Theopedia

Gregory Boyd

Overview

Gregory Boyd (born June 2, 1957) is an American pastor and theologian associated with open theism, the position that God does not know the future exhaustively because he limits his own knowledge of history to preserve human libertarian free will.1 Kyle Bagwell identifies Boyd’s God of the Possible (2000) as one of open theism’s representative primary texts, alongside Clark Pinnock’s and John Sanders’s work.12 Boyd is Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and formerly taught theology at Bethel University.

Life and Ministry

Boyd earned a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School (1982, cum laude), and a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary (1987, magna cum laude).3 His doctoral dissertation, published as Trinity and Process: A Critical Evaluation and Reconstruction of Hartshorne’s Di-Polar Theism Towards a Trinitarian Metaphysics, critiqued the process theology of Charles Hartshorne, attempting to “construct a philosophical theology that retains the positive features of a process worldview, while avoiding its unorthodox implications.”4

He taught theology at Bethel University (then Bethel College) in St. Paul for sixteen years, and in 1992 co-founded Woodland Hills Church, where he remains Senior Pastor.3 He also leads ReKnew.org, a teaching ministry built around his theology.3

Theological Contribution

Boyd’s central claim is that Scripture’s language of God changing his mind, being grieved, or testing what people will do should be read as describing a future that is genuinely, not merely apparently, open: some of it consists of possibilities rather than settled facts, and God knows it accordingly, as possibilities, rather than as certainties he has simply chosen not to reveal.1 Matthew Barrett situates Boyd, along with Pinnock and Sanders, within a wider Arminian move to open theism made specifically to resolve the tension between libertarian free will and exhaustive divine foreknowledge: rather than give up libertarian freedom, Boyd gives up the classical claim that God knows the future exhaustively, a move Barrett notes puts open theists “in good company with the sixteenth to seventeenth-century Socinians.”5

His later work moved beyond the foreknowledge debate into political theology, arguing in The Myth of a Christian Nation (2006) against identifying the church’s mission with any nation’s political power, and into historical Jesus studies, co-authoring The Jesus Legend (2007) with Paul Rhodes Eddy, a defense of the Gospels’ historical reliability that won Christianity Today’s 2008 Book of the Year award in Biblical studies.3

Historical Significance

Boyd resigned from Bethel’s faculty in 2003, following a dispute between him and some of the faculty over his open theism advocacy.3

The dispute drew sustained critical responses to open theism generally from Reformed theologians including Bruce Ware and John Frame.52

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Kyle William Bagwell, “Conclusion,” in “The Command from His Father: Begotten not Made, Submissive not Subservient, Assigned not Subjected” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2023), 217, n.1, citing Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel,” editor’s note 99. ↩ ↩2

  3. “Greg Boyd (theologian),” Wikipedia, accessed September 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  4. Gregory A. Boyd, Trinity and Process: A Critical Evaluation and Reconstruction of Hartshorne’s Di-Polar Theism Towards a Trinitarian Metaphysics, American University Studies, Series 7, vol. 119 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), quoted in “Greg Boyd (theologian),” Wikipedia. ↩

  5. Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 335 n.61. ↩ ↩2