No. Read in context, the Bible does not let us say that God failed to see evil coming. The call of Jeremiah, Jesus’s prediction of Peter’s denial and the apostles’ preaching about the cross all present a God who knows people and events before they happen. Process theology offers relief from the problem of evil by reducing what God knows. The passages its defenders lean on, where God relents or seems disappointed, are real. Read carefully, they describe a God who feels and responds. They do not describe a God who is in the dark.
That answer needs to be earned, because the passages on the other side are not imaginary, and the problem process theology is trying to solve is not a small one.
What Is Process Theology Proposing About God and Evil?
Rev. Darin Jones is an associate pastor and the director of discipleship and Christian education at the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York in Jamaica, Queens. He studied at Cornell, earned a Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and a Master of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. When Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, asked whether he had been trained in process theology at Union and Princeton, he said yes. He offers his summary with a warning that it is “definitely a grotesque oversimplification,” and that caution is worth keeping in view. What follows is the core idea as he states it, not a full account of a large and varied school of thought.
On his description, process theology holds that “God is a learning God.” God takes in new experiences the way human beings do. Things happen that God did not previously know would happen, and God reacts to them. The payoff for the problem of evil is direct. If God did not know a particular evil was coming, he cannot be blamed for failing to stop it. Jones states the conclusion plainly: “God doesn’t allow human beings to do bad things. God didn’t know that human beings are going to do them.” On this picture, he says, God “is only responsible for responding to those actions and not for preventing them before.”
The appeal is obvious. The sharpest form of the problem of evil asks how a God who saw a tragedy coming, and could have stopped it, let it happen. Process theology answers by removing the first half of that sentence. Fields summarized the effect in one line: on this view, God is “almost excused because he didn’t know about it.” Whether that trade is available depends on what the biblical text says about God’s knowledge of the future.
Which Passages Put Pressure on the Idea of a Learning God?
Fields raised the first test cases: Jeremiah’s call, Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial. Jones added the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. Each is worth reading in its own setting rather than stacked into a list.
Start with Jeremiah. The book opens with the prophet’s commission, and God speaks first:
“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)
The genre is a prophetic call narrative, and the point of the verse is to ground Jeremiah’s authority in God’s prior choice. The knowing comes before the forming. Whatever else the verse means, it places God’s relationship to Jeremiah ahead of Jeremiah’s existence.
Then the Gospels. At the Last Supper, Peter insists he will never fall away. Jesus answers:
“Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.” (Matthew 26:34)
The prediction is specific about the act, the number of times and the hour. John’s Gospel makes a broader statement about Judas: “For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him” (John 6:64). John is not reporting a lucky guess late in the story. He is telling the reader how to understand the whole account of Judas from its start.
In Exodus, before the confrontation with Pharaoh begins, God tells Moses, “but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go” (Exodus 4:21). Jones reads this as God acting to gain greater glory through Israel’s deliverance. Whatever one concludes about the hardening itself, the narrative frames Pharaoh’s resistance as something God announced in advance.
From texts like these, Jones draws his conclusion: “I think that personally I do not ascribe to process theology because of the instances that you just described.” His reason is cumulative, not a single proof text. He says that “biblically we see too many instances of God knowing ahead of time what’s going to happen, and also too many instances of God knowing how human beings are going to respond to different stimuli.” The second half of that sentence matters. The question is not only whether God knows what he himself will do. It is whether God knows what free human beings will do.
How Do Process Theologians Answer Those Passages?
A fair reading has to ask how the other side handles this evidence. Jones reports that process theologians accept these as examples of God knowing the future, but “they do not use those as a blanket rationale for God knowing everything.” God knows some things in advance and not others.
As Jones explains it, they draw the line at orchestration. Where God knows ahead of time, it is because God is arranging the outcome. God arranged for Judas to betray Jesus because the cross required it. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. And Jeremiah’s call is read narrowly: on this view, God knows Jeremiah in the womb, “not necessarily knowing everything that Jeremiah is going to do, but knowing what God would have Jeremiah to do if Jeremiah follows God’s will.”
This is a serious move, and it works best on the texts where God is clearly acting. It works least well on Peter. Nothing in Matthew 26 suggests that God caused Peter to deny Jesus. Peter’s denial is his own failure, made out of fear, in a courtyard, after he swore he would never do it. Yet Jesus names the night, the count and the rooster in advance. If God foreknows only what he orchestrates, the prediction of Peter’s free and sinful choice is hard to explain. The same pressure falls on John 6:64, which speaks of Jesus knowing “from the beginning” who did not believe.
The apostles’ own preaching closes the gap further. In Acts, Peter tells the crowd in Jerusalem that Jesus was:
“Delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” (Acts 2:23)
The verse holds two things in one sentence. God’s plan and foreknowledge stand behind the cross, and the people who carried it out are still guilty. The text does not treat foreknowledge as an excuse for human evil, and it does not treat human freedom as a limit on God’s knowledge. Process theology needs to pull those two apart. The verse keeps them together.
Isaiah states the principle in poetic form, as God sets himself against the idols of Babylon:
“Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.” (Isaiah 46:10)
The argument of that chapter is that knowing the future is one of the marks that separates the living God from carved images. A learning God would forfeit the very claim Isaiah uses to prove that God is God.
What About the Passages Where God Seems Surprised or Changes His Mind?
This is the strongest objection, and Fields did not avoid it. She had been reading Zephaniah 3 that morning, where God reflects on judgments already sent. In the KJV, God says, “I said, Surely thou wilt fear me, thou wilt receive instruction,” and the verse ends, “but they rose early, and corrupted all their doings” (Zephaniah 3:7). Read flatly, that sounds like an expectation that failed. Fields admitted its force: “I could see in a sense how one could take those passages and kind of vacillate with whether God knows all things.”
