Chapter 29

Divine Action, Providence, and Time

How God Acts in the World Without Determining Every Event

Introduction: The Question of This Chapter

How does God run the world?

That is the question behind this chapter. It is one of the oldest and most important questions in Christian theology. And it is one of the most practical. When a mother prays for her sick child, is God hearing her in real time? When a young man asks God for guidance about a career choice, is God actually doing something about it? When evil happens — a school shooting, a genocide, a drunk driver — is God in control? Did He plan it? Did He just allow it? Did He know it was coming? And if He knew, why didn't He stop it?

These are not just dusty academic questions. They touch the heart of Christian faith. They shape how we pray, how we suffer, how we hope, and how we trust. And the answers we give depend, in large part, on how we understand God's relationship to time.

In this chapter, I want to show something I find deeply encouraging. I want to show that a God who is genuinely temporal — a God who experiences real sequence and succession, who hears our prayers in the moment we pray them, who responds to us in real time — can also be a God of total providential sovereignty. A God who knows the whole future with absolute certainty. A God who weaves every strand of history into a purposeful tapestry. A God who never loses control, never makes a mistake, and never fails to accomplish what He intends. These two things — genuine temporality and exhaustive providential oversight — are not only compatible. I believe they go beautifully together.¹

That claim is not obvious. Many Christian thinkers have assumed that if God is really in time, He must give up some of His sovereignty. They have thought that a temporal God would be partly in the dark about the future, partly at the mercy of creaturely choices, and partly unable to guarantee that His plans will succeed. Open theists bite the bullet and embrace this conclusion, arguing that the God of the Bible is genuinely a "God who risks."² Classical theists, wanting to preserve sovereignty, push in the opposite direction and conclude that God must therefore be timeless. Calvinists split the difference by saying that God is timeless and that He meticulously determines every event, so there is no mystery about how He knows what will happen — He causes it all. Molinists try yet another route, appealing to God's knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom.

I think there is a better way. I am going to argue in this chapter that my position — which I call dynamic omnitemporality with transcendent temporal access — gives us the best of every world. It preserves everything the defender of divine sovereignty cares about. It preserves everything the defender of human freedom cares about. It preserves the genuine, moment-by-moment, responsive relationship between God and His creatures that the Bible so clearly portrays. And it does all this without collapsing into any of the dead ends that have plagued the providence debate for centuries.

Let me tell you the plan. First, I will define divine providence in plain language. Second, I will lay out the four main views on the spectrum — meticulous determinism, Molinism, simple foreknowledge with general sovereignty, and open theism — and explain what is at stake among them. Third, I will make the positive case for my view: simple foreknowledge with general sovereignty, grounded in God's transcendent access to all of time. Fourth, I will show how this view handles the two hardest questions in the providence debate: prayer and the problem of evil. Finally, I will consider objections and wrap up.

Before we begin, let me say one thing to set the tone. This is not a dry logical exercise. This is about the God we pray to. So I will try to keep that in view throughout. The God of Christian faith is not a cosmic chess master moving pieces on a board. He is a Father. A Shepherd. A Friend. A Bridegroom. He is love. Our question is how His love operates across time — how this loving, personal God runs the universe that His love made.

What Is Divine Providence?

Let's start with a definition that a sixth grader could understand. Providence is God's ongoing care for and governance of the world He has made. The word comes from a Latin root that means "to see before" or "to look after" — a useful double meaning, because providence involves both foresight and care. When we say God is providential, we mean He sees what is coming and He takes care of His creation as it unfolds.

Classical Christian theology has usually distinguished three aspects of providence.³ First, there is preservation — God holds the universe in existence moment by moment. Without His active sustaining, the world would simply cease to be. Second, there is concurrence — God works alongside or through created causes to bring about effects. When a farmer plants seed and the seed grows, God is at work through the seed's natural growth. Third, there is governance — God directs the universe toward the goals He has set for it, weaving all events into a purposeful plan.

Christians have agreed on these three aspects for centuries. The disagreement — the fierce, long-running disagreement — concerns how God exercises governance. Specifically, how much does God control? How much freedom do creatures have? And how does God know what will happen before it happens?

Michael Rea, in his warm and pastoral book God Inside Time, gives a nice image for what providence should feel like from our side. God, he says, is not the gypsy staring into a crystal ball, guessing what will happen. God is the painter sitting in front of the canvas, and with each brushstroke He is both telling the future and designing the future, at one and the same time.⁴ That is a beautiful image, and I think it captures something true. A providential God is not a passive observer. He is an active artist. But — and this is where the disagreement begins — how much of the painting does He actually paint? Does He paint every brushstroke? Does He paint only the main outline and let us fill in the details? Does He know what the painting will look like before He starts, or is He improvising?

Four Views on the Providence Spectrum

To understand my position, we need to see it against the backdrop of the other main options. Think of it as a spectrum, with "God controls everything" on one end and "God controls very little" on the other. From most control to least, the four main Christian views are: (1) meticulous determinism, often called Calvinism; (2) Molinism; (3) simple foreknowledge with general sovereignty; and (4) open theism. I will briefly sketch each one, show why I reject three of them, and then defend the third as the right view.

