Jamie and I used to have a lot of conversations on free will vs. predestination, because of our different backgrounds (United Methodist vs. Primitive Baptist). The whole thing was good though since it made me really figure out what I believed and come up with a way to articulate it. I was googling the speaker from Mars Hill this last Sunday and I found that he is a proponent of of Open Theism, a term I was unfamiliar with, but that really fits the way I see things. Here's an excerpt from his site:

Q: Is it true you’re an “Open Theist” and that you don’t think God knows the future perfectly?

A: I am an “Open Theist” – though I honestly don’t care for the label, because as I’ll show, the uniqueness of this view isn’t in what it says about God but in what it says about the nature of reality. (I think it would be better to call us something like “Open Futurists.”)

In any event, I and other Open Theists absolutely affirm God’s “omniscience.” God knows all of reality perfectly, exactly as it is. Open Theists differ from traditional theists not in our understanding of the perfection of God’s knowledge but in our understanding of the reality that God perfectly knows. The difference comes down to this: we believe that the reality God perfectly knows includes possibilities. Since God gave us free will, we believe some of the future is left up for us to decide. We may freely choose one course of action or we may choose another. To this extent the future is “open.” We base this view primarily on Scripture, since the Bible consistently ascribes free will to people and often presents the future as partly open (see my book God of the Possible for a brief presentation of the scriptural portrayal of the future as partly open).

So, Open Theism does not in any way limit God’s knowledge. Precisely because God’s knowledge is perfect, he knows possibilities as possibilities. (If he knew them any other way, his knowledge would be mistaken.)

Now, does this mean that God doesn’t know the future perfectly? Not at all, unless you assume at the start that the future is exhaustively settled (that is, unless you assume at the start that Open Theism is wrong). If the future is “out there” as an exhaustively settled reality then of course something would be lacking in God’s knowledge if he didn’t know it. But leveling this charge against Open Theists is question begging, since this is the very view of the future we deny. If one rather sees the future as partly composed of possibilities, then God knows the future perfectly precisely because he knows it as partly composed of possibilities.

Think of it this way. Suppose I’m the author of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure children’s books. In these books, various possible story-lines are laid out, but the reader gets to choose which of the possible story-lines they want to read. Now, do you think it would be accurate to say that I, the author of this book, didn’t know the future of each of the characters of my book perfectly simply because I let the reader decide which of the possible futures a character has? Of course not! As the author, I know all the possible story-lines for each character, so of course I know the future of each character perfectly.

So it is in Open Theism. If you grant that the future is partly comprised of possibilities, you can say, “God knows the future perfectly.”

Rob Bell's most recent sermon entitled "Wine and Heaven" is a MUST LISTEN. It's kind of long, but Rob covers a lot of ground in it. I've heard a few pastors try to explain the significance of Jesus' first miracle (or was it...listen and see) including Bishop Willimon, but I haven't really heard it really put in this light before. As always, he paints it in terms of the big picture, and says a lot of stuff about heaven, escapist theology, and he really turns a couple of ideas on their head and makes you think about them from a perspective that you perhaps you hadn't considered. Two men are in a field, one will be taken, one will be left. What if the idea is to be the one left behind and NOT the one taken?