Monday is the deadline for some popular, prosperity-gospel-preaching churches to report to Congress on how they spend their money. NPR’s Steve Inskeep talks to religion professor Anthea Butler about the “prosperity gospel.”

The April 5 issue of WORLD includes an interview with Udo Middelmann, president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation and the author of many books including one new one, The Innocence of God (Paternoster, 2007). Here are some more of Middelmann’s thoughts from that interview.

WORLD: Is all the world a stage?

UM: I describe reality as that stage or set of stages, the seen and the unseen, where there are multiple actors. There’s God acting continuously to limit, to oppose, to repair the damage that sin has produced. There are human beings who either go along with it or delay the completion, as the older generation did when they came out of Egypt and wouldn’t believe what God had promised them. Plus, there isn’t only God acting and human beings acting, there’s the whole angelic and demonic entity…

WORLD: So the openness theologian says that God doesn’t know what’s going to happen one minute from now, and you’re saying that God does know, but you criticize the view that for God all time is the present.

UM: Yes. My proposition is based on the realization that much of the Christian church has adopted a Greek view or Hellenistic view of time, of perfection, of knowledge, instead of the Jewish, biblical view… that while God knows the end from the beginning, not everything that God knows has happened, nor would it necessarily happen.

For instance, I refer to that little incident in 1 Samuel 23 when David is talking, hiding from Saul who pursues him in a city called Keilah, he asks God “when Saul comes to the city gates will the people hand me over?” and God says “Yes, they will hand you over.” Like any man in his right mind David runs away and Saul hears about it and never gets to the city. So, the God of the Bible knows all kinds of things, including the things that will only be if certain conditions are met, or may never be.

Before creation God — the Holy Trinity – discusses, ‘What kind of world should we make?’ What kind of bushes, apple trees, people, animals? He had, I’m sure, a lot of things in mind that he decided not to make. If we can think of unicorns, he could have. He decided not to concoct them. So, not everything that God knows in his mind by necessity becomes real.

WORLD: How can true prophets prophecy accurately if the future is indeterminate?

UM: They can because our God knows the end from the beginning. But there are all kinds of things that God does not prophecy about and in these areas there is genuine creativity both for good and for evil, and thus the course of history can be affected by that.