Millard Erickson channels his inner Bruce Ware to argue that if God gives timeframes about the future, then the future does not have freewill choices:

Here again, however, a feature of the narrative presents a problem for the open theist position. Bruce Ware in particular points out that Jehovah does not just tell Hezekiah that he will extend his life. He is much more specific: his life will be extended by fifteen years. Ware says:

Does it not seem a bit odd that this favorite text of open theists, which purportedly demonstrates that God does not know the future and so changes his mind when Hezekiah prays, also shows that God knows precisely and exactly how much longer Hezekiah will live? On openness grounds, how could God know this? Over a fifteen-year time span, the contingencies are staggering! The number of future freewill choices, made by Hezekiah and by innumerable others, that relate to Hezekiah’s life and well-being, none of which God knows (in the openness view), is enormous. 19

Erickson, Millard J.; Erickson, Millard J. (2009-08-30). What Does God Know and When Does He Know It?: The Current Controversy over Divine Foreknowledge (p. 24). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Erickson does not discuss any Open Theist counters to his point, but many can be easily imagined. Both “God’s protection” and “predictable probabilities” are two possible answers. A third that will be developed in this response is that often in the Bible a timeframe is given and that timeframe is only a loose estimate, sometimes off by decades. The pliability of predicted timeframes is both good evidence that the future is not known and good evidence that in the case of Hezekiah, that the timeframe did not have to be exact to still be fulfilled.

Two loose predictions that will be discussed are the Babylonian exile and the captivity in Egypt. In Genesis 15, God promises Abraham that Israel will be oppressed in Egypt for 400 years:

Gen 15:13 Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.

There is a specific and divergent number given in an Exodus text:

Exo 12:40 The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years.
Exo 12:41 At the end of 430 years, on that very day, all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.

Here is Answers in Genesis trying to answer the problematic numbers (they attempt to start the 400 years of persecution with Ismael mocking Isaac!). Not very persuasive. It is more likely the numbers are ballparks and not absolute.
https://answersingenesis.org/bible-questions/how-long-were-the-israelites-in-egypt/

The next event at which we will look is the Babylonian captivity. Christine Hayes writes:

Notice that the decree at the very beginning in Chronicles — in the 2 Chronicles version — the decree is said to fulfill the word of the prophet Jeremiah. Now, you remember that Jeremiah prophesied that the Babylonian exile would last 70 years; he wrote a letter, he said settle down, this is going to last a while, plant plants and build homes. So he had prophesied 70 years for an exile. Well, from the time of the first departure of exiles in 597, maybe to the return in 538, 61 years — it’s close. If you look from the destruction of the first temple perhaps in 586 to the completion of the second somewhere between 520, 515, we’re not really sure, that’s about 70 years. Either way, it seems that in the eyes of the Chronicler it was close enough. This seems to have been a fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prediction. That it would be about 70 years before they would return.

One site attempts to claim that the 70 years applies not to the judgment Israel but to a judgment against Assyrian. But to the author of Daniel, 70 years of desolation was applied to Israel:

Dan 9:1 In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the lineage of the Medes, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans—
Dan 9:2 in the first year of his reign I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years specified by the word of the LORD through Jeremiah the prophet, that He would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.

Either way, the Babylonian exile and the Egyptian captivity present major problems and inspire from apologists all sorts of clever ways to avoid the problems. Surely, if Hezekiah ended up dying in only 5 years, all sorts of similar apologetics would spring up (“Maybe the 14 years is counting from a time Hezekiah would have died if not for the foreknown repentance”). These explanations, much like the attempted explanations of the Babylonian and Egyptian captivities, stretch credulity.

In the Bible, prophecy is often not exact even when using precise numbers. This is because the future is not known, and leeway is allowed. These loose timeframes, contrary to being evidence against Open Theism, is evidence for Open Theism.

Bruce Ware objects that God’s test of Abraham just could not have taught God what Open Theism claims that it has taught God. Ware’s third reason for this:

Third, given the openness commitment to the nature of libertarian freedom, God’s test of Abraham simply cannot have accomplished what open theists claim it has.

