Part V: Philosophical and Systematic Challenges

Chapter 25

Foreknowledge and Genuine Emotion

If God Already Knows, Can He Still Feel?

Imagine a father who learns in January that his daughter has a terminal illness. The doctors are clear: she has six months. The father knows — with as much certainty as medicine can provide — that his little girl will die in the summer. He carries this knowledge every single day. He knows it when he tucks her in at night. He knows it when he watches her play in the yard. He knows it when she smiles at him across the breakfast table. And then the day comes. She takes her last breath. He holds her hand and weeps.

Here is the question: Was the father's grief real? Of course it was. Nobody would look at that grieving father and say, "Your tears are irrational. You already knew this was going to happen. Your grief cannot be genuine because you were not surprised." That would be absurd. That would be cruel. The father's foreknowledge did not cancel out his grief. Knowing something will happen and experiencing it when it happens are two fundamentally different things.

Now apply this to God. If God is omniscient — if He knows everything that will happen throughout all of history — can He genuinely grieve when tragedy strikes? Can He genuinely rejoice when sinners repent? Can He genuinely burn with anger when the innocent are abused? Or does His foreknowledge somehow drain the emotional life out of His experience, reducing Him to a God who eternally and statically "knows" everything without ever genuinely "feeling" anything?

This is one of the most powerful objections to the view that God has genuine emotions. And I believe it fails — completely. In this chapter, I want to show why the foreknowledge objection does not work and why a God who knows the future exhaustively can still feel deeply, genuinely, and responsively. The key lies in understanding the difference between propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge — between knowing that something is the case and knowing what it is like to experience it.

The Objection Stated Clearly

Before we respond to the foreknowledge objection, we need to state it as clearly and forcefully as we can. A good argument deserves a fair hearing, and this is a genuinely serious challenge. Let me lay it out in its strongest form.

The objection goes like this: If God is omniscient, He has always known everything that will ever happen. He knew from eternity that Adam would sin. He knew that Israel would rebel. He knew that Judas would betray Jesus. He knew about every genocide, every act of child abuse, every natural disaster. Nothing has ever surprised God. Nothing has ever caught Him off guard. He has always known the complete script of history from beginning to end.¹

If that is true, then how can God genuinely grieve "when" something happens? The grief cannot represent new information, because God already knew. It cannot be a response to a surprise, because God was never surprised. It cannot be a reaction to something unexpected, because God expected everything. So what exactly is there to respond to? What is there to feel? The objector argues that genuine emotional response requires some kind of novelty — something must change in the situation for a new emotional state to arise. But for an omniscient God, nothing is ever truly new.²

The classical theist presses the point even further. On the strict classical view, God is not only omniscient but also timeless. He does not experience events one after another. He does not "wait" for things to happen. Instead, all of history is eternally present to Him in a single, timeless act of knowing. Past, present, and future are all equally "now" for God. Stephen Charnock, the great Puritan theologian, argued that God's "certain prescience, or foreknowledge, secures him against any unexpected events" and therefore God's emotional life cannot involve any genuine change or response.³

On this view, God does not transition from a state of "not yet grieving" to a state of "now grieving." There is no moment at which grief begins for God. If God grieves at all, He grieves eternally — in one changeless, timeless state that encompasses all of history at once. His grief is not a response to anything. It is simply a permanent feature of His eternal experience, like a painting that always includes a splash of dark color.

Let me be honest: this is a serious argument. Anyone who believes that God has genuine emotions needs to grapple with it. We cannot simply wave it away or pretend it is not a real problem. The foreknowledge objection touches on deep questions about the nature of knowledge, the nature of time, and the nature of emotional experience. If we want to show that it fails — and I believe we can — we need to engage it head-on.

The Parent Analogy: Knowledge and Experience Are Different Things

I believe the most powerful answer to the foreknowledge objection begins with a simple observation from everyday human life: knowing that something will happen and experiencing it when it happens are two completely different things. This is my central counter-argument, and I want to develop it carefully.

Go back to the father with the terminally ill daughter. Or consider a different case. A mother is told by the doctor that her child must undergo a painful surgery next week. The surgery is necessary. The outcome will be good. But the process will involve real suffering for the child. The mother knows all of this with certainty. She has been briefed on every detail. She knows exactly what will happen: the anesthesia, the incision, the recovery, the pain her child will experience.

Then the day arrives. The child is wheeled into the operating room, and the mother sits in the waiting area. She weeps. Her stomach is in knots. Her heart aches. When the child comes out of surgery and cries in pain, the mother cries too.

Was the mother's weeping irrational? Was her grief fake? Was she being silly or theatrical? Not at all. Every parent in the world understands exactly what she is going through. The mother knew this would happen — but knowing it would happen did not exhaust what there was to experience. There is a difference between the proposition "my child will suffer" held in the mind as abstract knowledge, and the lived reality of watching your child suffer right now, in this moment, before your very eyes. The first is propositional knowledge. The second is experiential knowledge. And they are not the same thing.⁴

This is not an obscure philosophical point. It is something every human being recognizes intuitively. You can know that a roller coaster will be scary and still scream when the drop comes. You can know that a movie will be sad and still cry at the ending. You can know that your wedding day will be emotional and still be overwhelmed with joy when it arrives. You can know that a loved one is dying and still be devastated when they actually die. In every one of these cases, foreknowledge does not cancel out the emotional experience. It does not drain the feeling from the moment. Knowledge and experience live in different rooms of the soul.

