Divine Omniscience

“his understanding is beyond measure” 

Psalm 147:5

As we saw with infinity and atemporality (the use of in- or a-) for any other attribute of God to be without limit or without measure is what we mean by the use of the Latin prefix omni. In this case, the Psalmist is attributing measure-less-ness to God’s understanding. It is not simply beyond this or that measurement, but “beyond measurement” means any kind of measurement. This is a poetic way to say limitless knowledge, the totality of all that could be called knowledge. 

Let’s look at a few other biblical texts teaching omniscience. About those who would worship idols, “would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart” (Ps. 44:21). About our speech, “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether” (Ps. 139:4). About Jesus, Peter confesses, “Lord, you know everything” (Jn. 21:17). About the knowledge of God as judge over all creation: “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Heb. 4:13), or again simply, “he knows everything” (1 Jn. 3:20).

Just as with eternity, there are what we might regard to be understated ways of describing this total knowledge. For instance the things of redemptive history were “known from of old” (Acts 15:19). This is a common way of speech, just as we saw with eternity and “ancient of days.”

What it Means to Have All Knowledge

That God is omniscient means that he knows all things. The word is just a construct of the Latin words for “all” (omnis) and “knowledge” (scientia). Nothing that could ever exist (whether past, present, future / whether actual or possible) can be hidden from him, or learned by him. Turretin lists four attributes of the mode of this omniscience: “The mode consists in his knowing all things perfectly, undividedly, distinctly and immutably” [1]. As to the objects of God’s knowledge there are two main classes: first, all that is in God; second, all that is distinct from God.

Both of these aspects of omniscience—namely, its mode and its objects—will have implications for the Trinity. Both the Son and the Spirit (every bit as much as the Father) possess this same totality of omniscience.

Concerning the Son, Jesus says, “For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing” (Jn. 5:20), and of the Spirit we are told that “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10). What about propositions? These are linguistic constructs, though their object of reference can be either in God or outside of God. Yet a meaningful definition of omniscience with respect to propositions can be offered as well, such as this one by Helm: “an individual is omniscient if that individual knows all true propositions and has no false beliefs, that is, does not believe any proposition to be true which is not true” [2].

God’s knowledge of things outside of himself does not depend on those things in any sense. One theologian, Thomas Ridgley, put it in this way: [God] “doth not receive Ideas from any object out of himself, as all intelligent creatures do … so that if there were no such objects, they could not have the knowledge or Idea of them in their minds” [3], and then he cited Isaiah 40:13, 14 as to Scripture’s own teaching. 

Whom did he consult, and who made him understand? Who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? (Isa. 40:13, 14)

The knowledge of God is the first of his attributes that we have examined that can be called a communicable attribute. Even here though, caution is in order. No attribute of God is utterly communicable (nor utterly incommunicable), but each exists on a spectrum of analogy. But about the difference between divine knowledge and human knowledge, we are told,

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9).

The Challenges from Molinism and Open Theism

Molinism is a doctrine of God’s knowledge put forth by the Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina (1535-1600). In this view, a “middle knowledge” is posited between God’s 1. necessary knowledge and 2. free knowledge. The necessary knowledge of God refers to God’s knowledge of all that must be. This is the realm of logical possibility and necessary being. So it includes God’s knowledge of himself (as all that he is must be) and then all possible effects that God could cause. The free knowledge of God refers to God’s knowledge of all that he will freely decree (and thus things that are not absolutely necessary to be).

Open Theism was a late twentieth century development that stood in the same stream as Process Theology, which we have already met. For the Open Theist, one can still affirm a kind of omniscience—that is, that God knows all things—but that the results of free moral agents, their “free choices,” are not, strictly speaking, “things” and so cannot be known even by omniscience. The main proponents of this view were Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, and Gregory Boyd. 

Naturally, both views were motivated to make room for an essentially libertarian conception of free will. The Socinians did the same thing and for the same reason. The Molinist notion of “middle knowledge” was an attempt to carve out a third category that made room for this. In other words, they defined free will as the ability of a person to make choices that are (a) uncaused by any prior natures known by God, or (b) unknown by God, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b). Now option (b) is strict Open Theism, to which many Molinists would not want to subscribe or admit. Hence, some attempt will have to be made to divorce God’s foreknowledge from his foreordination. 

