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Greg Boyd's Open Theism: A Catholic Critique

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Raphael, St. Michael Vanquishing Satan (1518), depicting the archangel triumphing over the devil in spiritual warfare
Raphael, St. Michael Vanquishing Satan (1518), oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Greg Boyd is arguably the most publicly visible proponent of open theism in contemporary Protestantism. As pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and founder of the ReKnew ministry, Boyd has devoted decades to articulating and defending the view that God perfectly knows all possibilities and their probabilities but does not know future free choices as settled certainties—because, in his view, they do not yet exist as such. Over three books spanning the early 2000s—God of the Possible, Satan and the Problem of Evil, and Is God to Blame?—Boyd constructed what remains the most comprehensive evangelical case for reimagining divine omniscience. More recently, in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (2017), he has developed a “cruciform hermeneutic” for interpreting the Old Testament’s violent portraits of God through the lens of the cross—a project in nonviolent theology that presupposes but is distinct from his open theism.

As a former open theist myself, I approach Boyd’s work with genuine respect. His theological vision is serious, pastorally motivated, and deeply engaged with Scripture. And yet, having come to embrace the Catholic tradition, I find that Boyd’s fundamental theological commitments are incompatible with classical Christian teaching on the nature of God. This essay offers a sympathetic but critical engagement with his major works, asking what Catholics can learn from Boyd while also pointing toward the superior resources the Catholic tradition offers.

Who Is Greg Boyd?

Before turning to Boyd’s theology, a word about the man. Boyd holds a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Minnesota and an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School. He earned his Ph.D. in theology—specifically philosophical and systematic theology—from Princeton Theological Seminary. Boyd joined the faculty at Bethel University in 1986 and co-founded Woodland Hills Church with Paul Mitton in 1992, serving at both institutions simultaneously until leaving Bethel in 2004 after eighteen years. Woodland Hills has grown into a congregation of thousands. Through ReKnew.org, his nonprofit ministry, Boyd has become the public face of open theism in America. He is prolific: the author or coauthor of more than twenty books, a sought-after speaker at evangelical conferences, and a prominent voice on social media.[1]

What sets Boyd apart from academic open theists like David Basinger or John Sanders is his commitment to pastoral theology. Boyd writes not primarily for seminarians but for thoughtful Christians struggling with suffering and doubt. His theological work emerges from conversations with congregants who have experienced tragedy, injustice, and the apparent silence of God. This pastoral concern animates everything he writes.

God of the Possible: The Case for Open Theism

Boyd’s 2000 book God of the Possible remains the clearest popular-level defense of open theism. The argument is built on a straightforward observational claim: Scripture contains two seemingly incompatible motifs regarding the future.

The “motif of future openness” appears throughout Scripture. God responds to human prayer as though outcomes are genuinely uncertain. God grieves over his creatures’ choices (Gen. 6:5-6). He tests Abraham not to gain information but to see if Abraham will obey (Gen. 22:12). God “changes his mind” repeatedly—about destroying Nineveh, about punishing Israel, about his relationship with Saul. The prophets offer genuine conditional predictions: if you repent, this will happen; if you rebel, that will happen. For Boyd, these texts testify to a God who genuinely responds to creaturely freedom.

The “motif of future determinism” (or “settledness”) insists on God’s absolute sovereignty, omniscience, and control. Passages declare that God knows all things from eternity, that nothing can thwart his purposes, that he has predestined what will come to pass. Boyd does not dismiss these texts. Rather, he argues that classical theists have allowed this motif to dominate and interpret away the genuine openness of the first.

Boyd’s own reading prioritizes the motif of future openness as the more faithful to Scripture’s overall witness. God’s nature includes both omniscience and responsiveness, but omniscience means knowing all possibilities with their probabilities, not knowing which possibilities will be actualized through free creatures. As Boyd argues across his work, God knows everything it is logically possible to know—but because the future is not yet settled, it cannot be known as settled.[2]

The genius of God of the Possible is its accessibility. Boyd avoids technical philosophical argumentation and lets Scripture speak. He acknowledges the apparent tension without pretending there is no tension. And he trusts his readers to decide which motif better captures the biblical portrait of God’s character.

Satan and the Problem of Evil: The Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy

By his second major work, Boyd had begun to recognize that open theism is not merely an exegetical position but a full-orbed metaphysical vision with profound implications for theodicy. Satan and the Problem of Evil (2001) introduces what Boyd calls the “trinitarian warfare theodicy”—an attempt to address the classic problem of evil within an open theist framework.

