Chapter 10

A God Who Learns

Dake keeps the word omniscient and teaches that God finds out what people will do

Picture a mother waiting by the phone for her son’s test results. The doctor said the call would come by Friday. She has prayed all week, and now she asks the oldest question there is: did God know this was coming? Most Christians would answer at once that of course He knew. Many of them also study from a Bible whose notes give a different answer.

Finis Dake taught that God does not know ahead of time what free people will do. In the fourth lesson of his course God’s Plan for Man, he wrote that God “did not know beforehand that men would become so wicked” before the flood. He added that God did not know they would build Babel, or that Abraham would go through with offering Isaac.¹ He meant it literally. In his system God knows His own plan from beginning to end, but He learns what people will choose when they choose it. He sends messengers to find things out, and He tests people to see what they will do.

Theologians call God’s complete knowledge omniscience. The word means that God knows all things, past, present, and future, including every choice a free creature will ever make. Dake kept the word. He even asked his students, “Define and discuss the omniscience of God. Name some things He does not know.”² What he taught under that word is false teaching. It denies Isaiah 46:10, where God says that He declares “the end from the beginning” and announces what is not yet done. By the test God sets in Isaiah 41, it leaves Him unable to prove that He is God. It is the same error evangelicals rejected when a group of theologians taught it in the 1990s under the name open theism.

Why it matters what God knows

Dake had real concerns behind this teaching. He wanted the words of Scripture to mean what they say, and he wanted human choice to be real. He was an Arminian, which means he believed that a person can resist God’s grace and that a believer can fall away. That is an old Protestant position held by millions of believers, and it is not on trial here.³ The trouble is what he built on those concerns: a God who cannot see the future wherever free people are part of it.

Much rests on this question. When a believer prays about next year, she trusts that God already sees next year. Every fulfilled prophecy in Scripture passed through someone’s free choice. Cyrus had to decide to send the exiles home, Judas had to decide to take the money, and Peter had to decide three times to deny that he knew Jesus. If God cannot know free choices ahead of time, He could not have announced any of those things. Paul’s promise that all things work together for good to those who love God (Romans 8:28) depends on it too. A God who is still finding out what will happen can promise to do His best. He cannot promise that all things will work together, because He has not seen them yet.

Dake carried the doctrine all the way to salvation. He wrote that God “does not know which ones will be saved and which ones will be lost.”⁴ In his system the Lord who bought a believer does not know whether that believer will reach heaven. Jesus spoke very differently about His sheep. He said He knows each one by name, and that no one will snatch them out of His hand (John 10:3, 28).

What Dake taught about God’s knowledge

Verses that “limit God’s knowledge”

Under the heading “God is Omniscient” in Lesson Four, Dake says that certain verses set a limit on the word before he ever says what it means.

The question of the omniscience of God is also much misunderstood. The Bible makes many simple statements that limit God’s knowledge. There would be no sense to such passages if we do not believe them literally. There is no meaning to them if we take them figuratively. There was no object in God saying such things about Himself if they were untrue. God gets to know things concerning the free moral actions of men as others do. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, “God is Omniscient,” p. 62⁵

Dake gives his reader two choices. Either these verses are literal, or they mean nothing. He does not consider that they might mean what a Hebrew reader would have heard in them. That is his rule of reading at work, the rule that Chapter 4 examines, and here it settles the doctrine of God before a single verse is studied. His last sentence states the result. God learns about people’s choices the same way people learn about each other.

What God did not know

On the same page Dake gives his examples, one after another.

Each example is a scene from Scripture. They include the world before the flood, the tower of Babel, Sodom, and Abraham on the mountain. They also include Moses at the burning bush, asking how Israel would believe him, and Israel in the desert. In each one Dake reads God’s words as a report of something God had just found out. He also cites verses from Jeremiah in which God says that something never came into His mind.⁷ Those verses are taken up below.

Messengers sent to find out

If God does not know, He needs a way to learn, and Dake supplies one.