…

According to these openness advocates, Abraham’s testing proved to God now that Abraham was a faithful covenant partner who, therefore, fore, could be trusted to be faithful in working with God in the fulfillment of God’s covenant purposes. But since Abraham possesses libertarian freedom, and since even God can be taken aback by improbable able and implausible human actions, what assurances could God have that Abraham would remain faithful in the future? One realizes how transient the “now I know” is for God. As soon as the test is over, another test would seemingly be required.

And notice, too, an interesting dilemma faced in the openness understanding of Abraham’s testing. At best, what God could come to know, on openness grounds, is whether or not Abraham’s passing the test demonstrated the continuation of a pattern of behavior that would render Abraham’s future faithfulness more probable. But of course, on the one hand, if Abraham’s passing of this test confirms further a pattern tern of faithfulness Abraham had already demonstrated in his life of trust and obedience, then it could not be literally true that in this test (i.e., the test of the sacrifice of Isaac) God learned now that Abraham feared him. On the other hand, if Abraham passed this test in striking contrast to a pattern of his previous unfaithfulness, why would God then conclude that Abraham would remain faithful in the future, even when he had passed this test, given his previous pattern of disobedience? Either way, whether Abraham had previously demonstrated a pattern of faithfulness fulness or not, the singular and transcient nature of this specific test demonstrates that what openness proponents claim God learned simply could not have been gained.

Bruce A. Ware. God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism (Kindle Locations 587-600). Kindle Edition.

Ware offers a double edged third critique:

1. God cannot have gained any certainty from the test.
2. God should have already seen the pattern.

Let the reader imagine a perhaps analogous scenario. A wife wants to know if her husband is faithful. She knows that he has been faithful in the past, but really wants to see if he holds true when presented with the opportunity. This will impart new knowledge: a new situation in which his faithfulness has never yet been tested.

She enlists a friend of hers to approach him. Her friend is attractive and seductive. She arranges for her friend to proposition her husband. After an attempted proposition, the husband declines. The wife then calls her husband, exclaiming “Now I know that you are faithful to me.”

Are Ware’s objections valid? Does the husband’s past faithfulness make this new data point obsolete? Or, is this a useful and necessary data point in understanding who her husband truly is?

Can one now object to the wife’s statement that “now she knows that he will be faithful” because he still has the free will to become (at some point of time) unfaithful. Or maybe she should not be able to make that claim because she just didn’t hit the right variables (maybe her husband prefers blondes over brunettes and the wife has to exhaust infinite numbers of test to truly know anything).

Ware’s objections seem unreasonable. Even with a history of data points, a new data point might yet be informative, especially when it is designed to cover a point that no previous data point has covered. Additionally, a specific test can act as both a proxy for other similar tests and as a proxy for true knowledge. That truth can be proclaimed as such.

See also:

Apologetics Thursday – Erickson on Genesis 22

Brad Jersak takes exception to the popular claims that Greek thinking is in contrast to Jewish thinking. He lists several “problems” with this type of reasoning. He starts with wondering “What Greek thinking” because Greek thinking incorporates a lot of various beliefs:

Which ‘Greek thinking’?

Not all Greek thinking is even close to the same. Much of this critique of ‘Greek thinking’ is based on faulty assumptions that come from reading the Greeks with Cartesian lenses (i.e. Enlightenment era rationalism that Plato would scoff at) and notions of dualism that are Gnostic but not Platonic in the least. So, what many critics of Plato are describing is actually Cartesian rationalism (Rene Descartes, early 1600’s) and then reading the entirety of Greek literature through those lenses. This shows how much we are conditioned to reading the Greeks through the very lenses we think they’re critiquing (in Plato for example). That is, it’s a projection of our own modernism that blinds us to Plato’s critique of rationalism and his actual epistemology, the core of which is contemplative.

The “What is Greek thinking” question seems more like a feigned ignorance than a serious question. True, not all Greek thinking is the same. But the Platonists are preciously what is being addressed. In his book “The Great Partnership”, Rabbi Sacks speaks out on the Platonism (and accompanying Negative Theology) that corrupted Christianity:

We owe virtually all our abstract concepts to the Greeks. The Hebrew Bible knows nothing of such ideas. There is a creation narrative – in fact, more than one – but there is no theoretical discussion of what the basic elements of the universe are. There is an enthralling story about the birth of monarchy in Israel, but no discussion, such as is to be found in Plato and Aristotle, about the relative merits of monarchy as opposed to aristocracy or democracy. When the Hebrew Bible wants to explain something, it does not articulate a theory. It tells a story.

