Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the theology of God in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
My subject in this workshop is Openness of God Theology, sometimes called open God theology or simply open theology. It is not espoused by a very large number of people, but many of those who do espouse it are articulate and publishing and are capable speakers, so as a result their influence is significant.
The most important early books on the subject include that one edited by Clark Pinnock, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (1995). Then God At War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict by Greg Boyd, followed by John Sanders’ The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence. Then Greg Boyd again: God of the Possible. Since then, several more books, a recent one by Boyd on Satan, and so forth.
Moreover, these people would all identify themselves as evangelicals, but in the circle of those who espouse open theology are those who are just beyond the fringe of self-confessed evangelicalism, like William Hasker and a number of others. It’s an overlapping category with a variety of positions. What I propose to do is, first of all, lay out what the argument is, advance the most common structures of thought in openness theology, and then I will make some stab at replying.
Sanders will set the stage for us. He divides the different doctrines of providence that could be imagined into two camps: what he calls the no-risk view and the risk view. The no-risk view espouses a God who is so providential in his reign that there are no risks to him. That really is equivalent to classical theism in Sanders’ analysis. Then the risk view is his own.
The former means that God specifically ordains everything, but if you say that, he argues, that means he ordains not only the flowering of a buttercup but the Holocaust. He ordains it all. If you lose a friend, you may speak nicely of God taking that person home, but to be realistic, what it really means is that God killed her.
Methodologically, openness of God theologians warn constantly against any bifurcation of God into two realms: God as he is in himself and God as he has disclosed himself. If you have two realms, God as he is in himself and God as he has disclosed himself so you have some secret decree of God ordaining all things.… Well, if it’s not part of what God has ordained, you can’t know anything about it anyway, Sanders says, so why talk about it?
The only things we can say about God are what God has disclosed of himself. Increasingly, openness of God theologians are inclined to insist on three points that govern the perspective theologically. After discussing the three points we’ll look at some of the texts they handle, and then we’ll look at some of their theological and pastoral implications.
1. Three points that govern the perspective theologically.
A. What is really open in openness of God theology is not God himself but the future.
The future or some part of it is undetermined, even by God himself.
B. The real issue is not whether or not God has omniscience but its definition, according to them.
Classical theism insists that God knows everything that has been, is, and will be. Many, myself included, would go further and say that God also knows all possible alternatives as well. I would justify that in passages like Matthew, chapter 11, verses 20 and following, where God knows what Sodom and Gomorrah or Tyre and Sidon would have done if the gospel had been preached to them.
All of that is taken into account in God’s knowledge, but for the openness theologians, God does not know something in the future that he has not determined, precisely because there is nothing there to know. In other words, God himself is, like his creatures, locked in time. Maybe not time exactly as we think of it, maybe not time bounded by the movements of the heavenly spheres, but nevertheless in sequence, and God cannot know what there is nothing yet there to know.
He may choose to ordain something that will take place in the future. He is capable of doing that, but he does not ordain everything in the future, and what is not ordained he cannot know because there is nothing there to know. So, the openness theologians say, one may still speak of God’s omniscience, but it is omniscience that takes into consideration this understanding of time.
C. Both Calvinists and Arminians claim that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future.
Calvinists would say God’s knowledge of the future is also determinative, but the openness theologians go for a third option. They say God has some knowledge of the future, not least in matters where he has determined it should run in a certain way.
What God determines he thus certainly foreknows, but there are many things that depend on the free future choice of moral sentient beings, and such things God cannot know. There is nothing there to be known. If you say that God does know it, then their choice is not free and we have succumbed to some mechanistic view of the universe. Now that’s by way of introduction to show you the shape of the thing.
2. Passages classical theists appeal to.
Let me begin, as Boyd does in one of his books, by tackling the passages classical theists appeal to and read them as Boyd reads them. In other words, this list of passages is not, in the first instance, the passages Boyd finds strongest for his view. He wants, first of all, to refute traditional understandings of the passages his opponents think justify their view.
A. Passages where God declares his intentions with respect to the future.
Passages like Isaiah 46 and 48. Boyd says that in such passages God speaks generically of the future of broad movements, which are entirely within the reign of his knowledge purview, but that says nothing about specific details.
B. Foreknowledge of Israel’s future.
For example, the 400 years predicted in Genesis 15:13–15 or the 70 years predicted in Jeremiah 29:10. Boyd replies that God does not have to control and/or know every future decision to ensure these results. Boyd himself insists there are some points God does determine with respect to the future.
He does not deny that, but that does not mean he has to know everything that might bring these about. He could do it in all kinds of different ways or see how things are going and nudge things along, as it were. He has determined certain points but not all points.
C. Prophecies regarding individuals, especially those prophecies that actually name names.
For example, the naming of Josiah in advance, or better yet, the naming of Cyrus in advance. Who chose Cyrus’ name? Did his parents have a free choice to choose Cyrus’ name? Here, according to Boyd, God sets “strict parameters around the freedom of the parents in naming these individuals.”
Let me say at this point I think he’s trying to have his cake and eat it. If he sets such strict parameters around the free choice of the parents that they end up able to choose only Cyrus, it seems to me this is a backdoor to determinism, but we’ll let that pass for the moment. This is nevertheless what he argues.
D. The foreknowing of predictable characters and what they do.
For example, Peter’s denial predicted in advance and what Judas would do in terms of being the betrayer. What Boyd says is that Jesus has such profound insight into human beings and their fallacies and foibles he can well imagine that under certain pressures in certain circumstances this is what they will end up doing.
