Reddit mentions of God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction To The Open View Of God

It's called Open Theism. If you're at all serious about your inquiry, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God is a good academic place to start. It's not light reading though. I respect Greg Boyd enough to suggest God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God as well, though I haven't read it myself.

It's difficult to talk about a biblical God that doesn't have all power or know all things. That sort of language is employed often enough in the Bible.

Openness talks about God choosing to not exercise the power that He could, limiting himself in creating creatures with actual libertarian free will.

Since, the argument goes, true libertarian free will is incompatible with determinism, the future doesn't exist.

It isn't that God doesn't know the future. God knows everything. The future simply doesn't exist yet to be known.

When God or God's prophets make a statement about the future, it isn't due to knowledge of what will be, it is primarily due to God's knowledge of what he will do.

Say I tell you that next Wednesday I'm going to go to Walmart. If next Wednesday I'm at Walmart, it isn't because I had some special insight into the future, it's because I knew what I planned on doing. My truck could break down, I could catch cold, or any number of things might prevent me from going; but in all likelyhood I'd be there.

Now, consider God, a being who even in the most open views of God is 'most powerful'. When he says that next Wednesday he is going to be at Walmart; he's going to be at Walmart.

Also, Open Theism raises a lot of questions about God's immutability and impassibility. These are the ideas that God is unchangeable and therefore never the recipient of actions and only ever the subject of actions.

A lot of the ideas we have about omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, impassibility and immutability actually find their roots in Greek philosophy. That isn't necessarily bad though, at least not in and of itself.

There are a good handful of places in the Bible where God "repents" and changes his mind about things. These are often looked at as anthropomorphisms, but the argument for those instances being anthropomorphisms usually don't get much more deep than, "it isn't consistent with the picture of God I have, so therefore I refuse to accept that God could change".

I bought into Open Theism completely a couple of years ago, now I'm in the process of going back through and reevaluating things.

I can recommend a few things.

First, there's this blog that attempts to show that libertarian free will is consistent with perfect divine foreknowledge.

http://philochristos.blogspot.com/2005/04/is-free-will-compatible-with-gods.html

Then there's this book by Jonathan Edwards on The Freedom of the Will. There's a chapter in this book where Edwards agues the libertarian freedom is not consistent with divine foreknowledge.

http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/Jonathan%20Edwards%20Freedom%20of%20the%20Will.pdf

Check out Section XII on page 73.

There's this book by William Lane Craig called The Only Wise God where he uses Molinism to show that free will and perfect foreknowledge are compatible.

https://www.amazon.com/Only-Wise-God-Compatibility-Foreknowledge/dp/1579103162/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543020991&sr=8-1

Then there's this book by Gregory Boyd called God of the Possible, where he argues that God does not know the future perfectly because there is no truth value to future tensed statements about people's free choices.

https://www.amazon.com/God-Possible-Biblical-Introduction-Open/dp/080106290X/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1543021053&sr=8-14

Finally, there's this book called Four Views On Divine Providence where people with various opinions explain their point of view and why they disagree with each other.

https://www.amazon.com/Four-Views-Divine-Providence-Counterpoints/dp/0310325129/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543021516&sr=8-1&

I would recommend looking into open theism.

http://opentheism.info/

Here's an article from the site:
The Problem of Evil in Process Theism and Classical Free Will Theism
http://opentheism.info/information/problem-evil-process-theism-classical-free-will-theism/

To add to it, I would recommend these books.

The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence by John Sanders

The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?

God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God

Others here have recommended other Christian approaches to the issue too. Seek the truth. God honors that.

What you're describing is Calvinism, basically, and I completely reject it. Do you not believe in free will? If everything was already pre-planned, what would be the point of anything.

I am an open-theist. Basically, I believe that God's mind can be changed (there are plenty of scriptural references to this happening). Greg Boyd, who wrote the book, the God Of The Possible describes open theism as this:

>If I had to define “Open Theism” in one sentence, I would say that it as the view that the future is partly comprised of possibilities and is therefore known by God as partly comprised of possibilities. (By the way, I prefer to refer to this view as “the open view of the future,” since the most distinctive aspect of Open Theism is not its understanding of the nature of God, but its understanding of the nature of the future).

>To expound a bit on this definition, the open view of the future holds that God chose to create a cosmos that is populated with free agents – at least humans and angels (though some hold that there is a degree of freedom, however small, in all sentient beings). To have free will means that one has the ability to transition several possible courses of action into one actual course of action. This is precisely why Open Theists hold that the future is partly comprised of possibilities. While God can decide to pre-settle whatever aspects of the future he wishes, to the degree that he has given agents freedom, God has chosen to leave the future open, as a domain of possibilities, for agents to resolve with their free choices. This view obviously conflicts with the understanding of the future that has been espoused by classical theologians, for the traditional view is that God foreknows from all eternity the future exclusively as a domain of exhaustively definite facts.