And,

The fifth and most profound difference lies in the way the two traditions understood the key phrase in which God identifies himself to Moses at the burning bush. ‘Who are you?’ asks Moses. God replies, cryptically, Ehyeh asher ehyeh. This was translated into Greek as ego eimi ho on, and into Latin as ego sum qui sum, meaning ‘I am who I am’, or ‘I am he who is’. The early and medieval Christian theologians all understood the phrase to be speaking about ontology, the metaphysical nature of God’s existence. It meant that he was ‘Being-itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal, understood as the subsisting act of all existing’. Augustine defines God as that which does not change and cannot change. Aquinas, continuing the same tradition, reads the Exodus formula as saying that God is ‘true being, that is being that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient, and the cause and principal of every creature’. 8

But this is the God of Aristotle and the philosophers, not the God of Abraham and the prophets. Ehyeh asher ehyeh means none of these things. It means ‘I will be what, where, or how I will be’. The essential element of the phrase is the dimension omitted by all the early Christian translations, namely the future tense. God is defining himself as the Lord of history who is about to intervene in an unprecedented way to liberate a group of slaves from the mightiest empire of the ancient world and lead them on a journey towards liberty.

So, one of the key differences between Platonized Christianity and Jewish religion is abstract thinking about the nature of God. This is a key and heavy element in Platonism (and other varieties of Greek thought), but it was the Platonists who really captivated early Christianity. Justin Martyr, an early Christian apologist, makes the absurd claim that Moses was the one to influence Plato. Anything that Plato taught was just rehashing of Moses! Augustine claimed the Bible is absurd unless it is read in light of Platonism. Augustine elsewhere suggests stealing Platonistic philosophy. Origin shares tutelage with the famed Neo-Platonist Plotinus.

And all the Church Fathers show this Platonic influence in their writings. They deal with undermining the text of the Bible in favor of the abstract, in favor of the immutable, in favor of Platonism. This is where Christianity and Platonism need to part. In the wise words of Walter Brueggemann:

What is most crucial about this relatedness is that Israel’s stock testimony is unconcerned to use a vocabulary that speaks about Yahweh’s own person per se. Israel has little vocabulary for that and little interest in exploring it. Such modest terminology as Israel has for Yahweh’s self might revolve around “Yahweh is holy,” but this sort of language is not normally used, and most often it occurs only in specialized priestly manuals. More important, Israel’s characteristic adjectival vocabulary about Yahweh is completely lacking in terms that have dominated classical theology, such as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. This sharp contrast suggests that classical theology, insofar as it is dominated by such interpretive categories and such concerns, is engaged in issues that are not crucial for Israel’s testimony about Yahweh and are in fact quite remote from Israel’s primary utterance.

Matt Slick offers some reasons why evil exists. Here is his second possibility:

Second, God may be letting evil run its course in order to prove that evil is malignant and that suffering, which is the unfortunate product of evil, is further proof that anything contrary to God’s will is bad, harmful, painful, and leads to death.

Note the twisted logic here. God is attempting to prove something to creatures he could have just predestined the believe that same thing without all the fanfare. If God predestines everything, evil existing to prove a point or illustrate a concept becomes meaningless. After all, it would have been easier and less evil just to predestine that everyone just understand the concept of evil, rather than predestining evil to prove to people who are totally depraved something they could never believe unless predestined to do so. The sheer irrationality embedded in Slick’s number 2 possibility is countless.

Erickson writes in his What Does God Know and When Does He Know It concerning Genesis 22:

Note, however, exactly what is said here. God does not say, “Now I know what you would do in such a situation.” Rather, he says, “Now I know that you fear me.” While this may seem to be a small matter of difference, it will be worth bearing in mind. Apparently, Jehovah did not simply not know what Abraham would do. If one interprets this text in a literal fashion, then one has also established that, at least in this case, Jehovah did not really know the heart of the person involved. The problem comes from the fact that the open theists believe that God knows persons completely, all of the personality and character of each person, all of the thoughts of the heart. It is only on this basis that God is able to make the predictions he does of what persons will do.

