Omniscience of God

“God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.”

— 1 John 3:20 (ESV)

The omniscience of God is his perfect and exhaustive knowledge of himself and of all things actual and possible, past, present, and future, known in a single eternal act rather than gathered piece by piece the way creatures learn.¹ God’s knowledge does not depend on observing the world; it is the ground of the world’s existence, not the result of it.² Omniscience is one of God’s incommunicable attributes, those perfections Scripture ascribes to God alone, with no true analogy in any creature.

Confessional Witness

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor the wider Reformed confessional family devotes a chapter by name to omniscience; the doctrine instead appears where the confession states what God’s decree does and does not rest on. Rejecting the idea that God’s plan is built on a prior sight of what creatures would freely choose, the confession states: “Although God knoweth whatsoever may or can come to pass, upon all supposed conditions, yet hath he not decreed anything, because he foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.”³ God’s knowledge of “whatsoever may or can come to pass” is affirmed as total; what the confession denies is that this knowledge is the confession’s own account of why God decreed as he did. The decree comes first in the order of God’s own being, not his foresight of creaturely choice.

Biblical Basis

Scripture states the extent of God’s knowledge without qualification. “God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:20). “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Heb. 4:13). David confesses the same reach applied to his own inward life: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar… Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether” (Ps. 139:1-2, 4). Isaiah asks rhetorically who could possibly have taught God anything: “Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel?” (Isa. 40:13). Job, defending his own integrity, appeals to the same reach of God’s sight: “Does not he see my ways and number all my steps?” (Job 31:4).

Scripture also depicts God searching hearts and testing what people will do, language that on its face sounds like a God finding out what he did not already know (Gen. 3:9-13; Ps. 139:23-24). Sammons treats this as accommodated speech rather than real ignorance, quoting Spurgeon’s comment on Psalm 139’s “search me”: “Searching ordinarily implies a measure of ignorance which is removed by observation; of course this is not the case with the Lord… the Lord knows us thoroughly as if he had examined us minutely.”⁴ The verse that opens the same psalm already rules out real ignorance on God’s part: David has not yet spoken, and God already knows it all (Ps. 139:4).

Historical Development

Augustine, writing against the idea that God’s knowledge unfolds through time the way human knowledge does, argued that “foreknowledge” is not, strictly, the right word for what God has. Every moment is equally present to a God who is not himself in time: “For what is foreknowledge if not knowledge of future events? But can anything be future to God, who surpasses all times? For if God’s knowledge includes these very things themselves, they are not future to him but present; and for this reason we should no longer speak of God’s foreknowledge but simply of God’s knowledge.”⁵ This point, that distinctions of past, present, and future belong to creatures and not to God’s own knowing, became the standard Reformed account of how God can know a thing without having derived that knowledge from watching it happen.

Seventeenth-century Reformed theologians developed the same point at length against a live rival account. Charnock argued that God’s knowledge, unlike a creature’s, cannot be caused by the things it knows: “he did not make things to know them, but he knows them to make them… If his knowledge did depend upon the things, then the existence of things did precede God’s knowledge of them… [and] it could not be eternal.”⁶ Gill made the same point from the order of God’s own decree and will, arguing that God cannot be supposed to act “ignorantly and rashly,” so that his knowledge of what he wills is entailed by the fact that he wills it at all, not supplied to him from outside.⁷

The doctrine of “middle knowledge,” proposed by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century and developed by Francisco Suárez, argued that God has a knowledge of contingent events, what any free creature would freely choose under any possible circumstance, that is logically prior to God’s own decree. Bavinck describes both the appeal of the theory and the Reformed rejection of it: it was meant to hold together human free will and divine foreknowledge, but at the cost of making “God’s knowledge of free human actions” derived “not from his own being but from the will of creatures,” so that God “becomes dependent on the world for his own knowledge.”⁸ Reformed theologians rejected middle knowledge for this reason; it was received among Roman Catholic Jesuit theologians but never among the Reformed.⁸