The core argument is simple: If God genuinely respects creaturely freedom, then evil results from the misuse of that freedom, not from God’s design. God is not responsible for evil because he does not micromanage the world. At every moment, God faces a genuinely open future shaped by the free choices of billions of creatures (human and angelic). God wages constant warfare against evil, seeking to persuade creatures toward good, but he does not compel them to choose rightly.

This solves, Boyd believes, the classical theodicist’s dilemma: If God is omnipotent and loving, why does evil persist? Boyd’s answer: God has voluntarily limited his own power by granting genuine freedom. Evil persists because creatures freely choose it, and God respects those choices even as he works to overcome them through persuasion, providence, and ultimately through the cross.

For Boyd, Satan is not a helpless puppet in God’s hand but a genuine adversary with real power. The warfare motif that dominates Scripture—God fighting against chaos, against Egypt, against demonic forces—testifies to a cosmos where evil is real and God’s victory is genuine, not predetermined.

The strength of Boyd’s theodicy is that it takes suffering seriously and refuses to domesticate God’s transcendence by making him the architect of atrocities. The weakness, which I will address below, is that it requires rethinking divine omnipotence and omniscience in ways incompatible with classical theology.

Is God to Blame?: Theology in Pastoral Key

If God of the Possible is Boyd’s theological manifesto and Satan and the Problem of Evil his systematic working-out of its implications, then Is God to Blame? (2003) is his pastoral heart. This book speaks directly to the person who has suffered and wondered if God had ordained their suffering.

Boyd’s pastoral case is powerful. He argues that much Christian theodicy—even well-intentioned attempts to defend God—actually compounds the suffering of believers by suggesting that their pain is ultimately part of God’s plan. A child dies in an accident, and a well-meaning Christian says, “God must have wanted this to happen for some hidden reason.” For Boyd, this is not just pastorally insensitive; it is theologically wrong. The child’s death is not God’s will. It is the tragic consequence of a world where genuine freedom exists—a world God values more than a world where he controls every outcome.

Instead, Boyd offers a God who grieves with us, who is genuinely surprised by evil, who fights alongside us against suffering. This God does not offer explanations but companionship. He does not reveal the divine purpose behind suffering but promises to be present in it and ultimately to overcome it through the resurrection.

For those struggling with theodicy, Is God to Blame? is deeply moving. I have seen it comfort believers in ways that classical theodicy sometimes cannot. Yet even here, the theological cost of Boyd’s vision becomes apparent. To preserve the genuine openness of the future, Boyd must sacrifice something central to classical Christian faith: the conviction that God’s knowledge is eternal and immutable, that he knows all things perfectly, that nothing in history takes him by surprise.

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: A Cruciform Hermeneutic

In his 2017 magnum opus, Boyd attempts something more ambitious: a complete theological vision grounded in what he calls a “cruciform hermeneutic.” The cross, for Boyd, is the lens through which all Scripture must be interpreted. When we read of God commanding genocide or smiting enemies, we must ask whether these portraits are consistent with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. If not, Boyd argues, we must be willing to question whether these accounts accurately represent God’s character, or whether they represent the cultural assumptions of ancient Israel read back onto God.

This move is theologically significant. By making the cross central to biblical interpretation, Boyd retrieves something genuinely important: the conviction that Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s character, and that any theology must cohere with what we learn from him. The problem comes when Boyd uses this principle to undermine the authority of large portions of the Old Testament, or to suggest that the biblical authors themselves sometimes misrepresented God.

The strength of Crucifixion of the Warrior God is its refusal to paper over the genuine tensions in Scripture. The weakness is that it offers a hermeneutical solution that many will find unconvincing—either because they see genuine continuity between the Old Testament God and Jesus, or because they question whether a cruciform reading can sustain the full authority of Scripture.

A Catholic Evaluation

Having sketched Boyd’s theological vision, I want to offer a Catholic assessment. I do this with charity. Boyd is theologically serious, pastorally motivated, and scripturally engaged in ways that deserve respect. His work has helped many believers hold together their faith and their experience of suffering. He has not written carelessly or out of ideological commitment to a philosophical position (though some of his critics have suggested otherwise). He genuinely believes that open theism better represents the biblical witness and better serves the Church’s pastoral mission.