Erickson, Millard J. (2009-08-30). What Does God Know and When Does He Know It?: The Current Controversy over Divine Foreknowledge (pp. 24-25). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Erickson’s objection is a strange objection. Imagine a wife enlists one of her friend’s help in a plan to test her husband’s faithfulness. She has her friend proposition her husband in an intimate situation. Say that the husband passes the test. What is his wife to proclaim: “Now I know that you are faithful” or “Now I know what you will do in such a situation”? Erickson posits an entirely unrealistic narrative that the text would have to follow in order to be an Open Theist text.

But real life does not work the way Erickson posits. We test to gain general knowledge, not to gain knowledge of the specific. Gaining knowledge of the specific would completely defeat the entire point of the text! What good is a test whose results cannot be generalized to other areas? What was the purpose, then, of the test? To figure out within very narrow parameters how Abraham would act? That is not how character tests work.

Erikson’s second problem comes when he assumes the heart is knowable. He envisions the heart like a computer hard drive, all the coding is intact and various scenarios can be run with predictable results (that is, if one has access to the code). There is no indication this is a Biblical concept, and it entirely violates the natural Biblical assumption of free will. God often laments about His failed attempts to sway the people to Himself. Hearts do not work like input-output devices. Instead, knowledge of the heart is gained through testing. See how people respond to tests and then general trends can be known. Throughout the Bible, it explicitly states that God tests to know.

Erickson writes in his What Does God Know and When Does He Know It concerning Genesis 6:6, 1 Kings 15:11, and 1 Kings 15:35:

Perhaps the most we can say from a direct exegetical treatment of these passages is that they teach that God experiences emotional pain as a result of his having created humans and put certain ones of them in positions of leadership. Whether they teach that God changes his mind, and if so, whether this entails the idea that God must not have known antecedently what was to take place, remains to be decided.

Erickson, Millard J.; Erickson, Millard J. (2009-08-30). What Does God Know and When Does He Know It?: The Current Controversy over Divine Foreknowledge (p. 20). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

This is a fairly odd claim. The repentance/sorrow/emotion is causes by something God did previously. God is showing sorrow, not over the events that occurred, but His own action. If His action was a rational and utilitarian best alternative, why the sorrow? Why then couple it with undoing the actions that made God sorrowful (in Genesis 6:6 this involves destroying the world and in 1 Kings 22 this involves revoking Saul as King). This is the normal word for regret and repentance, and only works in 1 Sam 15 as such (between the narrator’s statements, God’s statements, and the statement of Samuel). Erikson, irrationally, is forced to posit a shifting meaning of repentance in 1 Samuel 15.

These texts cannot be more clear about what is happening and the reasons it is happening.

Alternatively, I suggest there are no combinations of words that Erikson would accept as depicting God changing His mind up to an including a statement that says explicitly that God changes His mind.

In 1 Samuel 2, King Saul is hunting King David. King David is at the city of Keilah, and wonders what to do:

1Sa 23:8  And Saul summoned all the people to war, to go down to Keilah, to besiege David and his men.
1Sa 23:9  David knew that Saul was plotting harm against him. And he said to Abiathar the priest, “Bring the ephod here.”
1Sa 23:10  Then David said, “O LORD, the God of Israel, your servant has surely heard that Saul seeks to come to Keilah, to destroy the city on my account.
1Sa 23:11  Will the men of Keilah surrender me into his hand? Will Saul come down, as your servant has heard? O LORD, the God of Israel, please tell your servant.” And the LORD said, “He will come down.”
1Sa 23:12  Then David said, “Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?” And the LORD said, “They will surrender you.”

David asks God two things. David asks if Saul is coming to attack him. God says yes. Then David asks if the people will turn him over to Saul. God says yes again. David is asking for insider knowledge from God. David does not know the disposition of the people and relies on God to inform him. The people are probably afraid of Saul (who kills priests for harboring David (1 Sam 22)), and they probably owe their allegiance to the current ruler of Israel and his armies. God sees this and warns David.