God does not take care of every detail of His vast business in all the kingdoms of the universe. His agents help Him and they are found in every part of the universe on missions for God. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 62⁸

Then he says what the agents are for.

God sends messengers throughout the whole of His vast creations to find out for Him what He wants to know, the same as the head of any other business would be likely to do, so that plans may be made and actions taken accordingly. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 62⁹

The comparison to a business is Dake’s own. God is the head of the firm, and the angels are His field staff. They go out, gather what He does not know, and report back so that He can make plans.¹⁰ Scripture says of God, “His understanding is infinite” (Psalm 147:5), and Isaiah asks who ever taught the LORD knowledge (Isaiah 40:13–14). In Dake’s picture God is taught by His own messengers. Dake’s wider teaching on angels belongs to Chapter 19.

Not from all eternity

On the next page Dake states the rule plainly.

Such facts and many others make it clear that God does not know from all eternity what any one man will do, much less what different types and dispositions of men will do under various circumstances that are not yet present to deal with. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 63¹¹

Then he applies it to salvation.

God’s eternal plan for man is known from the beginning to the end and what He plans to bring to pass on Earth He has power to do, but concerning the free actions of free moral agents He does not know from all eternity what they will do before they are in existence and are here to have a part in His plan. He does not know which ones will be saved and which ones will be lost. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 63¹²

His system has two parts. God knows His plan, and He knows it perfectly. He does not know what the people in the plan will choose, and that includes who will be saved. Dake reached this partly by counting. He tallied the commands, the promises, and the conditional “if” clauses in the Bible, and he argued that so many conditions prove God does not cause every event.¹³ So far he is right. A conditional promise shows how God deals with people. It says nothing about how much God knows about them, and Dake’s argument proves the first point and then assumes the second.

The same teaching in his Bible

The doctrine is not confined to his course book. His Study Bible teaches it in its notes and its index. In his list of God’s attributes, printed beside Psalm 14, he writes:

9 Omniscient (all-knowing) as far as His nature, plan, and work are concerned (Rom. 11:33). As to free moral agents, God learns certain things about them (Gen. 6:5-7; 11:5-7; 18:21; 22:12; 2 Chr. 16:9; Job 12:22; 24:23; Ps. 7:9; 44:21; 139:1-6; Pr. 24:12; Jer. 17:10; Ezek. 11:5; Zech. 4:10; 1 Cor. 2:10-11; Rom. 8:27; 1 Th. 2:4). God sends messengers on innumerable duties to help Him carry on His rulership of all things (Dan. 10:13-21; 11:1; 12:1; Zech. 1:7-11; 6:1-8; Mt. 18:10-11; Heb. 1:14). He permits free moral agents freedom of action as to their conduct and destiny (note z, Rom. 8:29) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, “22 attributes of God (14:1),” item 9, classic O.T. p. 623¹⁴

His note on the visit to Abraham in Genesis 18 says the same thing in one line: “Here we have another proof that God receives knowledge of true conditions and becomes acquainted with existing facts” (classic O.T. p. 15, note m).¹⁵ The index entry for the word itself gives the doctrine its plainest form. Its headword is misspelled on the page.

Omnicient [sic], all knowing. This also must be understood in a limited sense, the same as omnipotence and omnipresence. Many passages show clearly that God comes to know certain acts of free and sovereign wills, and He does not plan or try to know from all eternity past the infinite details regarding beings who are here now and others that will be brought into existence in all eternity to come. Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, Concordance and Cyclopedic Index, newer typeset edition p. 101 (classic p. 81)¹⁶

A student working through the course and a reader who only looks things up in the index are taught the same doctrine. Both of them are also told to go on calling it omniscience.

Isaiah 46, kept for the plan

Dake knew Isaiah 46:10 and quoted it. In Lesson Five he puts it first among the passages that show God’s plan was known from the start.