Philosophers have a helpful way of putting this. There is a distinction between propositional knowledge — knowing that something is the case — and experiential knowledge — knowing what something is like. These are genuinely different kinds of knowledge. Propositional knowledge is a matter of facts and information. Experiential knowledge is a matter of lived, first-person acquaintance with reality.⁵

R. T. Mullins, in his important study God and Emotion, develops this point at length through a famous thought experiment in philosophy known as "Mary's Room." The story goes something like this. Mary is a brilliant scientist who has spent her entire life locked in a black-and-white room. She has never seen any color other than black and white. But she has access to every book and scientific paper ever written. She reads everything there is to read about color theory, optics, light wavelengths, and the neuroscience of color perception. She comes to know every propositional fact about the color red — its wavelength, how the eye processes it, how the brain responds to it. But she has never seen red.⁶

One day, Mary is released from her room. A scientist hands her a red rose. For the first time in her life, she sees the color red. Here is the key question: does Mary learn something new? Most philosophers — and most ordinary people — would say yes. She already knew every fact about red, but she did not know what it is like to see red. Her propositional knowledge was complete, but her experiential knowledge was not. Seeing the rose for the first time gave her a genuinely new kind of knowledge — the kind that cannot be captured in propositions.⁷

Now apply this to God. If there is a genuine distinction between propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge — and there clearly is — then God's exhaustive propositional foreknowledge of the future does not necessarily exhaust His experiential knowledge. God may know from eternity every tenseless fact about history (every event that will occur, every choice that will be made, every sin that will be committed). But experiencing those events as they actually unfold — knowing what it is like to watch history happen in real time — may be a genuinely different kind of knowing. And if that is the case, then God can gain genuinely new experiential knowledge as history unfolds, even though His propositional knowledge has always been complete.⁸

The Neoclassical Theism Solution: Tensed Knowledge, Tenseless Knowledge, and Experiential Knowledge

The argument from the distinction between propositional and experiential knowledge is not just a clever analogy. Philosophers and theologians have developed it into a careful, rigorous framework that shows exactly how an omniscient God can have genuine emotional responses even though He foreknows everything. The framework involves three different kinds of knowledge, and understanding how they relate to each other is crucial for solving the foreknowledge problem.

First, there is tenseless propositional knowledge. This is knowledge of facts that do not change their truth value over time. For example, the proposition "World War II ends on September 2, 1945" is timelessly true. It does not matter whether you are thinking about it in 1900, in 1945, or in 2025 — it is always true. God's knowledge of all such tenseless propositions has always been complete. He has always known the full inventory of events in history.⁹

Second, there is tensed propositional knowledge. This is knowledge of facts that do change their truth value depending on what time it is. For example, the proposition "World War II is happening right now" was true in 1943 but is not true today. The proposition "D-Day has not yet occurred" was true in May 1944 but false in July 1944. Tensed propositions are indexed to the present moment — they track what is happening now, what has already happened, and what has not yet happened.¹⁰

Here is the key insight that Mullins highlights: a timeless God, on the classical view, cannot know tensed propositions. Why? Because tensed propositions require a perspective within time — a "now" from which to evaluate them. If God is completely outside of time, experiencing no succession, then there is no "now" for God. And if there is no "now," then God cannot know what is happening now. He can know all the tenseless facts — the complete catalog of events pinned to specific dates — but He cannot know which of those events is presently occurring. As Mullins notes, classical theists typically respond by saying that God does not know tensed propositions because such knowledge would make God dependent on creation. But this means the classical God knows less than a temporal God who has both tenseless and tensed knowledge.¹¹

Third, there is experiential knowledge. As we have already seen with Mary's Room, this is the knowledge of "what it is like" to experience something. It is qualitative, first-person, lived knowledge. And it is genuinely different from both tenseless and tensed propositional knowledge. You can know all the propositions about what will happen and still gain something genuinely new when you actually experience it.

The neoclassical theist — the theologian who affirms God's genuine temporality and passibility — puts all three together like this: God has always had exhaustive tenseless propositional knowledge. He has always known the complete catalog of events in history. But as history actually unfolds, God gains tensed propositional knowledge (He knows what is happening now, what has already happened, and what will happen) and experiential knowledge (He knows what it is like to experience these events as they occur). This growth in God's knowledge does not represent an imperfection. It represents the fullness of omniscience — a God who knows everything there is to know, including the kinds of knowledge that only come through temporal experience.¹²

Let me give a concrete example. Before the Holocaust occurs, God knows (propositionally and timelessly) that it will occur. He knows every detail — every victim, every perpetrator, every act of cruelty, every cry for help. But when the Holocaust actually happens, God gains experiential knowledge. He knows what it is like to experience these events as they unfold in real time. He knows the horror of watching it happen right now, in this moment. And that experiential knowledge — that lived, first-person engagement with the unfolding evil — is the ground of His genuine grief. His grief is not fake. It is not theatrical. It is the most appropriate possible response to the most terrible evil — a response grounded in the deepest possible knowledge of what is happening.¹³

Several philosophers and theologians have noted the importance of this point. As Mullins explains, the passibilist insists that an omniscient God must know everything there is to know, and that includes experiential knowledge. When God creates the universe, there is "something that it is like" for God to experience creating a universe out of nothing. God's experiential knowledge grows as He freely exercises His power and brings about new states of affairs into existence. God comes to know what it is like to experience His creatures for the first time, and this experiential knowledge is not reducible to God's propositional knowledge.¹⁴

God and Time: Why Temporality Matters for Emotional Responsiveness

The foreknowledge objection gains most of its force from a particular view of God's relationship to time — namely, the classical view that God is strictly timeless. If God is outside of time entirely, experiencing no succession, no "before" and "after," then genuine emotional responsiveness becomes very difficult to explain. But if God can experience temporal succession — if He is genuinely present within the unfolding of history — then the problem largely dissolves.

This is why the question of God and time is so important for the divine emotion debate. I have argued at length in my companion book, The God Beyond the Clock: A Biblical and Theological Case for Dynamic Divine Temporality, that God is genuinely temporal — He can and does experience temporal succession. He is not limited to an eternal, static "now." He interacts with the world in real time, experiencing events as they unfold. At the same time, God is not limited by time the way creatures are. He transcends time even as He is present within it. God is both within time and beyond it — what some theologians call "omnitemporal."¹⁵

The implications for the foreknowledge problem are significant. If God can experience temporal succession, then He can genuinely experience events as they happen, even though He has always known (propositionally) that they would happen. He is not stuck in an eternal, frozen "now" where past, present, and future are all equally present. Instead, He is dynamically engaged with the flow of history, entering into each moment with genuine presence and responsiveness.

