God’s Omniscience According to Hermann Cremer

God’s Omniscience According to Hermann Cremer

Here are my thoughts about Hermann Cremer’s thoughts about God’s omniscience as spelled out in the book The Christian Doctrine of God’s Attributes: Part 4: Second Series: 3: The Omniscience of God (pp. 69-75). If you have read these pages, feel free to comment. If not, feel free to ask a question. In about a week I will comment on 4: The Eternity and Immutability of God (pp. 76=81).

I approached this section of Cremer’s book with a bit of fear and trembling after being so intimately involved in the evangelical debate about “open theism.” As you may or may not know, open theism is the belief that God voluntarily created a world in which he does not know everything that will happen because he gave/gives his human creatures genuine free will, power of contrary choice, and because he wants us to interact with him freely and knowing all that we will freely do in the future and all that he will do in the future is incompatible with genuine freedom as power of contrary choice. Well, I find it hard to summarize open theism. To understand it you really need to read Greg Boyd’s book The God of the Possible.

Back to Cremer. According to Cremer, God’s omniscience includes absolute, total, exhaustive, infallible foreknowledge but does not violate freedom. (I assume that in this book “freedom” translates the German “Freiheit” rather than “Willkur.” The former does not necessarily mean power of contrary choice whereas the latter does.)

For Cremer, God’s omniscience is “the determination of his will and work for the world, or his action for and upon the world, as it is unveiled in revelation, through his knowledge of all that is and occurs….along with God’s will for the creature, antecedent to the creature and its conduct, God’s knowledge concerning it is also posited and so precedes it.” (71)

In the middles of that quotation, where I included elipses, Cremer says “This does not imply that the creature first causes knowledge in God and so makes God to a certain extent dependent on it.”

Clearly, Cremer was not an open theist. Could he have been? Yes, because not long before Cremer wrote this, German theologian I. A. Dorner expressed that God learns from what creatures do. He surely knew of Dorner’s idea of God’s “ethical immutability.” (Side note: He also surely knew of G. Thomasius’s idea of the Son of God’s “kenosis” in the incarnation which may be why he occasionally denies God’s self-limitation.) Cremer’s denial that the creature can cause knowledge in God or that God is in any way dependent on creatures may be a nod toward Schleiermacher, although he clearly did not agree with Schleiermacher about many things.

Cremer goes on to argue that God’s omniscience, including absolute foreknowledge, does not violate or conflict with our freedom, but one has to wonder if he is thinking of “freedom” as “free will” or something else. Whether he, as a Lutheran, believed in free will is yet unclear to me. What is clear is that he believed nothing we do can cause knowledge in God and that God is not in any way dependent on us for anything.

That is where I have a problem. The biblical narrative more than implies, it presupposes, that our actions cause God to feel things like anger and jealousy and satisfaction. Why is it a problem to believe that our prayers, for example, can affect God? I just don’t get it.

I want to ask here again, as I would ask Cremer if I could, why open theism is objectionable? What difference does it make whether God knows the future exhaustively and infallibly or not? So long as God, in his omnipotence, is able to respond wisely and effectively to whatever we do? Perfect knowledge of the future gives God no providential advantage. John Sanders has shown that decisively. So have William Hasker and Richard Swinburne who have also shown quite decisively that absolute foreknowledge DOES conflict with free will as power of contrary choice.

Cremer simply appeals to his basic principle that in theology we must not be slaves to the “law of consistency.” I cannot settle there. To me, inconsistency in theology is a sign of “more thought needed.”

*Note: If you have read this section, feel free who comment or question; if you have not, feel free only to ask a question. In any case, keep your comment or question relatively brief (no more than 100 words), on topic, addressed to me, civil and respectful (not hostile or argumentative), and devoid of pictures or links.*