledge is incompatible with the existence of free will, the will of God is not free, because all his volitions are perfectly foreseen.” (pg.400) This of course is the “IF” that the entire OT enterprise hinges upon. (Isa.55:8)

So, what strong reasons establish this cornerstone assertion of OT? Is it that God can’t know things that don’t exist? (Rom.4:17) McCabe is concerned with God’s infinite mind being filled with an infinite number of nonentities. (pg.19) Although filling an infinite mind is akin to the end of eternity, self-refuting. Nonetheless, McCabe takes comfort in the idea that all nonentities are unknowable otherwise God’s mind would be full of them, an idea he finds particularly painful. (pg.19) For McCabe a nonentity is something that “had no previous incipiency”. “The simple and single choice of a free will was the absolute incipiency” and “If I am an originator, my determination before I made it had no previous incipiency”. If I originate it, then it doesn’t exist until I originate it. His case in point is human sin, something he says originated in the human mind and not God’s mind, otherwise God authored directly it. But God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 Jn.1:5) Thus God could not know my sin before I committed it, because it was a nonentity, the very things we can’t have filling God’s infinite mind. Perhaps a good place for OT to appeal to divine mystery is ‘How could God who can’t foreknow nonentities such as sins not yet committed (our sins, me & my sins- 1 Cor.15:3, Gal.1:4, Heb.1:3 ,1 Pt.2:24, 1 Jn.2:2, 3:5,4:10, Rv.1:5), foreordain a solution for those very sins (1 Pt.1:19-20, Ac.4:28) before men existed? Or have names of people he could not know because they didn’t exist, written in and not in the book of life from the foundation of the world?’ (Rev.13:8, 17:8, 2 Tim.1:9) McCabe writes “After the sin of Adam, the death of Christ was foreordained to come to pass.” (pg.257) Was the cross just one of many divine contingency plans? (1 Cor. 2:7-8, Acts 2:23, Rom.8:29, Eph. 1:4, 2 Tim. 1:9, Rom. 16:25, 26) McCabe- “How absurd the doing of a nothing, but equally absurd is the knowing of a nonentity. Indeed, knowledge of a nothing is self-contradictory” because a nothing “is a nonentity” Maybe it is my failure to see a problem with God foreknowing men and their sin, or that foreknowledge would be knowledge of a nothing and a meaningless word and OT has opened up mysteries hidden from the foundation of the world.

"God possesses the power, therefore, of awakening original thoughts and taking the initiative, as he may sovereignly determine, in the untrammeled exercise of his absolute freedom. This possibility of unthought-of contingencies yet to come will keep the intelligent universe, throughout eternity, in endless expectancies of new unfoldings of God's infinite resources to instruct, expand, elevate and entertain beings created in his own intellectual and moral image. This view of Deity invests his glorious character with perfections utterly impossible under any/theory of absolute prescience, or of unconditional predestination." (pg.12) OT asserts that a God who foreknows the future actions of his creatures would necessarily have the character of an immoral God who makes his creatures do what they do while holding them responsible as a ‘logical’ conclusion (therefore). Thus, this is “most pernicious an error” and an “irrational and needless dogma of universal foreknowledge” and ought to be rejected. (pg.399) That “freedom of human action would be destroyed if God literally knew beforehand what that action would be” (pg.401) is to OT self-evident. I personally struggle to understand how this is so; how this is logically unavoidable. God can know the past actions of freewill agents and it doesn’t involve divine determinism, so why can’t this knowledge simply apply to future events? In a similar way, God knows what free moral agents can do and what they will do before they actualize it. (Gen. 49:1; Deut. 31:29; Acts 20:29-30; 1 Tim.4:1-3) Again, I fail to see how these are mutually exclusive thoughts. (Isa.46:10, Ac.15:18) To assert that were future decisions of free agents known before would mean they are fixed and couldn’t be otherwise and thus not free, is to beg the question. We know history and it is fixed and cannot be otherwise and yet free agents were acting. It seems perfectly compatible and analogous to conceive of a divine foreknowledge of free agents in the same way. I don’t see how stripping this foreknowledge from God saves us from divine determinism. OT and Calvinism both make God’s omniscience indistinguishable from his omnipotence at this point; as well as redefine the meaning of foreknow as equal to predestine. That is, God accurately foretells what will happen because he directly causes it to. “He himself, however, openly declaring that he does this, repudiates the evasion. That men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on anything but what he has previously decreed with himself, and brings to pass by his secret direction, is proved by numberless clear passages of Scripture.” Institutes- Calvin, Book 1 Ch. 18 Sec.1