E. Foreknowledge of life plans.
Jeremiah 1:5 or Paul in Galatians 1:15. Well, in general terms, God may determine that someone or other will be a prophet or the like, but after all, he says, over against such texts you must balance a passage like Luke 7:30, where we are told that some rejected God’s purposes for themselves, so probably all could have rejected God’s purposes, or maybe God knew Jeremiah from the womb, but if you believe Luke 7:30, then Jeremiah could have rejected God’s purposes for himself as well.
F. Prophecies of the rise of kingdoms and the fall of kingdoms owing to judgment.
Passages like Daniel 2:28–40. Boyd understands these in terms of a kind of (this is his terminology) “choose-your-own-adventure pattern.” That is, if you operate in a certain way, if you live a certain way, this is what’s going to come out. If you live in another kind of way, it’ll come out differently, but if you act in this kind of fashion, this is what will doubtless prevail, so choose your own adventure.
G. Passages that speak of the foreordination of Christ as the sacrifice or as dying on the cross or the like.
One thinks of passages such as Acts 2:23 and Acts 4:27–28. Then, we are told, the crucifixion is itself predetermined. The individuals who did it were neither predestined to do so, nor foreknown to do so, but somebody had to do it because the event itself was predestined.
There are other categories he uses, but I’m not going to go farther down that track for want of time. Now let me turn to …
3. Passages and categories that are commonly adduced in favor of the openness of God theology.
A. God regrets how certain things turn out.
I suppose the classic example is Genesis 6:6. God is grieved at the great sin that he sees and so institutes the flood. The implication is that God may change his assessment of his own prior actions or beliefs. That’s their understanding. This is not my assessment of their assessment. That’s their assessment of these passages.
Thus, Sanders writes, “Since God learns what happens as history unfolds, it is possible that God may learn things that make him reevaluate and reassess the correctness or wisdom even of his own past actions.” Then Sanders comments on God’s promise not to destroy the earth again with a flood, and he writes, “It may be the case that although human evil caused God great pain, the destruction of what he had made caused him even greater suffering. Although his judgment was righteous, God decides to try different courses of action in the future.”
In other words, the reason God promises not to institute another worldwide flood in response to judgment is that he himself suffered so much pain the first time around he thinks better of it the next time. Then other passages are quoted: Exodus 3:16–4:9; Jeremiah 3:7; Jeremiah 3:19–20. These and other texts “leave open the possibility that God might be mistaken about some points, as the biblical record acknowledges.” That’s Sanders again. Similarly with respect to Saul’s kingship in 1 Samuel 13:13. “It grieves me that Saul is such-and-such.”
B. God asks questions about the future, confirming his own uncertainty.
Such passages as Numbers 14:11 or Hosea 8:5. All sides recognize that some questions God asks are rhetorical. For example, in Genesis 3:8–9, when God says, “Where are you?” all sides in the openness theology camp would say God knows the answer to that question. He is not asking the question because he is seeking information. Why not? What is the criterion?
The reason why is that it is a question that has to do with the present. God, they insist, knows everything about the past and the present. What he does not know is about the future. So if God asks a question where it seems as if he doesn’t know something to do with the present, you must infer that God actually does know the answer, so the question must be rhetorical, but where God asks the question with respect to something in the future, then you must take it at face value. It is not a rhetorical question or anything of that order. It reflects God’s ignorance.
C. God confronts the unexpected.
Isaiah 5 is sometimes quoted here, the little parable Isaiah sings as a kind of ballad, where God is pictured as making a fence around his lovely vineyard, and God looked for good fruit, but all that the land brought forth was stinkers, bad fruit. Because of this, therefore, God decides to shut down and curse this vineyard.
In other words, God is thus forced to confront the unexpected; namely that this vineyard he so carefully nurtured and planted turns out to produce nasty stuff. God himself turns out to be a wee bit surprised, as it were. Or a passage like Jeremiah 3:6 and following. “I thought you would return,” God says. Oops! Or Jeremiah 19:5. “It never entered my mind,” God says.
D. God gets frustrated.
Exodus 4:10–15 and Ezekiel 22:30–31. That’s the famous passage. “I sought for a man to stand in the gap before me for my people, but I found none. Therefore, I will do such-and-such.”
E. God tests people in order to find out what their character is really like.
In other words, it’s not merely a question of testing them so the people themselves are proved to themselves; they are tested so God himself may find out what these people are like. The Akedah, the Genesis 22 account of the testing of Abraham in the matter of the sacrifice of Isaac, is perhaps most frequently quoted.
Up to this point, Sanders says in his book The God Who Risks (pages 52–53), God really does not know what kind of man he has in Abraham. “God needs to know if Abraham is the sort of person on whom God can count for collaboration toward the fulfillment of the divine project.” Thus, Genesis 22 is the means by which God finds out if he is that sort of chap or not.
Or again, Sanders writes, “In [Genesis] 15:8 Abraham asked God for assurance. Now it is God seeking assurance from Abraham.” Similar things are said with respect to Hezekiah in 2 Chronicles 32:31; a corporate testing of the people of God in Deuteronomy 8:2; God is disappointed with his people in Psalm 95:10–11; and so forth.
F. God speaks in terms of what may or may not happen.
“If it be possible, take this cup from me,” or “Hastening the day of the Lord’s return.” The flexible potter in Jeremiah 18. If a pot doesn’t turn out right, God is quite happy to do it again.
