Part 6: A Preliminary Response

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the foreknowledge of God in this address from The Gospel Coalition.

Now it’s late. I haven’t gone on for my full hour, but I see haze dropping over some of your eyes. We were a little late getting going, so I’m going to stop here and skip some of this other material. I’ll come to theological and philosophical questions tomorrow. If you want to have a few minutes for questions now before we all break up, now is your time. We’re supposed to, in theory, finish at 5:00, aren’t we?

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Okay. We’ll fudge a little bit here if you have a few questions. If you’re really just desperately desirous of getting out and going home and having friends around or sitting in a coffee shop, just don’t ask any questions. But if you want to raise questions, this is, by all means, the time.

Male: In the openness-of-God view, how would they deal with the hermeneutical principle of not contradicting Scripture. I’m hearing you say that’s key to the whole issue here. In terms of a response from them, I can’t see them raising their hands and saying, “We don’t agree with that.”

Don Carson: Yeah. No, no. That’s right. That’s exactly right. That’s why, you see, it is important for Boyd, in the first part of his book, God of the Possible, to begin by working through the passages that, I think, are pretty strong in the domain of compatibilism, to say that’s not really what they mean at all. He has to reinterpret those passages that seem to talk about God’s utter sovereignty and this sort of thing, to domesticate them in some way, so that, when he gets to these other passages, there’s room to interpret them in the openness-of-God way that he wants.

Which means, likewise, as I’ve come back, what I’ve had to do, in fact, following him, is simply say, “I don’t think he has understood the ones on God’s sovereignty properly.” If you agree with my interpretation there, then by the time I get to the passages that he induces in favor of his position, there is already a head of steam built about saying, “Wait a minute now. If he’s right, now you have a built-in contradiction.” He doesn’t have built-in contradiction if all the passages about God’s sovereignty can be rightly interpreted the way he interprets them.

He’s not arguing for contradiction. I’m saying, he ends up with contradiction if the interpretation I’ve given on those other passages on compatibilism are right, the Isaiah 10, verses 5 and following passages; that sort of thing. You see? I don’t see how you can get around those sorts of passages and some others that we haven’t begun to deal with yet. I’ll deal with a few them tomorrow in connection with the doctrine of God. Does that make sense? I’m not accusing them, at all, of overtly trying to build some kind of contradiction into Scripture.

Male: You have great energy at 5:00. That’s great. Thank you. I have just a few thoughts. In the Genesis 6 passage, as I read Dr. Greg Boyd’s material, his issue is about the genuineness of the regret. When God says he regrets, and I don’t have a dictionary with me, but the word implies a genuine expectation for something else, and then remorse that it didn’t happen. How authentic, how genuine is it for God to express himself as truly regretting when, in fact, as Dr. Boyd makes the point, he knew it wasn’t going to happen, so what’s he doing there? Is he playing a card and then not playing the card? Then I have a follow-up.

Don: Let me deal with that in a larger frame of reference. I have hinted at it again and again this afternoon, and I will be coming back to it again tomorrow, but let me push a little bit on that one. It does have to do with a whole range of issues, including the notion of impassability and other things. In fact, let me come at it from the side door, in talking about impassability. Impassability has been defined in a number of ways. Impassability, of course, comes from a Latin root that has to do with God not having passions, that is, emotions.

Some people, no doubt, have taken this to mean that every passage in Scripture that talks about God’s passions is anthropomorphic. That’s all they are. I don’t believe that. As a result, today, there are many Christians, even outside the openness-of-God camp, who deny the impassability of God, even though the impassability of God has been a staple in Western theology through the Middle Ages and down into the present, through Augustine and before that. You find it there. It’s part of the staple, and there are all kinds of passages that can be induced to support it.

Male: Allowing some things to eclipse, as you were saying. Some things …

Don: Yes, that’s right. But is there any sense in which those who affirm impassability are right? When there’s something that is that longstanding in the church, almost always, it is connected with something that’s right. Sometimes there has been a misinterpretation, misapplication, or abuse of it that has gotten something wrong. What I would want to argue is that the passages that speak of God’s love and God’s wrath are really passages about God’s love and God’s wrath. In that sense, impassability is incorrect.