The following passages prove that the plan was made and known unto God from the very beginning: “Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times” (Isa. 46:10-11). God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Five, “The Drafting of God’s Plan,” p. 77¹⁷

The verse may prove that God knew His plan. It may not prove that He knew what people would do. Much later in the course, in Lesson Thirty-Three, Dake states that rule outright.

The word foreknowledge simply means the prescience of God or the knowing beforehand certain events that will happen. If we are to take the Bible for what it says about God we will have to recognize that God gets to know certain things concerning free moral agents just as they get to know some things about each other. This is plainly stated in Gen. 3:8; 6:6,7; 11:5-8; 18:18-21; 22:12; Ex. 2:24, 25; Psalms 1:6; Jer. 17:10. God knows His plan from the beginning to the end, and certain passages used to teach foreknowledge from all eternity in connection with detailed events in the lives of free wills really refer to His general plan only, not to free moral acts of those particular men . . . God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Thirty-Three, “Foreknowledge,” p. 621¹⁸

Every passage about foreknowledge is sent back to the plan, and the person drops out of it. Genesis 18 and Genesis 22 appear again in his list. Dake builds the doctrine on the same texts in Lesson Four and in Lesson Thirty-Three, which shows that it was a settled position and not a passing remark.¹⁹

What the Bible says God knows

Dake asked his readers to take the Bible at its word. That rule has to cover every verse, including the ones that speak about God’s knowledge directly. Isaiah gives the plainest of them.

Remember the former things of old, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things that are not yet done, Saying, “My counsel shall stand, And I will do all My pleasure,” . . . Isaiah 46:9–10 (NKJV)²⁰

God gives His knowledge of the future as the reason no one is like Him, and what He declares includes “things that are not yet done” as well as His own plans. A few chapters earlier He turns this into a challenge to the idols.

“Present your case,” says the LORD. “Bring forth your strong reasons,” says the King of Jacob. “Let them bring forth and show us what will happen; Let them show the former things, what they were, That we may consider them, And know the latter end of them; Or declare to us things to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter, That we may know that you are gods . . . Isaiah 41:21–23 (NKJV)²¹

God rests His claim to be God on this test. Tell us the future, He says to the idols, and we will know that you are gods. If knowing the future is what separates the true God from false ones, then a God who cannot know free choices ahead of time fails His own test. Isaiah presses the point in the chapters that follow. God says He announced events before they happened so that Israel could not give the credit to an idol.²² Those events included the choices of a foreign king and the stubbornness of Israel itself. Anyone can announce his own plans. A God who announces what stubborn people will do, and then it happens, has shown what only God can show.

David says the same thing about his own life. Dake cites the opening verses of Psalm 139 as proof that God learns by searching, but the psalm goes on.

For there is not a word on my tongue, But behold, O LORD, You know it altogether. . . . Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them. Psalm 139:4, 16 (NKJV)²³

The words on David’s tongue and the days of his life were known before either of them existed. The New Testament says it in two short statements: God “knows all things” (1 John 3:20), and no creature is hidden from His sight (Hebrews 4:13).²⁴ The church has confessed the same. The Westminster Confession says that God’s knowledge is infinite and that nothing is uncertain to Him.²⁵

Futures God named in advance

Scripture also offers a direct test. Did God ever announce ahead of time a free choice that a particular person would make? He did, many times, and sometimes by name.

He called Cyrus by name and described his work long before Cyrus was born.²⁶ Cyrus still had to decide to let the exiles go home, and no one forced him. A prophet at Bethel named Josiah about three centuries ahead of time and said what he would do to that altar.²⁷ Josiah chose to carry out his reform. Micah named Bethlehem as the town where the Messiah would be born, and getting Mary and Joseph there took a Roman census and a long journey to a town they did not live in.²⁸

Then Jesus told Peter what he would do that very night.

Assuredly, I say to you that this night, before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times. Matthew 26:34 (NKJV)²⁹

That one sentence names three free choices by one man, the number of them, and the hour. If God cannot know free acts before they happen, Jesus could not have said it. The apostles spoke the same way about the cross.

Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death . . . Acts 2:23 (NKJV)³⁰

Peter puts God’s foreknowledge and the guilt of the men who crucified Jesus in one sentence. He saw no conflict between them.

Genesis 18: a judge at work

Dake’s case rests mostly on two chapters of Genesis, and they deserve a careful answer. The first is the visit to Abraham before Sodom was destroyed.

And the LORD said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grave, I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry against it that has come to Me; and if not, I will know.” Genesis 18:20–21 (NKJV)³¹

The chapter itself shows what kind of language this is. Before the LORD speaks of going down, He asks whether He should hide from Abraham what He is about to do. He decides to tell him, so that Abraham will teach his household to keep the way of the LORD “to do righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19).³² Then Abraham pleads for the city, and he rests his plea on one question: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” This is the language of a courtroom. God acts as a judge who hears the case in the open, and Abraham learns to intercede. The chapter never reports anything God found out. It ends with mercy offered to a whole city for the sake of ten righteous people.

The same chapter shows God knowing things that no one reported to Him. He tells Abraham that Sarah will have a son in a year, and He knows that she laughed to herself inside the tent. So the chapter Dake uses to show God going to look also shows Him knowing without looking.

Genesis 22: “Now I know”

The second chapter is the harder one. On the mountain the Angel of the LORD stops Abraham’s hand.

Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me. Genesis 22:12 (NKJV)³³

Dake reads “now I know” as new information reaching God. Scripture tells us elsewhere what God’s tests are for.

And you shall remember that the LORD your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. Deuteronomy 8:2 (NKJV)³⁴

God led Israel into the wilderness and set the test Himself. He chose the place and the forty years. The test brought what was in Israel’s heart into the open, where Israel could see it and every generation after could read about it. Abraham’s test worked the same way. His faith was real before he climbed the mountain, and at the top it was shown to everyone. James points to that moment and says that by works Abraham’s faith “was made perfect” (James 2:22).³⁵ “Now I know” announces that the matter stands proved.

The verses in which something never came into God’s mind need the same care. In Jeremiah they speak of parents burning their children in the Valley of Hinnom. They are words of horror. God says He never commanded such a thing and never had it in mind. They tell us how far that sin was from His will, and nothing about the limits of His knowledge.³⁶

His own proof from prophecy

In Lesson Two Dake defends the Bible against skeptics. His argument is fulfilled prophecy, and he makes it well.

This is an indisputable proof, for there are hundreds of prophecies spoken centuries before fulfillment which exclude all human possibility of fulfillment. They are in such infinite detail as to be beyond all human power to predict. There were 333 prophecies fulfilled in the life of Christ. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Two, p. 22³⁷

A few lines later he states his conclusion.

Only God could foretell such future events, thus proving the Bible to be a revelation of God by inspiration. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Two, p. 22³⁸

I agree with him. The trouble is that this argument and his teaching on page 63 cannot both stand. The prophecies about Christ are full of free human acts: a betrayal for thirty pieces of silver, soldiers gambling for His clothing, a rich man giving his own tomb. If God does not know ahead of time what any one man will do, He could not have foretold them, and Dake’s best defense of the Bible falls with them. His argument for the Bible needs the doctrine his notes deny.

When Dake is not arguing the point, he reads the Gospels the way the church does. In Lesson Twenty-Three he uses Peter to show that a believer can fall and be restored.

He went out immediately and repented and was converted again, fulfilling the prophecy of Jesus of his backsliding and conversion. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-Three, p. 427³⁹

Dake calls it a prophecy, and he is right to. Jesus foretold both Peter’s fall and his return. Someone might answer that Jesus simply knew Peter’s character well. Knowing a man’s character does not tell you the hour of a rooster’s crow or the number of his denials.

