Gordon C. Olson was a Bible teacher influential in the early years of Youth With a Mission (YWAM). He taught evangelism and theology and often explored issues around Calvinism and Arminianism (but he is not to be confused with C. Gordon Olson, who wrote on remarkably similar topics, and is of no relation).

The Foreknowledge of God (1941) is a theological inquiry into the relation between divine foreknowledge and human freedom. Today, it is classified as an “open theist” stance, but it predates that terminology, as do Samuel Fancourt and Lorenzo Dow McCabe. People with YWAM links may consider Olson’s work to be seminal in this area, whereas in mainstream evangelicalism, most people learned (or learn) of open theism through modern theologians like Greg Boyd, Terence Fretheim, and John Sanders.

Gordon Olson writes from the point of view of denial of “absolute divine foreknowledge”—in other words, God plans and causes much of the future (as written in prophecy) but does not plan and cause all of it. Olson was not a professor or an armchair theologian, but a mobilizer of evangelism. He quotes extensively from certain classic writers of the Reformed period and some Wesleyan theologians. Olson himself quotes extensively from Lorenzo Dow McCabe’s work on the topic in the 1880s. Because he predated the modern debate on open theism by some fifty years, he does not interact with any authors now well-known for open theism; and he remains practically unknown to many of them as well because he mainly operated in the parachurch crowd, not in academia. It is interesting, then, that the arguments that they present are more or less the same.

The introduction has a stunningly long compilation of quotations from theologians asserting the total incompatibility between absolute divine foreknowledge and free will. This incompatibility is noted by Calvinists and Arminians alike, including conservatives and liberals, across centuries of the Christian church. This stream of quotations was a striking way to open the book, and in my opinion is itself worth the price of the book, since it justifies Olson’s line of inquiry. My favorite quotation here was Martin Luther: “Divine foreknowledge is a thunderbolt to dash free will to atoms!”

For those who have not heard of open theism or have only heard secondhand, Olson offers a great introduction to the open point of view. His book is more accessible than McCabe or Fancourt.

Unlike Fancourt, Olson calls the open theist position “denying absolute foreknowledge” or for short, “denying foreknowledge”. This is, in my view, a weakness of Olson’s language. Fancourt stubbornly affirmed foreknowledge, but sought to redefine what was foreknowable on proto-Wesleyan terms. McCabe, a philosopher, spoke of “divine nescience of future contingencies”, which sounds too technical to be a heresy. Olson, Boyd, and most modern open theists, write and speak, in so many words, of “denying foreknowledge”, and this attracts the barbs of their opponents. But when they are describing theologically is justified from the same reasoning and the same Scriptures that led Fancourt and McCabe to their position.

I appreciate that Olson is able to lead us through the paradoxicality of the abstract “eternal now”, so foundational to many determinist viewpoints, as well as the more basic and practical problem of determinism: It makes us want to sit on our hindquarters and await the inevitable. All in all, Olson’s arguments may not sound particularly unique to those who are well-read on open theism; however, the time in which he made them, and the initial chapter which quotes many Calvinists, lend some interest to this book.

In a valuable appendix, Olson also gives an extensive table of Scriptures which support or deny “absolute divine foreknowedge”. Sola scriptura believers should grapple seriously with the many Scriptures that present seemingly contradictory views on foreknowledge. Reconciling foreknowledge with free will is a logical, theological, philosophical problem, yes, but for the Christian believer, it is also a biblical problem.

Chapter 3 is where Olson presents most of his argument in favor of the “open” worldview. Because of the somewhat odd outline of the book, Chapter 3 takes up a large portion of the book and is divided into six sections. Olson gives six reasons to “deny [absolute divine] foreknowledge”:

• To provide for the duration of time necessary for human experience and relationship
• To provide for God’s free will
• To provide for man’s free will
• To provide a tenable theodicy
• To restore the spiritual and volitional energies of the soul
• To satisfy Scripture

He recapitulates these six points in Chapter 4, which summarises his arguments. I’ll conclude with these quotations; if they whet your appetite, you may want to download Olson’s book, which is freely available in PDF, and is now quite cheap in print.

1. To provide for the duration of time necessary for human experience and relationship
   If God lives in the past, present, and future all at once, which is commonly stated as an “eternal now”and generally admitted by prescientists (those believing in absolute foreknowledge), then there can be no succession of thoughts or acts or experiences in God’s existence, or, the all important element of time is not an element of His being. He therefore ceases to have personal characteristics and becomes to us an impersonal force, with the result that there is no common basis of fellowship with Him and we cannot say that we can know or experience the life of God.
   
2. To provide for God’s free will
   Because the absolute divine foreknowledge of all events or acts from all eternity must result in the conclusion that God never originated a single choice. If everything conceivable existed with God from all eternity the will of God is not free and has never exerted a free choice to originate anything.
   
3. To provide for man’s free will
   If God foreknows all the moral choices of His free beings, everything that ever has or ever shall come to pass has from eternity been a fixed certainty in the divine mind. In order to have proper freedom of the human will, it must have the power to determine for itself between two or more possible choices in a given instance. This freedom would make the future uncertain or contingent. Since certainty and contingency are incompatible, the certain foreknowledge of God and the contingent actions of men are incompatible. The foreknowledge of God therefore denies to moral agents their proper freedom of will.
   
4. To provide a tenable theodicy
   If God foreknew before all creation, with absolute certainty, all the terrible suffering in this life, and all those who would suffer unspeakably throughout the countless ages of eternity, and He brought them into existence anyway, then we are tempted to question the good character and wisdom of God.
   
5. To restore the spiritual and volitional energies of the soul
   Foreknowledge is denied because this doctrine creates in the mind, realized or unrealized, the idea that the future is a fixity. The Christian says within himself, either in honest words or suppressed thoughts, that since God knows the future and has determined everything that He will do throughout eternity, volitional acts of the spiritual life, or prayer, cannot change anything. This doctrine therefore becomes an impediment to the Christian and an excuse to the unsaved.
6. To satisfy Scripture
   And finally, the above mentioned formidable difficulties have been the occasion for the inquiry into the teachings of Scriptures on such a momentous doctrine, (which is indeed the foundation stone of many other doctrines which stand or fall with it). It is found that the Bible gives very many positive testimonies against the doctrine of absolute divine prescience.

This review was written in 2020 and published in 2023. I had read the book many years earlier and went back over it for this review. Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought about Olson's book!