The problem is that when we think of love and wrath, we think of them in the context of a finite being. If I’m wrathful, chances are very good that I’m wrathful because I’ve lost my cool. I may even be right. Let’s say I’m really ticked at one of my kids for doing something or other. Lest I give you the wrong impression, I have wonderful kids from my perspective. I have a good relationship with them, but I can be really ticked. It could be that I’m really ticked at something, and I might blow it and say something I shouldn’t say. Then I have to go back and apologize and so on.

So when we speak of falling into wrath, usually what we’re really saying is that the passions then control us in some ways. Likewise, we speak sometimes of falling in love instead of a principled, deep commitment or something like it. We “fall in love” and then there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve fallen in love. Because of our finiteness, limitations, and sinfulness, we think of passions thus, in some ways, as taking over and controlling us. But supposing you have passions in a being like God, who is not so limited, who does know the end from the beginning, and who never loses his cool?

When God is full of wrath against us, is it because he’s lost it? No. It’s not because he’s lost it. He’s genuinely wrathful. But that’s a function of his holiness against our sin. It’s not that he’s lost control. Thus, the best defenses of impassibility, historically, have not denied that God has passions; they’ve denied that God has passions whereby the passions rule and God loses control.

In other words, the passion of God’s love or the passion of God’s wrath as a function of his holiness, must always be integrated into all of God’s other perfections, including his reason, his knowledge, his compassion, his perfect control, his righteousness, his integrity, his truth-telling … all the time.

Now, in that sense, you see, I think the historic view of the impassability of God is correct. I don’t think that the Bible espouses a view of God’s passions that somehow in God’s passions means that God loses one or the other attributes, that somehow his sovereignty, however you understand sovereignty, is mitigated at that point because he lost it; it was a bad hair day.

Let me press on. If that’s the case, then, if God always has all his perfections, it’s one more instance where language that we use about God has, in certain respects, only an analogous connection to the way we use language about ourselves with respect to those same passions. Thus, when God is wrathful against us, is it because he’s ticked, or because this is his principled judgment?

In the Old Testament, God sometimes says, in connection with the exile, for example, “What’s going to happen is, you’re going to do this sin, and then I will be angry against you and I will pour out my wrath, and then my wrath will be vented, and I will have compassion upon you, and I will return you.” He can say, in advance, all that he’s going to do under all of these circumstances. He sees in advance and announces it in advance, and announces that after the wrath has been poured out, then he’ll turn again in compassion upon them and bring them back because he’s that kind of God.

So that all of God’s wrath upon his people for their sin is not God losing it, but God’s determined, willed, known, purposeful, holy reaction against sin, which never mitigates even for a moment that he’s still a God of compassion, love, and grace, so that all of his harmonies, all of his perfections, are always operating all the time. The way they manifest themselves in a particular case will be dependent on how he is responding to a particular thing. But then God himself can announce in advance that is what he’s going to do.

Now if that is the correct understanding or approaching some correct understanding of how the perfections of God come together, then when I come to a passage like Genesis 6, and Boyd asks the question (you’re right, this is what he does do), “If there is grief on the part of God at this, is there sincerity to the grief unless, somehow, he is changing his mind?’ I would say the question is loaded. It’s loaded with presuppositions of a finite God. I would say that his sincerity is precisely bound up with all of his perfections all the time.

Of course he’s sincere in his grief! And of course he knows in advance what he’s going to do, and he knows that his grief is coming. Christ was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the earth. God wasn’t surprised by the sin. God’s plan from before there was a world was that eventually there would be a Lamb on the cross.

Are we really to understand that God’s reaction to the sin in Genesis 6 is as if God knew that the race would rebel? He knew that somehow, and he had planned that Christ would die in advance, but when it actually happened, they were even more rebellious than he thought? That’s what caught him by surprise, and that’s why he grieved? You see, there’s no hint of that. In the context of biblical theology, he grieves over sin. He always does. It’s part of his perfection. He’s wrathful against sin. That’s part of his perfection.

And he still loves sinners anyway because that’s part of his perfection. To make it a question of integrity in grief tied to a view finiteness is already a presupposition that the text doesn’t mandate and other texts are already actively against. That’s why I insist the question from Greg Boyd is, in fact, a loaded question. It already presupposes the answer.

