Open theism is a false teaching that attempts to explain God’s foreknowledge in relation to man’s free will. Open theism essentially teaches that God can’t actually know everything, for if He did, then man couldn’t truly be free.
Open theism denies the essential attributes of God, namely his omniscience, but also denies his sovereignty and Lordship over all Creation. It denies the power of God by implying that God could create a world and deny Himself the ability to know the final outcome of His creation, particularly as it comes to those who He would save. One cannot read the Word of God and come away with such a conclusion, though, and open theism is nothing more than an attempt to get around God’s sovereignty over salvation.
The crux of the false teaching here is the denial of God’s attributes clearly taught in the Scriptures, and this is why it has been rejected as such by the Church.
Jenna Winston is a “pastrix” at Bethel Church in Redding, California and also the proprietor of the “Heartscaping” ministry. Her testimony is that she is a diagnosed schizophrenic who spent the first 40 years of her life going through psych ward and holds a “multiple abuses, mental illness” diagnosis, extreme drug addictions, and has multiple suicide attempts, all before winding up at a faith-based recovery program where she claims to have a radical encounter with Jesus that “forever changed the trajectory of her life.”
Finding freedom from her demons, she calls herself a “Seer Prophet” and does counseling through her Heartscaping ministry and “specializes in inner healing, prophetic deliverance, identifying and cultivating your spiritual gifts, and restoring your full identity.” One distinctive is that unlike most people shilling their wares, hers are unusually upscale in terms of their price, with a typical course video being $129.
In a conversation with Shawn Bolz, [Editor’s note: Shawn: if you’re reading this, we know something about you. We can’t release it yet until we get our hands on a particular document that we know is out there, but we want you to know that we know], Winston explains how God knows a bit about us but doesn’t know our future.
True deliverance is about – there are so many things that happen in our lives all the time that God never planned. God doesn’t make bad things happen but he will take the assaults from the enemy, who but he doesn’t want us happy and full of life and walking in our identity and we’re all gifted, we’re all called, well, have epic, you know, whatever, and so he doesn’t know our exact future but he does know our callings. He does know our giftings. And he’s just gonna hit you opposite all the time you know? And we get stuck in ‘blame and this and that’ and believing all of it to where we don’t even know our identity, right? So what does it look like instead of dissecting everything wrong with you. [Editor’s note: You may recall that God is All-knowing, and there has never been a time in history that He has not known or has had to learn anything.]
Johnson: My understanding in this area creates the greatest challenges for me…my approach is that God doesn’t control everything.
He’s in charge of everything. And the way I’d illustrate is well, you’re a parent, or you’re in charge of your household, but you’re not in control of everything that happens, you know?
Some dish will break. Something will happen. Somebody will say something that was unkind. Those things aren’t because of your influence. They just happen because you have a household of free will.
