Does God Deliberate?

*The image is not intended to represent God; it is only intended to represent deliberation*

What I ask here is whether the God of the Bible makes decisions and chooses between options. I’m not asking about any other god. Does the God Jews and Christians worship consider options and make choices and then act on them?

The god of the philosophers usually does not. Blaise Pascal said with some justification that the god of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. One reason is that the gods of the philosophers are impersonal. Of course, the gods of the ancient philosophers were not always impersonal, but many, perhaps most philosophers since then have thought of God as hardly personal if not impersonal.

But what about Christians? There seems to be two streams of thought about God among Christians. One is that God is both personal and absolute and, as Jonathan Edwards said, always does what is wisest. Most Christians would agree with that but wonder if Edwards believed God can ever do “otherwise” than he does. It seems he did not think so.

The other stream of thought among Christians is that God faces genuine choices and at least sometimes deliberates before acting.

Both streams of thought about God have supporting biblical passages. Every student of the Bible knows them. Those who believe God always does what is wisest without having to think about it argue that biblical passages, mostly found in the Old Testament, that seem to say otherwise, that portray God as making hard choices and decisions and then acting on them are “anthropomorphisms.” Those who believe God does sometimes deliberate before acting ask what those alleged anthropomorphisms mean, tell us about God, if they are only figures of speech.

It seems to me, as it did to my friend and mentor Clark Pinnock, that a God who does not make choices, does not deliberate, must be very bored. And such a God seems more like a computer program than a person. All Christians say that God is a living God. But what does that mean IF God does not think, consider, deliberate, make decisions and choices?

Then there are confused Christians who would say that, yes, God does deliberate but is “outside of time” and eternally knows what he is going to decide. When challenged they will say that it is a paradox based on a mystery. But is it a paradox or a contradiction?

It seems to me the God Jews and Christians worship, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Bible is intensely personal even if not human (except in the person of Jesus Christ who obviously DID deliberate). He is not a cosmic computer, as one evangelical Christian professor told me. In his book We Who Wrestle With God Jordan Peterson rightly says that a person can only be described narratively. And that tells us something about God—if he/they is a person/are persons. And he is and they are!

Dallas Willard describes God in very personal terms in The Divine Conspiracy. Evangelical theologian Donald Bloesch did the same in his books. So did Clark Pinnock in The Most Moved Mover.

Surely God does deliberate, consider options, make choices—always between equally good and wise options. To those who doubt it I ask “Did God create the universe freely, deliberately, by grace? Could he have done otherwise?” If the answer is no, then creating the universe was something God could not avoid doing and the universe becomes necessary for God, something most Christians have always decided is a heresy. To avoid making creation part of God, as Hegel and other speculative, panentheistic philosophers and theologians have done, we have to say that creation was a free act of God. That’s crucial to God’s transcendence. Otherwise, with Hegel and his followers (e.g., process theologians) we have to say that “Without the world God is not God.”

A Christian university professor told me he thinks of God as a cosmic computer. Many Christians have had and still have images of God and notions about God that are unbiblical. Those who dismiss all really personal biblical images of God as mere anthropomorphisms are infected with what John Sanders calls “the ontology of perfection” which is more philosophical than biblical and tends toward de-personalizing God.

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