Male: I wonder if you would say that if God embraces that language to describe himself, whether it’s Greg’s question that’s loaded or whether it’s the issue of whether we’re understanding that phrase. I also wonder about when Moses was arguing with God about whether to wipe out Israel and start over with him. I wonder if Moses (I’m not being trite) is “Gee, God’s having a bad hair day here.”

I mean, there was a sense in which it seemed, at least to Moses, that unless God was just trying to elicit from Moses greater sincerity for the people he was leading. Of course, that’s a possibility, but it does seem that there was God responding. He was ticked off, and he said, “I’m going to take this people out, and we’ll start over here with you.” Again, obviously I think there’s a way to think … I guess the question I’d like to have you address is … Is there any sense in your thinking, Dr. Carson, in which the future is open and undetermined?

Don: To God?

Male: Yes.

Don: None.

Male: So that at the end of the day of everything, we will look back and we will say, “Everything that happened, God determined that it happened.”

Don: It depends what you mean by determined.

Male: That’s what I’m trying to get at.

Don: Because if you’re including in that notions I’ve already introduced that are part of the whole heritage of secondary causalities (of permission given to the Devil in Job, of sin foreseen by an omniscient God and therefore a Lamb that’s going to be slaughtered from before the foundation of the earth in God’s mind, of a son of perdition with all kinds of secondary causalities so that the sin is never directly chargeable to God) within that large framework, yes.

If, by determined, you mean the kind of robotic determination that is being set up very frequently by the openness-of-God people as if that were our position, then most definitely not. I think that’s a mere straw man. I don’t know any Christian who holds that view.

Male: Okay. Thank you.

Male: Perhaps this will be the last. I don’t know. In the relenting passages, it has been helpful to me, and perhaps you can comment, that it can be said at times that it is God’s will that his stated intentions be opposed. For example, that would be the Ezekiel passage where, having threatened the annihilation of Israel, he’s wondering why no one stands in the gap and stops him. That would also inform Moses, in Exodus 32 and 33, opposing the stated intention of God, etc., the propitiation, etc., which is really a type of Christ in that way.

Don: Before you go on with the question, let me make a footnote. I agree with what you’ve said, but the reason why it’s not duplicitous is because God says that’s the way you ought to act.

Male: That’s right. That’s right.

Don: Then I’m with you.

Male: But that also then informs the sense of dynamic unfolding of his purposes rather than simply a static, “I’ve pushed the ‘return’ button at the beginning of history, and now the program is flying.”

Don: Absolutely.

Male: So there is a personal dynamic unfolding rather than just simply an Islamic fatalism.

Don: Correct.

Male: Secondly, in a discussion with, not a theologian but a scientist, one day, it was his, because in the last 10 to 15 years, all the suppositions with regard to knowledge itself have been either undermined or overturned in almost any direction, mathematically, scientifically, and, in fact, scientists are finding themselves to be more metaphysicians nowadays than pure scientists, because they’re finding that everything they presupposed has been overturned by recent discoveries.

This person’s comment to me was that the openness theology is more a sense of a rebuke against modernism. That is, modern Calvinism or the fruits of Reformation are more a product of modernism than they are of pure Reformation theology, and that the openness question is a revolt against that expression of modernism. Your comments?

Don: Oh boy. Twenty-five words or less. In one sense, you’ve pushed my button, of course, because I have written in the area of postmodernism, and, in fact, in September, I have to go to Cambridge University for a conference with scientists on the epistemology of science from a Christian point of view. I’ve been working away at that one for a long time and it really does interest me a great deal, and I don’t really have time to answer here.

Let me say this. First of all, in the domain of science, although there have been a lot of things overturned in science and some scientists feel threatened, probably there is still a majority of scientists who resent postmodern incursions into their domains. Read, for example, a book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt called Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. It’s by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. It’s a modernist book through-and-through.

