Prophecy and Biblical Authority.
Predictive prophecy is used as a support to Biblical authority. In order to predict the future God must have foreknowledge. Can he predict the future, especially of free-willed human beings? What is the basis of God’s foreknowledge? There are philosophical as well as Biblical considerations.
Philosophical Considerations.
What would be the basis of God knowing the future? That is, how is it logically possible for God to know with absolute certainty that a specific kind of event performed by a free-willed human being would take place?
1) Theological determinism. God simply determines what happens. This is the position of Calvinism. God decrees every event in human history. If God does this then it’s no problem at all for God to foreknow and to predict the future. There are three excellent books that take issue with Calvinism from a traditional Christian understanding:
Grace Unlimited and
The Grace of God, the Will of Man, both edited by Clark Pinnock, and
What the Bible Says About God The Ruler, by Jack Cottrell. An excellent debate on the subject can be found in Basinger & Basinger, eds,
Predestination and Free Will. Suffice it to say that if theological determinism is true, then God cannot be a good God because he decrees all of the evil we experience in human history. All of it. No belief in “God’s inscrutable ways” can absolve God of this guilt. And no alternative definition of human freedom can absolve God of this guilt, either. Furthermore, if God told us to do good things and yet decrees that we should do evil things, then he’s lying to us. He’s telling us that he wants us to do something good, but behind the scenes he’s decreeing that we do the exact opposite. That makes him a liar, plain and simple.
2) God is outside of time so he sees everything as present. If this were so, God would have no problems with predicting the future because it is not actually in the future. He’s merely seeing the present from his perspective. Stephen T. Davis, in his book,
Logic and the Nature of God (Eerdmans, 1983), argues against this view by claiming that such a timeless being is “probably incoherent.” If God created this universe, then there was a time when it didn’t yet exist, and then there was a later time when it did exist. So he argues: “it is not clear how a timelessly eternal being can be the creator of this temporal universe.” It would also make 2005 B.C and 2005 A.D. simultaneous in God’s eyes. But they are not simultaneous in human historical space and time. Davis argues, “we have on hand no acceptable concept of atemporal causation, i.e., of what it is for a timeless cause to produce a temporal effect.” (pp. 8-24).
From the timeless view of God come the doctrines of God’s immutability (that he cannot change), and impassibility (God cannot suffer).
The notion of a timeless God can be traced to Greek philosophers. Plato argued that God must be an eternally perfect being. And since any change in an eternally perfect being must be a change for the worst, God cannot change. Aristotle argued that all of God’s potentialities are completely actualized. Therefore, God cannot change because he cannot have unactualized potentialities. Christian thinkers like Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas brought these concepts to the Bible. Boethius: “God lives in an everlasting present.” According to Aquinas God has no past, present or future since everything is “simultaneously whole” for him.
But Plato’s argument, for instance, “is straightforwardly fallacious, because it rests on a false dichotomy. It rests on the assumption that all change is either for the better or for the worst, an assumption that is simply false.” We want a watch to reflect the correct time, and so it must change with the time of day. The watch that stays the same all day long, and didn’t change, would be imperfect. Likewise, “when God began to create the universe he changed, beginning to do something that previously he had not done.” Such a change implies no imperfection in God. [(From William Hasker, in,
The Openness of God, IVP, 1994, pp. 132-133). See also Thomas Morris,
Our Idea of God, and Ronald Nash,
The Concept of God.].
The whole notion that God doesn’t change seems to imply that God never has a new thought, or idea, since everything is an eternal NOW, and there is nothing he can learn. This is woodenly static. God would not be person, but a block of ice, a thing. To say he does nothing NEW, thinks nothing NEW, feels nothing NEW, basically means he does nothing, thinks nothing, feels nothing, for it’s all been done. What would it mean for a person not to take risks, not to plan (for it’s already been planned), or to think (thinking involves weighing temporal alternatives, does it not?). But if God cannot have a new thought then he cannot think--he is a block of ice.