G. God changes his mind.
Not only Jeremiah 18:8–10, but in about 40 passages we read that God … the translations vary … changes his mind or repents or relents or whatever. Jonah 4:2; Joel 2:12–13; and so forth. So if you then come across a passage like 1 Samuel 15:29, which says God is not a man that he should repent (to use the King James Version), in this case, they say, God will not change his mind, but he could. The fact that he does in 40 other cases shows that he could. Again, I’ll skip further running down those lines and bring up some of the theological issues these people see as the strengths of openness theology.
First, they argue that this view of God produces a much more believable and sympathetic theodicy. Theodicy is the defense of the righteousness of God. It’s justifying the ways of God to men, to use Milton’s famous language. If you have God finally behind everything good and evil, they argue, it is difficult to abstract God from the charge of being amoral, even cruel. It puts God behind Pol Pot or the Holocaust or war or whatever. But, supposing God doesn’t foresee some of these things.
In Greg Boyd’s first large book on the subject, God At War, he begins with the story of a little girl whose eyes are about to be poked out by Nazi tormenters. You must believe, he says, that God wouldn’t have allowed it. God didn’t foresee that that was going to happen. It makes much more sense to allow evil some freedom so that the poking out of little Zosia’s eyes is not chargeable finally to God Almighty. Thus, it produces a kind of theodicy that is far more comforting. These writers speak along these lines frequently.
In their churches, for example, a family comes grieving with news that their 18-year-old daughter has just been run off the road by a drunk and is killed. What does God think he’s doing by this? You have to see instead that God didn’t ordain this in any sense, they say, but rather in this fallen, broken world the Devil wins some. Evil does prevail, and then God gives you strength to fight back, but there is no sense in which God stands behind that event. They argue theodicy is strengthened by this sort of approach. Moreover …
Secondly, they argue that this vastly improves our understanding of prayer. The old debate about whether prayer changes us or prayer changes God is now definitively answered. You can batter down the gates of heaven in your praying and get God to do things, and this is what you jolly well ought to do. You thus become participants in the great purposes of God in redemptive history, it is argued.
Thirdly, this generates a much more sophisticated handling of things we have too quickly assumed in the past are anthropomorphisms. Every time you find some passage about God changing his mind or relenting or not knowing something or the like, we have just written them off as anthropomorphisms. If you find God’s emotions, then we have another word. We call them anthropopathisms. That is, ways of talking about God in human (anthropos) categories.
These authors argue this is merely a way of ducking what the text says. What the text says is that God changes his mind or that God asks something to find out. They have a number of other matters as well. They think this improves the doctrine of the Trinity, and so forth. So that is a sketch of openness theology. It has many pastoral and other implications.
It sometimes presents itself as a slightly more consistent version of Arminianism, but it does have to be acknowledged that no Arminian has ever held this view. The only people in church history, to my knowledge, who come out this way on occasion are Socinians, who are really condemned for other matters, but in terms of the broad stream of orthodoxy very largely defined, I cannot find this view of God anywhere in the history of the church.
There are other matters I have not gone into. They claim the reason the classical view of God prevailed so strongly was because of the influence of Neoplatonic thought and, later, Aristotelian thought in the church. It’s not grounded in exegesis. It’s grounded in the corruption of Christian theology by the impact of Hellenistic pagan philosophy.
Let me pause here for a couple of moments and ask if there are questions about what openness theology is. Do you see where openness theology is coming from, where it is going, what it is about, before I start pressing on with some preliminary responses?
Question: Is there a distinction between God’s permissive will and his directive will?
Don Carson: Yes, but not in such a way that the parameters I’ve already laid out are circumvented. Those sorts of distinctions (as deployed in Calvinism, for example) they would not be happy with. Not because of the categories themselves but because of the larger Reformed structures of thought.
Question: When did it first appear?
Don: Well, they would argue it appears in the pages of the Bible. In terms of a movement within evangelicalism, there are fairly extreme forms of Arminianism and a libertarian vision of will in Pinnock’s Grace Unlimited about 25 years ago but still no unambiguous openness theology.
There are moves in this direction that overlap with openness theology in process thought. That’s extraordinarily important. But to be fair to the evangelical so-called openness theologians, they are not quite process theologians. Process theologians, for example, deny a place for creation. Creation itself is part of process and God’s interaction with things, whereas all of these people I’ve been referring to want to preserve a Christian doctrine of creation.
Nevertheless, someone like Greg Boyd did his PhD on Hartshorne, who is one of the fathers of process thought. So if you’re asking if the philosophical roots of the movement extend farther back than the books by these writers themselves, yes, they do. They extend very deeply into process thought, which really runs from the beginning of the twentieth century on.
It’s partly bound up with a dissatisfaction with what is perceived to be a static vision of God and the need for change. There are many roots that go into process theology and, before that, process philosophy. So Schubert Ogden, Charles Hartshorne, and a number of authors along that line. In terms of people who are self-confessed evangelicals but who adopt this line, it really only goes back to the early 1990s. I really don’t have time to track down the process roots now, but those are the antecedents as far as I can see.
To be fair to these people, it is important not to label them process theologians. In fact, there is one important book out that is jointly written by genuine process theologians and by the openness of God theologians in which they mutually explore each other’s commitments and boundaries. They treat each other with vast respect and then articulate their differences. It would be nice if similar respect were extended toward the classical view of God. Now let me respond, first of all, by talking briefly, in the same order, about …
4. Passages and categories ostensibly in support of classical theism.
Let me begin where Boyd begins in his book God of the Possible.
