Wednesday, June 12, 2019

The Omniscience of God Against the Pelagian

Both Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses explicitly deny the omniscience of God. And that denial is consistent with their Pelagian soteriologies. An exhaustive divine knowledge is consistent only with a Calvinist soteriology (though the average Arminian will deny it). Any form of Pelagianism logically leads to open theism, the doctrine of a learning deity, one who is unable to know anything which is supposedly dependent on the contingent choices of men.

However, it is only the Calvinist view which is consistent with the portrayal of God in the Bible.

"His eyes are on the ways of a man, and He sees all his steps. There is no gloom or deep darkness where evildoers may hide themselves."
- Job 34:21-22

The Bible knows only the living triune God, who has exhaustive and intuitive knowledge of all things at all times. That is what is meant by omniscience. Such exhaustive knowledge is consistent with His omnipresence, His exhaustive and simultaneous presence in all places, in heaven, on the earth, and in Hell. If He knows all things in all places at all times, then no event is contingent to Him. Everything is immediate to His awareness, and, thus, determined by Him.

The Arminian will object to that last part, claiming that His knowing all things doesn't imply His determination of all things. Really? If He knows a thing before it happens, then He passively allows it to happen, the Arminian claims, creating a distinction between knowing and determining. But, if God allows a thing, is it because of His own choice, or is it because He is forced to do so by some force outside of Himself? If it is because of His own choice, then He has determined that the thing will happen; the distinction is without significance. On the other hand, if He does so because of some force outside of Himself, then that thing is greater than God. Surely the Arminian cannot accept such a conclusion. More importantly, that force to which God yields is then the real god, and that god is the determiner, merely putting the assertion of the Arminian one step back, in an infinite recursion.

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