Claim. Although God was aware of the possibility of Adam and Eve’s fall and Cain and Abel’s failure, His heart of hope and desire for their success was so strong that it virtually overrode His reason — revealing a structural difference between divine heart and divine reason.
Elaboration. Lee addresses head-on the standard objection: if God is omniscient, how could He genuinely grieve at the fall, since He knew it would happen? (God’s Heart as Experienced in Adam’s Family). His answer is striking: God was aware of the possibility of the fall, but because He is “the God of heart and hope, His desire for human beings to succeed and not to fall was incomparably stronger than His fear that they might fall.” The same holds for Cain and Abel’s offerings — God’s hope was so strong He “virtually ignored the possibility of their failure.”
The distinction Lee draws is between heart and reason in God: “God’s impulse of heart is so strong as to override reason.” This is a substantial theological claim with consequences. It preserves divine foreknowledge (God did know the possibility) while preserving genuine divine grief (because heart, not reason, determines God’s actual experiential disposition). It also models a kind of divine vulnerability — God can be genuinely surprised by joy and genuinely crushed by sorrow even with full knowledge of possibilities.
The move has implications for theodicy and for the Unification doctrine of free will and believers-responsibility. If God’s heart overrides His reason, then God is not the dispassionate calculator of probabilities but a parent whose love is structurally optimistic. This is why God could not openly weep at the fall (Satan was watching) but had to leave “silently, with His head bowed” — God maintains dignity while bearing crushing internal sorrow.
The position is in tension with classical theism’s divine impassibility, with strong Calvinist views of meticulous providence, and with open-theist denial of foreknowledge altogether. Lee’s solution is distinctive: full foreknowledge of possibilities + genuine emotional response weighted by heart. Critics will press on whether this is coherent (can a fully omniscient being “virtually ignore” what He knows?) and on whether it makes God overly anthropomorphic. The atomic flags this as an open theological question Lee resolves by appeal to the priority of heart.
See also. education-of-heart-three-forms-of-gods-heart, goal-of-history-determined-process-undetermined, god-is-the-god-of-heart