Perhaps, it is actually true that foreknowledge and free will are correct but beyond the current capacity of men to link these doctrines together i.e., divine mystery. There really are such things; see- Psa.131. OT says no; they demand God’s thoughts be like our thoughts. McCabe swells “Theologians of the largest endowments have ever been striving with the energy of Titans to reconcile the two incompatible propositions; namely, man's free agency and God's absolute foreknowledge. The great thinkers of all times and lands have, with almost unbroken unanimity, pronounced them to be irreconcilable, and relegated them to the domain of the incomprehensible. "The attempt to reconcile foreknowledge with creature freedom," says Dr. M'Cosh, "has engaged the subtlest and perplexed the clearest minds since man began to ask the how and the why and the wherefore.” (pg.400) McCabe however believes along with our current OT proponents that OT is the explanation for this dilemma. Divine nescience saves from divine determinism. To postulate divine ignorance is to command the sun to rise on the darkest night and drive back the “the dread monster of fatalistic necessity”. (pg.343) Calvinist’s appeal to divine mystery when the question of God directly and secretly instigating the evil actions of his creatures arises by us. Non-Calvinists appeal to divine mystery when we are trying to reconcile free will and providence. OT makes divine mystery God himself not knowing the future.

Another angle McCabe approaches is causation. Cause and effect presuppose time. The effect follows the cause. This is objective truth as opposed to subjective. In the subjective if we are free, we are not making decisions by an external cause (determinism), but by internal ordering of the will. A will free of deterministic forces, divine or natural. McCabe accurately observes “The sensibilities act on the will according to the law of cause and effect, but the will acts freely, and sovereignly sends out its volition.” (pg.403) In other words, cause and effect influence our sense data but the will acts freely and not by necessary causation. Thus, observing external forces affecting a person is not indicative of their response because it is truly free. “The action of the law of cause and effect is always shut up to a single result, while the action of the law of liberty is never shut up to a single result. The will may elect one or another or none of many alternates.” (pg.20) McCabe then says (begging the earlier question about foreknowledge equaling determinism) “If God foresees our choices, then, it is only by looking at the will. If he seeks for a present knowledge of our future choices in the sensational precedents of those choices, he seeks the living among the dead. He seeks for a responsible cause of action where a responsible cause can never be found, and ought never to be found.” (pg.403) Again, OT asserts God can’t look at a decision before it is made. And even if he looks at the “sensational precedents” he can never find the action a free will might take. Why? Well, again ‘free will is a contradiction to foreknowledge’. This also refutes OT’s appeal to God extrapolating data and statistics to make predictions as an explanation of fulfilled prophecy. Yet they appeal to this to explain away prophecies. What a miserable position to find oneself, trying to erase prophecies from scripture. With a double tongue OT says ‘our decisions are sovereign with no indication possible by present knowledge’ and ‘some prophecies are possible because God predicts based on present knowledge’. A false balance is abomination to the Lord. (Prv.11:1)

