Rightly noting that truth is that which corresponds to reality, he states that God knows the future: “That means that propositions about the future are true — if some proposition is going to be known, it has to at least be true.” From my perspective he is right. What God exhaustively knows about the future is true. Moreover, what God exhaustively knows about the future will happen; and if any event were to happen otherwise, He would have known that alternative as well.

Steven continues: “But what truthmakers could there be for future propositions? None that look to good for the Arminian.” To get at the heart of what he means, he continues, “If the future is real, and there is some real concrete fact that grounds the truth, then the agents involved lack absolute ability to do otherwise — the future isn’t open, they don’t have genuine access to metaphysical alternatives.” I think he has a point, even if I disagree with a couple of particulars.

When Jesus Christ died, the future reality of His resurrection was a concrete fact grounded in truth, as Steven rightly notes. Luke records: “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24 NASB). Christ’s resurrection could not have been otherwise; the future of Christ’s resurrection was not open to any other metaphysical alternative. Christ’s resurrection was not merely foreknown (passively) by God (as though He merely foresaw the event) but was strictly foreordained. Certainly, all Classical Arminians agree.

What Steven is arguing against is the Libertarian notion of future contingencies. We agree with him that God’s knowledge of the future is not open (for neither we nor Arminius are Open Theists). We disagree, however, with Steven in that, what is done among humankind is accomplished by necessity — i.e. accomplished because God prescripted said event. Steven grounds all events in God’s foreordination of all things. God pre-planned exactly how He intended all events to unfold for all of His creatures, including their eternal destinies by decree. When an event happens in the life of an individual, it is brought to pass by God’s preordained plan and will.

But is it possible for God to know a contingent event, even if that event were not to occur? When King David was being pursued by Saul and his men, he asked the LORD: “‘Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?’ And the LORD said, ‘They will surrender you’” (1 Sam. 23:12 NASB). So David and his men left from Keilah and went another way. God foreknew a future contingency which did not take place. In what was the truth of God’s statement grounded? And what do we make of this event in light of God’s foreordination of all things?

Orthodox Christians do not believe in the pagan concept of chance. Boethius, late fifth- to early six-century Christian philosopher, defines chance as “an unexpected event due to the conjunction of its causes with action which is done for some purpose” (The Consolation of Philosophy, 117). Since nothing happens by chance, and God is sovereign over all things, governing His world, in what sense does God know all things? Steven confesses that the origin or foundation of God’s knowledge is not contingent upon His relation to His creatures, strictly taken. Thus God does not passively foreknow or foresee what any creature will do and subsequently foreordain that said action will occur. The argument usually takes the following form: “If God foresees all things and cannot be mistaken in any way, what Providence has foreseen as a future event must happen” (120). Philosophy, personified, responds:

It is not necessary, they say, that what is foreseen must happen, but it is necessary that what is destined to happen must be foreseen, as though the point at issue was which is the cause; does foreknowledge of the future cause the necessity of events, or necessity cause the foreknowledge? But what I am trying to show is that, whatever the order of the causes, the coming to pass of things foreknown is necessary even if the foreknowledge of future events does not seem to impose the necessity on them (120).

On what, then, is God’s foreknowledge grounded? Are we to equate God’s foreknowledge with His predetermination of all things merely by decree? And if so, then why the redundancy in Scripture: i.e. those whom He foreknew He also predestined (Rom. 8:29)? In this sense, then, the interpretation follows: those whom He predestined He also predestined; or, those whom He foreknew He also foreknew.

We know from Scripture that God is capable of knowing a truth which is not realized, as in the case of 1 Samuel 23:12. Still, in the mind and knowledge of God, there was certainty of David’s outcome. Philosophy responds:

The question is, therefore, how can God foreknow that these things will happen, if they are uncertain? If He thinks that they will inevitably happen while the possibility of their non-occurrence exists, He is deceived, and this is something wicked both to think and to say. But if His knowledge that they will happen as they do is of such a kind that He knows they may as equally not happen as happen, what sort of knowledge is this, which comprehends nothing sure or stable? (121).