View One: Meticulous Determinism (Calvinism)

Meticulous determinism is the view that God unconditionally decrees every event that will ever happen.⁶ Every rainfall, every conversation, every thought, every sin — all of it is part of God's eternal decree. God knows the future because He has determined the future. In the classical Calvinist tradition, this view is paired with divine timelessness: God, outside of time, decrees the entire history of the world in one eternal act. John Calvin himself put the doctrine in sharp terms when he wrote that God "foresees future events only by reason of the fact that he decreed that they take place."⁷ A contemporary defender, Paul Helm, argues that without such a strong doctrine of decree, God cannot really be sovereign at all.⁸

The attractions of this view are real. It preserves God's total control. It gives a clean answer to the question, "How does God know the future?" — He knows it because He causes it. It makes the Bible's language of God "ordaining" events (Ephesians 1:11; Romans 8:29–30) easy to accommodate. Calvinists often point out that a God who is not meticulously sovereign would seem, by comparison, weak — subject to creaturely choices He cannot predict or control.

But there are enormous problems with this view, and I believe they are decisive.

First, meticulous determinism makes God the author of sin.⁹ If God unconditionally decrees every event, then He decrees every murder, every rape, every act of child abuse. The Calvinist tradition has worked hard to avoid this implication — usually by distinguishing between God's decretive will and His permissive will, or by saying God "ordains" evil without "causing" it. But I do not think these distinctions hold up under pressure. If an agent unconditionally wills every detail of an event, that agent has caused the event, whatever we call it. And the Bible is clear that God is not the author of sin (James 1:13). God is holy. He is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). A theology that makes Him the ultimate determiner of every wicked act cannot be squared with these truths.

Second, meticulous determinism undermines human responsibility. If every thought I have, every choice I make, every word I speak has been unconditionally decreed by God from all eternity, then I am not really a responsible agent. I am a puppet whose strings are pulled from outside. The Calvinist tradition has tried to rescue responsibility through the doctrine of compatibilism — the claim that freedom and determinism are compatible, because freedom just means "doing what you want," not "being able to do otherwise." But this redefinition of freedom seems contrived, and it does not match what ordinary people mean when they say they are free. I believe, with the majority of the Christian tradition before Augustine and with the Eastern Orthodox tradition throughout, that human beings have libertarian free will — the genuine ability to choose between real alternatives.¹⁰

Third, meticulous determinism makes nonsense of the biblical picture of God's responses. When God grieves over human sin (Genesis 6:6), He is grieving over events He unconditionally decreed. When He calls sinners to repent (Ezekiel 33:11), He is calling them to do what He Himself has decreed they will not do. When Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because they "would not" come to Him (Matthew 23:37), He is weeping over a refusal He Himself has eternally determined. The whole interactive, responsive, relational texture of the biblical story is flattened.

For these reasons — and others that I develop in Chapters 6 and 30 — I reject meticulous determinism.

Let me add one more note here, because I know Calvinist readers sometimes feel that critics of Calvinism have not really understood the view. I want to be fair. The Calvinist tradition at its best is not trying to make God the author of evil; it is trying to preserve the radical sufficiency of God's sovereign grace. Calvinists rightly insist that God is not a spectator. They rightly insist that God's purposes cannot be frustrated. They rightly insist that salvation is entirely a gift, not a human achievement. All of these convictions I share. My disagreement is not with Calvinist intuitions about the greatness of God. My disagreement is with the particular metaphysical machinery — unconditional decree of every event, including sin — that Calvinists have often used to cash those intuitions out. I believe my view preserves everything the Calvinist cares about while avoiding the steep costs. God is fully sovereign. His purposes cannot fail. Grace is entirely a gift. But not every event is unconditionally decreed.

View Two: Molinism

Molinism, named after the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, offers a clever alternative. Molinism tries to combine God's sovereign control with genuine libertarian freedom. The heart of Molinism is the doctrine of middle knowledge.¹¹

Here is how it works. Molinists say God has three kinds of knowledge, arranged in "logical moments" (not temporal moments — they are meant to describe an order of dependence, not an order of time).¹² First is natural knowledge: God knows all necessary truths — truths that could not be otherwise, like mathematical truths and logical truths. Second is middle knowledge: God knows what every possible creature would freely do in every possible circumstance. Third is free knowledge: God knows what will actually happen, because He has decided which possible world to bring into being.

Middle knowledge is the key move. According to Molinism, even before God decides to create, He knows what Peter would do if placed in the circumstances of denying Christ three times. He knows what Judas would do if invited into the inner circle. He knows what every person would freely choose in every possible situation. Armed with this knowledge, God can then choose to actualize the particular world in which the free creatures He creates will make the choices He wants them to make. The result: God sovereignly controls the whole flow of history through creaturely freedom rather than against it.

William Lane Craig, the most prominent contemporary defender of Molinism, sees this as a beautiful synthesis.¹³ It preserves genuine libertarian freedom (creatures really choose). It preserves exhaustive divine sovereignty (God arranges the circumstances so that free creatures end up where He wants them). And it explains how God can know future contingents without causing them.

I have great respect for Molinism. It is elegant. And I think Craig and other Molinists are asking the right questions. But I reject Molinism for two main reasons.

The first is what philosophers call the grounding objection.¹⁴ Consider a counterfactual of creaturely freedom, such as: "If Peter were in circumstances C, he would deny Christ three times." For Molinism to work, this proposition must be true — and true prior to God's decision to create, so that God can use it to pick a world. But what makes it true? In our actual world, what makes statements about Peter's choices true is the fact that Peter makes them. But in the logical moment before creation, Peter does not exist. He has not chosen anything. So there is no Peter making any choice to ground the truth of the counterfactual. The Molinist seems to be stuck with claiming that there are free-choice facts floating around with nothing to make them true. That strikes me, as it strikes many critics, as metaphysically bizarre.¹⁵

The second reason is that Molinism requires something like divine timelessness to make sense — or at least a sharp "logical moments" structure that embeds the same kinds of puzzles. Mullins has argued forcefully that Craig's version of Molinism faces a problem of temporary intrinsics: at the first logical moment, God is "undecided" about creation; at a later logical moment, He is "decided." But these are incompatible properties, and the mere appeal to logical priority cannot make them compatible.¹⁶ I find Mullins's critique persuasive. If Molinism cannot avoid embedding something like a timeless-then-temporal structure, it inherits all the problems of divine timelessness that I have developed in Chapters 6 and 27.