4) The Inferential View. God just figures out from the range of options which choices we will make. He does this because he knows who we are completely and thoroughly as the “ultimate psychoanalyst.” He can take us in our present state and absolutely with certainty know what we will do next, and next, and next, and so on, and so on. He knows the future because he deduces it from who he knows us to be now. This option actually means, however, that what we do is somehow "programmed" into us. The determinist claims that it's all in the genes and environment, so this viewpoint commits the believer to the same position as the determinist. If God can predict future human actions 500 years from now, based upon what he knows about people living today, then we are merely environmentally and genetically programmed rats. There is no human freedom.
5) The innate view. God just has comprehensive knowledge of the future. He just “sees it” because he is omniscient. But this isn’t an explanation at all! When I asked Dr. William Lane Craig in class how it is that God has foreknowledge, Craig, who would normally have elaborate arguments and defenses for his views, merely said, as if this is all that needed to be said, "It's innate, God just has it." What? How? This answer actually triggered my mind, and in time led me to reject God’s foreknowledge of future human free-willed choices.
From these philosophical considerations, I just don’t see any real basis for believing that a good God can have absolute and certain foreknowledge of future truly free-willed human actions. Therefore, along with a great many recent Christian philosophers, I do not believe God can predict the future of human history with certainty. And since I also reject theological determinism, then there is no basis for predestination either, whether due to God’s supposed foreknowledge of what we will do, or in God’s decrees.
Biblical Considerations of God’s Timelessness.
The Bible does say that God is eternal. (
Psalms 90:1-4;
Psalms 102:25-27;
Revelation 22:13). But this only means that God has always existed and will forever exist. The Bible never says God is timeless, experiencing no past, present or future. The Bible does say that a thousand years is as a day to God (
Psalms 90:4), but this verse cannot support the weight of a timelessly eternal view of God. The passage is merely contrasting God’s everlasting existence with man’s temporal existence. That is, unlike people, God always has existed and will forever exist. [See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “God Everlasting,” in
God and the Good, eds Clifton Orlebeke and Lewis Smedes (Eerdmas, 1975)]. “If God is truly timeless, so that temporal determinations of ‘before’ and ‘after’ do not apply to him, then how can God act in time, as Scriptures say that he does? How can he know what is occurring on the changing earthly scene? How can he respond when his children turn to him in prayer and obedience?” William Hasker in The
Openness of God, (p. 128).
The Bible does say that God is unchanging (
Exodus 3:14-15; 34:6-7;
Numbers 23:19;
Psalms 33:11;
Malachi 3:6;
Hebrews 13:8;
James 1:17). But this only refers to God’s nature, character and purposes. God is described as changing is several passages in the Bible (
Genesis 6:6-7;
Exodus 32:10;
Deuteronomy 9:13;
I Samuel 15:11;
Psalms 106:44-45;
Jeremiah 18:8-10;
Joel 2:13;
Amos 7:3, and
Jonah 3:10). Besides from these specific verses, according to Clark Pinnock, the Bible presents “a God who responds to us like a dancer with her partner” (in
Predestination and Free Will, p. 158). He answers prayer, directs his people, and redirects his people.
The impassibility of God is the weakest link and the most dubious of the doctrines that follow from in a timeless view of God. One would have to deny almost every book in the Bible here, for nearly all of them speak of God’s pain and grief over human beings (
Genesis 6:1-5;
Judges 10:16;
Psalms 95:10;
Jeremiah 3:1-3; 13:26-27; 31:20;
Hebrews 5:7). Jesus felt the same way (
Matthew 23:37;
John 11:35), especially on the cross.
Biblical Considerations of Predictive Prophecy.
God is described as declaring what will happen in the future (
Psalms 139:4,16;
Isaiah 46:10-11;
Hebrews 4:13). But these verses do not demand that God has absolute certain foreknowledge of what we humans will do. Just as God does not have the power to do an absurdity (Can he create a rock so large that he cannot lift it? Can he ride a horse he isn’t riding?), neither can God know our future free-willed choices because they simply cannot be known. The Bible speaks often as if God doesn’t know the future (
Genesis 22:12;
Deuteronomy 13:3;
Jeremiah 3:7, 19-20; 26:3; 32:35;
Ezekiel 12:3 and
Jonah 3:10).