The root problem with Molinism is in its foundational classification of divine knowledge into 1. necessary, 2. free, and 3. middle. As John Frame helpfully probes,

“Note that in Craig’s definition, necessary knowledge is a ‘knowledge of all possible worlds,’ and middle knowledge is a ‘knowledge of those possible worlds which God can make actual.’ What is the difference between these? Are there worlds that are genuinely possible, that God cannot make actual? What is a ‘possible world’ if it is not a world that God can make actual?” [4]

Nor does presupposing creaturely free action as the root of a counterfactual help matters. To know what Causal Agent X “would do” in B-Z circumstances, rather than A, is nothing other than 25 sets within the larger set of natural knowledge, and it simply begs the question to suppose that they are not, merely because Causal Agent X is a free agent. One must first establish that creaturely free action is an act of self-creation, or for some other reason, not a thing that God can eternally know. And once that is dissected, it too will be exposed as mired in self-contradictions. 

Answering Some More General Objections

Objection 1. What about those texts of the Bible that plainly depict God as either lacking some knowledge, or learning it? For instance, in the book of Genesis alone, in the Garden, “the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” (3:9); or about the Tower of Babel it says that, “the Lord came down to see the city and the tower” (11:5); or to Abraham, as he readied the knife to sacrifice Isaac, and the Lord stopped him and said, “now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (22:12). 

Reply to Objection 1. First, a general statement regarding anthropomorphisms. An anthropomorphism is a form of figurative speech whereby God depicts himself in the form (morphe) of a man (anthropos). The purpose is to explain one or a few things at a time so that we can understand an otherwise infinite amount of relations about God that are “behind the scenes” of the narrative. About these texts, let us start with the simple challenge of which view is more reasonable, given all that we know from Scripture. This “coming down,” and knowing what he would not have before, would not simply contradict omniscience, but also infinity, simplicity, omnipresence, eternality, and immutability. In other words, reading these narrative texts sensitive to anthropomorphisms is not about some convenient escape hatch, but rather, it is a matter of reasoning systematically. It doesn’t just re-read to account for a hypothesis made of one thing (omniscience), but one made of many things: many of the most necessary things. 

As it is, there are perfectly good reasons to speak in these ways in the narrative. The “Where are you?” of Genesis 3. Here, God is exposing Adam. The calling out to him is meant to highlight that exposure, to give the sense of hunting down or peering in.

This was the first human experience of the terror of being searched out by God, and so the value of this expression is to expose that sense that all readers have shared with Adam ever sense. We already experience this from early childhood in our parents’ probing “What have you done?” When we now know that they knew perfectly well what we did and were doing nothing more than graciously inviting us to end the charade.

Likewise with the other texts. The view “down” in Genesis 11 is a way of sarcastically drawing out the puny project of the Tower, as if to say: “Let’s see what those little ants are beating their chests about.” And as for the “Now I know” after the knife of Abraham was stopped, there was the testing of Abraham’s faith for the view of the reader to whom God wished to highlight Abraham’s faith. God wasn’t the one taking the test. 

Objection 2. It belongs to the necessary conditions of a personal being that they have memory. But memory requires location in time, or in other words, temporal duration. Moreover, if such a memory is possessed, then whatever knowledge is remembered is recalled, and thus is not present whereas it once was. Now either God has a memory or is not a person. But since memory implies recall, and recall of knowledge, which is less that omniscience, it follows that either God is omniscient or else a person. Since God is a person, therefore God is not totally omniscient. 

Reply to Objection 2. On the contrary, what God knows of the past requires no experience of having lost the past. As has already been demonstrated, the past, present, and future are so-called as having existence from our subjective vantage point of passing away. God knows all attributes of things in time as pure objects of knowledge, not as passing subjective experience. And the idea that a being possessing “necessary non-forgetfulness” [5] cannot be a person has not been established, but rather merely assumed. Further, when the Bible does speak about God either remembering or forgetting, this too is anthropomorphic speech. For example, that “God remembered Noah” (Gen. 8:1) or that “God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Ex. 2:24)—these words are not literally to suggest that he had previously forgotten. Rather, he is recalling for the hearer; he is harkening back to that marker. Likewise, when he says, “I will remember their sins no more” (Jer. 31:34), it is speaking of the data falling out of his memory? No! This is a legal and relational forgetting: that is, the charges being dropped and the hostility being erased. Or elsewhere,

They have set their detestable things in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. And they have built the high places … to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind (Jer. 7:30, 31). 

To “enter my mind” here speaks of design and God’s preceptive will, and not at all intellectual apprehension. 

Objection 3. “One may hold that God knows all things, but that the results of actions committed by free moral agents cannot be known because they are not things.”