God must exist, according to OT, with his mind in “a pure uncertain contingency” instead of with foreknowledge. “This human incipiency necessitates a divine incipiency. The human incipiency could have had no previous existence. The divine incipiency, therefore, could have had no possible anterior other than a pure uncertain contingency. Personic action being wholly sovereign and independent of constraining influences, there is nothing to indicate its final determination. To foreknow that determination is, therefore, knowing without any possible foundation for the knowledge. And to know without evidence is certainly absurd.” (pg.21) There is no foreknowledge in OT because there is no future to foreknow. (Ac.2:23, Rom.8:29, 1 Pt.1:2) It’s a nonentity. He insists that God’s mind function like ours. (Isa.55:8) We who believe God does actually foreknow free choices whom he calls “the prescient freedomist”, apparently do not see the dilemma McCabe raises with great persistence. Does God need particular forms of evidence to know some things? Is God an empiricist? In OT yes! Likewise, is God a master statistician. God draws upon the evidence available to His senses and calculates probabilities to arrive at conclusions. (Necessarily bound by time.) God created a ‘game of chance’ like a universal pinball machine where the ball has freewill and God is responding in real time not knowing which way the ball will bounce. In OT God can however perceive thoughts as they emerge from the minds of men, just not before because they are “nonentities”. And we well know thanks to McCabe that if God can know one nonentity then he would be forced to know an infinity of them, “for if one nonentity is knowable then all nonentities are knowable”. (pg.19) It would “fill the divine Mind with countless millions of worthless unrealities”. (pg.26) And to have God’s mind swamped with nonentities would not be good for anybody!

To the “the prescient freedomist” McCabe says “the proposition, "I will in the future choose life or death" is meaningless and very vexatious” if in fact I have no “future exercise of my faculty of freedom”. (pg.22) The reason McCabe sees this conclusion is because he persists in the assumption that if God in fact knows which I will choose it therefore cannot be a possible alternative. In other words, again, foreknowledge destroys freedom. He continues begging this very question. “The proposition is an absurdity if one of the two alternates is already certain”. (pg.22) To him it is absurd to think that God knows what free choice I will make regarding life or death. Because by sheer fact of definition foreknowledge excludes free choice. ‘It’s true because it’s true by definition’. This seems to be the modus operandi. He is a Calvinist at this point. “The present certainty that either A or B will take place is a very different certainty from the certainty that A and not B will take place”. (pg.22) The problem with his objection is he assumes that if God knows that B will take place then from my perspective either A or B cannot be correct. The question begging is deeply ingrained here. There is nothing logically wrong with the idea of God knowing a free choice before it is made, as our analogy of history. However, if you define it to be a contradiction then it is by definition. So far McCabe gives us no reason to accept this ‘true by definition’ question begging. His definition is Calvinistic- God foreknows because he causes it. But, McCabe invites us into OT to escape Calvinism. “Alternation, in the nature of things, necessitates subjective uncertainty in the divine mind.” (pg.22) “Contingencies are and must be instantaneous originations in the absence of all eternal conceptions thereof.” (pg.16) “Prescience and originality are incompatible propositions. But to originality Divine nescience is absolutely indispensable.” (pg.17) “The only proper future for such undetermined initiations must be one that is now unfixed, undetermined, and, therefore, uncertain.” (pg.15) There is the therefore assumption again. McCabe continues in this extended quote laying out his account of how foreknowledge destroys free will. Since we are trying to understand this as the cornerstone of OT let’s give him a full hearing.

“If man can of himself form an original conception of a thing, if he can at will bring or not bring that thing from nonentity into the universe of contingent entities, and if in willing it into existence he exercises an element of power that is wholly other than and apart from that of his Creator, then the provision of such initiatives must be an utter impossibility. If he cannot do those things, he cannot be an originator of moral character. In making man a free being, capable of originating volitions, God was compelled in the deep necessities of things to leave his future unsettled, unfixed, and unknown. And in making man such a being, he bound upon himself the solemn obligation of varying his treatment of him in the way of rewards and punishments, smiles and frowns, in exact accordance with his self-originated volitions. Freedom in the creature necessitates this modified mutability in the Creator.” (pg.15) To McCabe the “logical sequiturs of the assumption of absolute prescience” are “God makes worlds and burns them up, creates souls and binds them in everlasting chains, invites them to his love and fixes an impassable gulf between them and himself, and millions of other self-contradictory things”. In contrast to these ‘absurdities’ divine ignorance “of future contingencies secures to Deity an intellect free from all such contradictions, and presents for our admiration a mind of unspeakable perfections, activities and resources, conceiving, imagining, inferring, calculating, originating and thinking with unutterable grandeur, and always to sure issues and with magnificent realizations.” (pg.27) This sounds like a connoisseur of abstract art describing what they see amidst all the, well, abstractions.