Negative theologians seem to take this verse as some sort of prooftext showing that God knows “all possible futures”. This features in the most popular Systematic Theology book sold on Amazon: Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine:

The definition of God’s knowledge given above also specifies that God knows “all things possible.” This is because there are some instances in Scripture where God gives information about events that might happen but that do not actually come to pass. For example, when David was fleeing from Saul he rescued the city of Keilah from the Philistines and then stayed for a time at Keilah. He decided to ask God whether Saul would come to Keilah to attack him and, if Saul came, whether the men of Keilah would surrender him into Saul’s hand. … And the LORD said, “They will surrender you.”

Likewise, other theologians make the same claims. Otherwise scholarly Michael Heiser states:

So in summary, with respect to actual events, God may or may not have predestined them, but he foreknows them all—and even foreknows events that don’t happen. And it is at this point that I am in disagreement with open theists who insist that God doesn’t know human choices ahead of time. That seems incoherent in that, if God foreknows events that don’t happen, why wouldn’t he foreknow what the possible choices were and which choice would be made? How can God foreknow a list of options that will not happen, but be unable to know the thing that does? This makes little sense.

The problem with this is that the prooftext proves too much. It takes a normal everyday occurrence (predicting people’s actions) and ascribes extraordinary conclusions. It is a non-sequitur. There is no link between God’s knowing the strength of people’s allegiances (what they will do when pressed) and knowing “all possible futures”. Probably any insider from the city would know the exact same thing.

In fact, plenty of instances in the Bible (and in modern life) show normal human beings making similar predictions. This is because it is easy for anyone to know what people will do just using common sense and present knowledge. In Genesis 12, Abraham (Abram at the time) predicts what the people of Egypt would do if Sarah (Sarai) did not pretend to be his sister:

Gen 12:11  When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, “I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance,
Gen 12:12  and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me, but they will let you live.
Gen 12:13  Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.”

Abraham is not “Omniscient”. Abraham did not know “all possible futures”. This is not a prooftext for a strange conception of Abraham’s knowledge. Instead, Abraham used his present knowledge to extrapolate on the motives of people he had never before met. This was not a hard prediction. Abraham’s suspicions seem to be true, evidenced in Pharaoh’s attempting to capture Sarah against her will.

There is no reason to make more of 1 Samuel 23 than it presents on face value. David is merely requesting that God inform him on the state of Keilah’s allegiances. This is doubly true considering that the same author wrote 1 Samuel 15 in which God regrets His own actions. Grudem seems to be stretching his theology to explain why a God who knows the future would think in conditional terms. This theological stretch just does not fit the entirety of the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel.

In a paper entitled “Hellenistic Or Hebrew”, Michael Horton attempts to discuss the contrasting interpretations between Open Theism and Calvinism. In contrast to the paper’s title, throughout the paper the one thing that Horton forgets to address is the Hebrew method of interpretation. Horton seems to be under the impression that the Jewish method of understanding the Bible should be assumed to be his own.

This lies in stark contrast to what actual Jews have said on this matter. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks comments in his The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (pp. 64-65):

‘Who are you?’ asks Moses. God replies, cryptically, Ehyeh asher ehyeh. This was translated into Greek as ego eimi ho on, and into Latin as ego sum qui sum, meaning ‘I am who I am’, or ‘I am he who is’. The early and medieval Christian theologians all understood the phrase to be speaking about ontology, the metaphysical nature of God’s existence. It meant that he was ‘Being-itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal, understood as the subsisting act of all existing’. Augustine defines God as that which does not change and cannot change. Aquinas, continuing the same tradition, reads the Exodus formula as saying that God is ‘true being, that is being that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient, and the cause and principal of every creature’.

But this is the God of Aristotle and the philosophers, not the God of Abraham and the prophets. Ehyeh asher ehyeh means none of these things. It means ‘I will be what, where, or how I will be’. The essential element of the phrase is the dimension omitted by all the early Christian translations, namely the future tense. God is defining himself as the Lord of history who is about to intervene in an unprecedented way to liberate a group of slaves from the mightiest empire of the ancient world and lead them on a journey towards liberty.

Rabbi Sack goes on to describe exactly who is the character Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible:

Far from being timeless and immutable, God in the Hebrew Bible is active, engaged, in constant dialogue with his people, calling, urging, warning, challenging and forgiving. When Malachi says in the name of God, ‘I the Lord do not change’ (Malachi 3: 6), he is not speaking about his essence as pure being, the unmoved mover, but about his moral commitments. God keeps his promises even when his children break theirs.