Rob Lister offers a helpful metaphor for understanding this. He borrows from John Piper the image of two "lenses" through which God views reality.¹⁶ Think of it this way: God has a "wide-angle lens" and a "narrow lens." Through the wide-angle lens, God sees all of history at once — the grand sweep of His eternal plan, the beginning and the end, the whole tapestry of redemptive history. From this perspective, God knows how everything fits together. He sees the big picture. He understands how even the darkest chapters of history serve His ultimate purposes.

But God also has a "narrow lens" — the lens of His intimate, covenantal engagement with His creatures. Through this lens, God enters into each moment with genuine presence. He relates to His people in the here and now. He responds to their prayers, their sins, their repentance, and their suffering with real, present-tense emotional engagement. When God looks at a tragedy through the narrow lens, He sees it for what it is in itself — and He is grieved. When He looks at the same event through the wide-angle lens, He may also see how it connects to His larger redemptive purposes — and He may even find reason for a deeper confidence that all will be made right. But the grief is real. The narrow-lens engagement is genuine.¹⁷

These two lenses are not contradictory. They are complementary perspectives of a God who is both transcendent (above and beyond history) and immanent (present and active within history). The wide-angle lens does not cancel out the narrow lens any more than a panoramic photograph cancels out a close-up. Both capture something real. And both are necessary for understanding how God relates to His world.

Lister himself makes this point in connection with the story of Jesus at Lazarus's tomb in John 11. Here is a remarkable case: Jesus knew that Lazarus would die. He even delayed His arrival deliberately, telling His disciples that Lazarus's sickness would not end in death but was "for the glory of God" (John 11:4). Jesus knew He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead. He had both foreknowledge and the power to reverse the situation. And yet, when Jesus arrived and saw Mary weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping — "he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled" (John 11:33, ESV). And then the shortest and perhaps most powerful verse in all of Scripture: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35).¹⁸

Why did Jesus weep? He knew that within minutes He would call Lazarus out of the tomb. He knew that the grief of the mourners was about to be turned into astonishment and joy. His foreknowledge was complete. And yet He wept. Why? Because foreknowledge does not cancel out compassion. Knowing that you will fix the problem does not mean you are unmoved by the suffering in front of you. Jesus looked at the death of Lazarus through the narrow lens — He saw the grief of people He loved, the ravages of death in a fallen world, the pain of separation — and He was genuinely moved. Through the wide-angle lens, He knew that resurrection was moments away. But the narrow-lens grief was real.¹⁹

The Problem with Strict Timelessness: Why the Classical Position Fails

If the neoclassical view makes room for genuine emotional responsiveness, the strict classical view has a much harder time. In fact, I believe that the strict classical position — God is absolutely timeless, experiencing no succession whatsoever — makes genuine emotional responsiveness impossible. Let me explain why.

On the strict classical view, God's entire life is a single, timeless "now." There is no before and after in God's experience. God does not first know something and then respond to it. He does not transition from one emotional state to another. His entire experience — if we can even call it "experience" — is a single, changeless, eternal act. The fourth-century theologian Augustine and the medieval giant Thomas Aquinas both described God's knowledge in this way: God knows all things through a single, introspective act of understanding Himself. All of reality — past, present, and future — is present to God in one eternal, undivided moment.²⁰

Now think about what this means for emotional responsiveness. On this view, God does not "respond" to events because events do not "happen" for God — at least not in any sequential sense. All of history is equally and simultaneously present to Him. The fall of Adam, the exodus from Egypt, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the final judgment are all equally "now" for God. There is no moment at which God transitions from "not yet grieving over Adam's sin" to "now grieving over Adam's sin." There is only one eternal state.²¹

But if God does not transition from one state to another, then He does not genuinely respond to anything. A response, by its very nature, is a reaction to something — it comes after the thing it is responding to. If there is no "after" for God, there can be no response. And if there can be no response, then there cannot be genuine emotion, because emotion — on the cognitive-evaluative theory we developed in Chapter 2 — involves an evaluative response to something perceived. Take away the responsiveness, and you take away the emotion.²²

Mullins makes this point sharply. On the classical view, God's knowledge comes entirely through self-knowledge — God does not perceive the world but instead knows all things by knowing Himself. God's knowledge is "in no way based on a perception of the universe." But if God does not perceive the universe, how can He respond to it? Perception is the gateway to emotional response. You cannot grieve what you do not perceive. You cannot rejoice over what you do not encounter. A God whose knowledge is entirely self-referential — who knows the world only as a reflection of His own essence — is a God who has no direct experiential engagement with creation. And without experiential engagement, genuine emotional responsiveness is impossible.²³

To be fair, classical theists have tried to address this problem. One common response is what we might call the "eternal grief" rejoinder. It goes like this: God eternally grieves over all the evil that He eternally foresees. His grief is not something that begins at a particular moment in time. It is an eternal feature of His experience — always present, never changing, encompassing all of history at once.

But this response creates more problems than it solves. Consider what it actually claims. If God eternally grieves, then God also eternally rejoices — because there is much to rejoice over in His plan as well. So God eternally grieves and eternally rejoices at the same time, over the same history, viewed from different angles. Is that a coherent picture? It is hard to see how. Grief and joy are not the same emotional state. They are not two different words for the same experience. They are distinct responses to distinct evaluations of distinct situations. To say that God simultaneously and eternally grieves and rejoices — with neither response ever changing, neither ever beginning or ending, neither ever intensifying or diminishing — is to describe something that looks nothing like genuine grief or genuine joy. It looks more like a static, frozen, undifferentiated state that we are merely labeling with emotional language.²⁴

There is a deeper problem here as well. If God's grief is eternal and unchanging, then it is not a response to anything. It is just a fixed feature of God's nature — like a permanent property or attribute. An eternal, unchanging grief that was never triggered by an event, that never began, that never arose in response to something perceived — is that really grief at all? Or is it just a label we have attached to a permanent divine state that has no real emotional content?