Opposing Views

Molinism holds that God’s knowledge of what a free creature would do in any given circumstance precedes, and is not grounded in, God’s own decree. On this view, God consults his knowledge of every creature’s counterfactual free choices before deciding which circumstances to create, so that the creature’s own will, not God’s decree, is the ultimate ground of what God knows it will do.⁸ Bavinck presses this to what he takes to be its consequence: a God who must “await” creaturely decisions before knowing them is no longer the sovereign source of the world’s history but “the chief executive of a world in which he is the slave of his subordinates.”⁸ The confession’s own statement, that God has not decreed anything merely because he foresaw it as future or as conditionally certain, is aimed at the same ordering Molinism proposes.³

Open theism denies that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future at all, rather than merely reordering how God has it. Barrett’s definition states the position plainly: open theism “denies God knows the future; it denies God has exhaustive foreknowledge.”⁹ Clark Pinnock, the view’s best-known evangelical proponent, held that God has bound himself by “a kind of covenant of non-coercion with creatures” and so does not exhaustively foreknow how they will freely act, choosing instead to respond to their choices as they occur.¹⁰ Reformed critics have traced this move to the same root that produces Arminian denials of total depravity: a prior commitment to a libertarian freedom that cannot be squared with certain, exhaustive foreknowledge, so that rather than give up the account of freedom, open theists give up the foreknowledge instead.¹¹

Objections and Responses

If God infallibly knows in advance what a person will freely do, that choice cannot really be free. A. A. Hodge answered that certain foreknowledge and free agency are not in competition, because foreknowledge is not itself the cause of the act it foreknows: “the certain foreknowledge of God involves the certainty of the future free act” without that certainty being what produces the act.¹² A future choice can be genuinely free in how it is made and still be certain in the sense that God, who is not bound by time, already knows it; the objection assumes that certainty and freedom cannot coexist, which is the very point in dispute rather than a given.

Doesn’t Scripture’s language of God “searching,” “testing,” and asking questions imply he does not already know the answer? Genesis 3 depicts God asking Adam where he is and what he has done, and Psalm 139 has David ask God to search and know his heart, both of which read on the surface as a God finding something out. This is accommodated language, describing God’s action toward the creature in terms a creature can follow rather than describing a real gap in God’s own knowledge; the same psalm that asks God to “search” also states, four verses earlier, that God knows what David will say before he says it.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 10, “Omniscience,” 199-200: “God perfectly and exhaustively knows everything about Himself and His creation: past, present, and future… By omniscience, we mean that God has an infinite knowledge of all things, both actual and possible. And His knowledge is intuitive (because He is God); it is neither derived nor learned.” ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God,” sec. “Knowledge, Foreknowledge, Middle Knowledge”: “Unlike human knowledge, God’s is not based on observation (a posteriori); it is a priori, present from eternity.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 2. ↩ ↩²
Sammons, Forgotten Attributes of God, 208-9, quoting C. H. Spurgeon on Psalm 139. ↩ ↩²
Augustine, quoted in Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 8, sec. “Knowledge, Foreknowledge, Middle Knowledge”: “For what is foreknowledge if not knowledge of future events? But can anything be future to God, who surpasses all times?… we should no longer speak of God’s foreknowledge but simply of God’s knowledge.” ↩
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, Discourse VIII, “On God’s Knowledge,” 456-57. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 9, “Of the Omniscience of God.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 8, sec. “Knowledge, Foreknowledge, Middle Knowledge”: “The theory of middle knowledge attempts to harmonize the Pelagian notion of an indifferent free will with God’s omniscience and thus is incompatible with a decree of God. God is seen to derive his knowledge of free human actions not from his own being but from the will of creatures and thus becomes dependent on the world for his own knowledge… God becomes the chief executive of a world in which he is the slave of his subordinates.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Matthew Barrett, ed., None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Bethany House, 2019), glossary, s.v. “open theism”: “A view that denies God knows the future; it denies God has exhaustive foreknowledge.” ↩
Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 137, quoted in Craig A. Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 1. ↩
Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 317-355: “Open Theists… cannot reconcile exhaustive foreknowledge with libertarian free will. Therefore, rather than rejecting libertarianism they reject God’s exhaustive foreknowledge.” ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” Q. 40: “God’s certain foreknowledge of all future… the certain foreknowledge of God involves the certainty of the future free act.” ↩