LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Theism: Open Theism
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Open Theism is a dangerous heresy. It destroys the doctrine of God. It exalts man and his free will and degrades God to an impotent bystander in his creation, struggling to stay in control of events that are unfolding in a way he never planned. It subverts the Scriptural testimony to God’s power, greatness, and sovereignty. It ... demonstrates the dangers of Arminianism. It shows the horrible and heretical nature of a rigorous and logically consistent Arminianism.
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Open Theism is a theological position that attempts to explain the concept of God’s foreknowledge. The essential question of Open Theism is, “Does God know the future?” For nearly 2000 years of church history, the answer has been almost universally, “Yes! Of course God knows the future.” Open Theists today... claim that this view of God’s foreknowledge is based more on philosophy than the actual teaching of Scripture.
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Ultimately, Open Theism fails in that it attempts to explain the unexplainable - the relationship between God's foreknowledge and mankind's free will. Just as extreme forms of Calvinism fail in that they make human beings nothing more than pre-programmed robots, so Open Theism fails in that it rejects God's true omniscience. God must be understood through faith, for "without faith it is impossible to please Him" (Hebrews 11:6a). The concept of Open Theism is, therefore, not scriptural. It is simply another way for finite man to try to understand an Infinite God with his finite mind, akin to trying to drink an ocean dry. Open Theism should be rejected by followers of Christ.
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Open Theism is the belief held by some which teach that God does not have full knowledge of the future. It is based basically upon free will tenets stating that man is free to make choices and if God knew what those choices were, then man would not truly be free. One of the teachings of Open Theism is that God did not know ahead of time that Adam and Eve would fall into sin.
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Process theism typically refers to a family of theological ideas originating in, inspired by, or in agreement with the metaphysical orientation of the English philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and the American philosopher-ornithologist Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, it is an essential attribute of God to be fully involved in and affected by temporal processes. This idea contrasts neatly with traditional forms of theism that hold God to be in all respects non-temporal (eternal), unchanging (immutable,) and unaffected by the world (impassible). Process theism does not deny that God is in some respects eternal, immutable, and impassible, but it contradicts the classical view by insisting that God is in some respects temporal, mutable, and passible. The views of Whitehead and Hartshorne should ... be distinguished from those that affirm that the divine being, by an act of self-limitation, opens itself to influence from the world. Some neo-Thomists hold this view and a group of Evangelical Christian philosophers, calling themselves “open theists,” promote similar ideas.
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Open theism generally begins from the assumption that there are no truths about future contingents. A contingent truth is something that is true but didn't have to be. A contingent falsehood is something that is false but could have been true if things had been different. Contingent truths about the future are truths about what will happen that aren't necessary truths. Just as there are truths about the past that didn't have to be true, most philosophers take there to be truths about the future that are indeed true but didn't have to be true. Things could have gone differently in the process of what will lead up to them.
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Open Theism