Reply to Objection 3. On the contrary, to say that they are not things and thus not knowable is to deny to God’s knowledge what one retains for his own. But in addition to being self-deifying, it is also self-contradictory. This is not quite like the square circle or the married bachelor. After all, the Molinist and Open Theist would not claim that these future contingencies are impossible per se, but only impossible given a time before that action. 

As Turretin summarized: A thing “can be contingent in two ways—either with respect to the first cause … or with respect to second causes.” The former is perfectly free to produce any such effects or else not; the latter is distinguished only in it being possible not to have caused their effects: i. e. future contingents. We affirm God’s perfect knowledge of both classes.

“The objection is fruitless that ‘all things’ refers to all knowable things and that future contingents are not such … However we say that they are knowable not in themselves determinately, but in the decree of God” [6].

And then there is the obvious, but apparently not so obvious point. Even granting the difficulties in the passages containing contingencies, Turretin concludes, “Because God predicts future contingent things, therefore he knows them” [7]. But according to the Middle Knowledge or Open Theist definition of omniscience excluding future contingencies on the ground of free will, then no such contingencies should be known by God. But most such passages are not texts containing any difficulties. Therefore these critics of classical omniscience must wiggle to make all of these exceptions for their model.

Beyond answering the objections, the classical doctrine is concerned to show what else is gained by holding to total omniscience, and what else is lost in dispensing with it. The Puritan divine Stephen Charnock pointed out that omniscience must also be immutable. If God’s knowledge changed, then he is not infinitely wise. That is because, if he was “ignorant of, or mistaken in, his apprehension of any one thing,” then the basis of his decisions would be in doubt. Further back,

“If God understood a thing at one time which he did not at another, he would be changed from ignorance to knowledge; as if he could not do this day that which he could do tomorrow, he would be changed from impotence to power.”

So he shows that omnipotence also requires an immutable omniscience. Moreover, in such a scenario, “He could not always be omniscient” [8]. In this way, God’s eternal transcendence above time would also be undermined. Contrary to any need of discursive reasoning in God, Charnock suggests that “God knows all things by one intuitive act” [9]. That is to say, omniscience could not depend upon the observation of an effect from its cause, nor an inference from a ground to its consequence. To know all things implies a perfect knowledge of the connection between causes and effects, and between premises and conclusions.

Practical Use of the Doctrine of God’s Omniscience

There are three practical uses of this doctrine: (1) to know how nearly our heavenly Father pays attention to us; (2) to know how piercing the heavenly Judge’s view is toward the most secret sin; (3) that God might be seen as infinitely worthy of worship and trust. 

Use. 1. This doctrine is given to know how nearly our Father pays attention to us. Jesus said, 

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows (Mat. 10:29-31).

Notice the connection between this minute knowledge and how our Father regards us as precious to him. That is the reasoning here. The whole of the sparrow and that small part of our being (namely a single hair) have something in common. They both “fall to the ground,” and are both perfectly known to the Father. But the emphasis is not on the whole sparrow and the whole saint, nor even a single feather versus a single hair, but rather the whole sparrow and the smallest of our extremities. He says to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (1:5).

Use. 2. This doctrine is given to know how piercing the heavenly Judge’s view is toward the most secret sin. At a time the LORD was entering into judgment with his people, he said, “O house of Israel. For I know the things that come into your mind” (Isa. 11:5). How total is this knowledge of man’s sin? It is from all eternity: “For I knew that you would surely deal treacherously, and that from before birth you were called a rebel” (Isa. 48:8).

Use. 3. This doctrine is given that God might be seen as infinitely worthy of trust and worship. How so? In Charnock’s practical considerations, he reasons that if God’s knowledge changed, and thus if he was not infinitely wise, then he would also be an unfit object of trust.

This is because, “[that which] might be revealed as truth now ... might prove false thereafter, and that as false now which hereafter might prove true; and so God would be an unfit object of confidence in regard of his precepts, and unfit object of confidence in regard of his promises” [10].

It was when God was lining up all the pagan gods in Isaiah, and essentially showing what it would take to be God. Omniscience is central to this: “Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods” (Isa. 41:23), but for himself he says he is, “declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done” (Isa. 46:10).

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1. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.12.2.

2. Helm, Eternal God, 64-65.

3. Ridgely, Body of Divinity, 55, col. 2, quoted in Muller, PRRD, III:239

4. Frame, Systematic Theology, 325.

5. Helm summarizes this attribute with these words and makes the same point: “Who says, and by what argument?” Eternal God, 61

6. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.12.8, 11.

7. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.12.14.

8. Charnock. Discourses, I.322.

9. Charnock. Discourses, I.323.

10. Charnock. Discourses, I.322.