I think that Steven was aiming at the same question and complaint, and rightly so. The last statement that any orthodox Christian wants to admit is that God is uncertain about the future. The question remains, however, how God knows what He knows, and on what that knowledge is grounded. Here is where Philosophy (Boethius) responds directly:

There seems to be a contradiction here, and you think that the necessity of events is consequent upon their being foreseen, while if there is no necessity, they cannot be foreknown, because you believe that nothing can be comprehended by knowledge unless it is certain. If events of uncertain occurrence are foreseen as if they were certain, it is only clouded opinion, not the truth of knowledge; for you believe that to have opinions about something which differ from the actual facts is not the same as the fulness of knowledge.


The cause of this mistake is that people think that the totality of their knowledge depends on the nature and capacity to be known of the objects of knowledge. But this is all wrong. Everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own nature, but according to the ability to know of those who do the knowing (125-26).

Arminius echoes Boethius here, when he states that God “knows all things, neither by intelligible . . . representations, nor by similitude, but by His own and sole essence” (Works, II:341). God’s exhaustive knowledge (and foreknowledge) is not rigorously contingent upon the creature, per se, but is grounded in His own essence. God knows all things by His own essence — omniscience is an attribute and quality which comprises God’s nature. He does not need to decree a thing in order to know a thing, as the example was given at 1 Samuel 23:12 — an event which did not take place, and one which was not decreed by God, but one of which God had true knowledge. This does not mean, however, that God has not decreed anything (or in one sense all things).

God, being the “I Am” (Exodus 3:14), exists in an eternal presence: “His knowledge, too, transcends all temporal change and abides in the immediacy of His presence.” God’s present-knowledge “embraces all the infinite recesses of past and future and views them in the immediacy of its knowing as though they are happening in the present” (134). Boethius answers Steven’s question, stating, “And so it comes about that when God knows that something is going to occur and knows that no necessity to be is imposed upon it, it is not opinion, but rather knowledge founded upon truth” (135). He continues, at length:

If you say at this point that what God sees as a future event cannot but happen, and what cannot but happen, happens of necessity, and if you bind me to this word necessity, I shall have to admit that it is a matter of the firmest truth, but one which scarcely anyone except a student of divinity has been able to fathom. I shall answer that the same future event is necessary when considered with reference to divine foreknowledge, and yet seems to be completely free and unrestricted when considered in itself. For there are two kinds of necessity; one simple, as for example the fact that it is necessary that all men are mortal; and one conditional, as for example, if you know someone is walking, it is necessary that he is walking. For that which a man knows cannot be other than as it is known; but this conditional necessity does not imply simple necessity, because it does not exist in virtue of its own nature, but in virtue of a condition which is added. No necessity forces the man to walk who is making his way of his own free will, although it is necessary that he walks when he takes a step.


In the same way, if Providence sees something as present, it is necessary for it to happen, even though it has no necessity in its own nature (135).

When an Arminian (or other non-Calvinist) admits that a person could have done otherwise than that which he or she did, this hypothetical does not infringe upon God’s knowledge, foreknowledge or sovereignty. If a person would have done otherwise, God would have known and foreknown that reality. What Arminians are denying is the philosophical necessity that God must have prescripted our choices in order for Him to know or foreknow reality. Boethius concludes:

So that difficulty you put forward a short time ago, that it was unfitting if our future is said to provide a cause of God’s knowledge, is solved. The power of this knowledge which embraces all things in present understanding has itself established the mode of being for all things and owes nothing to anything secondary to itself. And since this is so, man’s freedom of will remains inviolate and the law does not impose reward and punishment unfairly, because the will is free from all necessity (137).

Arminius, James. “Seventy-Nine Private Disputations: Disputations XVII. On the Understanding of God: XVIII. On the Will of God: XIX. On the Various Distinctives of the Will of God.” The Works of Arminius, Vol. II, trans. James and William Nichols. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

THE UNDERSTANDING OF GOD

Arminius begins by defining the Understanding of God as “that faculty of His life which is first in nature and order, and by which the living God distinctly understands all things and every one, which, in what manner soever, either have, will have, have had, can have, or might hypothetically have, a being of any kind” (Works, 2:341). God also understands “the order, connection, and relation of all and each of them between each other” (341). In this manner, nothing is excluded or exempted from what God understands regarding all things.