There are other objections — that Molinism makes God strangely dependent on counterfactuals He did not create, that the practical difference from determinism is vanishingly thin, and so on. I will not rehearse them here. The short version: Molinism is clever but unstable. We do not need it.

View Three: Simple Foreknowledge with General Sovereignty (My View)

This is the view I defend. Simple foreknowledge is the oldest Christian view of divine knowledge, going back to the early Fathers and through most of the pre-Augustinian tradition.¹⁷ The core claim is simple: God knows every future event directly, by perceiving it, without having to cause it and without having to calculate it from middle knowledge of counterfactuals. God just sees the whole future, as plainly as He sees the present and the past.

On the classical version of this view — defended by Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas — simple foreknowledge is grounded in divine timelessness. God, existing outside of time, sees all of time in one eternal gaze. For Him, all moments are present. There is no "before" and "after" in His knowing.

My version is different. I agree with the classical tradition that God directly perceives the whole future without having to cause it. But I reject the timeless framework. Instead, I argue that God is genuinely temporal — He experiences real sequence and succession — while also having transcendent temporal access: the ability to perceive all of time, past, present, and future, from any vantage point in His own temporal life. God is not locked into the now the way creatures are. He is not limited to perceiving only the present moment and then waiting for the future to arrive. He can see all of created time at once, even while He Himself lives and acts in succession.¹⁸

I develop this view in detail in Chapter 25, so I will not repeat the full argument here. For our present purposes, what matters is how this view grounds divine providence. On my view, God knows every future free choice because He perceives it directly — He sees Peter denying Christ, He sees Judas betraying Jesus, He sees you choosing your next breakfast, because He has access to the whole temporal series. This is not causal knowledge (God is not making these things happen). It is not inferential knowledge (God is not reasoning from counterfactuals). It is simply direct perception of what is temporally there to be seen.

Given this exhaustive simple foreknowledge, God can exercise a very robust form of providential governance without determining every detail. Because He knows the whole future, He knows every choice every creature will ever make. Because He knows every choice, He can weave His own providential actions — answering prayers, providing guidance, sending deliverance, working miracles, arranging circumstances — into that known tapestry in such a way that His overarching purposes for creation are infallibly accomplished. Creaturely freedom is preserved. Divine sovereignty is preserved. The future is fully known. And evil is not unconditionally decreed by God, but permitted and overcome.

View Four: Open Theism

Open theism, at the other end of the spectrum, says that God does not know the future free choices of creatures — not because He is limited in any unworthy sense, but because there are no future free choices to be known. The future is genuinely open, even for God.¹⁹ Open theists such as Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, William Hasker, Gregory Boyd, and Richard Rice argue that this view best captures the Bible's picture of a God who genuinely responds, who risks, who can be surprised, grieved, and delighted by what His creatures do.²⁰

I have enormous sympathy for what open theists are trying to protect. They want a God who is genuinely relational, not a stone idol of perfection. They want a God who really responds to prayer. They want human freedom to mean something. They want the Bible's language of divine grief, regret, and wonder to be taken seriously. I want all those things too. I devote Chapter 32 to a full refutation of open theism, so I will not repeat that argument here. But let me briefly say why I reject it.

The biblical evidence for exhaustive divine foreknowledge is overwhelming. Isaiah 46:9–10, Isaiah 41:21–24, Psalm 139:16, Jesus's prediction of Peter's triple denial, Acts 2:23's description of the crucifixion as taking place "according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" — these and dozens of other passages teach that God knows with certainty what free creatures will freely do. The open theist readings of these passages strike me as strained.²¹ And, more importantly, open theism creates serious pastoral problems. If God does not know the future, our hope in the victorious consummation of all things is shakier. Our confidence in biblical prophecy is shakier. Our trust in the "all things work together for good" promise of Romans 8:28 is shakier. Open theism is not the only way to preserve genuine divine responsiveness. My view — which affirms both full foreknowledge and full temporality — does the same work better.

A Brief Biblical Tour of Providence

Before I develop my positive model in detail, I want to walk briefly through some of the key biblical texts that shape Christian thinking about providence. I will keep this short, because many of these passages receive fuller treatment in the biblical chapters of this book (Chapters 16–23). But a chapter on providence without any Scripture would be strange. So here are some of the threads that I believe my model captures best.

The very first paragraph of the Bible introduces a God who acts purposefully in time. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). Creation is a temporal act, executed in a temporal sequence of days, culminating in a purposeful rest. Before the first chapter is over, we already have a God who plans, speaks, orders, evaluates, blesses, and rests. Providence begins with the way God makes the world.

The story of Joseph gives one of the clearest snapshots of providence in the Bible. Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery. He is falsely accused, unjustly imprisoned, and forgotten. And yet, decades later, he looks at his brothers and says: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive" (Genesis 50:20). Two actors, two intentions, one outcome. Joseph's brothers genuinely meant evil, and they are responsible for it. God genuinely meant good, and He brought it about. Neither intention cancels the other. The evil was real; the good was real; and God wove them together into a plan of preservation. This is the tapestry metaphor in living color.

