Open Theism vs. Process Theology: What's the Difference?

For nearly a decade, I was an open theist. I found its critique of classical theism compelling—the idea that God’s knowledge of the future is limited, that human beings genuinely possess libertarian free will, and that an omnipotent God might voluntarily constrain His knowledge to preserve that freedom. It seemed intellectually honest in a way that Molinism or Thomism did not.

Then I encountered process theology.

At first glance, open theism and process theology seem like kissing cousins. Both reject exhaustive divine foreknowledge. Both argue that the classical theist picture of an immutable, omniscient God creates intractable problems for human freedom and the problem of evil. Both offer themselves as more coherent alternatives to the inherited tradition of Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm.

But as I read more deeply—Hartshorne on God’s dipolar nature, Griffin on the metaphysical foundations of process thought, Cobb on aesthetic experience—I realized these movements inhabit entirely different theological universes. Open theism, for all its iconoclasm, remains tethered to classical theism in ways process theology has deliberately severed. And the distance between them matters enormously for anyone serious about Christian orthodoxy.

In this essay, I want to map that distance carefully. Not to polemicize, but to help readers understand why two systems that seem to agree on the headline issue—“God doesn’t know the future exhaustively”—are actually in profound disagreement about what God is, what creation is, and what it means to say that God is God.

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The Basic Disagreement

Let me start with the simplest way to distinguish them.

Open theism says: God is omnipotent in the classical sense. God knows all of reality exhaustively—but the future, insofar as it depends on genuinely free choices, does not yet exist as a determinate reality. There is nothing there to know. God’s lack of exhaustive foreknowledge is not a limitation on God’s power or knowledge but a consequence of what the future is: genuinely open.

Process theology says: God is not omnipotent in the classical sense. God cannot know the future exhaustively because the future is not fully determined. The very structure of reality—the genuine openness of becoming—makes exhaustive divine knowledge logically impossible. God is all-powerful within the constraints of reality’s metaphysical structure, but those constraints are not chosen by God. They are fundamental.

This is a crucial divide. Open theists argue that God’s omniscience is intact—God knows all that is knowable—but that future free acts are not yet knowable realities. Process theologians go further, arguing that omnipotence itself must be redefined because reality has a different metaphysical structure than classical theism assumes.

Let me unpack what this means across several key doctrines.

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Creation Ex Nihilo

Open theism: God created the world from nothing, ex nihilo. God alone is necessary; the world is contingent. God could have chosen to create differently, or not to create at all. Open theists affirm this classical Christian doctrine without hesitation.¹

Process theology: God did not create the world ex nihilo. In the process metaphysic inherited from Whitehead, “creativity” is a fundamental feature of reality itself. God cannot create something from nothing because “nothing” is metaphysically impossible; there is always something—some actualization of creative possibility—already present. Process theologians speak of God as “persuading” the world toward greater beauty and complexity, but not as calling it into being from absolute non-existence.

This difference cascades. If God created ex nihilo, then God’s power is not constrained by any pre-existing material—not even by metaphysical possibility itself. If creativity is a fundamental principle independent of God, then God’s power is always exercised within a system God did not create.

For a Catholic like myself, this is dispositive. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo is not negotiable. It protects God’s transcendence and uniqueness. Process theology, by denying it, has already moved outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy in a way that open theism—despite its heterodoxies—has not.

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Divine Omnipotence

This is where the theological rubber meets the road.

Open theism: God is omnipotent. God can do anything that is logically possible—and some open theists would say, anything that is metaphysically possible. But omnipotence does not entail the ability to know what does not yet exist as a determinate fact. Future free choices are not yet realities, so they are not objects of knowledge—even for an omnipotent God. Open theists maintain that God’s sovereignty is exercised through providential wisdom, intimate knowledge of every creature’s character, and the power to respond to whatever unfolds.

Process theology: God is not omnipotent in the classical sense. God cannot unilaterally determine outcomes because doing so would violate the “principle of creative advance” that Whitehead built into the heart of reality. God persuades but does not coerce. God cannot, even in principle, determine what free creatures will choose, because the power to determine choices belongs to the creatures themselves as a feature of their metaphysical status.

Moreover, in process theology, God does not have “all the power.” Some power resides in every actual entity—every drop of experience in the universe. God has the most power, certainly, but it is not qualitatively different from creaturely power. God and the world are entangled in a metaphysical system neither controls.

Here, process theology makes a more radical metaphysical claim. It’s not just that God has chosen to limit His foreknowledge. It’s that the very concept of omnipotence as classical theism understands it—unilateral divine power—is incoherent given how reality actually works.

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Divine Foreknowledge

Open theism: The future does not exist. Only the past and present are real. God knows all actual facts—everything that has happened and is happening—exhaustively and infallibly. But the future, being open and constituted by genuine possibilities, is not an object of knowledge in the same way. God has perfect knowledge of what could happen; God knows probabilities and potentials. But God does not know what will happen in cases of genuine libertarian free choice.