A. God declaring his intentions in passages like Isaiah 46–48.
I wish I had time to work through these texts with you, but what’s very important to observe in such passages as Isaiah 43, 44, 46, and 48 is that, in the context, there is a contrast between the true God and false gods, what makes God true as opposed to what makes the false gods false. The answer is the false gods cannot predict or control the future. Only God can do that.
If God only gets it right some of the time and then has to say on occasion, “Oops, I made a mistake,” then he falls into precisely the categories that God himself insists, according to Isaiah, describe the false gods. Is that really, therefore, a fair picture of what Isaiah is saying? When Boyd says that all God is saying here is that God gets it right normally, that he’s statistically superior to the false gods, he’s not claiming very much, and it does seem a little bit out of line with the actual words of Isaiah.
B. Passages regarding God’s foreknowledge of Israel’s future.
Yes, it would be possible to say that God could have knowledge of the 400 years or the 70 years without specifying all of the details, but these passages must also be linked to texts in which it is insisted that God turns the heart of the king in whatever direction he likes, or to passages in Proverbs that speak of throwing dice, and whatever comes up, that’s determined by God. They’re fairly sweeping things.
So although such passages do not themselves specify absolutely everything, they certainly lead you to think along those lines. Moreover, Daniel’s prayer is based on the assumption that God has specified the 70 years and now will fulfill his promise. It is not based on the assumption that Daniel thinks it’s statistically likely that God will keep this one or anything along those lines. We’ll come back to the matter of prayer in a few moments.
C. Prophecies regarding individuals, especially about Cyrus.
This one I found astonishingly unbelievable. What was the psychology of the parents who named their kids? If God, in fact, so circumscribed their options that only one came out, it seems to me that is a classic definition of God’s mysterious providential rule.
D. The foreknowledge of predictable characters.
Don’t forget. Christ does not say in general terms that Peter has a record of being a bit unstable, so he’s likely to flub this one. He actually says, “Before the cock crows, he will deny me three times.” That’s pretty specific. This does not sound like a statistically clever bet. “Oops! I was wrong. He did it four times, but I was close.” That’s not the kind of picture that is actually being described here.
Moreover, passages like John 6:64 and 17:12 regarding Judas. Although these texts do insist absolutely on Judas’ guilt, nevertheless, Judas’ perfidy is described in terms like this: “So that Scripture might be fulfilled.” “He is the son of perdition.” “He is going to the destiny that was predicted of him.” Again, it sounds like a very weak assessment of those actual passages.
E. The foreordaining of Christ.
Turn to Acts, chapter 4. We need to start looking at some texts and put our finger on them in strong ways. In this passage, if you recall, the Christians are facing their first whiff of persecution. When Peter and John face it, they eventually go back “to their own people” (4:23), to Christians. They report all that has happened, and they begin to pray, in Acts 4:24, “Sovereign Lord …”
It’s interesting there too, isn’t it? Immediately, they begin in the context of persecution by confessing God’s sovereignty. “ ‘Sovereign Lord,’ they said, ‘you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together the Lord and against his Anointed One.” ’ ”
In other words, the assumption of this quotation from Psalm 2 is precisely that the sort of thing Peter and John have experienced falls precisely within the realm of what Scripture itself ordains or predicts or describes, in some way. Then it gets tighter yet. Verse 27: “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.”
Verse 28: “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” A moment’s reflection shows that if you lose either verse 27 or verse 28, you do something desperate to the cross. Supposing you lose verse 28. Now you have the conspiracy. Herod and Pontius Pilate are in a nasty conspiracy together.
That means that what brought Christ to the cross was not that Christ had been ordained to go to the cross from before the foundation of the earth (to use the language of Revelation), not that he’s fulfillment of the entire sacrificial system, which has been going on for centuries, not that he is the fulfillment of Yom Kippur, but instead that there was a conspiracy.
Thus, the cross itself becomes not the result of God’s foreordaining sacrifice but the result of a nasty political conspiracy amongst third-rate politicians in a small Mid-Eastern country. If, on the other hand, you affirm verse 28 and lose verse 27, then you have these human beings perpetrating all kinds of nastiness but simply according to God’s ordination with no blame really chargeable at their door.
If that’s the case, if there’s no blame really chargeable because they’re really ordained to do these sorts of things, then the question becomes.… Why do you have to have a sacrifice in the first place? If they’ve done things that cannot be called wicked simply because they are robots, because they’re determined in some mechanistic way, if there’s no fault that can be rightly charged to them, then you don’t need a sacrifice in the first place. It’s merely an amoral God standing equivalently behind good and evil.
That is why in the history of the church these two verses together are often used, with many others, to support what is called, in the philosophy of religion, compatibilism. Compatibilism does not teach us that we understand all there is to know between God’s sovereignty and human accountability. It does insist that the Bible teaches both and that the two are mutually compatible. There’s much more to be said about compatibilism than that. I shall return to it toward the end, if I have time.
What Boyd wants of these passages is this: God ordained the crucifixion, all right, but he didn’t specify any of the movers and shakers. He specified that Jesus would go to the cross, and, therefore, somebody had to be the nasty who put him there, but God didn’t specify anybody who did it. So somehow we have God specifying all that was done but not who did it.
How much sense does that make in totalitarian regimes? Who on earth has the right to pronounce judgment? Who on earth has the right to pronounce crucifixion? If these events are predicted, and they are predicted of Jesus, and they are predicted of Jesus in first-century Palestine about the year AD 30, of whom must this be true? Could it be true of anybody other than Pilate? It becomes more and more ludicrous to make distinctions of this fine order.