You can see then that this circularity, that foreknowledge destroys free will, is in the very brick and mortar of OT. It is necessary to OT and assumed here to be axiomatic. “As future free choices are self-originated... the foreknowledge of them involved selfcontradiction”. (pg.294) But it is not self-evident unless you define foreknowledge as ‘that which destroys free will’. I see nothing incoherent in the idea of divine foreknowledge of free decisions, but OT stipulates this be a contradiction. Yet unfixed in the divine mind would not necessitate unknown to the divine mind. Prescience does not demand determinism. It does indicate omnipotence as would all possible knowledge in the creature (see presuppositionalism). Also troubling is this idea of a “modified mutability in the Creator”. Quoting one Dr. Domer McCabe affirms “Neither intellect nor heart can be satisfied with a view of God which represents him as remaining eternally the same, for present, past, and future, instead of his position and feelings assuming a form correspondent to man's character.” (pg.15) But, God is immutable, that is he changes not. (Mal.3:6, Jam.1:17, Heb.1:11-12,13:8, Psa.102:12, Ex.3:14) In OT God is ever learning, never knowing what he will do until he is forced to decide. Will he have mercy or justice in each situation? In OT he can’t know and he could choose either in every instance else he would not be free. OT postulates change in God which requires he exist in time and that time be eternal.

“But if God is a free being he can originate. If he originates, the thing he originates, previous to its origination, had no possible incipiency even in his conception. The activities of the divine Mind and the freedom of the divine Will necessarily imply that in the future, as in the past, God will ever go forth to creations of things absolutely new to himself for the perfection of his ideal universe, and for the elevation and the bliss of his intelligent millions. If God can not now originate a new thought, he never could and never did. If he never did originate a new thought, all his thoughts were eternal and necessary.” (pg.24) However, if God’s thoughts are new to himself, he cannot be said to know all his works from the beginning. (Act.15:18) Nor could be said to declare the end or the things that are not yet done from the beginning or from ancient times. (Isa.46:10) He cannot know how he will respond to us if he cannot know how we will act. Sometimes OT slanderously caricatures “the prescient freedomist” view as God helplessly watching history unfold unable to change anything because he foreknows the future, and it can’t be otherwise.

OT proponents need to conceptualize God existing in a state of eternalized time. They combine the two ideas, because they imagine that a view of God inhabiting eternity (Isa.57:15) as the eternal present I AM (Ex.3:14) contradicts the concept of him within time moving from past to future (God manifesting himself within time and space in the beginning of both is not considered). He would be in a frozen eternal present state unable to react or respond or think in sequence. For if he already and eternally knows every possible contingency as well as every actual future free action (Psa.147:5) then OT declares everything would be a divinely determined illusion of time and freedom, as Calvinism would imply. God sees the entire film stretched out in one instant where we see it frame by frame. According to OT & Calvinism this can only be true if God animated the film wrote the entire script and directly created every frame. And the only alternative that OT sees as rational is that God is in time (just like us observing frame by frame) and therefore time is eternal. In OT time did not have a beginning, rather time is just duration of existence. There is no eternal present in the nature of God since there is only eternal sequence. In OT if God exists, then he exists in a duration of time. But unless God is doing something or thinking linearly or sequentially then there would be no conception of past or future, no measure or indication of time. Before creation God would not move from a previous unknown thought through a movement in time subject to any cause and effect to a new idea unless he did not know things. He can’t know nonentities as McCabe sufficiently burdened us with. If this is God in OT, then he has existed from an infinite past series of thinking new thoughts. His understanding would not be infinite. (Psa.147:5) His thinking would be from an infinite past set of new thoughts to the awaiting of an infinite set of future new ones. “To escape Pantheism on the one hand, and stark necessity on the other hand, to avoid charging grave imperfections upon God and limiting his omnipotence in respect to originating new forms, creations, and enterprises, we are compelled to admit that there was a time in the eternal past, when some thoughts and purposes were not before him.” (pg.343) However, this creates the problem of an infinite regress in the divine mind. How could God ever be in the present state of understanding if there is an infinity of thinking leading up to this point in time? You cannot traverse an infinity by definition. Or if he learned a finite number of new things in the past then his understanding was not infinite at some point and he changed. You must either abandon the idea of eternal sequence of time, which defies logic, or you must abandon an idea of God forever learning new things which defies scripture, to which we will next appeal.