Some open theists argue this is not a limitation on God’s knowledge but rather a feature of reality: the future simply isn’t there to be known. God knows reality as it is—which includes the genuine openness of the future.

Process theology: The future is genuinely open because of the metaphysical structure of reality, not merely because of God’s voluntary choice. God has some knowledge of the future, perhaps, through understanding general principles and trajectories. But God cannot have propositional knowledge of particular future free acts because those acts do not yet possess the kind of actuality that would make them knowable.

In process theology, this follows not from God’s self-imposed limitation but from the very nature of becoming. To know something is to prehend it; to prehend it is to relate to an actual occasion. Future free acts are not yet actual occasions, so they cannot yet be prehended. Even an infinite mind cannot know the unknowable—not because of a divine choice, but because of what knowledge is.

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The Nature of God

Here the divergence becomes acute.

Open theism: God has traditionally divine attributes: aseity (self-existence), simplicity, immutability, impassibility… or at least, open theists argue about which of these must be retained. But many open theists, especially evangelical ones influenced by thinkers like Greg Boyd, are willing to modify these attributes to cohere with openness. Some embrace the idea that God experiences temporal change, that God responds emotionally to human choices, that God “suffers with” His creatures in time.

The core conviction is that God remains God—transcendent, all-knowing (within the bounds of open possibility), all-powerful, and free.

Process theology: God is dipolar. God has a “primordial nature” (timeless, abstract, containing all possibilities) and a “consequent nature” (temporal, concrete, changing in response to the world). God is not simple but complex. God is not impassible but genuinely affected by the world. God experiences time.

Charles Hartshorne, the philosophical architect of modern process theology, argued that God must be dipolar to be perfect. A timeless, unchanging God would be static, frozen, unable to respond to the world. True perfection requires sensitivity to the world—relatedness, responsiveness, emotional engagement. God must be temporal to be good.

For process theologians, God and the world are correlatives. Neither can exist or be understood without the other. This is metaphysically radical: it denies God’s aseity in a way that classical theism—and open theism—affirms it.

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Comparison Table

Here’s a side-by-side overview:

Doctrine	Classical Theism	Open Theism	Process Theology
Creation ex nihilo	Yes	Yes	No (creativity is fundamental)
Divine omnipotence	Absolute power; God can do anything logically possible	Absolute power; future free acts are not yet realities to be known	Redefined; God persuades, not coerces
Divine omniscience	God exhaustively knows the future	God knows all actuals; future is open	Future is unknowable in principle
Divine simplicity	God is absolutely simple	Often rejected or modified	Rejected; God is dipolar and complex
Divine immutability	God is unchanging	Often modified; God responds in time	Rejected; God changes in His consequent nature
Divine impassibility	God is unaffected by creation	Often modified; God experiences emotion	Rejected; God is genuinely affected
God’s aseity	God is self-existent, needs nothing	Affirmed	Denied; God and world are correlatives
God’s relationship to time	Timeless/eternal	Temporal or tenseless	Temporal in consequent nature
Orthodoxy	Catholic, Orthodox, classical Protestant dogma	Challenged; heterodox but intelligible	Far outside Christian orthodoxy

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Compatibility with Christian Orthodoxy

This brings us to the most practically important question: which, if either, can be reconciled with historic Christian faith?

Open theism faces significant obstacles. It requires modifying traditional doctrines of divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility. It seems to make God ignorant of future human choices, which clashes with biblical passages and centuries of doctrinal development.² But—and this is crucial—these are internal problems to be worked out. Open theists can affirm creation ex nihilo, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Trinity, the sacramental system, purgatory, the Communion of Saints. The framework of Christian belief remains intact. The question is whether that framework can tolerate a more open divine nature.

Many Catholics and Orthodox theologians would answer: no, not without serious doctrinal damage. But the problem is one of coherence within Christian metaphysics, not a wholesale rejection of that metaphysics.

Process theology breaks from Christian orthodoxy more radically. By denying creation ex nihilo, it denies God’s unique transcendence and power. By redefining omnipotence as persuasive rather than coercive, it seems to evacuate divine sovereignty of meaning. By treating God and the world as metaphysically correlative, it undermines the Creator-creature distinction that Christian theology has always maintained.³

Process theologians like David Ray Griffin have genuinely tried to recover Christian resources—especially an emphasis on God’s persuasive rather than coercive power, in which divine love is understood as self-giving and vulnerable. And there are beautiful insights in process theology, especially on the problem of evil. A God who suffers with us, who is not impassible but moved by our pain, speaks to something deep in the Christian heart.

But the metaphysical cost is high. As the theologian Kathryn Tanner has observed, process theology cannot account for the kind of radical divine transcendence and creative power that Christianity has historically affirmed. It trades the classical God for something more like a supreme being within being—cosmic, wise, good, but not the God who called worlds into existence from nothing.⁴

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Why I Became Disillusioned with Open Theism (And Why Process Theology Was Never an Option)

My own journey illuminates this comparison. I embraced open theism because it seemed to solve the theodicy problem: if God cannot foreknow the future, God cannot be blamed for the evil that results from free choices. It seemed more coherent than Molinism—God doesn’t rely on middle knowledge to know what counterfactuals will be true—and more biblical than classical theism.