Think of it this way. If someone told you, "I have always been grieving, for all of eternity, and my grief has never changed, never fluctuated, never begun, and will never end — it is simply what I am" — you would not think that person was experiencing genuine grief. You would think they were describing a permanent personality trait, not an emotional response. Grief, by its very nature, is a response to loss. It arises when something valued is taken away. It has a beginning (when the loss occurs), a middle (when the pain is most acute), and — in healthy cases — a gradual resolution. Take away the responsive, temporal character of grief, and you no longer have grief. You have something else — something static and impersonal that merely resembles grief from the outside.²⁵

Biblical Evidence: God's Emotional Responses Presuppose Temporal Sequence

The Bible consistently describes God's emotions in ways that presuppose temporal sequence — in ways that make sense only if God genuinely responds to events as they unfold. Consider a few key passages.

In Genesis 6:5–6, we read: "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" (ESV). Notice the temporal logic here. God saw the wickedness — He perceived something. He regretted that He had made humanity — His emotional state was responsive to what He perceived. He was grieved to his heart — the perception triggered a genuine emotional response. This passage makes no sense on the strict timeless view. If God eternally and changelessly perceives all of history in one undivided act, then there is no moment of "seeing" followed by a moment of "regretting." There is only an eternal, static state. But the text clearly describes a sequence: perception, then response.²⁶

As we discussed in Chapter 15, the Hebrew word used here for God's grief is 'atsav (עָצַב), which means to be hurt, pained, or grieved. It is the same word used for the pain of childbirth in Genesis 3:16. This is not gentle disappointment. This is deep anguish. And the word translated "regretted" is nacham (נחם), which in the niphal form conveys the idea of being sorry, experiencing a change of heart, or feeling grief. The text is describing a God who genuinely responds to what He sees in the world — and whose emotional state changes in response to what He sees.²⁷

Now, I am fully aware of the objection: "But God already knew humanity would become wicked. He knew it from eternity. So how can He regret making humanity if He always knew this would happen?" This is precisely the foreknowledge objection we are addressing in this chapter. And the answer, as we have been developing it, is this: knowing something will happen and experiencing it when it happens are fundamentally different. God knew from eternity that humanity would fall into wickedness. But when the moment arrived — when God actually saw the depth of human depravity spread across the earth, when He experienced the reality of it in its full, present-tense horror — He was genuinely grieved. His foreknowledge did not prevent His grief any more than the father's foreknowledge prevented his tears at his daughter's deathbed.

Consider another passage. In 1 Samuel 15:11, God says: "I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments" (ESV). The same word nacham appears again. God regrets making Saul king because of Saul's disobedience. This is a responsive emotion — it arises in response to Saul's specific actions. Yet we can be sure that God foreknew Saul's disobedience when He chose him. God was not caught off guard. He knew exactly what Saul would do. And yet He genuinely regretted it. The foreknowledge did not cancel the grief.

Interestingly, the same chapter includes the seemingly paradoxical verse, 1 Samuel 15:29: "And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret" (ESV). Critics have pointed to this verse as a contradiction with verse 11. But it is not a contradiction when we understand what is being affirmed. Verse 29 is saying that God does not regret in the way humans sometimes do — fickly, capriciously, based on incomplete information or changing whims. God does not "change His mind" the way a person might who realizes they made a mistake. But verse 11 affirms that God genuinely experiences something analogous to regret — a real emotional response to Saul's betrayal. The two verses together paint a picture of a God whose emotional responses are real but not capricious, genuine but not destabilizing.²⁸

Hosea 11:8 provides another striking example. God cries out: "How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender" (ESV). Notice the anguished tone. This is not the language of a God who is calmly and serenely observing His eternal plan unfolding exactly as expected. This is the language of a parent torn between justice and mercy, between judgment and compassion — genuinely wrestling with the tension of loving a rebellious child. If God always knew Israel would rebel, and if His foreknowledge drained all genuine emotion from His experience, then this passage is deeply misleading. It describes a God in the grip of real anguish — and yet, on the timeless, impassible view, God was never in the grip of anything.²⁹

We could multiply examples — Jeremiah's depiction of God weeping over His people (Jeremiah 8:18–9:1), God's grief when Israel provoked Him in the wilderness (Psalm 78:40–41), God's joy when sinners repent (Luke 15:7, 10), and Jesus' own emotional responsiveness throughout the Gospels. In every case, the emotional language presupposes temporal sequence: God perceives something, evaluates it, and responds with an appropriate emotion. This is how emotions work. And this is how the Bible consistently describes God's emotional life.³⁰

Foreknowledge Without Timelessness: A Better Model

At this point, we need to be very clear about something. Affirming that God has genuine emotional responses does not require abandoning divine foreknowledge. This is a crucial distinction, and it is one that some readers might miss. The foreknowledge objection assumes that omniscience and emotional responsiveness are incompatible. I am arguing that they are perfectly compatible — provided we reject strict divine timelessness.