“Nescience of future contingencies is the new and great principle of exegesis, which redeems Bible theology from all the absurdities and contradictions which its advocates have crowded into it” (pg.98) Open theism asserts that God can know the things that come into our minds- every one of them (Ezk.11:5) BUT not until they actually come INTO our minds. But 1 second before He is waiting to see what we will choose to think. I wonder what thoughts come into open theists minds about Ezek.38:10 - Thus saith the Lord God; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought: This verse doesn't come up in a word search on the pdf of McCabe’s book. If OT as a philosophical system is not convincing, is OT as a theological system convincing? OT sees God in time reacting, responding, judging sin, rewarding righteousness, answering prayer and concludes their theological system is the correct choice in a false dilemma (OT or Calvin). They think if this be true then the idea of God eternally existing as the I AM outside of time or sequence cannot be... because foreknowledge destroys free will. The philosophical construct becomes a theological one. “The uniform testimony of the philosophy of the current age supports our position”. (pg.225) The bible is filtered through the circular reasoning of the OT philosophy. (Col.2:8) OT philosophy becomes OT theology as they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments. A God who prophecies of the future “is a mere conception of a being bound in the chains and fetters of a changeless fatality.” (pg.347) Because if God knows what he will do then his foreknowledge destroys his own freewill. At some point you wonder if McCabe needs 490 pages to make this one point. Or if the design is to fatigue the reader into agreement.

“If it be possible for God to previse and to declare with certainty the future volitions of a free spirit, while acting under the law of liberty it can only be by looking not at the occasions of the will's action, but at the source where alone its certainty can originate; namely, at the human will itself. But the free will of a future free spirit has as yet no existence whatever. Its future free choices are bound up in no existing causes. No existing causes can now give the slightest indication of what those future choices will be.” But “The will itself is also a nonentity.” “A nonentity, for whose future possibility there now exists no causality, can not, therefore, be foreknowable.” (pg.225) Is it by rational necessity that it is only possible for God to foreknow free spirits choices by directly observing the will which wouldn’t yet exist? Or is this a limitation of McCabe's knowledge of God infinite understanding?

McCabe ponders about God being incapable of knowing all his works from the beginning but thinking new things. “If you affirm that he could not on the morrow form such an original conception and purpose, you limit his power of originality and creation. Activity is one of the highest peculiarities of intellect. The most thrilling delight of mind is to make new discoveries in untraveled ways, and to put forth power in conceiving of the new, the unknown, and the difficult. And certainly we can not deny to God these capacities and gratifications.” (pg.347) Yes, he actually felt this was important enough to print. But OT postulates an infinity of knowledge yet waiting for God to learn. God has supposedly created a realm of possible infinite future knowledge impenetrable even to his own infinite understanding.

Even, more unsearchable than God’s own depth, even a realm outside the Spirit’s searching of all things yea the deep things of God is the realm of future contingencies in OT. God’s own omniscience and omnipotence cannot penetrate this sea of unknowns. But in OT God is good with that because in exchange he gets a “most thrilling delight of mind”.

In scripture God distinguishes himself from idols by prophecy- Isa.41:22-3, 44:7, 45:21. He himself can and does “Shew the things that are to come hereafter”, “the things that are coming, and shall come”. Jesus exercised himself in this revelation stating regarding his future betrayal in John 13:19 “Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he.” God told Moses that in rebellion to his will Israel will demand a king over 450 years before they did. (Deut.17:14, Ac.13:20-21) God foretells in Daniel 9:25 that there will be a “going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem” from a future leader capable of commanding this who will actualize this free will decision. And Isaiah called him by name some 170+ years prior stating, “That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.” “Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him...” (Isa. 44:28, 45:1) Which indeed came to pass- 2 Chr.36:22-3, Ezr.1:1-2. OT creates an existential quandary where God would be speaking of an idea of a man who he could not know would exist, as though he were speaking of that exact man who did indeed exist. The scriptures are very clear he is speaking of the actual man Cyrus; thus, God foreknew him.