From one of the most prominent Jews in the world, it would be hard to dismiss his understanding as flawed. The Hebrew idea of God is not one of the Greek philosophers. The Hebrew position starts with the face value testimony found in the Bible. This is echoed by Christian Old Testament Scholar Walter Brueggemann and Secular Harvard Professor Christine Hayes. Both these individuals recognize that the Hebrew religion is in essence relational. Yahweh is not the timeless, immutable, and omniscient god of Plotinus, be relentlessly modifying His actions in response to human beings. This is the language of the Bible.

Yahweh began in earnest curiosity as mankind first budded onto the scene. This curiosity quickly morphed to regret as mankind fell into utter depravity. After a near universal destruction, God’s resignation towards a sinful creation allowed mankind to again replenish the Earth. Through dedication, God sought to reconcile the world to Him, choosing a man and a nation to act as His people. Through fierce anger, God punishes their oppressors. Through hope and mercy, God liberates them and brings them to their own land. In jealousy, God wants to destroy them time and time again for their rebellion. But through reason, God spares His wayward people.

This nation continually disappoints God. God grows frustrated and exasperated. God tries all types of blessings and curses to sway them, but they do not listen. God cycles through stages of sorrow, depression, anger, vindictiveness, and downright indifference. The world has at one time collectively failed God, and now God is suffering by fault of His own people.

Lastly, God sends His son to liberate His people once again. But once again this is met with rejection. A promise of a Kingdom on Earth is met with widespread disbelief. This results in a previously unseen mission to the Gentiles. Paul declares that God has made this people equal to the surrounding nations in a last ditch effort to provoke them to jealousy. After all these things are done, Yahweh will return to Earth and establish an everlasting Kingdom of God. Yahweh will rule from Jerusalem and all the nations will be subject to God.

Horton and his Calvinist kin (Ware, Piper, Sproul, Geisler) offer an alternative model. In this model, basically everything that is written in the Bible must be rejected because it does not fit their notions of God. Where do they get these notions if they are discounting the Biblical reference? They do not say. What makes their ideas about God true and others false? They do not say.

Instead, they start with the assumption that human beings cannot relate to the text of the Bible. Horton states:

All of God’s self revelation is analogical, not just some of it. This is why Calvin speaks, for instance, of God’s “lisping” or speaking “baby-talk” in his condescending mercy. Just as God comes down to us in the incarnation in order to save us who could not ascend to him, he meets us in Scripture by descending to our weakness. Thus, not only is God’s transcendence affirmed, but his radical immanence as well. Transcendence and immanence become inextricably bound up with the divine drama of redemption. Revelation no less than redemption is an act of condescension and grace.

In other words, the Bible must not be taken seriously except for in light of “transcendent” and “immanent” attributes that are presupposed. Why it is rational to believe that the authors of the Bible had this in mind at the time of writing is not explained. Why the authors would not use more accurate language and less language that contradicts Calvinist ideas of God is not explained. Why Calvinists condemn those who take the language seriously is also not explained.

Most importantly, how this is the “Biblical” interpretation technique is not at all touched upon. The fleeting verses that are referenced are referenced out of context to make points not being made by the authors. Besides, if the language of the Bible is not accurate, then how can a Calvinist claim to know the meaning of any single prooftext. This is not explained.

One very bad example of prooftexting is the use of Malachi 3:6. This verse is the same referenced by Rabbi Sacks as relating to God’s unilateral promise to Israel. Horton changes the meaning to cover all promises everywhere and to cover God’s nature:

The same is true in Mal 3:6: “For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.” Neither God’s nature nor his secret plan changes, and this is why believers can be confident that “if we are faithless, he remains faithful; he cannot deny himself ” (2 Tim 2:13).