Let me state the author's position clearly. I affirm that God knows the future exhaustively. He knows every event, every choice, every detail of what will happen from now until the end of history and beyond. I reject open theism — the view that God does not know future free choices. God's foreknowledge is complete and infallible. Nothing will ever surprise Him. Nothing will ever catch Him off guard.³¹

But I also affirm that God experiences temporal succession. He is not frozen in an eternal "now." He genuinely moves through history with His creatures, experiencing events as they unfold, even though He has always known what those events would be. This is the view that we might call "dynamic divine temporality" — the view that God is genuinely temporal (He experiences sequence, before and after, past, present, and future) while also transcending time in important ways (He is not limited by time, He created time, and He can in some sense operate beyond time as well).³²

On this view, foreknowledge and emotional responsiveness are perfectly compatible. Here is why. God has always known (propositionally, timelessly) that a particular tragedy will occur on a particular date. This propositional knowledge has been part of His eternal understanding of the complete script of history. But when that date arrives — when the tragedy actually unfolds in the present tense — God experiences it. He encounters it as a present-tense reality. And His experience of it generates genuine grief — not because He is surprised, not because He has received new propositional information, but because experiential knowledge is genuinely different from propositional knowledge. The gap between "knowing that my child will suffer" and "watching my child suffer right now" is a real gap — and God, like the parent, feels it.

This model preserves both divine foreknowledge and genuine emotional responsiveness. It does not compromise God's omniscience — God still knows everything. And it does not compromise God's emotional life — God still genuinely grieves, rejoices, and responds to what happens in the world. The key is recognizing that foreknowledge and emotional response are not competitors. They are different aspects of God's complete engagement with reality.

Mullins makes a similar point in his discussion of the passibilist understanding of God's knowledge. The neoclassical theist affirms that God has exhaustive knowledge of all tenseless propositions. But she also affirms that God grows in experiential knowledge as history unfolds. Before an event occurs, God knows (propositionally) that it will occur. When it occurs, God gains experiential knowledge — He knows what it is like to experience this event as it unfolds. This experiential knowledge is genuinely new, even though the propositional knowledge has always been there. The result is a God whose omniscience is even more complete than the classical God's, because He has both propositional and experiential knowledge of everything that happens.³³

Lister's Framework: Foreknowledge, Foreordination, and Passion

Rob Lister, in his comprehensive study God Is Impassible and Impassioned, offers a careful framework for understanding how divine foreknowledge and divine emotion work together. Lister affirms what he calls "exhaustive divine foreknowledge" — God knows the entire future with complete certainty. But Lister also affirms that God has genuine emotional responses to events as they unfold in time.³⁴

How does Lister hold these together? He argues that God not only foreknows the acts of His creatures but also "decrees his own emotional response to their reactions." In other words, God's emotions are not involuntary reactions that catch Him by surprise. They are sovereign, voluntary responses that flow from His character and purposes. God has eternally known and ordained not only what His creatures would do but also how He would respond to what they do. But — and this is the crucial point — the foreordination or foreknowledge of a relational response is not the same thing as the experience of that response. Knowing you will grieve is not the same as grieving. Knowing you will rejoice is not the same as rejoicing. The experience happens when it happens — in the actual moment of engagement.³⁵

Lister puts this point forcefully: "Though his knowledge of that plan is eternal, his unfolding experience of it occurs in the temporally progressive covenantal context, even while he stands as Lord over that very covenantal context." In other words, God knows the plan from eternity, but He experiences the plan as it unfolds in time. His knowledge is eternal; His experience is temporal. And His emotional responses belong to the domain of experience, not merely the domain of knowledge.³⁶

This is a remarkably important insight. It means that we should not think of God as "eternally experiencing all of his emotional experiences." God is not eternally wrathful and eternally merciful toward the same individual in the same undifferentiated moment. Rather, God's emotional engagement with individuals unfolds in the "temporally progressive covenantal context." There is a time when God is patient with the sinner, calling them to repentance. There is a time when God's wrath falls on the impenitent. There is a time when God's mercy meets the repentant. These are not simultaneous, eternal, static states. They are genuine, responsive, temporally ordered engagements with creatures.³⁷

Lister also emphasizes that God's foreknowledge and sovereignty do not make His emotional engagement "anthropocentric" in the wrong sense. Just because God foreknows and even foreordains events does not mean His emotional responses are somehow "predetermined" in a way that makes them fake. Think again about Jesus at Lazarus's tomb. Jesus both foreknew and permitted Lazarus's death. He even deliberately delayed His arrival (John 11:6). And yet He was "still compassionately moved at the loss and grief of his friends." As Lister observes, Jesus looked at the situation through both lenses — through the wide-angle lens, He saw the glory that would result (John 11:4); through the narrow lens, He sympathized with His friends in the face of death. Both perspectives were real. Both were genuine. And neither canceled out the other.³⁸

Kim's Mediating Model: The Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity

J. D. Kim offers another helpful perspective on the relationship between foreknowledge and divine emotion. In his important study Constructing a Mediating Theology, Kim argues that we need to distinguish between the immanent Trinity (God as He is in Himself, apart from creation) and the economic Trinity (God as He engages with creation in the history of salvation).³⁹

Within the immanent Trinity, Kim argues, God's inner life is one of perfect, self-sufficient blessedness. The Father, Son, and Spirit eternally love each other, delight in each other, and exist in what Kim calls "dynamic reciprocity" — a living, relational exchange in which each person both moves and is moved by the others. This eternal, intra-Trinitarian emotional life does not depend on creation. God did not create the world because He was lonely or because He needed creatures to love. His inner life was already complete in the fellowship of the Trinity.⁴⁰

But when God freely chose to create and to enter into covenant relationships with His creatures, He freely chose to be emotionally affected by them. Kim argues that in the economy of salvation — in God's actual engagement with the world — God genuinely wills to be moved by His creatures. The Father genuinely grieves when His people rebel. The Son genuinely suffers at the cross. The Spirit genuinely groans in intercession (Romans 8:26). This economic passibility is not something forced on God from outside. It is a free, sovereign decision flowing from God's love.⁴¹

How does this relate to the foreknowledge question? Kim's framework helps by showing that God's foreknowledge belongs to His eternal, immanent life — He has always known everything that would happen. But His emotional responses to those events belong to His economic engagement with creation — the domain in which He freely relates to creatures in real time. Foreknowledge is an attribute of the eternal God who transcends history. Emotional responsiveness is an attribute of the God who freely enters into history. Both are real. Both are genuine. And they operate in complementary, not contradictory, domains.⁴²

