The Narrow Path Ministries

The crux of my question is whether people who hold various "unorthodox" or "heretical" views all have in common that they do not take the bible literally? I'm not disregarding the value that these various people have in various ways, just that, if they are genuine lovers of God and Jesus, how can they hold views that are clearly not biblical/scriptural?

An example of this Pastor Dr. Greg Boyd. Steve Gregg was in the documentary Jesus of Testimony featuring Greg Boyd as well.

I really believe that some of Greg Boyd's material is literally revolutionary and extremely important, such as "open theism", "myth of a Christian nation/religion".

His discussion of open theism contrasted with the traditional view (s) of Sovereignty has really helped me.

Book: "God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God"

But then I think he believes you can make Christianity compatible with evolution. But how can you have good theology and think that we came from evolution? Why would Jesus even need to die if there was no Adam and Eve and first human sin? Plus evolution involves the survival of the fittest, a supposedly brutal process of rape, murder, stealing, and destruction as the process for the fittest to survive. How can God even be good if evolution is how we came about?

And I think he has some other heretical views about how most of the Old Testament was "not really true prophecy, but largely tainted by the human element of prophecy" (Book Cross Vision), and yet he still thinks the OT is divinely inspired? This would ultimately lead a person to conclude the apostles and Jesus himself was actually wrong about lots of stuff.

The NT clearly states:

"But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture becomes a matter of someone’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" 2 Peter 1:21-22 NASB

How can you actually believe in the Gospel and Jesus and hold views like this?

So my original question:

The crux of my question is whether people who hold various "unorthodox" or "heretical" views all have in common that they do not take the bible literally? I'm not disregarding the value that these various people have in various ways, just that, if they are genuine lovers of God and Jesus, how can they hold views that are clearly not biblical/scriptural?

It is hard to say why some people choose the theological options that they do. I assume that they think the Bible teaches their doctrines. Obviously, if someone has reached wrong conclusions, there has been something wrong in their reasoning process—even if they are reasoning, as they think, from scripture. I don't think it has much todo with taking the Bible "literally," but it does have something to do with how "seriously" they take the Bible. Even those who take the Bible seriously, however, sometime reach conflicting conclusions where the Bible is less than clear.

Thanks for the reply

Are you aware of pastor Greg Boyd?

Any thoughts on his particular example?

Or do you have another leading person as an example?

Boyd is a Ph.D so he is very intelligent and thinks through things. But how can he come to some of the conclusions he does? It does not seem like such an intelligent person who genuinely loves God can have such an inconsistent worldview.

njd83 wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 31, 2022 11:19 pm

The crux of my question is whether people who hold various "unorthodox" or "heretical" views all have in common that they do not take the bible literally?

Nobody can take the Bible literally, aside from the fact the word "literal" is too indefinite to understand. There are statements we have to take with some other meaning like getting whatever we ask for, and gauge against the import of all other verses like not asking for the right reasons.

I'm not disregarding the value that these various people have in various ways, just that, if they are genuine lovers of God and Jesus, how can they hold views that are clearly not biblical/scriptural?

I think there are 3 sources of false beliefs, ignorance, the devil and the fleshly mind, trying to figure things out in our own intellect. The reason we accept false beliefs is because they please our flesh somehow.

An example of this Pastor Dr. Greg Boyd. Steve Gregg was in the documentary Jesus of Testimony featuring Greg Boyd as well.

I really believe that some of Greg Boyd's material is literally revolutionary and extremely important, such as "open theism", "myth of a Christian nation/religion".

He seems like a sincere man and deep thinker, but that doesn't make him right in everything.

His discussion of open theism contrasted with the traditional view (s) of Sovereignty has really helped me.

Book: "God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God"

Limiting God's knowledge doesn't really help or solve anything, it just makes God less powerful. Even if God doesn't know the future he would still be guilty by these people's logic of taking unnecessary risks, and the whole point of positing limiting God's foreknowledge always seem to be to try to make God less culpable somehow. God tabernacles in eternity and knows free will choices ahead of time in the Bible.

But then I think he believes you can make Christianity compatible with evolution. But how can you have good theology and think that we came from evolution? Why would Jesus even need to die if there was no Adam and Eve and first human sin? Plus evolution involves the survival of the fittest, a supposedly brutal process of rape, murder, stealing, and destruction as the process for the fittest to survive. How can God even be good if evolution is how we came about?

