OMNISCIENCE. This term does not appear in Scripture as either a noun or an adjective. Nevertheless, the “all-knowing” God is an inescapable teaching of the Scriptures. Support for this is on almost every page, as any systematic theology attests. A. H. Strong (Systematic Theology, 282) is illustrative: “God knows His inanimate creation (Ps 147:4); He has knowledge of brute creation (Matt 10:29); of men and their wills (Ps 33:13-15); of hearts of men and their thoughts (Acts 15:8; Ps 139:2); of our wants (Matt 7:8); of the least things (10:30); of the past (Mal 3:16); of the future (Isa. 46:9, 10); of men’s future acts (Isa 44:28); of men’s future evil acts (Acts 2:23); of the ideally possible (1 Sam 23:12); from eternity (Acts 15:18).” To which may be added that all such knowledge is incomprehensible (Ps 139:6; Rom 11:33; Eph 3:10), and is incomprehensible to men because at one and the same time it embraces past, present, and future (Job 14:17; Ps 56:8; Isa 41:22-24; 44:6-8; Jer 1:5; Hos 13:12; Mal 3:16).

On the basis of Scripture the omniscience of God may be argued from other attributes of His being. Because He is truth and has truth, and because His self-knowledge is complete, and that all things rest on Him, His knowledge of such things must be complete. In the same way, for example, one could argue His omniscience from His omnipresence. In His fullness He is everywhere always, and therefore His awareness is complete. Arguments also are brought forward from prophecy and the fulfillment of prophecy.

Although God’s nature is ineffable, one must still affirm certain things to be true about Him which cannot be grasped fully. His omniscience is at once immediate and eternal. He knows things immediately as they really are without sense experience or imagination, so that all things which men think about in the time sequence are known by Him as an “eternal now.” Without the observation of successive events and without steps of logical reasoning, all things—past, present, and future—are known to Him simultaneously. He grasps, in ways which we cannot define or explain, those necessary acts which follow in the logic of events, and, at the same time, He knows the outworkings of the free acts of His creatures. He not only foreknows how certain events will lead to other events in the total complexity of reality, but He directly knows how the complex motives of multitudes of men will work themselves out in multitudes of personal acts.

When the nature and extent of omniscience are stated in every way possible, there arise two difficult problems, neither of which allows a final answer within the limitations of human thinking. First, how God by His omniscience knows the future as He knows the present and the past; and second, whether the knowledge of the future in any way predetermines the acts of His free creatures.

With regard to the first question, how God can know the future as He knows the present and the past, there are no analogies in human experience to help. The only answer which the scholars have suggested comes under the useful expression of “one eternal now,” which means, in brief, that what the finite mind sees in sequence under the human form of time is seen by God immediately in its totality. God’s nature is not subject to the law of time. God is not involved in time sequence. Whatever logical succession there may be in God’s thoughts there is no chronological succession. It has been suggested that God sees the future as easily as man sees the past, that God looks through time as he looks through space. These analogies may be helpful but are in no way explanatory.

The philosophers get at the problem this way: there is a reality called “Succession.” Otherwise one would not know events to be “successive.” It is only when men observe a stream from above it or from the outside that people see its flow. That which connects and concludes succeeding events (if one is willing to accept “Succession” as a reality) must itself stand above the flow and stream of events. That man can in some measure understand that this could be true, and because man can in some measure observe the move of events in the past and present and grasp some picture of the future, is a transcendental quality in man which is a part of his image of God. People are faced with an order of being and categories of thought which contain the finite and human, but cannot be contained by the finite and human.

Something of the same problem arises in the second question of the relationship between God’s foreknowledge and the free acts of man. Since His foreknowledge is completely true in every detail, does such a foreknowledge necessitate what comes to pass in the free acts of men? Is prescience in God merely an observation or is it, because it is God’s prescience, deterministic? A quotation from Geerhardus Vos shows the narrow edge of the thinking required in facing this problem: “Since scripture includes in the objects of the Divine knowledge also the issue of the exercise of free will on the part of man, the problem arises how the contingent character of such decisions and the certainty of the Divine knowledge can coexist. It is true that the knowledge of God, and the purposing will of God are distinct, and not the former but the latter determines the certainty of the outcome....At the same time, precisely because omniscience presupposes certainty, it appears to exclude every conception of contingency in the free acts of man, such as would render the latter in their very essence undetermined. The knowledge of the issue must have a fixed point of certainty to terminate upon, if it is to be knowledge at all....The appeal of God’s eternity as bringing Him equally near to the future as to the present and enabling Him to see the future decisions of man’s free will as though they were present cannot remove this difficulty, for when once the observation and knowledge of God are made dependent on any temporal issue, the Divine eternity itself is thereby virtually denied. Nothing remains but to recognize that God’s eternal knowledge of the outcome of the free will choices of man implies that there enters into these choices, notwithstanding their free character, an element of predetermination, to which the knowledge of God can attach itself.”

Both questions which arise out of the acceptance of God’s omniscience have no final answer for man’s understanding. That God knows all things must be maintained; how He knows all things cannot be understood.

Bibliography Finney, BS (Oct. 1877), 722; A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology (1947), 282; Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159; A. B. Davidson, Old Testament Theology, 180ff.; Royce, Conception of God, 40; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, I, 344; G. Vos, ISBE, vol. 4, 2191, 2192.