Kim's model also addresses the concern that changing emotional states in God would compromise His essential nature. On Kim's view, God's essential nature — His holiness, love, wisdom, power, and self-sufficiency — does not change. What changes are His relational states and emotional responses as He interacts with creatures. The Father's character does not change when He transitions from patience toward a sinner to grief over that sinner's final impenitence. What changes is His relational posture — the specific emotional engagement appropriate to the specific situation. This is not a deficiency. This is precisely what we should expect from a personal, relational God who genuinely cares about His creatures.⁴³

Addressing Remaining Objections

Objection 1: "If God's Emotional States Change, He Is Imperfect"

Some classical theists argue that any change in God implies imperfection. If God moves from one emotional state to another, then either the earlier state was less than perfect (in which case God was imperfect before the change) or the later state is less than perfect (in which case God is imperfect after the change). Either way, change seems to imply imperfection.

This objection rests on a particular understanding of perfection — the Greek philosophical idea that perfection is static and unchanging, like a mathematical constant. But this is not the only or even the best understanding of perfection. A God who responds perfectly to every situation — who grieves when grief is appropriate, who rejoices when joy is fitting, who burns with anger when anger is called for — is more perfect than a God who remains in one changeless emotional state regardless of what is happening. The former God perfectly tracks reality with His emotional responses. The latter God fails to respond to reality at all. Which one sounds more perfect?⁴⁴

Think of it this way. Imagine two judges. Judge A always maintains the same serene, undisturbed emotional composure — he is never moved by the testimony of victims, never angered by acts of cruelty, never grieved by stories of suffering. Judge B is genuinely moved by each case — he grieves for the victims, burns with righteous anger at the perpetrators, and feels deep satisfaction when justice is served. Which judge is more perfect? Most people would say Judge B. His emotional engagement is a sign of moral sensitivity, not weakness. His responses track the moral reality of each situation. An emotionless judge is not a perfect judge — he is a deficient one.

God's emotional changes are not changes from perfection to imperfection. They are changes from one perfectly appropriate response to another perfectly appropriate response. When God's people sin, grief is the perfectly appropriate response. When they repent, joy is the perfectly appropriate response. God's transition from grief to joy is not a move from one imperfect state to a better one — it is a move from one perfect response to another perfect response, each one fitting the situation it addresses.⁴⁵

Objection 2: "Foreknowledge Makes Emotional Responses Predetermined and Therefore Not Genuine"

Another objection holds that if God foreknew His emotional responses from eternity, then those responses are predetermined and therefore not genuine. A predetermined response, the argument goes, is not a real response — it is a performance, a script being followed rather than a genuine reaction.

But this objection confuses the origin of a response with its genuineness. A response can be both anticipated and genuine at the same time. Think about a marriage ceremony. The groom knows he is going to see his bride walk down the aisle. He has been preparing for this moment for months. He knows exactly when it will happen. And yet, when she appears — radiant in her wedding dress — he chokes up. Tears stream down his face. His emotional response was anticipated, even "predetermined" in the sense that he knew it would happen. But it is not fake. It is not a performance. It is as genuine as any emotion he has ever felt.

Or consider a parent watching a child take their first steps. The parent expects it, anticipates it, even looks forward to it. But when it happens — when the child wobbles and takes that first unsteady step — the parent's heart leaps with joy. The anticipation does not make the joy less real. If anything, it makes it more intense. The same is true of God. His eternal knowledge of what He will feel does not make those feelings artificial. It means His emotional life is purposeful, intentional, and perfectly integrated with His eternal plan — not that it is fake.⁴⁶

Objection 3: "The Passible God Cannot Be Trusted Because His Emotions Change"

The Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock raised a concern that has echoed through the centuries: if God's emotional states change, can we really trust Him? A being who changes in knowledge and emotion, Charnock argued, might make promises that seem reasonable now but become impractical later. A changeable God would be an unreliable God.⁴⁷

Mullins addresses this objection directly and, I think, decisively. The neoclassical theist has no problem here. God's promises are grounded not in an emotional snapshot but in His unchanging character, purposes, and foreknowledge of the future. God knows (with complete certainty) every tenseless truth about the universe He is actualizing. His knowledge of the future does not change. His character does not change. His purposes do not change. What changes are His emotional responses to creatures as history unfolds — and these changes are always perfectly consistent with His unchanging character and purposes.⁴⁸

To put it simply: God's emotional changes are expressions of His unchanging character, not violations of it. When God transitions from patience with a sinner to grief over their impenitence, this is not a change in God's character — it is His unchanging love expressing itself differently in response to different circumstances. A loving parent who disciplines a disobedient child and then embraces the repentant child has not changed their character. Their love is constant. What changes is how that love is expressed, depending on the situation. God's emotional life works the same way.

Objection 4: "This Seems to Compromise God's Sovereignty"

Some worry that affirming genuine emotional responsiveness compromises God's sovereignty. If God is emotionally affected by His creatures, doesn't that give creatures power over God? Doesn't it make God dependent on creation in a way that undermines His aseity and self-sufficiency?

This is an important concern, and it deserves a careful answer. The key distinction is between involuntary passibility and voluntary passibility. On the view I am defending, God is freely and sovereignly passible. He is not affected by His creatures against His will, as if creaturely actions had some kind of magical power to penetrate God's inner life without His consent. Rather, God has freely chosen to be affected by His creatures. He has voluntarily opened Himself to being moved by them — not because He must, but because He loves. This is a sovereign decision, not a vulnerability forced upon Him.⁴⁹

Think of a father who voluntarily decides to be emotionally invested in his children. Nobody forces him to care. He could, in theory, distance himself emotionally and remain unaffected by their joys and sorrows. But he chooses to love them — and in choosing to love them, he opens himself to being moved by them. When they succeed, he rejoices. When they suffer, he grieves. Is this a weakness? Is this a loss of sovereignty? Not at all. It is a free exercise of love. And it does not compromise his authority as a father one bit.