It could work if you put original sin before evolution begins. Evolution really encapsulates the heart of a lot of sinful valuations as you even note here, so perhaps evolution is part of the punishment for sin.

And I think he has some other heretical views about how most of the Old Testament was "not really true prophecy, but largely tainted by the human element of prophecy" (Book Cross Vision), and yet he still thinks the OT is divinely inspired? This would ultimately lead a person to conclude the apostles and Jesus himself was actually wrong about lots of stuff.

Even if you think the Bible is somehow inspired, everybody can interpret the same words differently anyway, so just saying it's inspired doesn't help at all or make everyone on the same playing field.

The NT clearly states:

"But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture becomes a matter of someone’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" 2 Peter 1:21-22 NASB

How can you actually believe in the Gospel and Jesus and hold views like this?

One starts to realize an extremely simplistic view of things just doesn't always fit, so you start to think more outside the box in some ways. For example, some people think six literal 24 hour days is just not really necessarily what Genesis 1 was trying to convey, and in fact seems kind of unthoughtful.

So my original question:

The crux of my question is whether people who hold various "unorthodox" or "heretical" views all have in common that they do not take the bible literally? I'm not disregarding the value that these various people have in various ways, just that, if they are genuine lovers of God and Jesus, how can they hold views that are clearly not biblical/scriptural?

We can all hold wrong views, and it seems with the amount of people differing almost no one has everything perfectly.

Some things that have helped me have discernment and feel secure that I am not entertaining deception is, stay extremely serious about your relationship with God and focus on prayer over intellectual study and listening to a thousand teachers' opinions; always double and triple check the motivations of your own heart, being willing to accept your own impurity, and asking God constantly to show you your own weaknesses; believing the Bible is in some way inspired and always honoring the Spirit of it the best you can; always check your own humility level in your willingness to admit you are wrong or accept things you don't like.

The Bible has a verse, "Cursed is the man who trusts in man, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord."

If I didn't have a long deep sustained disciplined and abiding relationship with God I would just feel insecure and doubt myself at every teaching I ever heard. Instead I pray for discernment, pray for truth, pray for integrity, and keep doing what I know is right, so that I don't lose the light I have.

Dizerner:

Nobody can take the Bible literally, aside from the fact the word "literal" is too indefinite to understand. There are statements we have to take with some other meaning like getting whatever we ask for, and gauge against the import of all other verses like not asking for the right reasons.

Its a really good point, and I do have a specific meaning of "literal" which I did not explain, but I do not mean "wooden literal". The best description of how to take the bible as "plainly written" is described here:

https://creation.com/should-genesis-be-taken-literally

Limiting God's knowledge doesn't really help or solve anything, it just makes God less powerful. Even if God doesn't know the future he would still be guilty by these people's logic of taking unnecessary risks, and the whole point of positing limiting God's foreknowledge always seem to be to try to make God less culpable somehow. God tabernacles in eternity and knows free will choices ahead of time in the Bible.

Its funny how so many uninformed responses to Boyd or open theism repeat the exact arguments he goes over in the book listed above. That's why I like Body so much in that he is very thorough to compare all the objections and strengths and weaknesses from both sides. And as he is a very educated man, can gather thoughts and points into well thought out sentences and descriptions that I have had a hard time for a while to gather my own thoughts about the various theologies floating around. He helped me to more concisely describe my own qualms with the various things I've heard over the years. My own objections, etc.

So for one, he actually describes how its not "limiting God's knowledge or making God less powerful". And how the traditional view actually does that.

On your second point, "unnecessary risks", its a good point, however from the other side I would see myself not trying to make God less culpable, but actually trying to make sense of the Divine Being since complete and exhausted foreknowledge would paint a extremely awful picture of a Divine Being, which would not even be Divine in my mind. "Free Will" also would be the responsible party in the "existence of evil" and therefore although God would not want or will evil, he allows free will to continue for a time, including the negative consequences everyone feels in the world. There are Two Wills in the world so to speak, "The Devil's Will Be Done" or "God's Will Be Done". Complete and Exhaustive Foreknowledge would render free will nonexistent, or a person would have to throw up their hands in the air and say "I just don't know how God knows everything but that I still have a free will". That's a very inadequate conclusion, especially when verses describe God dealing with people in real time as if they did have the option to choose one way or the other, and God being will to change his own mind if they change theirs. That makes no sense of Complete and Exhaustive Foreknowledge. Again he goes over all these scriptures in that book and discusses both views. Its very interesting.