The Exodus is a providential drama of enormous scale. God declares to Abraham, four hundred years before the event, that his descendants will be enslaved in Egypt and then delivered (Genesis 15:13–14). The prophecy is fulfilled to the day (Exodus 12:41). That is simple foreknowledge in action — not meticulous control of every whip and every brick, but a sure knowledge of the whole arc, with God acting at just the right moments to bring about the outcome He has promised.

The Psalms return again and again to the theme of providential care. "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1). "The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry" (Psalm 34:15). "Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you" (Psalm 55:22). This is the language of a present, attentive, responsive God — a God who hears, sees, and acts now. Psalm 139:16 adds a remarkable claim about foreknowledge: "In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." God knows the whole life of the psalmist before any of it is lived. Yet He is also with him in every moment of it.

The prophets depict providence as a grand, purposeful drama. "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose'" (Isaiah 46:9–10). Here is a ringing affirmation of both foreknowledge and sovereign accomplishment. God knows the end from the beginning, and His purpose will stand. This is the foundation of the Christian's confidence in providence.

When we come to the New Testament, providence takes on new depth in the person of Jesus. Jesus's entire life is a providential display. He is born at the right moment ("when the fullness of time had come" — Galatians 4:4). He speaks and acts in ways that fulfill ancient prophecy (Matthew 1:22; Luke 24:44). He knows what is coming and says so — Peter's denial, His own death, His resurrection. He is handed over to crucifixion "according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23). And yet, throughout, those who participate in the drama act freely. Peter really chooses to deny. Judas really chooses to betray. The Jewish leaders and Pilate really choose to condemn. God's plan is accomplished through genuinely free choices, not by bypassing them.

The apostolic writings develop this providential vision. Paul tells the Ephesians that God has "a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth" (Ephesians 1:10). He tells the Romans that "for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). This is providence as tapestry: every thread — including the painful threads — being woven toward a good and glorious end. The "all things" is breathtaking. Not most things. Not good things. All things.

Hebrews describes God as the one who "upholds the universe by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3) — ongoing preservation. Peter describes believers as "elect exiles . . . according to the foreknowledge of God the Father" (1 Peter 1:1–2) — providential calling. Revelation describes the Lamb as the one who was "slain from the foundation of the world" (Revelation 13:8) — the cross as the centerpiece of an eternal plan.

What ties all of this together is a vision of a God who is sovereign without being coercive, who is temporal without being limited, who is present without being overbearing, and who is provident without being deterministic. That is the God whose providential model I want to articulate in what follows.

The Author's Providential Model: God as the Master Weaver

Now let me develop my own positive account in more detail. The core image I want to offer is this: God is the master weaver of history. He knows every strand of the tapestry — every choice, every event, every action — before any of it is woven into the cloth. And because He knows every strand, He can act providentially at every moment to weave the tapestry toward the glorious pattern He has set from the beginning.

Let me unpack that metaphor.

The Weaver's Foreknowledge

Our imaginary weaver, before she ever threads her first strand onto the loom, sees every strand that will ever be used. She sees every color. She sees every knot. She sees every piece of fabric that every future owner of the tapestry will ever cut. Nothing about the finished tapestry will surprise her. She has full, complete, exhaustive foreknowledge of every thread.

This foreknowledge does not cause the strands to be what they are. The weaver is not making the wool blue or red. The wool just is the color it is. She perceives it. Her knowing is not creating; her knowing is seeing. But her knowing is perfect and comprehensive.

So it is with God, on my view. God perceives every future free choice, not because He causes it, but because He has transcendent access to the whole of created time. When I freely choose to eat oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow, my choice is genuinely mine. I am not programmed. I am not coerced. The oatmeal-choosing is caused by me. But God sees it before I make it — not by inferring it, not by middle-knowing it, not by decreeing it, but by having access to that future moment from the standpoint of His own transcendent temporal life.²²

The Weaver's Art

Now consider: because the weaver knows every strand in advance, she can plan her weaving perfectly. She knows where every color will appear. She knows when to introduce a new thread. She knows when to tie a knot. She can plan the whole pattern around the strands she has to work with.

This is the analogy for providential governance. God, knowing every free choice in advance, plans His own actions — His interventions, His provisions, His guidance, His miracles, His answers to prayer — around and through those choices. The resulting tapestry of history is genuinely a collaboration between God and His creatures. The strands are contributed by creatures. The pattern is planned and executed by God. But because God knows the strands in advance, the collaboration is infallible: the pattern is going to come out the way He intends.

Notice what this does not mean. It does not mean God is just reacting to creaturely choices, scrambling to adjust His plans as surprises come in. That is the open theist picture, and I reject it. It also does not mean God is unconditionally determining the choices themselves. That is the meticulous determinist picture, and I reject it too. My view is a middle path. God, with exhaustive foreknowledge, plans from all eternity a providential strategy that incorporates genuinely free creaturely choices. The plan is set. The strands are chosen (by creatures). And the pattern comes out exactly as God intends.

This is a version of what Mullins calls "general providence" — God adopts general policies for governing the world rather than specific intentions for every individual event — but it has more structure than most general providence accounts.²³ Because of God's full foreknowledge, His general policies can be calibrated to the actual choices creatures will make, producing an outcome that is as providentially guaranteed as any Calvinist or Molinist could wish.

The Weaver Is Also a Person

I need to push the image one step further, because a tapestry-weaver metaphor, taken alone, could still sound cold. It could sound as if God is an artisan working on a project, with us as His materials. That is not what I mean. The weaver is a Person. In fact, the Weaver is three Persons — the Trinity. And the threads He weaves are not merely colored wool. They are living creatures made in His image, loved by Him, called to know and be known by Him. The tapestry metaphor captures the providential architecture, but it does not capture the warmth. Let me add a second metaphor that does.