The company this teaching keeps

In the 1990s a group of evangelical theologians argued for what they called the openness of God. They said that God knows everything that can be known, but that future free choices cannot be known because they do not yet exist. They read Genesis 18 and Genesis 22 the way Dake read them.⁴⁰ After a long debate, conservative evangelicals rejected the view. Dake had published the same conclusion in 1949.⁴¹ Many believers who would reject open theism by name study from margin notes that teach it.

His Arminian convictions are not the cause. Jacob Arminius taught that God’s knowledge is eternal and takes in all things, including what free people will do. John Wesley taught the same, and he added that God’s knowing a thing does not cause it. The classic Arminian account of election depends on complete foreknowledge, because it says God chooses those whose faith He foresees, and no one can foresee what cannot be known.⁴² Historic Arminianism guards human freedom by limiting what God does. Dake guards it by limiting what God is. Chapter 11 shows him making the same move with God’s power.

Isn’t it more faithful to read “now I know” at face value?

This is the strongest objection, and it has something right in it. A good deal of theology has buried the plain words of Scripture under abstractions. But face value has to work in both directions. “I will go down now and see” is in the Bible, and so is God’s word that He declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10). “Now I know” is in the Bible, and so is David’s confession that there is not a word on his tongue that God does not already know. Both sets of verses are written in the same plain style. The question is which set explains the other.

Scripture settles that itself. God offers His knowledge of the future as public proof that He is God, and then He gives the proof by naming Cyrus, Josiah, Bethlehem, and Peter’s three denials. The verses that tell us who God is should govern the verses that show God speaking with people inside a story.

Didn’t Dake say God could know if He chose to?

Readers who have worked through Lesson Four sometimes point to page 64, where Dake seems to soften his position.

So in the thought of God being limited concerning His knowledge of human affairs, we must conclude that it is not so much that God cannot know beforehand all things if He chose to do so, but He does not choose to do this because of the very nature of His plan, and because it was made in conjunction with unpredictable free moral agents. We can still believe that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, impartial, longsuffering, etc., by nature, but that He limits Himself according to His plan of dealing with other beings who are capable of free action, and therefore, it cannot be known what they will do under all circumstances until they are tested. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 64⁴³

The first sentence says that God could know if He chose to, and simply chooses not to. That would leave God’s ability whole. The second sentence ends by saying that “it cannot be known what they will do under all circumstances until they are tested.” That is a claim about what can be known at all, so it takes back what the first sentence offered.⁴⁴ In between, Dake keeps every one of the old words, which is the pattern Chapter 5 describes.

The softer reading does not help him anyway. A God who has closed His eyes to free choices still could not name Cyrus or count Peter’s denials, so Isaiah’s test still fails. Nor is there any comfort for the mother by the phone in hearing that God could have known and decided not to.

If God knows what I will do, am I still free?

This fear drives much of Dake’s system, and it is an honest one. He wanted to guard human responsibility, and he was right to guard it. Knowing a thing, though, is different from causing it. If you told me what you did yesterday morning, I would know it, and my knowing would not have forced you to do it. Being certain about an act and controlling it are two separate things. God sees the road you will take, and He does not push you down it.⁴⁵

Christians have argued about the will for centuries. Arminian and Reformed believers alike have held both that God knows the future and that people are responsible for their choices. You do not have to settle every question about the will in order to keep the doctrine of God’s knowledge.⁴⁶

The God who already knows

Dake kept the word omniscient. Under it he taught that God does not know ahead of time what free people will do. In his account God learns by investigating and testing, and He sends messengers to find out what He wants to know. That is false teaching. It denies Isaiah 46:10, it fails the test of Isaiah 41, and it is the error evangelicals rejected in open theism.

The true doctrine gives believers what those notes take away. Paul promised that all things work together for good to those who love God, and in the next verse he rested that promise on God’s foreknowledge: “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29).⁴⁷ Only a God who sees the whole road can make that promise. He knew you completely before He set His love on you, so there is nothing about you left for Him to discover. The mother by the phone has to wait for Friday, but God has nothing to wait for. Before the test was run, and before her son was born, God knew the result and knew her, and His promise to her was already made.