It could work if you put original sin before evolution begins. Evolution really encapsulates the heart of a lot of sinful valuations as you even note here, so perhaps evolution is part of the punishment for sin.

Can you explain how you put evolution after original sin? What were the first creatures who sinned and then what did they evolve into afterwards?

The Fall definitely is believed to be the cause of "Death, disease, suffering, cancer, poverty, hunger, etc", and mutational problems are of course part of that. But genomic mutations are downward in fitness by nature, and in the data (e.g. Prof Lenski's Bacteria experiments), not upward in genomic fitness--the direction secular science needs evolution to go in order to prove it is a viable scientific theory--able to explain the progress from a simple single cell organism to a complex multicellular organism such as a horse or human. This has not been shown, and origins of life researchers, when pressed on their research, always end up making a statement of faith that "they will eventually find out how evolution could have done it". The fossil record we've dug up the last 100 years is pretty much close to complete now, so there wont be a huge amount more of new fossils that provide huge insights into "evolution". The problem now is finding genomic mechanisms that can actually do what their "hand waving" "storying telling" says it can do, connecting all the "tree of life's" branches for which we have no data.

Darwin said himself about the fossil record:

“… the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”
- Darwin

More modern Professors:

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design … has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution"
-Prof Stephen J Gould

"… transitional or linking forms are absent. The geological record gives no indication of such relationships … . But what the fossil record does give is many examples of the ‘instantaneous’ origin of new structural plans"
-Professor Euan Clarkson

see article: https://creation.com/cambrian-explosion

One starts to realize an extremely simplistic view of things just doesn't always fit, so you start to think more outside the box in some ways. For example, some people think six literal 24 hour days is just not really necessarily what Genesis 1 was trying to convey, and in fact seems kind of unthoughtful.

I realize this, but this is based on importing "secular scientific theory" into Christianity. It may be so. I am open to looking at evidence. A couple problems with this though. Genesis is written as history, not allegory. But, when does the supposed "allegory" of Genesis stop and the real history start? Before Abraham? Its a seamless history, written as history, written to be taken as history, and taken as such by both the OT Jews, Jesus himself and the apostles, and much of the early church. There is geological evidence for the global flood as well, so the allegory might have to be before Noah. I think if you knew how many issues there are with the various secular cosmological theories you would not give them so much credence. So what if God created in 6 days? Knowing what I know from the research I've done, I have no problem giving God the benefit of the doubt in reading Genesis as "plainly written". I'm open to learning and reading articles and journals.

Jesus himself believed a historical Genesis, and quotes it as plainly written, so if then Jesus himself was "wrong" about some things... so what kind of Jesus is this now?

He's the "Way, the Truth and the Life".... but yet does not "know the truth". hmmmm. He seems like a deceived lunatic now.

I think many people do not think through their beliefs thoroughly to their logical conclusions. That's what bugged me about Boyd. He's smart as hell, very good at explaining difficult subjects, but then does not seem to see the glaring issues with some of his beliefs. Very strange to me.

We can all hold wrong views, and it seems with the amount of people differing almost no one has everything perfectly.

When I first became a believer this was the most confusing thing ever to me.

Some things that have helped me have discernment and feel secure that I am not entertaining deception is, stay extremely serious about your relationship with God and focus on prayer over intellectual study and listening to a thousand teachers' opinions; always double and triple check the motivations of your own heart, being willing to accept your own impurity, and asking God constantly to show you your own weaknesses; believing the Bible is in some way inspired and always honoring the Spirit of it the best you can; always check your own humility level in your willingness to admit you are wrong or accept things you don't like.

This is my take home comment.

The Bible has a verse, "Cursed is the man who trusts in man, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord."

