A lot of people think that if God knows what we’re going to do ahead of time, then we have no free will.
But that’s a huge mistake—and to see why, you’ll need to watch to the end of this short video.
Classical theism holds that God is omniscient, meaning that he knows everything, and this means that he knows the future. This is how God lets the biblical prophets know what’s going to be happening in the future.
However, the terms “foreknow” and “foreknowledge” don’t appear at all in the Old Testament, and they appear only seven times in the New Testament. With that small a number of examples to study, we have to be very careful about how we understand it and what inferences we draw from them.
In Greek the verb that means “to foreknow” is proginôskô, and the noun for “foreknowledge” is prognosis—yes, the same as the English word prognosis.
Foreknowledge in the Bible
When we study the seven occasions where the word appears, we find that they aren’t always referring to God’s foreknowledge.
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- In Acts 26:5, St. Paul tells King Agrippa that the Jews had known—or, literally, foreknown—him from the start.
- And in 2 Peter 3:17, the text refers to how Christians know beforehand—or foreknow—that the ignorant and unstable twist the Scripture to their own destruction.
That leaves us with only 5 cases where God’s foreknowledge is referred to.
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- In Acts 2:22, Peter says that Jesus was delivered up for crucifixion according to the foreknowledge of God.
- In Romans 8:29, Paul says that those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.
- In Romans 11:2, he says that God has not rejected the Jewish people, whom he foreknew.
- In 1 Peter 1:2, it says that Christians are living in various regions according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.
- And in 1 Peter 1:20, it says that Jesus was foreknown before the foundation of the world and has now been revealed for us.
So that’s it! Those are all of the passages where God is said to foreknow something in the Bible.
Foreknowledge = Love?
One of the controversies about foreknowledge in theology has to do with whether it just refers to knowledge of future events or whether it means something more than that.
One proposal is that foreknowledge refers to love between God and the people he foreknows—if God foreknows you, that means he loves you.
You might try to relate that idea to what people sometimes refer to as “knowing in the biblical sense,” like where Genesis 4:1 says that Adam “knew” his wife and she conceived a son. Just stick a “fore” on the front of that kind of knowledge—or the preposition pro in Greek—and you’d have a kind of loving foreknowledge.
Except that won’t work, because knowing “in the biblical sense” doesn’t refer to love in general. It always refers to having sex with someone. God is not having sex with the people he is said to foreknow, and if you look in a standard Greek dictionary, you won’t find a meaning for progniôskô listed as some kind of general loving ahead of time.
Foreknowledge as Knowledge and Choice
What you’ll find instead are two definitions, the first of which is just intellectually knowing something ahead of time, and the second of which is forming a judgment or making a choice ahead of time.
That second sense of choosing something also corresponds to one of the ways that the Hebrew verb for “know”—yada`—is used, like in Amos 3:2, where God tells Israel, “You only have I known of all the clans of the earth,” which some versions translate as “You only have I chosen of all the clans of the earth,” which is obviously what it means since God intellectually knows about the other clans. Only Israel was his chosen people.
Those two definitions adequately explain the seven instances where the concept appears in the New Testament.
When Paul says the Jews foreknew him from the start, when Peter says that Christians foreknow that the ignorant and the unstable twist the Scriptures, it’s very obvious that we’re simply talking about intellectually knowing something.
The matter is a little less clear in the other verses. For example, when Acts says that Jesus was delivered up for crucifixion according to the foreknowledge of God, it could mean that God was intellectually aware of what would happen to Jesus. It also could be a reference to God choosing this for Jesus. The passage could go either way, so this is ambiguous.
You also could read the other 4 passages we looked at as references to God choosing things ahead of time, though I think that they also are ambiguous and could be read more than one way.
However, choosing something ahead of time also involves intellectually knowing about it ahead of time, and the main thing that I’m interested in discussing at the moment is how that works in God’s case. Because there has been a shift in how this is understood.
Time and Eternity
Today—because of the leading of the Holy Spirit—we understand that God is fundamentally outside of time. That’s what we mean when we say that God is eternal. But if he’s outside of time, then what does it mean for him to know about something ahead of time? How can we make sense of that?
In the biblical period, the fact that God is outside of time was not yet clearly understood. They didn’t have the concept of eternity the way we understand it today.
What they did have was an understanding that God does not change. For example, in Malachi 3:6 God says, “I, the Lord, do not change,” and in James 1:17 it says that with God “there is no variation or shadow of change.”
As Christians reflected on this, they realized that time is the measure of change, and so if God is fundamentally changeless, then he must be outside of time. He must be eternal.
The classic definition of eternity was given in the early 500s by Boethius, who said that “Eternity therefore is a simultaneously total and perfect possession of an interminable life” (The Consolation of Philosophy 5:6). This was the meaning that the term had in later Christian circles.
Therefore, this was what it meant when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council confessed that “We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite, and unchangeable” (DS 800, CCC 202).
As the Church understands it, all created beings—including humans and angels—are inside of time.
But God alone is not.
Anthropomorphic Language
So if God is outside of time, how can he know something beforehand? To the biblical authors, this question would not have occurred since they didn’t have a clear understanding of God’s eternity. They weren’t yet at that stage of doctrinal development. But to us the question does occur.
