Here is a series of questions, if taken literally as Open Theory
demands for their
'Divine Repentance' Motif, that indicate Divine Unawareness of Present/Past.
The Lord asks Cain for details,motives,reasons unknown to the Lord
as information
beyond His awareness/understanding. This would also indicate Divine
Unawareness
of current heart/character/internal/emotional/spiritual state of
affairs.
The risen,glorified,ascended,exalted,Heavenly Jesus asks for
details unknown to Him about Saul's reasons/motives for persecuting Him.
He literally doesn't know WHY Saul is behaving this way,information He
must obtain by asking Saul directly to enlighten the Son of God. "I don't
have a clue as to why you would do such a thing!" Indicates lack of knowledge
of PAST/PRESENT facts.
Lack of knowledge of Abram's Present and recent Past capability.
The LORD was not certain IF Abram was able to number the stars or not.
(JS also listed out approx. 20 similar verses suggesting divine ignorance of past and/or present).
On this 'Divine Unawareness of Past & Present' (DUPP) motif, I believe that sound exegesis can show that the proposition "God does not know the past/present state of things" cannot stand the Biblical test (leaving aside for now what in the 'present' God is said not to know). This same exegesis will also show that God does at times repent, and genuinely so.
As the DUPP issue consists almost entirely of God asking questions of people, the below offers three situations (by no means the only ones) in which I hope to make one point clear: Asking questions does not NECESSARILY imply ignorance on the part of the questioner! In fact, in most of these cases, the superiority of the questioner is assumed.
1) Take for e.g. Gen 4:6-10. It seems very obvious (at least to me) that it is because God knows what Cain has done that He says/'asks' what He does. I think psychologists and counsellors can confirm that one way of dealing with a counsellee's already-known guilt/evil, etc. is to ASK HIM about it, get it out of his system, make him talk, etc. It's really for the counsellee's sake. The counsellor's awareness of the latter's problem is rarely the issue in such cases.
2) Likewise, if we both see a teacher asking his second-grade students, "What is 10 x 10?", we would never conclude that the teacher doesn't know the answer himself. Nor would we see this question to have anything to do with the teacher telling us later on he changed his mind about something else.
3) Finally, I'd think many people can easily tell the difference between a grieved father EXCLAIMING to his rebellious kids, "What have you guys done?!" over the evil they've commited, and the same father truly changing his mind about, say, his previous high evaluation/hopes for their character in light of their crimes (a'la the repentance motif).
What I'm saying is that God can surely adopt a rhetorical, questioning/probing approach towards His people, which is what I term most (not all) of the DUPP-verses to represent. Other such verses show the cry of a frustrated Lover/Parent expressed in a question (not entirely surprising if love does involve SOME element of risk i.e. 'unknowing').
Objection: But why then can't we view the repentance motif through a similar 'rhetorical' / non-literal lense? Are you high on double standards, Al?!
Remember that the repentance motif has passages either stating that God changes His mind ("And God repented...") or Him saying so ("I repent that..."). The DUPP pseudo-motif merely shows God asking questions ("Why are you persecuting me?").
The repentance motif involves specific statements about God or God Himself TELLING US about His 'state of mind'. Pending strong counter-evidence, we have no reason not to use these as primary data on understanding the person/nature of God i.e. He changes His mind at times because the Bible depicts Him doing so and He has told us that He does. What more, again, do we need?
On other hand, to repeat, the DUPP motif simply depicts God asking questions(duh). What right do we have to say that in ALL such cases, God was ignorant of the answer? There is no basis for us to move from "God asked a question" to "God did not know the answer". This not only contradicts everyday experience (see the cases above) but in fact, the Q&A approach was generally adopted by Jewish rabbis (to use another example) in their teaching, suggesting in this case that questions ASSUMED the superiority(!) of the questioner.
Note the kind of reasoning being ascribed to the open view: ALL divine questions entail divine ignorance! But if we can grant that human teachers/leaders/fathers can engage in rhetorical questioning, i'm sure we need not rule this out with God, let alone use this issue to deny that God changes His mind as a perfectly valid aspect of being PERSONAL.
So my (though not necessarily Boyd's or Pinnock's) response to the DUPP objection is to say that our shared framework of experience DISALLOWS us to conclude that God is unaware of past/present solely on the basis that Scriptures depicts Him asking questions(!). On the other hand, this same shared framework suggests that, pending counter-evidence, we normally believe people when they say they repent (esp. when they do so dozens of times).
For all the DUPP verses, I'd think that what we need to do is work out exegetically:
Blessings,