This is not how Malachi 3:6 is being used by the author. This is only referring to the Abrahamic covenant, and this covenant will stand. When God wishes to kill all of Israel in Exodus 32, He plans to fulfill the covenant through the lineage of Moses. Moses convinces God otherwise on multiple occasions. John the Baptist states that God can rise up sons of Israel through the rocks (Mat 3:9). John is literally claiming that God can kill all of Israel due to their rebellion and still find a way to fulfill His promise. Paul claims that God can fulfill His promise to Israel although all of Israel is cut off. Paul states in Romans 9 this is because Israel can adopt Gentile believers. In other words, Malachi is about God being determined to fulfill one particular unilateral covenant and has built contingency plans in order to see it to fruition. This is not a text about immutability, but just the opposite. Malachi is about God changing and reacting to people’s decisions:

Mal 3:7 … Return to me, and I will return to you…

And then God challenges the people to test Him to see if what He says is true:

Mal 3:10 Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.

For Horton to take Malachi 3 as a prooftext shows with what little regard Calvinists show the text of the Bible. In short, the paper Hellenistic or Hebrew is filled with unfounded assumptions and faulty logic.

Episode page.

David Hunt posits that Open Theists fall afoul of the law of Excluded Middle:

This reason for embracing Openism flies in the face of both logic and common usage. Let’s begin with logic. Either I will call my mother tomorrow, or I won’t call my mother tomorrow. One or the other of these statements about the future must be true. The principle that either a given statement or its denial is true is called the “Law of Excluded Middle.” But this first brief on behalf of Openism requires that this law be abrogated. That’s a heavy cost, and the vast majority of logicians would decline to pay it.

Craig, William Lane; Copan, Paul (2009-08-01). Contending with Christianity’s Critics: Anwering New Atheists and Other Objectors (Kindle Locations 5283-5287). B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Where David Hunt errors is that he does not understand the law of Excluded Middle. The law of Excluded Middle only applies to statements that describe reality. For example, is the following statement true or false: “This statement is false”. If this statements was false, that would mean it is true. If this statement was true, that would mean it is false. If Hunt would apply his “logic” to this statement, then it is obvious that his law of Excluded Middle runs afoul of the law of Non-Contradiction.

Instead, when statements are abstract, and not based in “what is”, then the law of Excluded Middle does not apply. Does Santa have a beard? Well, “Santa” is an abstract concept. There is no real answer, not unless it is tied to reality in some sense: “Did Saint Nicolas at any time ever have a beard?” or “Does Santa, as imagined by the Coke commercials, have a beard?” These answers can be true or false because they are asking about an aspect of reality. Not unless a statement can be tied to reality does the law of Excluded Middle apply.

For Hunt to say that the law of Excluded Middle proves that the future can have true or false statement, he must first assume that the future can have true or false statements. He is falling prey to the Fallacy of Begging the Question (assuming what he is trying to prove), this is in addition to the fallacy of False Dilemma.

Hunt continues:

Ordinary usage and common sense also reject [Open Theism]. We make claims about the contingent future all the time, and we assume that such claims are sometimes true. Consider the following:

1. This coin will land heads on the next toss.
2. My wife will vote for candidate X in tomorrow’s election.
3. The U.S. will elect its first female president in 2016.

The openist may object to taking such claims at face value on the grounds that the future is not yet real and that claims about it are therefore not yet true. But this objection would be received with bemusement by anyone engaged in the actual practice of making claims about the future.

Craig, William Lane; Copan, Paul (2009-08-01). Contending with Christianity’s Critics: Anwering New Atheists and Other Objectors (Kindle Locations 5287-5293). B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Hunt moves from claiming that Open Theism flies in the face of “common usage” to claiming “ordinary usage… reject[s]” Open Theism. Hunt’s first statement might be correct; language is a good tool for showing how common people might intuitively understand a concept. But Hunt’s second statement is irrational. Language is filled with metaphors, hyperbole, figures of speech, and other linguistically shortcuts. “Language” does not “reject” anything. This is easily illustrated.

People talk about the “Sun rising”. This is even though, when questioned, basically everyone would admit that their concept of the “Sun rising” is that of the Earth revolving and spinning around a stationary Sun. The Sun rise imagery is a linguistical shortcut for all these people. When pressed, they will claim that the Sun really does not “rise”. The “Sun rising” is linguistical shortcut, and although it is a linguistical shortcut, it happens to a shortcut to a false concept.