If one asks how God knows all things, we do not confess that He knows all things because He has strictly decreed all things, as though the only way in which He could know all things is via foreordination. Neither could we confess that God knows all things because He first viewed what the future would hold, and thus learned what should become of all things. Arminius answers:

God knows all things, neither by intelligible . . . representations, nor by similitude, but by His own and sole essence; with the exception of evil things, which He knows indirectly by the good things opposed to them, as privation is known . . . by means of the habit.

The mode by which God understands, is, not by composition and division, not by . . . gradual argumentation, but by simple and infinite intuition, according to the succession of order and not of time (341).

Therefore God knows all things by His own essence — omniscience is an attribute and quality which comprises God’s nature. He does not and cannot know evil or sin as He knows all other things since in Him there is no hint of sin whatsoever: “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5 NKJV). He knows all things in a succession of order: He knows Himself “entirely and adequately,” and knows “all possible things in the perfection of their own essence, and therefore all things impossible” (341).

God’s exhaustive knowledge and understanding is “certain and infallible: So that He sees certainly and infallibly even things future and contingent; whether He sees them in their causes, or in themselves.” Arminius is quick to add: “But this infallibility depends on the infinity of the essence of God, and not on His unchangeable will” (341). God’s exhaustive understanding of all things does not establish or necessitate determinism but contingency. Arminius writes:

How certain soever the acts of God’s understanding may itself be, this does not impose any necessity on things, but it rather establishes contingency in them. For as He knows the thing itself and its mode, if the mode of the thing be contingent, He must know it as such, and therefore it remains contingent with respect to the Divine knowledge (342).

God’s knowledge is not causal; His will is causal (those things which He has decreed shall come about, for example, the crucifixion of Christ Jesus). The knowledge by which God knows anything “precedes the free act of the will with regard to intelligence. But it knows something future according to vision, only through its hypothesis” (342). Again, this foreknowledge (i.e. vision) depends on the infinity of the essence of God. Also, middle knowledge “ought to intervene in things which depend on the liberty of created . . . choice or pleasure” (342). This Knowledge or Understanding of God is comprehensive and absolute.

THE WILL OF GOD

God’s will is “spoken of in three ways: First, The faculty itself of willing. Secondly, The act of willing. Thirdly, The object willed” (343). The first faculty is the “principal and proper one, the two others are secondary and figurative” (343). Arminius does not count three wills in God, but one single will with various distinctives. The second faculty, “the act of willing,” flows from the life of God, flowing through “the understanding from the life . . . that has an ulterior tendency; by which faculty God is borne towards a known good” (343).

However, the sin or evil (not calamity, disaster or punishment for sin) which “is called . . . that of culpability, God does not simply and absolutely will” (343). In other words, God has in no wise decreed that person A will sin by necessity, while person B will not sin by necessity. He may decree that a wicked person sin as an act of judgment or consequence for sin, but not without regard to the sinner’s voluntary wickedness or disobedience.

The will of God is “borne towards its objects in the following order: (1.) He wills Himself. (2.) He wills all those things which, out of infinite things possible to Himself, He has by the last judgment of His wisdom . . . determined to be made” (343). God wills to make a creature, and then He is “affected towards them by His will, according as they possess some likeness with His nature [Gen. 1:26], or some vestige of it” (343).

God also wills those things “which He judges fit and equitable to be done by creatures who are endowed with understanding and with free will: In which is included a prohibition of that which He wills not to be done” (343). He also permits things to be done, chiefly by which “He permits a rational creature to do what He has prohibited, and to omit what He has commanded” (343). A well-used example includes the sacrificing of children to a false god by the Israelites. The God of the Hebrews comments: “which I did not command or speak nor did it come into My mind” (Jer. 19:5 NKJV). Also, the Israelites wanted to set up their own kings. God responds: “They set up kings, but not by Me; they made princes, but I did not acknowledge them” (Hosea 8:3 NKJV).