Jones added the scene in Genesis 18, where Abraham bargains over Sodom and God agrees, “I will not destroy it for ten’s sake” (Genesis 18:32). Process theologians, he explained, see in this “that malleability of God’s will and that malleability of God’s decision concerning judgment also shows that God is in process.” Other texts could be added. After the golden calf, “the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (Exodus 32:14). In the KJV, repent here does not mean confessing sin. It means relenting, turning from a stated course of action.
Jones gave one direct reply: “one could argue that God knew ahead of time that Abraham would not find that.” He then conceded, “we can go back and forth all day.” That honesty is useful. These texts do not settle themselves, and a reader should not pretend they do.
Fields proposed a different way to read them. Rather than concluding that God lacks knowledge, she suggested “looking at it through the lens of God has real emotions,” and attending to how the passages were written, given “the type of the genres of the day and the writing style, especially the Old Testament.” Jones developed the point. These are moments where God’s mercy is given room to act, often through someone’s intercession. In them, he said, “we definitely see that God’s a God of emotion,” a God deeply invested in what happens to people. That does not mean, in his view, that God fails to know what will happen.
The text itself supports this reading in a striking place. In 1 Samuel 15, God says of Saul, “It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king” (1 Samuel 15:11). Eighteen verses later, Samuel tells Saul:
“And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent.” (1 Samuel 15:29)
Then the chapter closes by saying “the LORD repented that he had made Saul king over Israel” (1 Samuel 15:35). The same narrator, in the same chapter, says that God repented and that God does not repent. The writer is not confused. The most natural reading is that the first kind of statement describes God’s real grief and changed dealings with Saul, while the second denies that God changes his mind the way a fickle human does. Many Christian interpreters read the relenting passages this way. It is an interpretation, but it is one the chapter itself invites.
Jonah offers a second clue. The prophet is angry precisely because he already knew what God would do:
“For I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.” (Jonah 4:2)
God’s relenting is not an unpredictable reaction. It is part of his known character, announced long before Nineveh repented. A God whose mercy can be counted on in advance is not a God learning as he goes.
Is Keeping God’s Full Knowledge Worth the Cost?
Here the honest objection returns. If God knows everything, the problem of evil stays sharp. Process theology at least offered an answer. What does the classical reading offer instead?
Jones’s deepest reason concerns what the word God means. He argues that a God who can be “stripped or deprived of those specific particular characteristics causes that God to not be God.” His concern, put plainly, is that such a God ends up shaped and limited by his own creation rather than ruling over it. Fields named the method behind the error. Process theology, she argued, “forces God to change in our minds and not us to change.” In her words, “the starting point is not God, it’s us and our understanding versus understanding that God is above us and we must alter our understanding.”
There is also a reason inside the process view to doubt that the trade delivers what it promises. Even on Jones’s summary of it, God still responds to evil once it begins. A God who watches an atrocity unfold and responds in some ways and not others still faces the question of why. Shrinking foreknowledge moves the problem. It does not make it disappear.
The alternative Fields offered is to keep God’s attributes and humble our judgments: “So in order to solve the problem of evil, we don’t take away God’s attributes. We just have to understand that his definition of evil could be potentially different from ours.” Jones extended it: “God’s understanding of good and God’s journey to actualizing good supremely universally globally probably extends beyond our ability to understand it.”
That claim has limits, and they should be stated. Fields connected it to the familiar line in Isaiah:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” (Isaiah 55:8)
In context, the verse just before it calls the wicked to return to God, “for he will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:7). The higher thoughts Isaiah has in view are God’s surprising mercy. That fits Jones’s emphasis on mercy, but it gives no license to call any particular cruelty secretly good. Fields’s example was Zephaniah, where God’s judgment aimed at repentance. Jones suggested such judgment “probably” prevented worse evil, and the word probably is doing honest work. Scripture does not hand readers an explanation for each loss. It tells us who God is while some explanations remain withheld.
Fields also kept the larger question open. She noted that the problem of evil is one on which people will not all agree, and that theologians spend whole careers on it. The case against process theology does not close the problem of evil. It closes one proposed exit.
Quick Answers
Does the Bible teach that God knows the future? Many passages say so directly, including Jeremiah 1:5, Isaiah 46:10, John 6:64 and Acts 2:23. Most Christians throughout history have read them as teaching that God knows the future fully, including free human choices.
Why do some people think God learns or changes his mind? Texts like Genesis 18, Exodus 32:14 and Zephaniah 3:7 describe God relenting or expressing a disappointed expectation. Process theologians, as Jones describes them, take these as evidence that God’s knowledge is limited.
How else can those passages be read? As real expressions of God’s emotion and mercy, written in the narrative and prophetic styles of their time. First Samuel 15 places God’s repenting beside a flat denial that God repents like a man, which suggests the writer meant two different things.
If God knew evil was coming, is he responsible for it? Acts 2:23 holds God’s foreknowledge and human guilt together without letting one cancel the other. That does not answer every question about suffering, but it shows the Bible does not treat foreknowledge as making God the author of the evil people choose.
Does rejecting process theology solve the problem of evil? No. It rules out one solution. The question of why God permits specific suffering remains, and Scripture leaves room for lament while that question stays open.
The choice process theology presents is real: keep God’s knowledge and live with a harder question, or reduce God’s knowledge and gain an easier answer. The texts point one way. The God who named Jeremiah before his birth and told Peter the hour of his failure is also the God who grieved over Saul and spared Nineveh. His feeling and his foreknowledge come from the same Scripture. A reader does not have to give up either one to take suffering seriously.