God's sovereignty is not threatened by His emotional responsiveness. Lister makes this point well: God's emotional responses are always "ultimately voluntary." He is "perfectly responsive" but "never ultimately passive." His emotions do not control Him. His emotions do not overwhelm His reason or derail His purposes. He remains the sovereign Lord over all things, including His own affective life. His grief is sovereign grief. His anger is sovereign anger. His joy is sovereign joy. Every emotional state He experiences is a free, purposeful, perfectly calibrated response of a God who is fully in control.⁵⁰

The Trustworthiness of God's Promises: Foreknowledge as a Foundation for Faith

Far from undermining trust in God, the combination of foreknowledge and genuine emotional responsiveness actually strengthens it. Here is why. If God foreknows the future exhaustively and also genuinely responds to His creatures with appropriate emotions, then we have a God who is both completely reliable (because His foreknowledge ensures that His promises are grounded in a full knowledge of the future) and genuinely caring (because His emotional responsiveness ensures that He is not indifferent to our experience).

Consider the alternative. A strictly timeless, impassible God who foreknows everything might be reliable in a cold, mechanical sense — like a computer that accurately predicts outcomes. But such a God does not care. He is not moved by our prayers. He is not grieved by our suffering. He is not delighted by our worship. He is simply... there. Unchanging. Unaffected. Reliable the way a machine is reliable — not the way a loving parent is reliable.

The God of the Bible is not like that. The God of the Bible knows the future — and still weeps when tragedy strikes. He knows the end from the beginning — and still rejoices when sinners come home. He has planned everything from eternity — and still invites His children to cry out to Him in prayer, promising that He hears and cares. This is not a contradiction. This is the fullness of divine perfection — a God who is both sovereign and compassionate, both transcendent and intimately engaged, both eternally wise and genuinely responsive.

Mullins shows that the passible God is perfectly capable of making trustworthy promises. Whether one adopts a Molinist or a Calvinist approach to divine foreknowledge and providence, the passibilist can affirm that God's promises are based on what He knows the future will hold. God's knowledge of tenseless facts does not change. He knows with certainty what will happen. And His promises are grounded in that certain knowledge. There is no worry that God will make a promise that later turns out to be impractical or immoral to keep.⁵¹

Indeed, I would argue that a God who genuinely cares about His creatures — who is emotionally invested in keeping His promises because He loves the people He is making promises to — is more trustworthy than a God who is indifferent to the outcome. A loving parent who promises to be at their child's graduation is more trustworthy than a stranger who makes the same promise, precisely because the parent cares. The emotional investment is not a weakness. It is the engine of faithfulness.

Connecting to the Companion Work on Divine Temporality

Much of what we have argued in this chapter depends on the view that God can experience temporal succession — that He is not limited to a strict, timeless "now." I want to note briefly how this connects to the full argument made in the companion book, The God Beyond the Clock: A Biblical and Theological Case for Dynamic Divine Temporality.

In that book, I argue that the Bible consistently portrays God as genuinely temporal — acting, responding, planning, executing, and interacting within the flow of history. God calls Abraham, delivers Israel from Egypt, sends the prophets, and ultimately enters history Himself in the incarnation of the Son. These are not timeless, eternal acts viewed from a temporal perspective. They are genuinely temporal acts of a God who is present and active within the flow of time.⁵²

The argument for divine temporality supports the case we have been making in this chapter. If God is genuinely temporal, then He can genuinely experience events as they unfold. If He can genuinely experience events as they unfold, then He can have genuine emotional responses to those events. And if He can have genuine emotional responses, then His foreknowledge does not cancel out His emotional life — it merely means He knows what He will experience before He experiences it. The foreknowledge problem is solved not by abandoning omniscience but by embracing divine temporality.

As Lister and Kim both recognize, the combination of divine temporality and divine foreknowledge gives us the richest possible picture of God's engagement with the world. God is not ignorant of the future (as in open theism). He is not frozen outside of time (as in strict classical theism). He is the living God — the God who knows the future exhaustively and who also enters into the present moment with all the richness of genuine emotional engagement. He is the God who weeps and rejoices, who grieves and delights, who burns with holy anger and overflows with tender compassion — and who does all of this while remaining fully sovereign, fully wise, and fully in control.⁵³

Frame's Contribution: Foreknowledge and the Lordship of God

John Frame, a Reformed theologian who affirms both divine sovereignty and genuine divine emotion, offers a complementary perspective. Frame insists that God's existence is dependent on nothing but Himself. God's omniscience is not conditioned by any historical process of deriving knowledge from the outside. As Frame puts it, God "gains his knowledge only from himself (his nature and his plan) and serves as his own criterion of truth."⁵⁴

Yet Frame also openly affirms that God has genuine emotions. He classifies divine emotions under the category of God's eternal decree — God first chooses His own emotional response without being conditioned by the world. But this does not make the emotions fake. Frame's insight is that God's emotional responses are expressions of His lordship, not violations of it. God is Lord over His emotional life just as He is Lord over everything else. His emotions are not reactions forced upon Him by creatures. They are sovereign expressions of His character in response to specific situations that He Himself has foreordained.⁵⁵

Kim notes how Frame's view connects divine foreknowledge to emotional engagement. Frame holds that God, in His foreknowledge of the future events and choices of human beings, "chooses his own emotional responses and even sets the scope of the influence of these emotions upon himself." God's emotions do not burst out of Himself as random incidents or involuntary impulses. They are purposeful, chosen, and perfectly calibrated. And yet they are genuine — genuinely felt, genuinely responsive to the situations they address.⁵⁶

I find Frame's contribution helpful because it shows that even a strongly Calvinist theology — one that affirms God's comprehensive sovereignty over all events — has room for genuine divine emotion. If God has eternally decreed both the events of history and His own emotional responses to those events, then His emotions are part of His sovereign plan. They are not accidental. They are not out of control. They are the perfectly fitting responses of a perfectly wise, perfectly loving, perfectly holy God to a history that He Himself has authored. And the fact that He is the author does not make His emotional engagement with the story any less real — any more than a human author who weeps while writing a tragic scene is being fake. The emotion is genuine precisely because the author cares about the characters and the story.