Now I would love to say more about these sorts of things, but I will pass by, because of pressures of time, to …
5. Passages that are adduced in favor of the openness of God.
Let us begin with the last one. We will not take them in quite the same order now; we’ll pick and choose a few of them.
A. God changing his mind.
What do we make of such passages as these? I strongly invite you to do a word study on this matter. Part of the problem is in our translations. The King James Version for the relevant Hebrew word has repent most commonly, but today, repentance means turning away from evil or the like, so no one wants to use that word. The NIV, which is widely used in many circles, says God changes his mind, but that might be cranking up the issues in a way that is not quite right. Many translations offer something like relent. It may be a bit better.
Note, however, the contexts. If you work through all of the texts, you will discover that almost all of them find God as the subject of this verb in connection with his varied responses to our sins. In other words, it’s not as if God has a certain neutral project and then changes his mind. You cannot find texts of that order. Rather, God makes profoundly moral judgments or offers profound moral blessings, and then, when there is horrible judgment, God relents. He changes his direction. He changes his mind.
Does this mean that God is, in effect, saying, “Oops! I didn’t foresee that one; I have to go back and reconsider,” or does it fit within the broader pattern of covenantal structures in which God says, “This is the way of life, and this is the way of death. These are the blessings I now pour out upon you. If you do this, I will relent. I will change my mind”?
It’s not as if God is having a complete reversal of all of his previous judgments. It’s that God is a personal being who interacts with us, his personal being creatures, and responds to us. Is that unforeseen? The text does not say so. Moreover, some of the issue turns on a kind of psychologizing of God. When we say we are sorry for something, we usually mean we are sorry and we want to turn it around. We had not seen how this was going to come out. We made a mistake.
When God is sorrowful for something, it may reflect the fact that his sorrow is in function of his response against sin. His whole being is bound up with his evaluation of the circumstance. This brings us to the much larger question of God’s so-called impassibility. It has to be said that some defenses of impassability, in which God becomes a kind of Greek unmoved mover or the like, are indefensible. On the other hand, rightly defined, Scripture does insist that God is impassable in this sense.
When we speak of being moved by our emotions or carried by our emotions, we use language like “falling in love,” which gives the impression you can’t help yourself. You’re just swept along by it. “He suffers from a surge of jealousy” or “He flies into a fit of rage.” In every case, such language suggests that emotions have now dictated the conduct, behavior, and responses of the individual and will or reason or principle or priorities are, in some measure, tamed as emotions take over.
In that sense, surely, God is never described as falling in love. He sets his affection on people, he loves them from before the foundation of the earth, but he doesn’t fall in love. When he is wrathful, he doesn’t lose it. It’s not as if he simply can’t stand it anymore and, in a fit of rage, breaks out in a vile temper and lets people have it and then feels a lot better afterwards. He has been released from all this pent-up wrath.
No, the point is that all of God’s attributes function in the perfection of the context of all of his attributes. In other words, it’s not as if God turns on his sovereignty at this moment and then turns on his love at the next. Here he decides to be forbearing and gracious, and over there he turns on justice and is going to come down hard. No, all of God’s perfections are operative all of the time.
Within that framework, then, it is quite possible to speak of God’s love and God’s wrath, and God’s love is never merely the willed seeking of the other’s good so there’s no emotional connection. That’s an entirely mistaken notion of the love of God. Never does God fall in love. God is loving, God is holy, God is just, and all of these things work out in all of their perfection all the time.
In that sense, it would be wrong to speak of impassability as God in any sense losing it to his emotions, but God is impassable in the sense that though he has the most profound emotions, he is never controlled by them. The best definitions of impassability have always included that kind of sophistication.
So if God grieves deeply over Saul, let’s say, this is because God is not only sovereign will; he is a person who interacts with persons and thus can grieve and be angry and be loving, but this within the framework of his decrees, his will, his holiness, his perfection, his purity, his truthfulness, and his reliability. It is not that God sometimes loses the other perfections that are also described. He is always perfectly a perfect God.
If we take the biblical text as a whole, it seems to me that the passages about God changing his mind fit within that framework. This is part of the much larger pattern of speaking of God as simultaneously transcendent and personal. Part of our problem is that we so frequently think of personal attributes in finite terms, because most of the persons we know are finite. So when we speak of personal things like loving, responding to, talking to, interacting with, and asking questions of, we inevitably think in terms of finitude.
B. God displaying his transcendence.
The God of the Bible, though he is described in personal terms, is also described as transcendent, above space and time, above the created order, existing before there was a creation and, thus, not limited to it. If you stress God’s transcendence endlessly and not his immanence or his personhood, it is almost impossible to avoid slipping into some kind of pantheism or deism. If you stress God’s personhood endlessly and forget other things the Bible says, it is almost impossible to avoid a finite God.
In principle, that perspective is acknowledged by Boyd when he comes to a passage like Genesis 3 and acknowledges that the question he asks, “Where are you, Adam?” is really a rhetorical question. It is not that there is some clue in the text that says exegetically, “This one is rhetorical. You mustn’t read too much into this.” His reason for thinking that in this case it is rhetorical is because of his philosophical commitment to the view that the future is open.
If you’re not philosophically committed to that view, then why cannot you say the same sort of thing when God asks some question about the future, granted all of the texts that picture God knowing the future, determining the future, controlling the future, knowing all things, and that this is bound up with God himself in Isaiah 46 and 48? What is the problem exegetically in seeing that this is, to use the language of Calvin, the language of accommodation, of a transcendent, personal God disclosing himself in space-time history to finite beings who are made in his image?