And yet, I believe Boyd’s theological vision is fundamentally incompatible with Catholic teaching. The incompatibility lies not in peripheral matters but in the very heart of Christian metaphysics: the nature of God’s knowledge and his relationship to time.

On Divine Omniscience: The Catholic tradition, following Augustine and Aquinas, teaches that God knows all things—past, present, and future—in a single eternal act. God does not stand outside time in the way open theists sometimes suggest; rather, God’s knowledge is eternal and immutable, embracing the whole of creation in a single, timeless vision. This is not mere foreknowledge (as if God were predicting the future like a fortuneteller); it is knowledge of what eternally is, from God’s perspective. The future is not “unsettled” from God’s viewpoint, even if it is genuinely open from ours.

This teaching is not peripheral to Catholic theology. It follows from the doctrine of God’s immutability (formally defined by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and solemnly reaffirmed by Vatican I’s Dei Filius in 1870) and is grounded in Scripture’s testimony that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Boyd’s open theism, by contrast, requires that God learn, be surprised, and change his intentions—precisely what the tradition denies.

On Divine Omnipotence: Boyd limits God’s power by appeal to creaturely freedom. But the Catholic tradition has its own sophisticated account of how divine omnipotence and human freedom coexist. Through Molinism and other frameworks, Catholic theology affirms both God’s absolute power and human freedom without requiring that God’s knowledge be limited to mere possibilities.[3] God knows not only what could happen but what will happen—and he knows this without determining it, through his knowledge of how free creatures would choose in any possible situation.

On Divine Simplicity: Perhaps most fundamentally, Boyd’s open theism conflicts with the doctrine of divine simplicity—the teaching that God is not composed of parts, that his essence is his existence, that his knowledge, will, and power are ultimately one divine act. Open theism, by treating God’s knowledge as something that can be limited or grow, implicitly treats knowledge as a distinct property or part of God. The Catholic tradition, by contrast, insists that God’s knowledge is God. To diminish God’s knowledge is not to preserve God’s transcendence but to undermine it.

Yet What We Can Learn: This said, Catholics have much to learn from Boyd. His work reminds us that classical theism, for all its metaphysical sophistication, can sometimes appear cold or abstract when confronted with real suffering. Boyd’s insistence that Scripture often portrays God as genuinely responding to creatures, as taking their prayers seriously, as grieving over sin—this is not unbiblical. It may require a more subtle philosophical framework than open theism offers, but it is a biblical insight that classical theology must honor.

Boyd’s pastoral theology is also a gift to the Church. His refusal to suggest that suffering is somehow “part of God’s plan” can be deeply healing for those who have experienced trauma. The medieval scholastic’s metaphysical defense of providence can sometimes sound like a betrayal of the sufferer. Boyd reminds us that we must do theology not from the philosopher’s armchair but from the hospital bed, the funeral, the courtroom of injustice.

Finally, Boyd’s commitment to taking Scripture at face value—even when it creates tension with metaphysical theology—is exemplary. He does not dismiss inconvenient biblical texts. He wrestles with them. In an age when much theology is abstracted from Scripture, Boyd’s fundamentally exegetical approach is refreshing.

Conclusion

Greg Boyd deserves to be read. His work represents a serious engagement with the problem of evil, a deep commitment to Scripture, and a genuine concern for the suffering Church. He writes with clarity, passion, and intellectual integrity.

But open theism is not the answer to the classical problem of evil. It solves the problem of how a good God can permit evil by redefining what omniscience and omnipotence mean. In doing so, it diminishes the very transcendence of God that theodicy aims to preserve. God is not limited in his knowledge or power. He knows all things eternally. Yet he has freely created a world in which genuine creaturely freedom exists, and he works within that world to overcome evil through persuasion, providence, and ultimately through the cross.

The Catholic tradition offers richer resources for this vision than open theism does. It does not require us to compromise God’s transcendence. It allows us to affirm both divine omniscience and human freedom. And it remains open, through its mystical and contemplative heritage, to the experience of God’s immediate presence and responsiveness that Boyd rightly cherishes.

For those exploring theology, Boyd’s works remain essential reading. For those seeking a more adequate response to the problem of evil, the Catholic tradition’s integration of classical metaphysics with Scripture, reason, and experience offers a surer foundation.