God is also like a father preparing a great family reunion. He knows every guest who will come. He knows what each guest loves to eat, what each guest needs, what conversations will erupt in which corners of the room. He has thought through every detail — the chairs, the music, the food, the lighting, the seating arrangements. But he has not coerced his children into attending. He has invited them, he has prepared for them, he knows which ones will come freely, and he has planned the whole evening around their actual comings and goings. The evening is a gift. It is also a work of great intelligence and love. The children are genuinely free, and the father is genuinely sovereign — over the party, over the house, over the pace and tone of the gathering. That double truth is the shape of Christian providence.

What This Means for Divine Action

How does God actually act in the world on this model? Let me name several ways.

First, God acts directly in the world through His ongoing creative sustenance and through miracles. He keeps the universe in existence moment by moment. He intervenes in the normal course of natural events to bring about things that would not happen through ordinary causes — the Red Sea parting, Jesus walking on water, the resurrection.²⁴

Second, God acts through secondary causes. Most of what God does in the world, He does through the natural workings of creation, through human choices, through historical events, through the laws of nature He set up. When a surgeon skillfully removes a tumor, we can say with the Bible that God has healed the patient — without denying that the surgeon's hands really did the work. God works through.

Third, God acts interpersonally and relationally. He speaks to His people. He guides them. He convicts. He comforts. He warns. He encourages. This is the most intimate form of divine action, and it is not something we can reduce to mechanical causation. It is the Creator meeting creatures in the depths of their hearts.²⁵

Fourth, God acts by choosing when and how to intervene. Because God knows the whole future, He knows exactly when a well-placed miracle, a carefully timed word, a surprise provision, or a quiet whisper will serve His purposes best. He is not improvising. He is not guessing. He is executing a plan calibrated to the exact shape of the actual future.

How Can God Answer Prayer? The Temporal Model of Providence

Now we come to one of the most practically important questions in all of theology. Prayer. When we pray, what exactly are we doing? And what exactly is God doing when He answers?

This is a question where the God-and-time debate really bites. If God is strictly timeless, prayer becomes very strange. How can a timeless God hear a prayer that is uttered at a specific time? How can He respond to an event after the event takes place, when He Himself has no "after"? The classical tradition has worked hard to make timeless prayer-answering intelligible, usually by saying that God timelessly wills events to occur at particular times, including events of prayer and events of response. But this picture drains prayer of its interpersonal, conversational character. Prayer, on the strict timeless view, feels less like speaking to a Father and more like slotting a request into a pre-existing eternal computer program.²⁷

My view solves this beautifully. God is genuinely temporal. When you pray at 10:42 a.m. on Tuesday, God hears you at 10:42 a.m. on Tuesday. Not eternally, not timelessly, not before, not after — but then. Really. Literally. He responds to you in real time. Prayer is real conversation, because God is a real conversation partner in real time.²⁸

But — and here is the crucial move — God's temporal hearing of your prayer does not mean He is only learning about it now. Because of His transcendent temporal access, God has always known that you would pray this prayer, at this time, with these words. Your prayer has been "on His radar," so to speak, from the beginning. He has been planning His response from all eternity. The answer to your prayer was built into the tapestry before the first strand was ever woven.

I want to slow down here, because this is a big deal pastorally. Many Christians worry that if God already knows what we are going to pray, and already knows what He will do in response, then prayer is pointless. Why pray if it's all already decided?

The answer is: because your prayer is part of how it gets decided. God, with His exhaustive foreknowledge, sees the entire providential plan as a unified whole. Your prayer is not something He ignores when laying out the plan. Your prayer is one of the threads He weaves into the plan. In fact, many of God's actions in response to prayer would not happen unless you pray. The prayer is not redundant. The prayer is constitutive of the outcome God intends.²⁹

Let me put this another way. Suppose God has foreordained that the outcome at time T will be X. And suppose God, with His foreknowledge, has seen that you will pray at time T-minus-one, and that your prayer will move Him to act in a certain way, and that your praying and His acting are both part of how X comes to be. Then your prayer is not bypassed. Your prayer is built in. Your prayer genuinely contributes to the result. The fact that God already knows the result does not diminish the reality or efficacy of the prayer. It establishes it.

This, I believe, is the deep truth behind the old saying: "Prayer changes things — and prayer changes us." Prayer really does change the course of events, because God has ordered the world so that many of His actions happen in response to the prayers of His people. And prayer really does change us, because praying is itself a formative activity that God uses to shape our hearts into the image of Christ.

Three Kinds of Answered Prayer

When people ask "Does God answer prayer?" they often have a specific pattern in mind: ask for X, receive X. But answered prayer comes in many shapes. Let me name three.

The first is the direct fulfillment: you ask for X and you receive X. Perhaps you pray for healing and the person heals. Perhaps you pray for a job and the job comes through. Perhaps you pray for a wandering child and the child comes home. These direct answers are real, and they are cause for worship when they happen.

The second is the different answer: you ask for X and you receive something else — usually something better, though rarely recognizable as such at the time. Paul prayed three times to have his thorn removed, and the Lord said no (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). Jesus prayed in Gethsemane that the cup might pass, and the Father said no (Matthew 26:39). The no, in both cases, was an answer. A higher, deeper, costlier answer than a yes would have been. But an answer nonetheless.

The third is the delayed answer: you ask for X and years or decades later, you receive it. Hannah prayed for a son and received Samuel. The souls under the altar in Revelation cry "How long?" and are told to wait a little longer.³⁰ Jesus's own prayers for the salvation of the world — "your kingdom come" — are still being answered. Waiting is not unanswering. Waiting is part of how the answer unfolds.