Even from a Biblical perspective predictive prophecy can be explained in one of three ways: 1) God is announcing ahead of time what he plans to do (
Exodus 6:6-8; 7:3;
Isaiah 46:10-11). 2) God offers predictions based upon his exhaustive knowledge of the past and present (
Exodus 3:19-21). Knowing people as intimately as God does he can pretty much predict what they will do in certain limited situations, although, the further into the future human history moves then the more it becomes impossible even for God to predict. 3) Prophecy can also be understood as a warning, and is thus conditional and based upon human responses (
Jonah 3:2,5,10;
Isaiah 38:1-6; and
Jeremiah 18:7-10). [See Richard Rice, “Divine Foreknowledge and Free-Will Theism,” in
The Grace of God, The Will of Man (Zondervan, 1989, pp. 121-139)].
How the New Testament Writers Used Predictive Prophecy.
One of the major things claimed by the New Testament in support of Jesus’ life and mission is that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy (
Luke 24:26-27;
Acts 3:17-24). But if not even God can predict the future as it moves farther and farther into the distance, then neither can any prophet who claims to speak for God. None of the Old Testament passages in the original Hebrew prophetically applied singularly and specifically to Jesus. Early Christian preachers simply went into the Old Testament looking for verses that would support their view of Jesus. They took these Old Testament verses out of context and applied them to Jesus in order to support their views of his life and mission. None of the ones we’ve discussed proves anything of the sort of what was written about Jesus.
Many of the claimed prophecies came from the book of Psalms. But the Psalms are simply devotional prayers. Among other things in the Psalms we find prayers for help in distress, for forgiveness, and wisdom, and so on. They declare praise to God, and they express hope that their enemies will be defeated. There is nothing about them, when reading them devotionally, that indicates they are predicting anything at all! But the New Testament writers quoted from several of them and claimed they predicted several things in the life, death and resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus (i.e.,
Psalms 2, 16, 22, 40, 69, 110, and 118).
Psalms 2 expresses hope for the Messiah, the anointed one. But any Jew writing about his hope for a future Messiah could have said these same hopeful things. A hope is not a prediction. Besides,
Psalms 2 and 110 were most likely to be read at the coronation of Jewish kings.
Psalms 110:1 reads: “The Lord says to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for you feet.” The New Testament writers make a big deal out of the fact that David wrote this Psalm in which he calls someone else “lord.” This supposedly refers to David’s future Messianic son, Jesus--his divine nature and mission. But it’s fairly obvious that if David wrote this Psalm he did it on the coronation of his son Solomon, whom he subsequently called, ‘lord.” He did this because of Solomon’s new status, which placed him as a ruler even above the aged David himself.
The other Psalms do not predict anything at all. They are prayers to be interpreted within the range of the writer’s experiences alone. Any extrapolation of them to Jesus is reading Jesus into the text, and not justified by the text itself. It is more probable that the New Testament writers were influenced in the construction of their stories about Jesus by making his life fit some of these details. That may explain Luke’s concoction of a census in order to get Mary to Bethlehem so that Jesus could be born there, according to “prophecy” (
Micah 5:2,
Matthew 2:6).
Notice also that
Matthew 21:2 has Jesus requesting both a donkey and also a colt to ride into Jerusalem on, based upon a misunderstanding of
Zechariah 9:9, which reads: “Rejoice…your king comes to you…gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Zechariah’s prophecy is an example of Hebraic parallelism in which the second line retells the point of the first line. There is only one animal in Zechariah, but Matthew thinks he means there is a donkey and also a colt, so he wrote his story based upon this misunderstanding in order to fit prophecy! [Mark (11:1) and Luke (19:30) both say it was a “colt.” John (12:14-15) says it was a “donkey”, and then quoted Zechariah: “your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.”].
The Prophetic Paradigm.
Paul J. Achtemeier in
The Inspration of Scripture (Westminister Press, 1980), “It is precisely because the prophet is the one into whose mouth God placed his own words that the prophet became the model for an understanding of the inspiration of Scripture. This way of understanding the inspiration of Scripture was then applied to the other books of the Bible, and to other literary forms: poems, songs, histories, wisdom sayings and all the rest. Behind the books of the Bible stand the inspired authors, each of whom wrote down what God wanted to be written down.” (p. 30-32).