The situation is similar to what we read in various passages of Scripture—and particularly early on in Scripture—where the biblical authors depict God as if he were a human being. For example, in Genesis we read:
[Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden (Gen. 3:8).
This depicts God like a king who is taking a stroll through his pleasure garden after the heat of the day has worn off, and you can hear the sound of his footsteps crunching on leaves and twigs.
Similarly, a bit later in Genesis, we read that:
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart (Gen. 6:5-6).
But if God knows everything, then he knew what man would do in the future, so how can God repent or regret that he made man? That’s something men do because they don’t know the full consequences of their actions, but it’s not something an omniscient being should do.
The answer—in both cases—is that the biblical authors are using anthropomorphic language—that is, language that depicts God as if he were a man. This is likely because they were at a stage of progressive revelation and doctrinal development where they didn’t yet understand just how different God is from us.
So what we have to do is ask what the fundamental thing was that the biblical author was trying to communicate and strip away the layers of anthropomorphization that he uses to express it.
For example, in the first passage, the author was trying to communicate that Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness and hid. This is then depicted as an encounter with God where they heard him walking in the garden.
And in the second passage, the biblical author is affirming that humanity had become very wicked, that this was what led to the Great Flood, and the situation is depicted as God regretting that he made man.
God and Foreknowledge
To understand God’s foreknowledge, we have to do essentially the same thing. Since God is not inside of time the way a man is, we need to set aside that idea and think about the situation in terms of what’s really going on for God. That will give us the key to understanding what’s really going on when “foreknowledge” language is being used about God.
So the first thing to realize is that—being outside of time—all moments in history are equally present to God. The past, the present, and the future are all equally real to him. Thus the Catechism says:
To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination,” he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace (CCC 600).
This means that—from his viewpoint in the eternal now—God simultaneously sees the beginning, the middle, and the end of every story in history. For example, he sees what you were doing last year, what you are doing now, and what you are doing a year from now. They are all equally real to God, and he sees them all.
Now let’s change perspectives and put ourselves back in time. Currently we are in the present, but God still knows what you will be doing a year from now. Therefore, God could tell a prophet what you’ll be doing in a year’s time, and the prophet could announce it to you. The prophet might say, “A year from today, you’ll get a new job offer . . . or buy a new car . . . or have a new baby” or anything like that.
And from your perspective here—inside of time—it looks like God knows what’s going to happened to you ahead of time. He thus foreknows what will happen to you in the future.
But from God’s perspective there is no time. Therefore, God does not literally know what happens before it happens. The future is just as real to him as the present and the past. So he simultaneously sees what is happening with you in every moment of your personal history. He doesn’t see one moment before he sees another.
God’s Foreknowledge = His Knowledge
So while we—here in time—may speak of God knowing things ahead of time, from God’s perspective he just knows everything simultaneously. It’s foreknowledge to us, but it isn’t foreknowledge to him. To him, it’s just knowledge.
And this is not just my opinion. It’s also how St. Augustine—one of the key authors who explored God’s relationship to time—understood things. He wrote:
What is foreknowledge except the knowledge of future things? But what is there that is future to God, who is beyond all time? For if God’s foreknowledge contains these things, to him they are not future but present, and hence this can no longer be called foreknowledge but simply knowledge. . . . It is right, then, that we should speak not of God’s foreknowledge but only of his knowledge (Miscellany of Questions in Response to Simplician 2:2:2).
At least, we should not speak of God’s foreknowledge when we are discussing things from his perspective outside of time. For him, there is no foreknowledge because he simultaneously sees all of history.
However, from our perspective—inside of time—we can speak of God’s foreknowledge because he can reveal to us what will happen in the future. We just need to be careful not to confuse this humanly accommodated way of speaking with how God experiences knowledge of our future.
Foreknowledge and Free Will
This has important implications for the existence of free will.
As I mentioned, a lot of people think that if God knows what we’ll do in the future then it means we don’t have free will.
But once you understand that for God all times are equally real, you can see why this isn’t the case.
Remember: God sees everything you will ever do simultaneously. He sees what you did in the past, what you’re doing in the present, and what you’re doing in the future.
But merely seeing what someone does doesn’t deprive them of free will.
If it did that for God, it would do that for everyone.
But if I see you doing something—say, reading a book—then I’m not forcing you to read the book. You’re doing that all on your own—by your own free will. I’m just aware of it.
And if I got in my time machine and travelled a year in the future and saw you reading a book, I similarly wouldn’t be forcing you to read the book. Again, I’d just be aware of what you freely chose to do.
In the same way, if God sees you reading a book in the present, the mere fact he knows that’s what your doing doesn’t force you to read the book.
And if—from his eternal perspective outside of time—God sees you reading a book at a point that’s still in our future, it doesn’t mean that you’re being forced to read it—by God or by anything else.
You can freely choose to read the book at some future date—and, if you do, then God will be aware of it in the eternal now.
He could then tell a prophet in the present what you’ll freely choose to do at a point in our future.
So the bottom line is that merely knowing what someone has done, is doing, or will do doesn’t in any way take away their freedom.
All it means is that you know what they freely choose to do—whether they made that choice in the past, the present, or the future.
What we call God’s foreknowledge thus doesn’t deprive us of free will.