Jeremiah told them that they would serve Babylon 70 years and then he would punish the king of Babylon. “And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, saith the Lord, for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans, and will make it perpetual desolations.” Jer. 25:11-12, 29:10-11 In OT God cannot persuade anyone and he cannot know what actually they will choose 1 second before. How could God in OT know Nebuchadnezzar wouldn’t let them go after 59 years or that maybe he wouldn’t destroy the temple? Or maybe there would be a revival in Babylon? Or that there would be someone naming their child Cyrus who would be king or that he would rebuild anything? The weight of these prophecies are heavy enough that McCabe appears to be forced to modify his other premise regarding cause and effect.

Compare this- ”The moment we admit that the precedent of a volition is of such a nature as to afford omniscience ground for absolute certainty as to that volition, that moment we annihilate, to all human discrimination, the distinction between freedom and the great law of cause and effect, and we introduce confusion into our thinkings. That instant we logically destroy human freedom, accountability, and the possibility of a divine moral government.” (pg.402) “The action of the law of cause and effect can never achieve the least moral character, while the action of the law of liberty always creates moral character, and moral character is conceivable or possible under no other kind of action.” (pg.20) With his explanation of the Cyrus prophecies here- “When God desires or intends that a certain man shall perform a certain work, or illustrate to the world some doctrine or phase of religious or political or scientific truth, he can easily subject him to any discipline, or by force of circumstances call him to the performance of any duties, which he may deem best calculated to accomplish his divine purpose. All he would need to do, even in an extreme case, would be to bring controlling influences to bear upon his sensibilities, to put his will under the law of cause and effect, to make his choices certain, in order to foreknow with entire accuracy the whole process and final result. This view seems completely and satisfactorily to explain all the predictions of prophecy, all the teachings of Sacred Scripture, relative to or involving foreknowledge, and also all those other future events which God has determined shall certainly be accomplished upon our globe.” (pg.218-19) “How clearly do these passages show that Cyrus was a consenting instrument in the hands of God, and that his will was brought under the law of cause and effect!” (pg.221) “They need not, therefore, hesitate to accept the proposition that the human will does, at different times, act under two laws, the law of liberty and the law of cause and effect freely, under the former; consentingly, under the latter.” (pg.223) How does God then judge these instruments of providence as free agents? “And why the human will may not be subjected to constraining influences when used as an instrument of Providence, no argument, theological or psychological, is discoverable by the writer. "I girded thee," says God, "though thou hast not known me." And surely this is a very reasonable theory of inspired prophecy. Indeed, we think that there can be no other which is not open to fatal objections.” (pg.223)

He could follow a consistent version of OT where you deny “the possibility of prophecy in toto, on the ground that a prediction of human events is destructive of human freedom”. (pg.223) McCabe pulls back from that precipice as it is too treacherous and “open to fatal objections”. McCabe looked at the centuries of writers enormously gifted who believed it a divine mystery of how “God can foreknow with certainty the future choices of a free agent” (pg.204) and saw an opportunity to step into their midst and ‘sit in the chiefest place among them'; yea rather as their instructor. "Is there no way to remove these great difficulties?” “And thus prompted I could not but prayerfully resolve to seek a solution of these central mysteries.” (pg.205) Only to negate his OT solution wherein a human will “might come to pass or might not come to pass” (pg.7) with “the human will does, at different times, act under... the law of cause and effect”. Which is it? It's both; sometimes Calvinism and sometimes not. Some works brought into judgment, some not. “Things which are so unlike as the action of the law of liberty and the action of the law of cause and effect ought surely to be expressed by terms suggestive of their nature and of their radical differences.” (pg.20) He stipulates an ‘either/or’ only to augment that with a ‘both/and’ exception. With “God's watchful, provident care over sensitive beings, he works results and accomplishes his purposes by constraint of the human will”. (pg.45) No man can serve two masters, but for McCabe's exception. If you stick with the idea that God at times mysteriously causes free will agents to perform his purposes’, then OT must throw out the idea of God judging every work or at this point abandon the whole OT enterprise. McCabe stopping shy of the OT leap into absolute consistency advances nothing here. How can he “keep distinctly before his mind the grand distinction of man as an instrument and man as a responsible person” (pg.46) while holding all men will "appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad."? (2 Cor.5:10) McCabe's answers are “like clouds and wind without rain”.