But the model of the prophet receiving the very words of God is not a good paradigm for understanding the Bible as a whole. In the first place, prophetic speech claiming “thus says the Lord” is not seen much at all in the Old Testament, although it is true that it is common in the prophetic books. We don’t read, for instance, “the priests, who were heads of families, numbered 1,760,” ’ thus says the Lord’ (
I Chronicles 9:13). Or “I am the rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys,” ‘thus says the Lord’ (
Song of Songs 2:1). According to James Barr, in his excellent discussion on this whole subject, such a prophetic paradigm “is not applied to the total literature of the Old Testament by that literature itself. Large tracts of Old Testament material are not in any normal sense ‘prophetic’ and these tracts make no pretension to possessing the features of being words directly given by God such as we find in the speeches of the prophets themselves.”
Beyond Fundamentalism (Westminister Press, 1984), p. 21-23.
But when we do look at those passages where the prophets use the phrases like, “thus says the Lord,” what do we find? “For the most part the content concerns the divine judgment and the divine promise upon Israel, Judah and other peoples (See Amos).” “It is a warning of disaster that will come unless one’s ways are mended. What a prophet says, then, is characteristically not an absolute. What the prophet says is conditioned. It may be affected by repentance of the persons affected, or by the pleas and prayers of the righteous on their behalf.” (Barr, p. 23-24).
Jeremiah 18:5-10 describes this best. It reads: “The word of the Lord came to me: ‘If at any time I announce that a nation is to be uprooted and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.”
Isaiah prophesied that Hezekiah would die, but because he prayed to live, God gave him an additional 15 years (
Isaiah 38:1-6). Technically speaking, what the prophet Isaiah predicted was not fulfilled. But that didn’t bother Isaiah because “his utterances were not absolute statements of fact, past, present or future; they were warnings, threats, appeals.” (Barr, p. 25). Jonah (3:2,5,10) obeyed “the word of the Lord” by prophesying to the people of Nineveh, “forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” They repented and God did not destroy them. But didn’t Jonah prophesy that Nineveh would be overturned? We see this throughout the prophets. Barr: “Prophecy was not concerned with accuracy, but with communicating the will and judgment of God. The belief that the prophetic paradigm supports ideas of accuracy and inerrancy can be maintained only if the actuality of what the Old Testament prophets were like is ignored.” (p. 29).
Where the prophets do predict the future, according to Barr “the vast majority” of them are fairly short term ones, and as we’ve seen, most all of these are conditioned upon the responses of the hearers. The prophets did describe a future ideal messianic age in which pain and suffering would be eliminated (
Isaiah 11:6-9), but “these are not really ‘predictions.’ They are expressions of aspirations and ideals which, the prophet is confident, God will bring to realization. They do not ‘predict’ how or when or in what degree these expectations may be realized.” (pp. 101-102). Furthermore, “it is not the case that prediction is possible only with supernatural aid or guidance. People do it all the time. A number of the predictions which Old Testament prophets make could have been made by a capable newspaper columnist of the period.” (Barr, p. 102; see
Jeremiah 34).
From what I’ve said it will be clear that I do not believe Michael Drosnin’s claims in his 1997 book,
The Bible Code, that there are any hidden meanings or prophecies in the Bible. See the part in Jeffery L. Sheler’s book,
Is The Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures (Harper, 1999) that discusses the Bible Code. He debunks Drosnin’s claims more than adequately. See Sheller’s arguments also in U.S. News & World Report’s special issue: “Mysteries of the Bible,” November 2004.
What Then of Biblical Authority? The traditional prophetic paradigm does not adequately model what the Bible is like. If there is no predictive prophecy, then the life and times of Jesus were not predicted in advance either, except as aspirations of hope, human guesswork and misinterpretation. Along with other things, this leads me to believe that the Bible does not contain the very words of God. It has no authority over us.
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Does God Foreknow The Future?
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No matter what happens, someone will find a way to take it too seriously. 
People! We must stop