Further Reading

By Greg Boyd:

  • God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Baker Books, 2000)
  • Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (InterVarsity Press, 2001)
  • Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering (InterVarsity Press, 2003)
  • The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Reinterpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017)
  • ReKnew.org (Boyd’s ministry site)

On Open Theism:

Catholic Responses to the Problem of Evil:

Evangelical Responses to Open Theism:

  • William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Wipf & Stock, 1999)
  • Terrance L. Tiessen, Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in the World? (InterVarsity Press, 2000)

Footnotes

  1. Boyd maintains an active social media presence and publishes regular content at ReKnew.org. His prolific output—which includes numerous essays, podcasts, and responses to critics—testifies to his commitment to public theology and accessibility. This productivity has sometimes led critics to charge that his work is repetitive or insufficiently rigorous, though such criticism seems uncharitable given the consistency and depth of his thought across different genres.
  2. This formulation paraphrases Boyd's core argument as developed across several passages in God of the Possible (Baker Books, 2000), especially pp. 15–16, 120, and 125–126. Boyd's central claim—that God knows all possibilities but not which possibilities will be actualized—is the classic open theist solution to the problem of divine omniscience. It preserves omniscience (knowing everything knowable) while limiting it to what is, in principle, knowable (the realm of possibility rather than actuality).
  3. Molinism, the theological framework developed by Luis de Molina and employed by contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga (a Reformed Protestant) and William Lane Craig, offers a sophisticated account of how God can possess infallible foreknowledge of free creaturely choices without determining those choices. God knows not only what creatures will freely choose but also all counterfactuals about how they would choose in any given circumstance. See /molinism/ for a fuller exploration of this doctrine. This framework has the advantage of preserving both divine omniscience and human freedom without requiring open theism's revision of God's nature.
  4. Vatican I, Dei Filius (1870), ch. 1, teaches that God, "since He is one, singular, completely simple and unchangeable spiritual substance, is to be declared as really and essentially distinct from the world," and that "all things are naked and open to His eyes, even those which by the free action of creatures are in the future." This binding Catholic teaching makes clear that the Church's official teaching requires affirming God's complete and perfect knowledge of future contingents—a position fundamentally at odds with open theism.
  5. Augustine's treatment of God's knowledge in Confessions XI and City of God V, and Aquinas's extended discussion in Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, both emphasize that God's eternal knowledge is not successive or discursive but rather a single, eternal intuition that embraces all times. This is not knowledge "of" the future as if from some privileged external vantage point, but rather knowledge of what is, from God's eternal perspective.
  6. William Lane Craig's response to open theism can be found on his Reasonablefaith.org website and in his numerous publications defending Molinism. Craig argues that open theism, while well-intentioned, ultimately proves self-defeating because it cannot adequately explain God's ability to answer prayer or to guarantee that his purposes will be fulfilled.
  7. The phrase "theology in pastoral key" is my own, but it captures what I take to be Boyd's distinctive contribution. Unlike purely academic defenses of open theism, Boyd's work always maintains a connection to the lived experience of believers struggling with suffering and doubt. This is a genuine strength, even if the underlying theology is inadequate.
  8. Divine simplicity holds that God is not composed of essence and existence, attributes and substance, act and potency—distinctions that mark all creatures. Rather, God's knowledge is God, God's power is God, God's will is God. This doctrine, central to both medieval scholasticism and the Eastern Christian tradition, secures God's absolute transcendence and uniqueness. For a fuller exposition, see /divine-simplicity/.
  9. Boyd's use of the "cruciform hermeneutic" in Crucifixion of the Warrior God represents an important retrieval of the principle that Christ is the key to interpreting Scripture. However, the Catholic tradition would argue that the Old Testament can be read as fully coherent with Christ's self-revelation without requiring us to question the historical reliability of the biblical accounts or to suggest that the biblical authors misunderstood God's character. See /crucifixion-of-the-warrior-god/ for a more detailed review.
  10. The relationship between God's providence and human freedom is one of the deepest questions in theology. Catholic teaching, grounded in Aquinas and developed through thinkers like Luis de Molina and later Garrigou-Lagrange, insists that there is no genuine tension here—though the full resolution remains a mystery. See /divine-foreknowledge-and-free-will/ for an extended treatment.
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Garrett Ham, author — attorney, military veteran, and Yale M.Div.

Garrett Ham

Garrett Ham is an attorney, military veteran, and holds a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on theology, law, and service.

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