God wills those things “which, according to His own wisdom [Eph. 1:11], He judges to be done concerning the acts of His rational creatures” (344). Though God is sovereign over all things, events and persons, yet so, that “when He acts either through His creatures, with them or in them, He does not take away the peculiar mode of acting or of suffering which He has divinely placed within them” (344). God concurrently allows them to “produce their own effects, and to receive in themselves the acts of God, either necessarily, contingently, or freely” (344).

Arminius further comments: “As this contingency and liberty do not make the prescience of God to be uncertain, so they are not destroyed by the volition of God, and by the certain futurition of events with regard to the understanding of God” (344). There is no tension between God’s sovereignty and humanity’s free will, since God has not determined all things by a strict decree, and no one commits an act by necessity.

THE VARIOUS DISTINCTIVES OF THE WILL OF GOD

Arminius begins: “Though the will of God be one and simple, yet it may be variously distinguished, from its objects, in reference to the mode and order according to which it is borne towards its objects” (344). God always “tends towards His own primary, proper, and adequate object, that is, towards Himself” (344). But regarding all other things, He tends towards them “by the liberty of exercise, and towards many by the liberty of specification; because He cannot hate things, so far as they have some likeness of God, that is, so far as they are good; though He is not necessarily bound to love them, since He might reduce them to nothing whenever it seemed good to Himself” (344). Roger E. Olson comments:

Arminius was puzzled about the accusation that he held corrupt opinions respecting the providence of God, because he went out of his way to affirm it. He even went so far as to say that every human act, including sin, is impossible without God’s cooperation! This is simply part of divine concurrence, and Arminius was not willing to regard God as a spectator. . . .


Arminius argued that when God has permitted an act, God never denies concurrence to a rational and free creature for that would be contradictory. In other words, once God decides to permit an act, even a sinful one, he cannot consistently withhold the power to commit it. However, in the case of sinful or evil acts, whereas the same event is produced by both God and the human being, the guilt of sin is not transferred to God, because God is the effecter of the act but only the permitter of the sin itself (Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities, 121, 122).

Arminius writes that the will of God “is distinguished into that by which He absolutely wills to do any thing or to prevent it; and into that by which He wills something to be done or omitted by His rational creatures” (344). Though God does not need to strictly decree something in order for it to be done, this truth does not rob Him of His sovereignty, since God both “absolutely wills” to do any thing or to prevent it, or “wills” to permit or not to permit it, according to Arminius and Classical Arminianism. Everything that is done is in some sense “willed” by God, but not by necessity (or decree, strictly taken). God’s various distinctions of His one will includes a “will of His good pleasure,” and of His “open intimation” (344-45). Arminius comments:

The latter is revealed, for this is required by the use to which it is applied: The former is partly revealed, partly secret or hidden. The former employs a power that is either irresistible, or that is so accommodated to the object and subject as to obtain or insure its success, though it was possible for it to happen otherwise. . . .


One [distinctive of the] will of God is absolute, another respective. His absolute will is that by which He wills any thing simply, without regard to the volition or act of the creature; such as is that about the salvation of believers. His respective will is that by which He wills something with respect to the volition or the act of the creature (345-46).

Again, Olson explains that for Arminius and his followers a distinction between two modes of God’s will is absolutely crucial: “the antecedent and the consequent wills of God. The first has priority; the second exists because God reluctantly allows human defection in order to preserve and protect the integrity of the creature” (Arminian Theology, 123). The effort here is not to preserve “human self-determination,” as erroneously asserted by John Piper. There is no “human self-determination” when it comes to trusting in Christ Jesus for salvation (John 6:44, 65). But there certainly is human self-determination when it comes to one sinning against God, else we are forced to admit that the sinner sins by God’s determination, which is libelous against God’s holy character, nature and essence.

Arminius offers this corollary: “Is it possible for two affirmatively contrary volitions of God to tend towards one object which is the same and uniform? We answer in the negative” (346). Therefore, God cannot decree or will for person A to not sin by necessity in one sense and also decree or will for person A to sin by necessity in another. John Piper, Jonathan Edwards, and a host of other Calvinists are convinced that this does not have to be so. We confess that they hold a contrariety in God, and they jump through philosophical hula hoops to prove otherwise.