Basically every astrophysicists knows that movement in space is relative. Phil Plait, the leading astrophysicist, has a good article on this. Movement is relative in space, and one can no more say that the Sun revolves around the Earth than the Earth revolves around the Sun. A reference point has to be arbitrarily picked. There are no “right” or “wrong” reference points.

Pretend Phil Plait adopted the reasoning of Hunt to make his case. Pretend he made the case that “ordinary usage” of language “rejects” the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. This would be an absurd claim. Linguistical features could tell us what ordinary people might find reasonable, but they in no way inform what accurately reflects reality.

That being said, “I was right” could easily be a linguistical shortcut to mean “what I predicted then happened to materialize”. In the same sense, one could easily claim “Santa has a beard” but actually mean “the commonly accepted image of Santa includes a beard.” Linguistical shortcuts are ubiquitous in human communication. Discounting them to try to score cheap theological points is not a good idea.

One could easily point out how the Biblical language “rejects” Calvinism in the use of language where people “choose” and God is consistently thwarted by those choices. And statements about time are always about past, present, and future, “rejecting” any timelessness. Hunt needs to rely on flexible language to maintain his Calvinism. Hunt’s arguments thwart his own beliefs.

Martyn McGeown offers, perhaps, the best evidence for God knowing the future exhaustively. If God can predict, accurately, future events that involve too many random variables for even a present knowledge to accomidate, then this is evidence for divine foreknowledge. McGeown quotes Bruce Ware to this effect:

Consider the vast array of attending circumstances God must know about in advance for this prediction to be given. At the time Isaiah prophesies this, God must already know about the fall of Assyria, the rise and fall of Babylon, the rise of Medo-Persia, the fall of Israel, the fall of Judah, the birth and naming of Cyrus, the life and growth of this particular king, his ongoing life into adulthood, his selection as king, his willingness to consider helping the Israelites, his decision to assist in rebuilding Jerusalem, and on and on. This list hits a very few of the most significant items. Within each of these items is hidden a multitude of free will choices that would affect everything about the outcome for that particular piece of human history. It simply is incredible that God can say through Isaiah such a long time prior to Cyrus’s reign, “It is I who says of Cyrus, He is my shepherd! And he will perform all my desire.”

McGeown adds:

It simply will not do for the open theists to claim that God “tweaks” man’s free will occasionally to accomplish specific purposes. The example of Cyrus (Isa. 44:28) alone shows that open theism’s entire thesis collapses like a house of cards.

McGeown believes this is the best example in the Bible of God predicting something so minutely that it suggests future foreknowledge. This is an event in which Isaiah predicts the name (and character) of a king (possibly 140 years in advance). While McGeown is finally offering rational arguments, his evidence is fairly shoddy.

Assuming the prophecy of Isaiah is not Deutero-Isaiac (a critical assumption that must be held to make this point), then one would still have to figure out how likely it is to accurately predict names (and characters). It cannot be ruled out that God was involved with the naming (and breading), as power acts are traditionally how God predicts future events (as evident in Isaiah 40-48).

Two examples of people being named are found in the New Testament: Jesus and John the Baptist. In the case of Jesus, God asks Mary (Jesus’ mother) to name her baby and she does. In the case of John, God makes Zacharias (John’s father) mute until he names the baby what God wishes. Presumably, God would have killed Zacharias if he named his son anything except John. One naming was a request and one was coerced. Both of these examples suggest the naming is not fated, but must be brought about by free agents.

Another point should be added: it is a stretch to jump from “God knows the name and character of a baby, 140 years in advanced” to “God knows all events, no matter how small, infinitely into the future”. That is not a rational conclusion. If I was able to predict a name and character of a baby 140 years into the future (like a modern day Nostradamus) no one would jump to the conclusion I know the future in its entirety.

If a baby is the key evidence of future exhaustive foreknowledge, Open Theists should be assured that there is not any strong evidence against Open Theism in the Bible.

A Detailed Response to Closing the Door on Open Theism – Part 1 [link]
A Detailed Response to Closing the Door on Open Theism – Part 2 [link]
A Detailed Response to Closing the Door on Open Theism – Part 3 [link]
A Detailed Response to Closing the Door on Open Theism – Part 4 [link]
A Detailed Response to Closing the Door on Open Theism – Part 5 [link]