If I didn't have a long deep sustained disciplined and abiding relationship with God I would just feel insecure and doubt myself at every teaching I ever heard. Instead I pray for discernment, pray for truth, pray for integrity, and keep doing what I know is right, so that I don't lose the light I have.

Thanks for sharing, I appreciate it.

Thanks for the friendly and kind tones of your response. Most people I've encountered online have been more caustic.

These topics are extensive, so I want to first focus my response on just evolution, then hopefully after Open Theism.

The problem now is finding genomic mechanisms that can actually do what their "hand waving" "storying telling" says it can do, connecting all the "tree of life's" branches for which we have no data.

I feel the force and impact of your argument, and fully acknowledge your points. I was raised and taught that evolution was evil and if you believe it, the devil has got you, basically. So I worked hard at supposing I should somehow disprove it. And I want to acknowledge—the points you make are 100% legitimate. Organized complexity has not yet been solved and they have no good explanation for some of the most fundamental aspects of how it formed. However, the counter argument I can't get around, is the circumstantial evidence is just too strong too ignore. One could say God could put something very logical in front of you as a test of your faith, make it really, really "look" a certain way. I mean the universe could have just been created complete with all my memories 5 seconds ago, right. And of course I believe in the supernatural, so what does it matter anymore where the natural is violated, on the small scale of a jar of wine, or the large scale of making all of history look like it happened in a way it didn't? I don't know man. The whole point of miracles is to stand out as a sign, and I do feel it would be kind of dishonest and not a miracle for that large amount of circumstantial evidence to be allowed to exist. It doesn't challenge my faith and I can't see any reason for God to allow that massive scale of a deceptive historical record of nature. If there are even hypothetical yet unfound pathways, such as maybe self-organizational properties of the universe, then I have to respect at least the possibility. Plus, in praying about it, although I've received no definitive answer, I don't feel any reservation in accepting it.

Can you explain how you put evolution after original sin? What were the first creatures who sinned and then what did they evolve into afterwards?

I'm going to be honest... no, lol. Well, I have some thoughts. Eden represents the heavenly state, the real paradise where nothing goes wrong. Some people try to backtrack animal suffering into Eden and I think it's doctrinally wrong to state that as "very good." Eden was the idyllic state, see, because that is what a world without sin would be, experiencing the intimate glory of God. I don't think it was a "testing ground" for "conditional immortality," that's messed up. It's positing the very lie of the devil that God somehow withheld something from them. If God withheld nothing from them—they had all needed already. Now if we accept that as a foundational starting point, Eden represents an idyllic heavenly state of ultimate blessing (such as we are promised after death through faith in Christ), then we cannot have the current physics models and historical records we have be compatible with Eden. Eden could not be on this planet, unless all physical laws and materials were substantially different, and then there were be historical evidence of a change in physical law. This physical law is what produced tumors in dinosaur brains and creates the basis upon which sentient things suffer.

So I see original sin as a pre-existent heavenly state where two humanoids started the big bang by their disobedience to God. We have some evidence in the first verses of Genesis that creation was formed from a state "without form and void" and out of complete and utter darkness (and remember God is light with no shadows in him). Why does a "very good" creation start out of what symbolizes an evil mess? I think there is a "meta-DNA" to the universe in the seeds of its initiation that contain already the curses and imperfections of the judgment upon sin. Then all the good things, like pictures of a resurrecting life in spring after the death of winter, the night and morning of the circadian rhythm, the metamorphosis of the lowly caterpillar in "resurrection," the nurturing spirit of mothers towards the innocent young, the rewards of love and reproducing, and the signs of our origin itself being cursed—our reproductive system itself being inextricably tied in with our toxic waste system, our painful birth and inevitable death: Notice how all the good things are inextricably tied to a redemptive theme of coming out of bad things, just like Jesus suffered from sin so we can live.

This reply is not as in depth as I'd like, but here is some thoughts on Open Theism:

On your second point, "unnecessary risks", its a good point, however from the other side I would see myself not trying to make God less culpable, but actually trying to make sense of the Divine Being since complete and exhausted foreknowledge would paint a extremely awful picture of a Divine Being, which would not even be Divine in my mind.