Now let me pick up one or two more passages. There are texts like Romans 8:29–30, sometimes called the golden chain. You might want to take a look at that. Consider, then, Romans 8:29–30: “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”
This sounds like an extraordinarily tight chain. “Those whom God did this to, God did the next to.” And so on. It is entirely in line with passages like, “I know my sheep, and no one will pluck them out of my hand.” There is a strength to God’s sovereignty in these passages. Or turn to a passage like John 6:37–40. John 6:37 is sometimes misunderstood.
John 6:37: “All that the Father gives to me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” I have heard this passage expounded along these lines by somebody who should have known better: In the first part of the verse you have a Calvinist voice, and in the second part of the verse you have an Arminian voice, so this is a great text for Calminianism.
You have here, “All that the Father gives to me will come to me,” and all the Reformed types say, “Amen.” On the other hand, the complementary perspective is, “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away,” and that’s the Arminian perspective that balances things out. That really does misunderstand the passage in a massive way.
The second part of the verse is, from a literary point of view, a litotes. A litotes is a figure of speech in which you affirm something by denying the opposite. “How many people were at the theater last night?” “Oh, not a few.” What does “not a few” mean? It means many. You affirm the many by saying, “Not a few.” That’s a litotes. So in this passage, Christ says he will never drive certain people away. There is a litotes here, but the litotes is not by saying he will not drive certain people away he will, instead, invite them in.
That entirely misunderstands the sweep of the context. Rather, the litotes is by saying by not driving them out, he will, in fact, keep them in. The verb ekballo means to drive out. The opposite of that is to keep in. Do you see now what the flow of the passage is? “All that the Father gives to me will come to me, and now, once they’ve come to me, I won’t drive them out; no, I’ll keep them in.”
Now see where the text goes from there. Verse 38: “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me …” That’s the whole point. “All that the Father has given me will come to me, and then, of all that he has given me, I won’t drive them out.” That’s the litotes.
“No, I will keep them in, because I came to do my Father’s will, and my Father’s will is precisely this: that of all he has given me, I will lose none of them.” In other words, if Christ should lose any of those whom the Father has given him, it could only be because he is either unwilling or unable to do the Father’s will. I do not see how else you can interpret such passages. But this also from a book that insists Christians must persevere. We are back to compatibilism.
Think of a passage like Genesis 50:19–20. This passage is abysmally handled by the openness of God people. You recall the setting. The old man has died, and now Joseph’s brothers come to him and say, “Look, before the old man died he told us privately that you should not take revenge on us.” They’re afraid that with Joseph’s powerful political position he could now be quite mean toward them in the light of their perfidy in an earlier time. Joseph is upset. He has been through this once in Genesis 45, and now he comes to it again.
He says (his words are very important), “In the matter of your selling me into slavery, you meant it to me for evil, but God meant it to me for good.” Some texts say, “God intended it for good, while you intended it for evil.” Notice carefully what the text does not say. The text does not say, “God had intended me to be driven down to Egypt in an air-conditioned limousine, but unfortunately, you chaps mucked up his plan. God didn’t foresee that little ambush, and, as a result, I landed up as a slave down there.”
Nor does it say, “You had a nasty plan that I would end up in hopeless captivity, but God is a better chess player, so after you’d made your nasty move, God came along with several moves of his own, and, as a result, I ended up as prime minister of Egypt. Last laugh is on you. Isn’t God a good chess player?” No, in one and the same event, “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.” That is typical of the biblical doctrine of compatibility.
If you want to ask, “Are there some mysteries involved in this?” yes, I think that one can prescribe them pretty narrowly if one has enough time, but this is a typical sort of text. Or again, Isaiah 10:5 and following. Here God, through the prophet Isaiah, is addressing the Assyrians, who are being used by God as a weapon against his own covenant community. I’m sure you are familiar with the passage.
Now God speaks to the Assyrians through the prophet in astonishingly blunt language. “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath!” It’s important to understand the language here. God is pronouncing his woe against the Assyrian who has been God’s club of wrath against the Israelites. God says, “I send him [the Assyrian] against a godless nation [the Israelites], I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets.” It sounds like pretty definitive control.
But this is not what the Assyrian intends. This is not what he has in mind. His purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations. “ ‘Are not my commanders all kings?’ he says.” That is, “My military commanders are the equivalent of kings in other nations.” “Has not Calno fared like Carchemish?” That is, “These cities I’ve already raped and reduced to rubble.” “Is not Hamath like Arpad, and Samaria like Damascus?”
“Are not these cities before me that are still standing just like the cities I’ve already destroyed? If I’ve taken on Damascus, don’t you think I can take on Samaria?” “As my hand seized the kingdoms of the idols, kingdoms whose images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria—shall I not deal with Jerusalem and her images as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?” What does God say? “When the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion …” Notice this is God’s work, this work of punishing his own covenant people by the rapacious hand of Assyria.
“When the Lord has finished all his work … he will say, ‘I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes. For he says: “By the strength of my hand I have done this, and by my wisdom, because I have understanding. I removed the boundaries of nations, I plundered their treasures; like a mighty one I subdued their kings. As one reaches into a nest, so my hand reached for the wealth of the nations; as men gather abandoned eggs, so I gathered all the countries; not one flapped a wing, or opened its mouth to chirp.” ’ ” Sheer arrogance.