What of this OT saving device of “the dualistic action of the human will must be admitted, constrained when acting as an instrument, and free when acting as a free agent”? (pg.56) McCabe asserts it and stipulates this as compatible. “He has a just and perfect right to use both individuals and nations as he may deem best to subserve his providential designs. In order to do this the wills of the agents needed to accomplish his purposes are unconsciously led, or even, at times, put under the law of cause and effect, when he finds that to be necessary in order to secure the desired co-operation.” (pg.284) To McCabe it would “seem easy of explanation the moment it is admitted that the human will may be placed under the law of cause and effect, and thus become a consenting instrument in the hands of God to accomplish his providential purposes”. (pg.285) How can McCabe justify this? God will judge every work of man and no distinction is made between acts as an instrument or acts as an agent. (Ecc.3:17, 12:14, Dt.21:5, Jer.32:19) How does this interaction between man as a free agent and man as an instrument of Providence accomplish God’s purposes? God “frequently placing human wills under the law of constraint by means of motives or circumstances which they would not resist, is an inexplicable mystery” and in “no other way could he manage” the affairs of men. (pg.289) Ah yes, the appeal to mystery emerges as expected. “God in prophecy, we infer, overrides the law of liberty, just as he overrides the law of material forces in miracles.” (pg.210)

Don’t conclude however, that man will be judged for his actions as an instrument. “Binding constraint upon human liberty, where moral character is involved, is philosophically unthinkable”. “Logic requires that in the kingdom of Providence, man should act consentingly under the law of cause and effect, that is, under the law of true constraint or restraint.” “But the will of man is never used as an instrument of Providence, in cases where moral character is involved. Its action involving morality belongs to the kingdom of free grace. In the kingdom of free grace, the will always acts willingly under the law of liberty, not consentingly under the law of constraint.” (pg.101) The question is how will man be judged for acts under the law of cause and effect and under the kingdom of Providence? McCabe has the two realms as incompatible regarding human action. “But the action of the law of cause and effect is inexorably shut up to the producing of a single result; and the action of a will under the constraint of a superior power can produce nothing but the identical result purposed by the constrainer. Whereas, the free will can of itself choose to produce either one of two distinct results, or one of many results, or no result at all. The distinction between the action of a will and the action of cause and effect is profound, fundamental, and evident.” (pg.295) An “inexplicable mystery” is requested to explain how God rules in the kingdoms of men of free agency. He has advanced nothing between Calvinists and non-Calvinists who likewise must appeal to inexplicable mystery. Again, clouds without water, carried about of winds.

McCabe however has an extremely grandiose view of his efforts. “Let us then assume just what God himself assumes, his nescience of future contingencies, and that in the kingdom of Providence he uses man as an instrument, while in the kingdom of grace he treats him as a person; and that as an instrument his will acts consentingly under the law of constraint, and as a person his will acts willingly under the law of liberty. By so doing every contradiction in the word of God, every absurdity in theology, and every tantalizing perplexity in Christian life and experience, at once disappear as night and its misshapen specters, when glad morning opens the gates of day.” (pg.161-2) One wonders why we have to appeal to “an inexplicable mystery” after the flood gates of revelation have been opened so widely by McCabe.

