Foreknowledge & Free Will

"Another difficulty we get if we believe God to be in time is this. Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tommorow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Time-line like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call 'tomorrow' is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call 'today'. All the days are 'Now' for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not 'foresee' you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way--because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already 'Now' for Him." Mere Christianity

In Mere Theology (p. 52) I commented on this passage from Mere Christianity:

"Lewis borrows this idea from Boethius, a Christian philosopher born in Rome in A. D. 480. In book five of his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius seeks to reconcile God's foreknowledge with human free will. God's knowledge is 'not a kind of foreknowledge of the future but the knowledge of a never ending present.' 'God sees all things in his eternal present.' In response to The Christian Century's question, What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life? Lewis listed The Consolation of Philosophy as one of the top ten most influential books in his life. Lewis's line of though suggests, in regard to human salvation, that God has predestined who will be saved based on his foreknowledge of who will choose him."

But then if Lewis and Boethius are correct, about God being outside of time, there is no pre-destining and no fore-knowledge with God. There is, ultimately, only knowledge and destining. We must remember that all of the language of Scripture is an accommodation to our human knowledge and perspective, that is where the time element comes in. But there is no time element in God's eternal being. Time and space are both aspects of God's creation.

Thus if we paraphrase Romans 8:29 taking out the time references it reads like this:

"For those God knows he also destines to conformity to the likeness of his Son ..."

As I heard a Presbyterian preacher comment on this the other day he interpreted the passage to mean: "God is determined to shape you in the image of his Son." God is working through all the pain and suffering mentioned in the early part of Romans 8, to shape you like a sculptor shaping a block of stone, into a creation of great beauty. Alternatively, suffering in this life is like the birth pains of a mother delivering a baby into a new world. No mother likes those birth pains, but the end result is a good one. The end result of suffering in this life is to deliver us into God's new creation where we will be conformed to the image of Jesus. That is what God destines for those he knows. And that is good news for everyone who accepts it.

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Will Vaus

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