The gentlemen aren’t, in any sense, Christians, but they’re arguing unambiguously for a modernist epistemology with certainty and all that sort of thing, and universality of truth, and objectivity of truth, and all that sort of thing, which they claim all scientists really operate with. They go so far as to say that the postmoderns (who are in the arts departments, and the social sciences, and the literature classes, and all this) are destroying the universities.

They actually venture the opinion that sooner or later, the universities might have to divide between those who are really going after knowledge and those who are just playing games about it. It’s a blisteringly funny book. I mean, I don’t agree with every jot and tittle in it, but the scientific community is divided in this regard and that needs to be recognized. If you want a good read, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt … Higher Superstition. You just burst out laughing sometimes. Even though it is completely unchristian in its perspective, but it sure is funny.

In my experience, there are an awful lot of practical scientists and universities who are fairly modernist and objectivist in their own disciplines and are postmodern everywhere else. Whereas, the thorough-going theoreticians about science are often pretty postmodern even about science. Now that’s one whole range of issues that I can’t probe here.

The analogy with what you’re drawing and what we’re talking about, though … There is a point to what you’re saying about the tendencies of postmodernism to link with open-God theology and that sort of thing. There is one branch of theoretical atomic physics that likes to think of an open universe because they take Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in a particular way. In fact, there are three different interpretations of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but one of them is that the universe if open because of it. That leads to a certain kind of open view of the future. Do you see?

There is that link between science and the openness of God thing, and Boyd actually brings that up in a couple of places, but there’s more than that. In the postmodern critique of modernism … I know this is way outside the domain of this particular conference. If I’m doing technical stuff now, and you’re not interested, just forget it.

I’ll be done in a couple of minutes and the rest of you who are interested can listen, and then we can all go home. In fact, there’s a conference in this church on Saturday where I will have three or four hours to talk about the ancient Christian faith in a postmodern world, where I will be trying to explain some of these things step by step so they won’t be quite so obscure.

But in the postmodern debate, which constantly argues today that human beings can’t know objective truth, that they can’t know ultimate reality, that all truth is either socially defined or it’s individualistic, and so on. Interestingly enough, in this postmodern critique, we are constantly being offered an absolute antithesis there too. Either you can know something absolutely and unambiguously and clearly and exhaustively, or you’re lost in a sea of relativity.

Now if you buy into that antithesis, if you think that antithesis is valid, you’ll come up postmodern every time, because you can always show that no human being knows anything exhaustively and omnisciently, because everything is in some way connected with everything else in the universe. So that if you know anything exhaustively, then you have to know everything. The only being that can know anything exhaustively is omniscient. So if the choice is between omniscience and finitude (which is nothing other than relativism), then obviously we’re in the relativistic camp. The postmoderns win every time.

When you work through the literature on postmodernism, that antithesis comes up again and again and again, and the presumption is, you see, that the universe is more open-ended … well, you have a more open-ended thing, more open-ended interpretations, more open-ended perspectives. Obviously, it has some kind of psychological bearing in a postmodern world about having a more open-ended future too.

I agree with that, but what I’ve tried to argue too briefly in The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (although Gagging was long enough), longer elsewhere in lectures, I think that there are all kinds of ways of talking about human knowledge (human knowledge of true things) that is not exhaustive knowledge. That is, I think there are ways of talking about human beings knowing things truly and objectively without knowing anything exhaustively and omnisciently. There are ways of doing that: theoretical models, epistemological models, and so on. Those are the things that I appeal to in university missions, where I have to cover this stuff again and again and again, even to get a hearing nowadays.

My last university mission was at Yale in the first week of December. I stumble across some … The degree of biblical illiteracy in university missions nowadays is stunning. I came across an English professor there at Yale University who actually says that he delights nowadays in teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost to University undergraduates, because none of them know how the story is going to turn out.

The challenge of university missions nowadays is not that this is such difficult stuff to do. The challenge is that they’re bone-ignorant, it’s hard to know where to start. The trick is to get across the sort of basic biblical content, that I sort of absorbed by osmosis with my mother’s milk, to people who don’t know anything about anything. It’s like evangelizing in the middle of Thailand. Within this framework, one of the shifts is the shift in epistemology that we all postmodernism, in which it is either argued or presupposed that people cannot know objective truth. If you claim they can, that just seems arrogant and old-fashioned and bigoted.

