Let me start this post with a big caveat. Metaphors are useful for conveying ideas about specific points of reality and inadequate for conveying the entire complexity of our lived experience. The chess metaphor falls short in explaining the plan of salvation that God has for His kingdom. Still, it can be an excellent metaphor for understanding the relationship between God’s wisdom, power, knowledge and our agency.

I want to frame parts of the chess game before we read the following quotes.

1. To win at the chess of salvation means both God and His child wins. God is not our opponent, but the opponent of our incorrect choices and sins; he is the opponent of our fallen selves.
2. The game is happening with two individuals - God and me. How to move the pieces and respond is agency. God is not playing chess with the devil, where we are the pieces. Neither God or Satan control us.¹
3. God has either made up the rules or discovered the rules and shares them with us to play the game. Some rules describe the relationship between the two players, how we move, and define winning.

I believe that the wisdom of God is the solution in the dilemmas between man’s agency and God’s attributes of knowledge and power. The chess analogy helps us understand His wisdom in the context of our agency.

Chess game metaphor

An early comparison of God to the grand Chessmaster was by William James when he wrote the ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’ in 1884

Suppose two men before a chessboard—the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of them by a move of his own, which leads in the direction of victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the novice’s king.

Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for the infinite mind in which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not now decide on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous possibilities shall be left open, either of which, at a given instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations becomes real, I know what I shall do at the next bifurcation to keep things from drifting away from the final result I intend.

My preferred description of the metaphor is from Greg Boyd as it gets directly at the issue of fixed future foreknowledge and how it interacts with wisdom.

We might compare this view of God to a master chess player. We would ordinarily consider a chess player to be insecure to the extent that she would need to know ahead of time, or control if possible, all the moves of her opponent to ensure winning a match. Conversely, we would ordinarily consider a chess player wise and confident to the extent that she could ensure victory without relying on these aids. Her confidence is rooted in her ability to wisely anticipate all possible future moves her opponent might make together with all the possible responses she may make to each of these possible moves. She does not know exactly how many moves she will have to make, or what these moves will be, before the match begins, for she does not know exactly how her opponent will move his pieces. If her opponent is formidable, she may even have to place certain pieces “at risk” in order finally to checkmate him. But by virtue of her superior wisdom she is certain of victory. And precisely because her victory does not come from having a blueprint of her opponent’s moves or otherwise controlling her opponent’s moves, the wisdom she displays in achieving her victory is praiseworthy. (Gregory A. Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil, Pg. 113)

The wisdom of chess players

Maruice Ashley helps us understand that the chess metaphor is great for thinking through most of our lived experiences. I hope we can see him explain how ‘Chess is a discipline masking as a game ‘ to help us understand wisdom. Listen as he explains many of the concepts of wisdom through the analogy.

To push the metaphor a little farther, watch Magnus Carlsen starting at minute 1. Magnus is competing against ten players without looking at any of the ten boards of his competitors, and he wins all ten games. As he points to his head, he says, “You don’t really need the board you can keep in all in here.” While brilliant, Magnus is just a mortal man, and he can play and win ten simultaneous chess games without ever looking at any of the boards. I think this idea could help push the metaphor about each of our lives being a chess game with God. He is infinitely capable of making optimal decisions as He interacts with all of His children.

Concerns with the chess analogy

John Sanders, who is an open theist, challenges some tellings of the Chessmaster analogy when he says

[Peter] Geach, like William James before him, uses the grand-master analogy to assure us that, despite libertarian freedom and an indefinite future, God remains in complete control. … But the grand-master analogy lacks the genuinely relational qualities of the other analogies - theater director, professor, and climbing-expedition leader. In fact, it is doubtful that the chess-master analogy adequately handles the nature of the personal relationship between God and humans. The God Who Risks, Sanders, John Pg. 229

In [Beyond the Chess Master Analogy: Game Theory and Divine Providence](http://www.alanrhoda.net/papers/Beyond the Chessmaster Analogy.pdf), Alan R. Rhoda challenges the metaphor as well.

chess is a zero-sum game—if one player wins, it is always at the other player’s expense. But real life isn’t this way. When God invites us into a loving relationship with himself, he’s looking for a win-win outcome. We win in life not by competing with God, but by cooperating with him. Similarly, two people win in a marriage or in a friendship not by competing with each other, but by helping each other. In the above ways, and surely others besides, real life is much more complex, dynamic, and interactive than chess. The Chess Master analogy does a fine job of getting across some aspects of the open theist view of divine providence, such as God’s omnicompetence in dealing with contingencies, but it doesn’t give us a very good model for most realistic situations.¹

Seeing wisdom in the metaphor

Chess is an excellent metaphor to understand the relationship between God’s wisdom, power, knowledge and our agency based choices in time.

Seeing time in the metaphor

The chess metaphor provides an example of how time might work in the eternities. Time can be the period between contingent choices that affect the future panorama. The literal duration of the game or the term between moves has little impact on the study of the movements. However, the sequence of the steps does happen within an ordered time.

Seeing the wisdom in the metaphor

While the grand-master chess metaphor has many holes in describing God’s full relationship with His children, it is an excellent example of wisdom and how God may use wisdom with His knowledge instead of ‘fixed future omniscience’ to work with each of us. I see wisdom as the ability to make the best choice given all the current known facts in the face of future unknown events. It is the wisdom of the chess master that makes us all marvel. His, or her, ability to store massive amounts of knowledge in a way that they can leverage that information to optimally move forward in an interaction with another player that make’s libertarian choices beyond their control. God has this type of wisdom.

This post is part of a series on wisdom. The next in this series is For a wise purpose in Him (1 Nephi 9:5).

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