But gradually I confronted a problem internal to open theism: if God is truly omnipotent and timelessly aware of all possibilities, why would God create a world where certain evils will unfold? Even if God doesn’t foreknow the exact choices, God knows what could happen. Is creating a world where horrific suffering is possible really compatible with divine goodness?⁵

This wasn’t a refutation of open theism, but it undermined its distinctive advantage.

When I encountered process theology, I initially thought it might solve this problem more elegantly. A God who is genuinely affected by suffering, who cannot prevent evil because reality’s structure doesn’t permit it—this seemed to offer more theological honesty. But as I studied Whitehead’s Process and Reality and Hartshorne’s The Divine Relativity, I realized I couldn’t make the metaphysical leap they demanded. The denial of creation ex nihilo was the sticking point, but deeper still was the sense that process theology had abandoned God’s transcendence altogether.

Returning to classical theology—specifically, to the ressourcement of Catholic theology through figures like Balthasar and the ressourcement theologians—I found something I hadn’t expected: a way to affirm divine transcendence and God’s genuine responsiveness to creation. Not through denying creation ex nihilo or redefining omnipotence, but through recovering an older understanding of God’s simplicity and eternity that could accommodate God’s intimate knowledge of time without being bound by it.

But that is a different essay.

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Conclusion: Two Different Critiques of Classical Theism

Open theism and process theology are often grouped together as “non-classical” theologies that deny exhaustive divine foreknowledge. But they are after different things.

Open theism critiques classical theism on internal grounds. It says: given what Christianity teaches about human freedom and God’s goodness, classical theism’s picture of omniscience cannot be right. God must be omnipotent, transcendent, and creator—but not omniscient in the way Aquinas and Augustine suggested.

Process theology critiques classical theism on metaphysical grounds. It says: the very metaphysics that underpins classical theism is wrong. Reality is not a static hierarchy of being, with God at the apex and creatures below. Reality is dynamic, creative, constitutively open. Any theology that doesn’t begin with this metaphysical insight will be incoherent.

One is a reform. One is a revolution.

For someone seeking to remain within the Christian tradition—especially the Catholic tradition—the difference is profound. Open theism asks hard questions about divine attributes and freedom, questions the tradition must seriously engage. Process theology requires abandoning the very metaphysical foundations on which that tradition rests.

Both may contain insights worth learning from. Both are ultimately incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy. But they are incompatible for different reasons, and understanding those reasons is essential for thinking clearly about what we mean when we call God “God.”

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Further Reading

On Open Theism:

• Greg Boyd, God of the Possible (Baker, 2000)
• John Sanders, The God Who Risks (IVP, 1998; rev. ed. 2007)
• Clark Pinnock, Most Moved Mover (Baker, 2001)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Open Theism
• Internal links: /open-theism/, /does-god-know-the-future/, /open-theism-vs-molinism/

On Process Theology:

• Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (Yale, 1948)
• David Ray Griffin, God and Religion in the Postmodern World (SUNY, 1989)
• John B. Cobb Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Westminster, 1965)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Process Theology
• Claremont Center for Process Studies
• Internal links: /process-theology/, /divine-simplicity/

Critiques of Both from a Classical Perspective:

• Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Blackwell, 1988)
• David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003)

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Footnotes

1. Some open theists do modify certain classical divine attributes (immutability, simplicity, impassibility), but they uniformly affirm creation ex nihilo as a non-negotiable Christian doctrine. See Greg Boyd, God of the Possible (Baker, 2000), 119-122.

2. The biblical case for exhaustive divine foreknowledge is strong, though contested. Passages like Isaiah 46:10 (“I make known the end from the beginning,” NIV), 1 Peter 1:20 (Christ “chosen before the creation of the world,” NIV), and 2 Timothy 1:9 (God’s grace “given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,” NIV) seem to presuppose a comprehensive divine knowledge of future events. Open theists argue these passages need not be read as affirming exhaustive foreknowledge, but the textual case is challenging.

3. For a development of this critique, see Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Blackwell, 1988), which argues that process theology fails to maintain the theological distinction between God’s creative power and creaturely power.

4. Tanner, 123-145. Tanner notes that process theology effectively makes God a “supreme being” among beings rather than the transcendent source of all being—a move that undercuts the apophatic restraint necessary for Christian theology’s proper caution about anthropomorphizing God.

5. This is sometimes called the “providential foreknowledge problem”: even if God doesn’t foreknow future free choices, God foreknows all possibilities. So creating a world where certain terrible possibilities could actualize seems to require justification. Open theists have responses (William Rowe’s “no best possible world” argument, or appeals to the value of divine-creaturely cooperation), but the problem remains acute. See Alvin Plantinga’s “free will defense” for the traditional theistic response.