God’s response? “Does the ax raise itself above him who swings it …?” In other words, God uses the language of a mere tool. As far as God is concerned, the Assyrians are nothing more than tools in his hand, even in the matter of war against his own covenant people. “[Does the] saw boast against him who uses it? As if a rod were to wield him who lifts it up, or a club brandish him who is not wood! Therefore, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will send a wasting disease upon his sturdy warriors …”
Do you see what is going on here? Simultaneously, God dares to use the language of sovereign control even of an inanimate object. He dares to use language that controlling of a sovereign empire like the mighty Assyrians in his use of the Assyrians as a weapon of wrath against his own people, while simultaneously holding the Assyrians responsible for what they’re doing and the attitudes they display as they do it, such that God will then turn again and rend them. It’s compatibilism, and you find it everywhere.
Moreover, it’s impossible to come to terms with a book like Habakkuk unless you buy into biblical compatibilism. What is Habakkuk’s problem? Habakkuk’s problem is not that God has chastened the people of Israel. Habakkuk knows they deserve it. Habakkuk’s problem is that God has used a more wicked nation to chastise a less wicked nation.
The answer is finally an eschatological one. “When I went up to the temple, then I saw ultimately what their fate would be.” There is no doubt in either God’s mind or Habakkuk’s mind that God is using this wicked nation. I would dearly love to deal with other passages, but let me end by bringing up some of the …
6. Theological issues the openness theologians think are in their favor.
Let’s begin with …
A. Theodicy.
I am sorely tempted to write a cheeky article. I don’t know if I ever will. One has to be careful about using too much sarcasm when one responds to error, but I’m thinking of titling this article, “The God of Slow Reaction Times.” This is the openness of God theologians’ self-justification. They feel that the openness of God theology actually provides them with a superior theodicy.
God did not foresee the putting out of Zosia’s eyes. Well, let us presuppose that the tormenters did it pretty quickly, and they popped out the first eye. According to their own understanding, God has perfect knowledge of all that takes place in present time, so why didn’t he stop the second eye? Maybe he didn’t foresee the first one. Why didn’t he stop the second one? God of slow reaction times.
Maybe God did not foresee the final solution that led to Auschwitz and Birkenau and Dachau. After all, God can’t foresee all the future, can he? But once you’ve burned the first two million, doesn’t he have any idea what’s going to happen next? Once Auschwitz is built and you start pouring concrete at Birkenau, doesn’t he have some small clue about what’s going to happen next? It seems to me, therefore, that you must finally postulate not only a God who does not know the future but a God with slow reaction times.
In other words, the theodicy, far from being a help, actually becomes slightly silly when one starts working it out in practice, it seems to me. Moreover, it does not bring much comfort, because at the end of the day, after you’ve lost your daughter in a car accident to a drunk, the most you can say is that God didn’t see that one coming or that this is a horrible world where there is contention, and you simply have to fight on.
Whereas, Christians surely want to say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. All things work together for good to those who are the called according to his purpose. I may not know the end from the beginning and discern his deep purposes, but on the last day, not only will justice be done; it will be seen to be done. This world is not the final port. It is not the final stage. It is not the final place of assessment, and because we do not know the end from the beginning, we will trust him who does.”
I have a daughter who just finished her fourth year of university and is about to enter her fifth year. When she was about 15, we were living in Britain. We used to live in England one year in three. We lived there for nine of the last thirty years. At the time, her best friend was a lass called Melissa. Melissa and my daughter Tiffany were close friends when they were 12, 13, 14, and 15. Melissa was not a Christian.
That Christmas, when we were living in Cambridge, the plan was for Melissa to come and spend Christmas with us. Her parents were going to put her on the direct flight from Chicago. I would meet her at Heathrow, and Melissa would spend time with Tiffany. The night before I was to leave very early in the morning to meet the overnight flight, we received a phone call from Melissa’s parents. Melissa just that day, after some illness, had been diagnosed with leukemia.
To make a long story short, despite the best medical advances and the best medical care, Melissa started going downhill very fast. At Easter, we flew Tiffany the other direction, and she stayed with some Christian friends for three weeks and spent all day every day in the intensive care unit of the hospital where this lass was. Melissa was a six-foot tall, blond, strapping young woman. Now all her hair was gone. She was flesh and bones, and she was emaciated and weak.
Tiffany spent 12 or 14 hours a day there at the hospital by her side, all gowned and cloaked. She was the only one who cleared out Melissa’s trach tube during the day. Then Tiffany flew home to England. In June, Melissa died. Tiffany handled most of this pretty well. She’s not the sort of person who hides it all. She could talk about it. She grieved openly. She wept, and so forth. But at the end of the day, I could see it was bothering her a great deal.
In September of that year, by which time we were back in Chicago, I heard crying in my daughter’s room. I tapped on the door and went in. I said, “Come on, come on; tell me about it.” She burst into a flood of tears and said, “Daddy, God could have saved my best friend, and he didn’t, and I hate him.”
Now what will bring comfort to my 15-year-old daughter? “Well, you have to understand, Tiffany, this is a nasty world. God didn’t see that one coming. God is going to lose some of them, and Satan is going to lose some of them, but God is a good chess player. He’ll win in the end.” No, no. I had two things to say to my daughter, both of them deeply anchored in Scripture and in classical theology.
There was a preliminary thing to say: “My dearest Tiffany, I am so glad you told me. There’s no point in pretending that you think otherwise, since God knows your heart anyway. In fact, you’re not really saying much more than the psalmist says or Job says when he really is disgruntled at God’s mysterious providence, but before you write God off, before you are too certain that God is unfair and unjust and unloving, I beg of you to think of two things.