Well, now think a little about this sentence for me, lol. I'm not trying to be combative here. There is some cognitive dissonance going on, either that, or you misunderstood what "culpable" means. Saying an omniscient God somehow makes him "extremely awful" is a picture of culpability, that God is somehow guilty of something evil, see. And you yourself pointed out that so many people don't think deeply about the reasons they believe something—but again, it seems you are excluding yourself here, in a way.

What, exactly, is the logic that omniscience makes God evil? See, it is this bare fact, that as humans we consider people responsible to act upon what they know. We inextricably link responsibility with knowledge. If my friend gets into a car with a car bomb, and I have no idea whatsoever that the car is rigged, I am not culpable for him being blown up. I just didn't know. This lack of knowledge, see, in our thinking absolves me of all responsibility.

Now suppose I know my friend is getting into a car with a car bomb in it. And I don't act on the foreknowledge I possess. Suddenly I'm an evil monster, right, an "extreme awful picture" of a human being. But we are making all kinds of complicated moral assessments in the evaluation of this scenario that aren't being fully traced out. We are holding God responsible for not acting in a certain way based on his foreknowledge to prevent certain things we deem immoral.

But the whole reason we hold fellow humans accountable is a moral evaluation based on what we, ourselves, deem acceptable, and it is not based with a value system that has God as its core and source of all value. We tend to make human suffering an idol, and humanity the source from which we derive value, but this valuation at its very core, is pure idolatry and worshiping the creature over the Creator. This moral objection is the basis of atheistic objections to suffering.

Because all God needs is one thing: a legitimate reason to do something that he finds values himself. We may not even know that reason nor should we need to necessarily know. Think of the very lesson of Job, where you do all the right things and yet still suffer for it: being tempted to think God is a "monster" because his valuations feel evil to us. The problem is, we are the monsters and our valuations are evil because they put humanity first, and God last.

As for the logical problems with free will, there are several. But foreknowledge does not logically invalidate real alternate hypotheticals. Even if you didn't know the future, it doesn't even solve that logical problem. In the end, you still only will choose what you will choose, and it can't be more than one thing. I will never not choose what I choose, but that never means I couldn't have chosen otherwise; this is called the modal scope fallacy in logic.

So my choices are in one sense set in stone, but in another sense never forced, always from my agency. The only reason we think limiting knowledge of the future works, is if we see ourselves as the fount of all reality, so that our limitations can dictate possibilities beyond them. God doesn't need our limitations to dictate reality, he can be outside of time itself, and he can be surprised at something you're going to do 10 years from now, theoretically.

Thanks for sharing, I appreciate it.

Thanks man, I appreciate your kindness and interchange of thoughts. I hope you know I don't ever mean to be offensive.

I'm going to be honest... no, lol. Well, I have some thoughts. Eden represents the heavenly state, the real paradise where nothing goes wrong. Some people try to backtrack animal suffering into Eden and I think it's doctrinally wrong to state that as "very good." Eden was the idyllic state, see, because that is what a world without sin would be, experiencing the intimate glory of God. I don't think it was a "testing ground" for "conditional immortality," that's messed up. It's positing the very lie of the devil that God somehow withheld something from them. If God withheld nothing from them—they had all needed already. Now if we accept that as a foundational starting point, Eden represents an idyllic heavenly state of ultimate blessing (such as we are promised after death through faith in Christ), then we cannot have the current physics models and historical records we have be compatible with Eden. Eden could not be on this planet, unless all physical laws and materials were substantially different, and then there were be historical evidence of a change in physical law. This physical law is what produced tumors in dinosaur brains and creates the basis upon which sentient things suffer.

So I see original sin as a pre-existent heavenly state where two humanoids started the big bang by their disobedience to God. We have some evidence in the first verses of Genesis that creation was formed from a state "without form and void" and out of complete and utter darkness (and remember God is light with no shadows in him). Why does a "very good" creation start out of what symbolizes an evil mess? I think there is a "meta-DNA" to the universe in the seeds of its initiation that contain already the curses and imperfections of the judgment upon sin. Then all the good things, like pictures of a resurrecting life in spring after the death of winter, the night and morning of the circadian rhythm, the metamorphosis of the lowly caterpillar in "resurrection," the nurturing spirit of mothers towards the innocent young, the rewards of love and reproducing, and the signs of our origin itself being cursed—our reproductive system itself being inextricably tied in with our toxic waste system, our painful birth and inevitable death: Notice how all the good things are inextricably tied to a redemptive theme of coming out of bad things, just like Jesus suffered from sin so we can live.

