Open theism is not a tolerable variation within orthodoxy but a fundamental denial of the God of Scripture, for it strikes at His omniscience—an attribute the church has always confessed and the Bible everywhere affirms. To say that God does not know the future free acts of His creatures is to say that there is a vast and ever-growing realm of reality hidden from Him, that He learns as history unfolds, that He may be surprised and mistaken, and that His plans are provisional and subject to revision. This is not the God who declares the end from the beginning, who knows the word on the tongue before it is spoken, who numbers a man’s days before one of them is, and who predicts the free choices of men—Peter’s denial, Judas’s betrayal, Cyrus by name centuries in advance—with flawless precision.

The motives of open theism—to preserve human freedom and to distance God from evil—cannot justify the cost. A God who does not know the future is a God who cannot be trusted: His promises become hopeful predictions that might fail, the triumph of His kingdom becomes a wager rather than a certainty, and the believer’s confidence that all things work together for good collapses, since God Himself does not know how things will turn out. The anthropomorphic texts open theists press—God “repenting,” “testing to know,” being “grieved”—are accommodations to human understanding, figures by which the unchanging God describes His real responses to changing human conduct, not literal confessions of ignorance; to read them as denials of foreknowledge is to overturn the plain and pervasive teaching of Scripture by a handful of figures. Open theism, in the end, fashions a god small enough to fit the demands of libertarian autonomy—and a god that small is no God at all.