First, do you want a God just like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, very powerful but finally in the control of whoever holds the lamp? This God will do anything you say, provided you hold the lamp. Then the question becomes.… Who is God? The genie is powerful, but the boss is whoever holds the lamp. Or is the God of the Bible so immensely big that sometimes he will do stuff you might not yet understand? Do you want a God who, though powerful, is finally so under your control that you are god?
Second, before you write this God off, you will learn to measure God’s love not by whether or not your friend lives or dies but by a little hill outside Jerusalem. You lost your best friend. God lost his Son. In fact, he didn’t lose him; he gave him. When the whole world collapses around you, when you are suffering and under the curse of death yourself, you will remember God commended his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
The measure of God’s love for you is finally measured by two ugly pieces of wood on a little hill outside Jerusalem. That is an immutable in space and time and history, and it was planned by God from before the foundation of the earth. On this you will find secure comfort, and on this alone.”
In my judgment, there are similar lessons to be learned about the nature of prayer, the nature of accommodation, and other things, but since I promised some time for questions and answers, let me allow that time now.
Question: How can we deal with the challenges of open theism without reopening again the larger questions of Calvinism versus Arminianism and so forth?
Don: In some ways, the way to do it is by showing articles and books to Arminians who are tempted by open theism written by Arminians themselves who advance many compelling reasons for rejecting open theism. Although open theists like to consider themselves a more self-consistent brand of Arminianism, most Arminians I know reject that utterly.
The real question for Arminians is whether God knows the future exhaustively. That becomes the test. To lose at that point brings far too many problems, both pastoral and theological (and exegetical too, for that matter), down the road. However, if I were pastor of a church or teaching in a seminary, I would want to argue that the most consistent response is still the broad response that acknowledges the importance of compatibilism as a given of Scripture. I would want to argue that in the strongest terms. It is a more secure position.
Compatibilism has to watch out and defend itself against mere determinism. On the other hand, it seems to me it is a far more consistent position than positions that adopt a libertarian view of free will. In my view, human freedom needs to be anchored not in a libertarian view, in which human beings have absolute power to contrary; it needs to be grounded in something like Jonathan Edwards’ voluntarism: human beings are condemned because we choose to do, we want to do what we do.
In that sense, our ground of responsibility is not that we have absolute power to contrary, to do something else; our ground of responsibility is tied precisely to the fact that we do what we want to do, and that’s why we are justly charged with it, whether there are constraints of necessity in a larger frame or not.
But that takes us down another whole track. I would be prepared to argue that in most circles, and I think I could put it in a way that does not necessarily get everybody’s defenses all up in disarray. Nevertheless, that’s the track I would go down. It is why I spent quite a lot of time on four or five important compatibilism texts like Acts 4, Isaiah 10, and Genesis 50, and there are dozens more.
From the perspective of openness theologians, openness theology places more emphasis on the integrity of reciprocal relations. In other words, they would argue that it is less problematic. Because we live in an age that likes to think of truth itself as primarily relational, that likes to think of Christian vitality and fidelity as, first and foremost, relational and less in terms of metaphysics, objective truth, creedal confessionalism, and so forth, the emphasis on relationships is seen by openness theologians as, in fact, a strength and not a weakness.
From their point of view, knowledge of God under openness theology is strengthened in the relational domains. What I would want to argue by way of response is that the issue is not merely the integrity of the relationship but relationship with whom. We return, therefore, to what the Scriptures do actually say about this God. What the Scriptures say about this God, classic theism insists, is that he is personal. He is loving. He is relationally tied to us.
He is also sovereign. He is also transcendent. He is unimaginably holy. He knows the end from the beginning, and all things are at his disposal. So there comes in our relationship a certain element of hushed mystery (I acknowledge that) that you get a little less of in openness theology, where the relationship is more understandable because there’s an element of finitude to it. There’s an element of finitude to it precisely because the future is not so constrained by the mysteries of providence.
Question: [Inaudible]
Don: Part of the problem is that when you read openness theology depictions of their opponents, in my view they are rarely fair. In other words, you can find passages in, let’s say, Calvin or Edwards or most classical theologians who have dealt with the doctrine of God that depict God knowing things and controlling things absolutely.
They will cite all of those passages and say, in effect, “See? This is a deterministic view. It doesn’t make sense to speak of relationship. It doesn’t make sense to speak of responsibility. We’re merely determined, and if we’re determined, what’s the point of even trying?” But that is to choose passages that are all tilted one way in an author who, by his own understanding, insists that this God is not only sovereign but also relational, loving, interactive, personal, and so forth.
In other words, precisely because they reject compatibilism, they caricature the opponent’s position by quoting only those passages that deal with God’s sovereignty and not all of those passages in Calvin, let’s say, that deal with all of God’s other attributes. Thus, they have a caricature of Calvin which they then reject. In my view, it’s not good scholarship. I hate to say that, but it really isn’t.
If you are going to deal with an opponent’s position, you must deal with an opponent’s position fairly. So if you want to represent what Calvin or Edwards says on such matters, you must represent the complexities and nuances of his thought and then reject that, if you will, but not caricaturize Calvin as if he is a crypto-determinist. He is not. So sometimes the difficulty of dealing with these people’s interaction with classical theism is that what they are rejecting is, in fact, very substantially a straw man. Let’s close in prayer.
Our Father, we do see that in the mysteries of your providence, even such disputes as these are so often sent in this fallen and broken world to help us study the Scriptures again more closely, so that we are not merely adopting positions we have inherited but we are going back to your most Holy Word and thinking things through again and again and again. O Lord God, help us by your Spirit, through your Word, to embrace gladly all that your Word teaches us of yourself and not to go beyond the things that are written. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
