I thought about how listening to Genesis once in a monastery choir, I’d suddenly heard Adam’s naming the animals as a form of play. God does not command Adam to name the animals; God brings them to Adam “to see what he will call them.” This implies that God wants to be surprised and wants Adam to play along in the continual surprise of creation.
-Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, p.307
This sort of thing drives some theologians nuts. God can’t be “surprised” by something in his creation. That’s Open Theism heresy! To hell with that! They imagine God as a either someone participating in the sit-down read-through of a long screenplay he wrote himself and everything follows the script exactly. It’s all glorious of course and has a great ending, but he’s yawning half the time. Nobody will say their lines wrong since he made their tongues and breath too. Handy.
Either that or they imagine God to be like an impossibly deep-thinking chess computer that can see 40,000 moves ahead into any game. Of course he would know Adam’s neurons would fire at a certain time and analogies would present themselves to him in such an order that OF COURSE he was going to call that critter a “giraffe”. Yawn again. I think if that were really the case, Jesus would have needed a lot more coffee to keep himself engaged with humanity long enough to have to cultivate real friendships. Not when they could just be literally be analyzed away.
I’m not saying I have a better model for understanding the mind of God – just that here are two examples of things that I don’t think work. They don’t contain the Father well at all. He’s spilling out the sides of the container while having fun listening to Adam name the animals.