Implications: What Difference Does This Make?

The argument of this chapter might seem abstract and philosophical. But it has enormous practical implications for the Christian life. Let me highlight a few.

First, prayer. If God foreknows everything but is emotionally unresponsive, then prayer is essentially talking to a wall. You can speak to God, but He is not moved by your words. He already knows what you are going to say, and nothing about His inner experience changes as a result. But if God foreknows everything and is genuinely emotionally responsive, then prayer is a genuine encounter with a living, caring Person. God hears your cry and is genuinely moved by it — not because He is learning new information, but because He is genuinely present with you in this moment, experiencing your pain and your longing alongside you. Prayer matters because God feels.⁵⁷

Second, suffering. When we suffer, do we suffer alone — with a God who watches from a state of undisturbed bliss? Or do we suffer with a God who hurts alongside us — who genuinely grieves our pain even though He foreknew it? The foreknowledge objection, if accepted, leads to the first option. The view I am defending leads to the second. And the pastoral difference is immeasurable. A God who foreknew your tragedy and is genuinely grieved by it is a God who cares — deeply, personally, presently. You are not alone in your pain. God is there with you, and His heart aches with yours.

Third, worship. If God's foreknowledge renders Him emotionally static, then worship is essentially a one-directional exercise — we offer praise, and God receives it without being affected. But if God genuinely delights in the worship of His people — if Zephaniah 3:17 is literally true, and God "rejoices over you with singing" — then worship is a relational exchange. God gives; we receive. We give; God receives — and He is genuinely delighted. Our worship is not a performance before an indifferent audience. It is a love song offered to a God who smiles when He hears it.⁵⁸

Fourth, repentance. When a sinner repents, does heaven genuinely rejoice? Jesus said it does — "there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents" (Luke 15:10, ESV). If God foreknows who will repent and when, is that joy still genuine? On the view I am defending, absolutely yes. God's foreknowledge that a particular sinner will repent on a particular day does not drain the joy from the moment when it actually happens. Knowing that the prodigal son will come home does not prevent the father from running to embrace him. The knowledge makes the joy richer, not emptier — because the father has been longing for this moment, anticipating it, looking forward to it with all the intensity of a love that refuses to give up.

Conclusion: The God Who Knows and Still Feels

We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter, so let me pull the threads together.

The foreknowledge objection — the claim that divine omniscience renders genuine emotional responsiveness impossible — fails for several reasons.

First, and most fundamentally, propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge are genuinely different kinds of knowing. Knowing that something will happen does not exhaust knowing what it is like when it happens. A parent who foreknows their child's suffering still genuinely weeps when the suffering arrives. God's exhaustive foreknowledge does not prevent His genuine emotional engagement with events as they unfold.

Second, the strict classical view of divine timelessness makes genuine emotional responsiveness impossible because it eliminates the temporal sequence that responsiveness requires. If God's entire experience is a single, changeless, timeless "now," then there is no "before" and "after" — no transition from one emotional state to another — and therefore no genuine response to anything. The "eternal grief" rejoinder fails because an eternal, unchanging grief that is not a response to any event is not really grief at all.

Third, the neoclassical alternative — affirming divine temporality alongside exhaustive foreknowledge — provides a fully coherent framework. God has always known (propositionally) everything that will happen. But He genuinely experiences events as they unfold, gaining experiential knowledge that is genuinely new even though His propositional knowledge has always been complete. This allows for genuine emotional responsiveness without compromising omniscience.

Fourth, the two-lens framework (Lister) and the immanent/economic Trinity distinction (Kim) offer complementary ways of understanding how God can be both the transcendent Lord who knows the whole script and the intimate covenant partner who enters into each scene with genuine emotional presence. The wide-angle lens and the narrow lens are not contradictory — they are complementary perspectives of a God who is both beyond history and within it.

Fifth, the foreknowledge of an emotional response is not the same as the experience of that response. God has eternally known His emotional responses. But He experiences those responses in the "temporally progressive covenantal context" as history unfolds. His knowledge is eternal; His experience is temporal. Both are real.

The God of the Bible is not a frozen, timeless, emotionally inert deity who contemplates the totality of history with undisturbed serenity. He is the living God — the God who knows the end from the beginning and who still weeps at Lazarus's tomb. He is the God who foresaw every human sin from eternity and who still grieves to His heart when He sees the wickedness of humanity. He is the God who planned the cross from before the foundation of the world and who still agonized in Gethsemane. His foreknowledge does not prevent His feeling. It grounds it. It gives it depth, purpose, and permanence. God does not feel despite His foreknowledge — He feels with the full weight of it.

And that is good news for us. Because it means we serve a God who not only knows what will happen in our lives but who genuinely cares about every moment of it. When we cry, He cries with us — not because He is surprised, but because He loves us. When we rejoice, He rejoices with us — not because the outcome was uncertain, but because our joy matters to Him. When we pray, He listens — not because He needs new information, but because the sound of His children's voices genuinely delights His heart.

The God whose heart beats for you is not a God whose foreknowledge has frozen His feelings. He is a God whose foreknowledge has deepened them. He has always known you. He has always known what you would face. And He has always been prepared — not just with a plan, but with a heart full of love, ready to meet you in every moment of your life with all the tenderness and all the passion and all the grief and all the joy that only an infinitely loving Father can bring.

That is the God of the Bible. That is the God who knows — and who still feels.