What unites all three patterns is that God, with His full foreknowledge, has planned His response to every prayer from the beginning. Your prayer is not a surprise to Him, and neither is His response. Both are woven into the tapestry. Your job is to keep praying — not because God needs the information, but because prayer is the appointed way He has set up for many of His actions to unfold.

The Problem of Evil: How Does a Providential God Permit Suffering?

No chapter on providence can avoid the problem of evil. If God is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful, and if He providentially governs the world, why is there so much suffering? Why children with cancer? Why genocides? Why earthquakes that kill a hundred thousand in a day? Why abuse, rape, betrayal, loneliness, and death?

A full treatment of the problem of evil lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Many books have been written on it, and I cannot hope to resolve every strand of the debate here. But I do want to show how my providential model handles the question, at least in broad strokes.

Two Distinctions

Let me start with two distinctions that are essential.

First, we should distinguish between moral evil (evil resulting from free creaturely choices — murders, thefts, cruelty) and natural evil (evil resulting from natural processes — earthquakes, diseases, tsunamis). These require somewhat different responses. Moral evil is caused by the free choices of creatures — human beings and, on the traditional view, fallen angelic beings as well. Natural evil, in the biblical worldview, is connected to the fallen state of the whole creation, which "groans" under the weight of sin and awaits redemption (Romans 8:18–23).

Second, we should distinguish between God permitting an event and God willing an event. Permitting is not the same as willing. A parent who allows a toddler to fall while learning to walk is not willing the fall; the parent is permitting a mild risk for the sake of the child's growth. God permits many things He does not will — He permits sin, He permits injustice, He permits suffering — because permitting these things is necessary for the greater goods of human freedom, moral development, and genuine love. God does not will evil. He permits it, for reasons that are sometimes visible to us and sometimes not.³¹

Why God Permits Evil: The Free Will Defense

The most influential philosophical response to the problem of evil is what is usually called the free will defense, developed most carefully by Alvin Plantinga.³² The core idea is straightforward. If God wanted to create a world in which creatures could love Him and one another freely, He had to create a world in which creatures could also fail to love Him and one another. Love that is not free is not really love. A spouse who was mechanically programmed to say "I love you" is not really loving; the words are hollow. Genuine love requires the possibility of rejection. And that possibility is the possibility of moral evil.

I find this argument broadly convincing. Moral evil is the price paid for the glorious possibility of genuine love. God could have made a world of robots who never sin. He chose to make a world of free creatures who might sin and might love. The possibility of love was worth the possibility of sin. That is my reading of Genesis, and it is my reading of the gospel.

But — and this is crucial — the free will defense does not minimize evil. It does not say evil is fine. It does not say suffering is illusory. It says evil is real and terrible, and that it is the grievous cost of a world in which love and freedom are real. The world we inhabit is, in C. S. Lewis's haunting words, "enemy-occupied territory." The occupation is real, the suffering is real, and God has entered the occupation in the person of Jesus to defeat it.

How My Model Handles Evil Specifically

Given the four views we surveyed, here is how each handles the problem of evil in broad terms. The meticulous determinist struggles mightily, because every evil act has been unconditionally decreed by God. The Molinist does better, because she can say God did not have to create this world — but she owes an explanation of why, among all the possible worlds He could have actualized, He chose one containing this much evil. The open theist escapes the specific decretal problem (God did not decree the evils) but at the cost of saying God did not even foresee them, which raises its own worries about divine competence in world-making. My view, I believe, is best positioned.

On my view, God has genuine simple foreknowledge of every evil act that will ever occur. He knew, before creating, exactly what would happen. He still created. Why?

Because He determined that the greater goods of love, freedom, moral growth, and redemption — the whole glorious story culminating in Christ crucified and risen — were worth the cost. And crucially, He did not just decide to permit evil abstractly. He decided to enter the evil. He decided to bear the full weight of human suffering and sin on the cross. He decided that the answer to evil would not be detached permission but incarnate participation. The cross is God's answer to the problem of evil — not a philosophical answer, but a historical, personal, blood-stained answer. God is not a distant observer of suffering. He is, in Christ, its ultimate sufferer.³³

Michael Rea captures this with moving power. Speaking of his own grief and the suffering of many, he writes that God was in the Roman arenas, God was in the Nazi death camps, God was with the abducted child in the darkness. His mercy, Rea says, is so great that He carries the burden of every sufferer — and He carried it to the cross.³⁴ A timeless God who watches suffering from outside the world is not the God Rea describes. The God who is inside time enters the suffering of time. That is the God of the gospel.

There is a further point specific to my view. Because God is temporal and has transcendent access to all of time, He can respond to evil not just with sovereign governance but with genuine emotional engagement. He grieves in real time when we sin. He rejoices in real time when we repent. He suffers in real time when we suffer. The interactive, relational, compassionate portrait of God that fills the Bible is the portrait of a genuinely temporal God. I develop the emotional dimension of this in Chapter 28; the point here is that divine temporality makes God's engagement with evil more, not less, profound.³⁵

Objections and Responses

Let me consider several important objections to my view.

Objection 1: "If God knows the future, we are not free."

This is the classic theological fatalism objection.³⁶ If God infallibly foreknows that I will choose X tomorrow, then I cannot fail to choose X. If I cannot fail to choose X, then I am not really free to choose otherwise. Therefore, divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom.