James Arminius, “Seventy-Nine Private Disputations: Disputations XVII. On the Understanding of God: XVIII. On the Will of God: XIX. On the Various Distinctives of the Will of God,” The Works of Arminius, Volume II, translators James and William Nichols. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996.

Roger E. Olson, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006.

Arminius’ intellectualism is evident from the first in his definition of the scientia Dei [knowledge or understanding of God] as the faculty of the divine life that is “first in nature and in order.” The divine will, in other words, as “the second faculty” of the divine life, is not merely placed second in order for the sake of discussion: it is placed second because it “follows the divine intellect and is produced from it.”

It is, thus, by the divine will that God is inwardly directed [fertur] “toward a known good.” Nor is Arminius’ intellectualism confined to his doctrine of God: he assumes the priority of the intellect over the will in human beings also, both in their primitive condition before the fall and in their fallen condition as well. This latter point stands in contrast to the Reformed [Calvinistic], who, following Calvin, were typcially philosophical intellectualists and soteriological voluntarists, who placed the will over the intellect in the fallen nature of man.

The point also, significantly, stands in some contrast with Aquinas’ teaching — insofar as it represents a more thoroughgoing intellectualism, indeed, an intellecutalism tinged with rationalism. Aquinas had assumed that the indirect character of the knowledge of God available in the temporal order rendered the knowledge of God available to the viator [traveller] less perfect than the love of God which, even in this life, wills God directly. In Coplestons’ words, “in the beatific vision in heaven, . . . when the soul sees the essence of God immediately, the intrinsic superiority of intellect to will reasserts itself.” Arminius grants a higher status to mediate [middle] knowlege of God than does Aquinas — or, perhaps, a lower status to temporal human willing — with the result that intellect remains higher than will or love in the fallen condition.

From the tradition in general and from the scholastic theology both of the Middle Ages and of early orthodox Protestantism, Arminius draws out a doctrine of divine omniscience. The intellectus Dei [reason or understanding of God], like all other predicates of the divine nature, partakes of the simplicity, infinity, and eternity or simultaneous wholeness of the divine essence. Although it is a faculty of the divine life . . . it is eternally fully actualized.

The intellectus Dei, therefore, is an eternal knowledge of “all things and every thing which now have, will have, have had, can have, or might hypothetically have, any kind of being.” Even so, God does not merely know things but also the order and relation of all things.

Arminius extends this divine knowledge even to purely rational “things” — to concepts and relations — that exist only in the imagination. It ought to go without saying that this kind of intensely speculative argumentation, though quite typical of scholastic theology and philosophy, [sadly] has no parallel in the thought of the Reformers. . . .

This utter omniscience can be further described as a total self-knowledge, a complete knowledge of all possibility, and an absolute knowledge of all actuality. God, therefore, can be said to know himself absolutely. . . . Granting this infinite self-identical self-knowledge and granting also that God is the first cause of all things, God must know all possibility and all actuality (which is to say, all actualized possibility) and know these catagories exhaustively:

He knows all possibilia [writes Arminius], whether they are in the capability (potentia) of God or of the creature; in active or passive capability; in the capability of operation, imagination, or enunciation: he knows all things that could have an existence, on any hypothesis; he knows things other than himself, whether necessary or contingent, good or bad, universal or particular, future, present or past; he knows things substantial and accidental of every kind.

The divine knowledge of possibility, since it is a knowledge of what things can come into existence, is also a knowledge of the way in which all possibles could exist ideally or perfectly, without defect and a knowledge of impossibility as well. Arminius even argues an order in the divine knowledge of possibles.

Thus God knows, first, “what things can exist by his own primary act.” Second, in the logical order of knowing, God knows the possibilities resident in the secondary order of causality belonging to creatures. Whether a creature or order of creatures exists or will exist, God knows the capabilities of these creatures and what can occur in and through them by means of “his conservation, motion, assistance, concurrence, and permission. . . .” Third, “he knows what he can do concerning the acts of creatures, consistent with himself and these acts.” This logic must also be applied to God’s knowledge of actual things. The argument could be cited directly from Aquinas.

Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), 145-147.