Can McCabe bring these concepts together coherently? He has any will acting under the law of cause and effect as not involving any moral quality thus not judged by God or risk being "as unreasonable as it would be to hold inert matter morally responsible for obeying the law of gravitation". (pg.223) “Every rational mind must perceive that the opposite proposition, namely, that a coerced act of the will has moral quality and merits reward or punishment, involves contradiction and absurdity...” All other acts by men under the law of liberty are by definition unknowable by even God himself (divine nescience) and subject to responsibility in judgment. But God is forbidden from any entanglement of influence upon men to any degree else man falls under the law of cause and effect. And that particular work can't be brought into the category of “every work into judgment, with every secret thing” (Ecc.12:14). McCabe asserts that man can be subject to any number of other random influences, even other free agents, but God, the potter is strictly forbidden from choosing any influences that he freely decides for his free creatures, the clay. (Isa. 45:9, Rom. 9:20-21) Men influencing men or devils influencing men is lawful, but for God to influence would mean “acts involving morality, by constraint, or by the application of force”. (pg.223) If “a future act be unavoidable, it can not involve the quality of freedom. It is only under the supposition that the human will does act consentingly (not freely) under the law of constraint, that prophecy is possible in itself and possible of explanation.” (pg.223) This is the landscape McCabe spreads upon the OT canvas.

One problem with this view are these scriptures- (Mt.12:36, 2 Cor.10:5, Gen.6:5, Ecc.3:17, 12:14, Dt.21:5, Jer.32:19, Rv.20:13, 2 Chr. 6:30, 1 Ki.8:39) which assert that every word, purpose, thought and work of man will be judged by God and man is responsible. Whether they are secret or 'open beforehand, going before to judgment; or if they follow after’ all will be brought into judgment. Therefore, this innovation of the category of man as an instrument under cause and effect with works not brought into judgment has no merit.

Another problem is the revelation in scripture that God is sovereign, and man is a free agent- (Prv.29:26, 21:1, 19:21, 16:1,4, 9, Ac.2:23, 4:27-8 w/ Jn.19:11, Lk.22:22, 37, Mt.26:24, Psa.76:10, Rev.17:17) This would be an apparent paradox or a divine mystery. So, OT has made no advancements here being forced to appeal to divine mystery as well. Anything appearing to be prophetic which does not fall under God effecting man as an instrument in OT is just God calculating probabilities. Which in turn they claim cannot be done since the incipiency of a volition cannot be predicted by previous indicators. Take Dt.31:29. Moses can’t know this for certain: “For I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands.” Maybe they will repent. McCabe explains that Moses knew the current rebellious trends (with an enhanced divine insight) and calculated their persistence after his death. “From these manifest indications he could discover the strong probability of their continued unfaithfulness...” (Pg.288) Moses says “ye will utterly corrupt yourselves”, McCabe explains it was not certain but only highly probable. (pg.289) Here they are again trying to erase prophecies from the pen of the Holy Ghost. McCabe continues in the chapter entitled “GOD'S ESTIMATE OF PROBABILITIES”; “But while we maintain that it is impossible for Omniscience to foresee with definite and absolute certainty the choices of free agents when they act under the law of liberty, we nevertheless believe that God can in multitudes of cases, perhaps in most, judge very accurately as to what is most likely to take place, in given contemplated circumstances.” (pg.290) This again is God as the empiricist. But how could a detailed analysis of statistics indicate how many people would make it to heaven out of great tribulation? How could John be told “ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands” would be around the throne? (Rev.5:11) That they would be redeemed to God by Christ’s blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. (Rev.5:9) And again “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Rev.7:9-14) Or that 12,000 of each of the 12 tribes of Israel would be in heaven? (Rev.7:4-8) God according to OT could not know how many people if any would choose freely to accept the finished work of Christ for salvation.

So, whether the unsubstantiated assertion that ‘foreknowledge destroys free will’ or the assertion that man as an instrument is not responsible for his actions and thoughts which will not be judged, or the denial that God knows the future thus ripping the word foreknow from the pages of scripture, or the refusal to allow for mystery in one instance but by special pleading appealing to it in another instance, or the eternal time duration fallacy, or God can’t predict volitions on one hand yet extrapolates on the other hand and other false dilemmas, OT in McCabe’s apologetic is weak and beggarly philosophically and contradicted scripturally.