Craig has given the definitive response to this objection, and I will summarize it briefly.³⁷ The fatalist argument trades on a confusion between certainty and necessity. It is true that if God foreknows X, then X will certainly happen. But "certainly" is not the same as "necessarily." Something can certainly happen and still happen contingently. My choosing X tomorrow is certain (because God knows it), but it is not necessary (because I am genuinely the cause, and I could have chosen otherwise — in which case God would have foreknown that instead).

The key insight is that God's foreknowledge of my future free choice is grounded in my free choice, not the other way around. In the metaphysically relevant sense, my free choice is "prior" to God's foreknowledge of it, even though His foreknowledge is temporally earlier. If I had chosen otherwise, God would have foreknown that instead. My choice makes His foreknowledge what it is; His foreknowledge does not make my choice what it is. Foreknowledge does not cause. And what does not cause does not necessitate.

On my view, this response gains additional force. God's foreknowledge is perceptual. He sees what you will choose because He has transcendent access to that future moment. His seeing is no more determining than your seeing is determining when you watch your friend make a choice in front of you. Your friend's choice is caused by your friend, not by your watching. Likewise, my future choice is caused by me, not by God's eternally perceiving it.

Objection 2: "Your view makes simple foreknowledge useless for providence."

This is the providential uselessness objection, raised by William Hasker, David Hunt, and others.³⁸ The worry runs like this: for God's foreknowledge to be useful in providential planning, God must know the future before He decides how to act. But simple foreknowledge (as opposed to middle knowledge) is knowledge of the actual future — which is the future including God's own decisions. So God cannot use simple foreknowledge to decide what to do, because His foreknowledge already includes what He has decided to do. The foreknowledge comes "too late" to shape the decision.

This is a genuinely hard objection, and there are several good responses. The first is to note that the "too late" metaphor is misleading when applied to God. God is not making decisions in sequence the way we do. His providential plan is a unified whole, encompassing His actions and His foreknowledge in one integrated vision.³⁹ On my view of divine temporality, God experiences genuine succession, but He also has transcendent access to the whole temporal series. He can see the whole providential plan — His own actions plus all creaturely responses — as a coherent totality. The question "What does He know before He decides?" assumes a linear decision-making process that does not quite fit God.

A second response is to point out that even on my view, there are some providential advantages that foreknowledge secures that other views lack. For example, my view explains how God can make prophecies about events that will occur through creaturely freedom. The open theist has to say that such prophecies are at best educated guesses or unilateral divine decrees. On my view, they are perceptual certainties. Whatever else one says about the theoretical architecture, the practical payoff of simple foreknowledge is huge.

Third, and most importantly, my view is not committed to the strong claim that God uses foreknowledge to decide. What it is committed to is that God's foreknowledge is coherent with and sustaining of His providential plan. God knows what creatures will do. God knows what He will do. Both together form a coordinated plan. The plan is unified. Whether we describe God's activity as "deciding and then knowing" or "knowing and deciding together in one integrated act" is a matter of perspective, not substance.

Objection 3: "Your view of transcendent temporal access smuggles in timelessness."

A critic might object that my talk of God having access to "all of time at once" sounds like a sneaky reintroduction of divine timelessness.⁴⁰ If God can see the whole future in one glance, how is He really temporal? Haven't I just relabeled Boethius's "eternal present" as "transcendent temporal access"?

The difference is real and important. On the Boethian view, God has no temporal life at all. He exists in a single, durationless, timeless instant. He does not experience succession. He does not think one thought and then another. For Him, there is no "before" and "after" at any level. This view, I have argued in other chapters, is incoherent and incompatible with the Incarnation, with genuine divine action, and with the biblical portrait of God.

On my view, God does experience genuine succession. He has a real temporal life. The Father speaks and the Son responds. The Son deliberates and then acts. The Spirit moves and then speaks. There is real before and after in God's life — not clock-time, but real sequence grounded in the relational life of the Trinity.⁴¹ What my view adds is the claim that God is not limited to the present moment the way creatures are. He can access all moments of created time from any vantage point in His own temporal life.

Think of it this way. A human being is temporal and is limited to the present. We experience time as a narrow slice, and the past and future are closed to our direct perception. A Boethian timeless God is neither temporal nor limited; He has no experience of succession at all. My dynamic omnitemporal God is temporal and unlimited: He experiences real sequence and has access to the whole. He is not frozen in an eternal now. He is alive and active in real time, while also able to perceive the whole temporal sweep.

This is a distinct view, not a repackaged timelessness. And I think it is the view that best captures both the Bible's portrait of divine activity and the philosophical demands of genuine foreknowledge.

Objection 4: "Your view requires eternalism, which we rejected in Chapter 24."

A sharp reader of the whole book might press: "You claim to be an A-theorist of time, which means the future is not yet real. But if the future is not yet real, how can God perceive it? There is nothing there to perceive."⁴²

This is a serious objection, and I want to answer it carefully. Different divine temporalists have given different answers. Some, like Deweese, affirm a version of the growing block theory, in which the past and present are real but the future is not.⁴³ On this view, God can have infallible knowledge of what will happen because certain propositions about the future are already true — for example, God's essence may ground the truths of future-tensed propositions, as the early Augustine held.⁴⁴ Others affirm presentism and hold that God's knowledge of the future rests on His knowing true future-tensed propositions, without requiring future events to be ontologically real in the present.⁴⁵

My own view, which I develop in Chapter 25, is that God has a special mode of perception — rooted in His transcendence — that enables Him to "see" future events through their causal sources and through the coherent narrative unity of creation. I do not claim this is a complete theory. I am happy to say that how God knows the future is ultimately mysterious; what I am arguing is that God's knowledge of the future does not require a static block universe. The A-theorist has several options. What matters for this chapter is that on my view, God has comprehensive foreknowledge, that foreknowledge is not causal, and that foreknowledge grounds a robust providential account.