Its interesting, creative and imaginative but there are many presuppositions you take, as well as clearly deviating from plainly reading Genesis for what it presents its self to be, historical.

Hebrew theologians also say the same thing, that although we may think of it as fantastical and thus conclude its allegorical, the language used in Hebrew is the same type of language used when writing other history in the OT.

Also if I would say a literal reading of the Book of Revelation, I would mean "plain reading", meaning the symbolic language points to literal historical future events, not complete spiritualized mystic allegory. Such as, "the Beast represents the sin in us all that we have to deal with", not an actual ruling political leader anti-Christ figure. A plain reading would be the symbolic apocalyptic language is referring to actual historical future events. By the way, Open Theism does not rule out God's ability to have any foreknowledge or predestination ability, just that Complete Exhaustive Foreknowledge does not make sense of many scriptures. So a balance between free will options/futures as well as God's ability to foreknow and predestine. And God will never control or force anyone, but attempts to lead people and convict people, but only judges them after they have chosen with their free will to do evil.

The problem with Genesis 1-3 is that its very far removed from us being able to study it. Cosmology is known to be a pseudo science in that no one can test it against another universe, and no one can go to another part of the universe/galaxy to do lab test stuff over there. No one was there to witness it. All our data is historical data from telescopes, not actual lab repeatable tests like other branches of science, such as how we've tested the laws of physics and chemistry. An example would be inflationary theory which won a Nobel prize, but the winner later acknowledged the severe problems of his theory and discarded it. The Big Bang model has many fudge factors, such as dark energy and dark matter which are by definition untestable ad hoc add-ons to explain things they don't understand when interpreting the data from their Model's worldview. Another add on would be the Kuiper belt which supposedly has the source of comets/asteroids, but its an unproven idea used to explain things they don't understand according to their 15 billion year Big Bang Model. Its a common theme in cosmology.

Cosmology is somewhat unlike evolution, in that we can and do some pretty thorough critiquing of the theory of biological and chemical evolution for validity. But yet, evolution is also a historical science attempting to make a story about the past to explain the present. And so lacking the lab testable and repeatable genomic mechanisms, the "story telling" remains such.

njd83 wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 05, 2022 3:23 pm

Its interesting, creative and imaginative but there are many presuppositions you take, as well as clearly deviating from plainly reading Genesis for what it presents its self to be, historical.

Hebrew theologians also same the same thing, that although we may think of it as fantastical and thus conclude its allegorical, the language used in Hebrew is the same type of language used when writing other history in the OT.

Very thoughtful points.

Genesis 1-3 does have things that look like the marks of a historical record, but I think they also bear marks of the poetic and allegorical as well. Even many ancient Jews and Christians considered it a viable possibility, ones that truly respected Scripture. That's why I think it's a bit of a combination. In the end, the shared belief that ancestors brought the curse of sin seem foundational enough to me, and how exactly it happened seems far less important.

Such as, "the Beast represents the sin in us all that we have to deal with", not an actual ruling political leader anti-Christ figure. A plain reading would be the symbolic apocalyptic language is referring to actual historical future events.

Many Scriptures are dual layered thought, right, and even sometimes triple or more layered in meaning. Why couldn't it be both? Doesn't the Bible itself encourage us not to depend upon our own abilities to understand and instead receive revelation from God? Jesus "opened their minds" to understand the Scripture, and I don't think it was a study on hermeneutics that did it. Call unto me and I will show you, the natural man does not receive spiritual things, verses like this show us our dependence for interpretation.

just that Complete Exhaustive Foreknowledge does not make sense of many scriptures.

You're really gonna have to work harder to make that point, because I honestly can't see that.

If God is not obligated to act on his own foreknowledge in a morally obligatory sense, or might even somehow limit his own knowledge relationally, I don't see any contradiction with Scripture at any point whatsoever. The fact is—if God doesn't know the future, he can only guess about future free will decisions, yet he knew them perfectly in Scripture.There's no way around that point. Many verses talk about God knowing the future, and there's not even a good reason to posit God doesn't know it.