So within that kind of cultural environment and in intellectual circles, that is the environment in which we increasingly operate and the kind of theory that comes across subliminally in our TV programs and that sort of thing all the time, even if people have never heard the word postmodern. It couldn’t be fine if they’re becoming postmoderns by just watching the TV tube. In that kind of world then, to have an open-ended future is obviously intrinsically attractive. Oh, yeah. There’s no way you should think for a moment that this sort of development could have happened at the height of the Reformation.

Just as the open-God theologians are claiming that the church made mistakes because they were too dependent upon Neo-Platonism or something, the obvious question to ask back is, “Then what are you guys dependent on?” because we’re all locked-in in some way or another, you see, to influences around us from our culture. That’s inevitable.

The question is whether or not we can get enough distance from them to be reasonably faithful within the limits of our capacity, our finitude, and our fallenness to, nevertheless, say some true things about the gospel that get transmuted from generation to generation, from generation to generation, under different epistemological models, so that there is whole central heritage of what the gospel is that has come down to us a deposit, to use Jude’s language, that was once for all delivered to the saints.

Male: I’ll ask just one question, and it ties in with many of the things that you’ve just responded to in recent … One of the claims made by the open theists or openness-of-God folks has to do with the degree to which Greek philosophical constructs of deity inform Christian theology and impassability and immutability in relationship to the perfection of God.

My understanding is pretty limited in these areas, but it seems Greek thought was that God could not change, was completely static, because if he changed or did anything of any difference, it would betray an imperfection in the past. Comment on that in terms of issues of impassability and immutability and the terms that you have already been discussing.

Don: In my view, it’s one of those criticisms that is made with a small modicum of truth and huge swatches of error. You can find … Well, in the first place, in the Greek domain, there was a huge diversity of thought. The Greeks sometimes go back and forth between talking of god in the singular and talking of god in the plural. The reason they can do that is because underneath their polytheism, with all their gods … Zeus (called Jupiter on the Latin side), and Hermes (called Mercury), and Aphrodite, and on and on and on … behind all those individual gods is a god-ness that is roughly pantheistic.

So that when the best of the philosophical Greeks talk about god in the singular, often it’s a pantheistic notion of god, but as they speak of god in the dynamic active sense, then it’s a finite god who is subject to lust. Gods are getting raped and attacked and killed and resurrected and all kinds of things. That’s what’s happening to gods in the Greek pantheon. Do you see? Over against both of those kinds of things, the Christian gospel went forth, and people were saying, “Wait a minute. There’s only one God. He does interact with us, but not with lust and hate. But he is changeless, because he’s principled. But he’s personal, so he’s not pantheistic.”

As you work through the fathers, you discover that the fathers are struggling again and again against competing errors in the culture. To view the ancient Greco-Roman world as just a god with a static status and that’s all is a huge mistake. The pantheistic cycle of things saw history going around in circles and circles and circles, and that was a pretty static view.

Over against that, you find the apostle Paul, for example, in Acts 17 in Athens, building a teleological worldview, with creation and with certain things that have happened now and are waiting for the end, and judgment still to come. It’s a teleological linear view of history. He’s got to do that as part of presenting what the gospel is in Acts, chapter 17.

It is possible, therefore, to go through the fathers and find this father who sticks his foot in it, on one side or another. And it is possible at various points in church history to find Christians who pick up categories from Aristotle, especially the great Aristotelian civicist that comes out under the Middle Ages, and forms of ptomism that, in my view, are far too indebted to ancient Greek thought. You can find Christians making mistakes again and again and again.

One author, for example, in his response to some of this stuff, argues very strongly that the central tradition of the church in every generation, even when people have been influenced by their surrounding worldview, has been to think through Christian views of God over against that worldview. They’re doing it again and again and again. He goes through some of the same fathers and says, “That’s really what’s going on. They might stick their foot in it once in a while, but it’s not as if their snookered, shanghaied, tripped up, completely domesticated by all of this.” Do you see?

There really does need to be a small book written on how the fathers are appealed to, by a lot of contemporary thought, as the bad guys for all the things that we want changed. The fathers can’t be domesticated quite as easily as that, in my view.