Comparison with Other Christian Traditions

Before I conclude, let me briefly set my view in dialogue with several important Christian traditions, because I want the reader to see how my account fits into the broader landscape.

With the Reformed tradition, I share an emphasis on divine sovereignty. I affirm that God has a plan for history, that His plan will not be thwarted, that His purposes will be accomplished, and that nothing happens outside His providential care. I agree with Calvin that "not even the smallest sparrow falls to the ground without the will of the Father," understood in the strong sense that every event is encompassed in God's providential plan.⁴⁶ Where I diverge is on how that sovereignty operates: through determinism of every individual event, or through general governance informed by exhaustive foreknowledge of free choices. I take the latter route.

With the Arminian/Wesleyan tradition, I share an emphasis on libertarian human freedom, on God's genuine love for all people, on resistible grace, and on the biblical portrait of a responsive and relational God. Where I may differ from some Wesleyans is in the strength of my affirmation of divine foreknowledge (some Wesleyans have drifted toward open theism), and in the rejection of Molinism (some Arminians have been drawn to middle knowledge).⁴⁷

With the Eastern Orthodox tradition, I share a robust affirmation of libertarian freedom, a strong doctrine of divine-human synergy in salvation, and a refusal to let divine sovereignty flatten human responsibility. Where I push further than some Orthodox thinkers is in clearly affirming exhaustive divine foreknowledge grounded in God's unique relationship to time.⁴⁸

With the open theist tradition, I share the commitment to genuine divine responsiveness, the rejection of meticulous determinism, the rejection of classical impassibility, and the conviction that God is relationally temporal. Where I part company is on the question of foreknowledge itself. Open theists, I believe, overreact to Calvinism by concluding that only an uninformed God can be free of decretal guilt. I believe in a God who knows everything and still does not determine everything.

Finally, with Thomism and the classical tradition, I share a commitment to divine aseity, the importance of providence, and the conviction that God's knowledge is not derived from creatures in the way that would compromise His self-sufficiency. Where I part from the Thomists is on divine timelessness and strict simplicity, which I believe create more problems than they solve.⁴⁹

The Pastoral Shape of This Doctrine

Let me close this chapter by returning to the pastoral note I struck at the beginning. I said we would be talking about the God we pray to — the Father, the Shepherd, the Friend. Now, having walked through the technical terrain, I want to come back to that pastoral point and let it land.

If my account is right, here is what it means.

God knows your whole life. Every year, every day, every moment. He has seen the sorrows ahead of you and He has seen the joys. He knows the people you will lose. He knows the people you will meet. He knows the mistakes you will make and the forgiveness you will find. Nothing in your future will surprise Him. And this knowledge is not an abstract computer file in the sky. It is the personal knowledge of a Father who loves you.

God is planning His responses from the beginning. The prayers you will pray tomorrow have already been figured into His tapestry. The help you will need next week is already prepared. The rescue you cannot yet see has already been planned. This does not mean your prayers are pointless. It means they are essential — because your prayers are how God has chosen to bring many of His actions into the world.

God is present with you in real time. When you pray, He hears you now. When you suffer, He grieves now. When you rejoice, He delights now. He is not a timeless observer scanning your life from a cold eternity. He is a companion walking with you through every moment, genuinely and responsively engaged.

God permits suffering, and He also entered it. He did not avoid the cost of creating a world of free beings. He paid it, in His own blood, on a Roman cross. When you ask "Why did God permit this?" you are asking a real question. Sometimes we will not get answers in this life. But we have the cross. We have the evidence that God does not stand aloof. We have a Savior who was "a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief."

God's plan will not fail. No evil is final. No injustice is forever. No death is the end. The tapestry is being woven, and one day we will see it finished, and we will marvel at how every strand — even the dark strands we could not understand — contributed to the glory of the whole.

This is the God I want. This is the God I believe the Bible reveals. This is the God who is present, powerful, personal, and providential — all at once, all the time, all the way down. He is not locked in a timeless box. He is not weakened by temporal limitation. He is the Living God, in whose life all our lives are held, and whose love is the tapestry into which every moment is being woven.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that a temporal God with exhaustive foreknowledge through transcendent temporal access can act providentially in the world — answering prayers, guiding history, performing miracles, and working all things for good — without deterministically controlling every event. I have defended this position against three main alternatives: meticulous determinism (which I reject because it makes God the author of sin and undermines human responsibility), Molinism (which I reject because of the grounding objection and its covert dependence on timelessness), and open theism (which I reject because it is incompatible with the biblical evidence for exhaustive foreknowledge and creates pastoral difficulties).

My positive proposal is that God, knowing every future free choice directly through His transcendent temporal access, weaves His own providential actions through and around those choices so that His overarching purposes for creation are infallibly achieved. Prayer is real conversation with a real God in real time — and because God foreknows our prayers, our prayers are themselves essential threads in the providential tapestry. Evil is not willed by God but permitted for the sake of the higher goods of freedom, love, and redemption, and God has entered into the fullness of human suffering through the Incarnation and cross.

This model, I have argued, best captures the biblical portrait of God as both sovereign and responsive, both knowing and loving, both eternal and near. It preserves everything we should want to preserve in a doctrine of providence — divine sovereignty, human freedom, God's active care, God's moral character — and it does so without the paradoxes and pastoral costs of the major alternatives.

In the next chapter, I will turn to the topics of divine simplicity and strong immutability, arguing that these classical doctrines must be substantially revised if we are to maintain the dynamic, temporal, responsive God I have been defending throughout this book.