Responding to Open Theism

Article: Responding to Open Theism in Fourteen Words By Andrew Wilson (original source here)

Because of the controversy over open theism twenty years ago, there is a huge range of books and articles out there, both critiquing it and defending it. Greg Boyd’s website is a fount of free resources in defence; Crossway’s generosity means that in many ways the most significant critique, Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, is also free to download or read online. But when theological debates hit the person in the pew, there is a place for keeping things simple. So here are fourteen common sense objections to open theism, framed around thirteen words and one number. Here’s hoping they help.

Orthodoxy. Even the most sympathetic advocates of open theism admit that it is all-but-impossible to find in the first eighteen centuries of the Church’s history. (The Trinitarian heretic Faustus Socinus is the somewhat uncomfortable exception that proves the rule.) For those committed to historic orthodoxy, that is a massive problem—and the common open theist response, that we have only recently learned how to read the Bible without being skewed by Platonism, founders on the evidence from the (decidedly non-Platonic) Rabbis, among other things.

139. If you type “Greg Boyd Psalm” into Google, it immediately suggests “139,” and it’s easy to see why. “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether” (139:4). “In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.” Despite their best efforts, texts like these continue to pose an enormous problem for open theists.

Babies. If love is not love unless it is freely chosen—which is pretty central for many open theists—then how can babies go to heaven? (This is a problem for Arminians as well, of course.)

Exceptions. One of the difficulties of engaging with open theism is that, whenever a specific example of God knowing about a future human decision is under discussion—Pharaoh’s hardening, most of the things foretold by the prophets, Peter’s denial, Judas’s betrayal, and so on—it can be waved away as an exception: “ah, but that’s one of the things that God does know.” This makes it look suspiciously like a claim that is immune to being falsified. (It’s like Tom Wright’s comment on a Dominican theologian: “Schillebeeckx first sweeps all the evidence under the carpet, and then exclaims, ‘Look! No evidence!’”)

Miracles. As soon as you have a God who can work miracles, you also have a God who could work all sorts of miracles to prevent evil, and yet chooses not to. Why raise Lazarus and not John the Baptist? Why calm one storm and not another? Why provide manna for Israel and not Sudan? Why strike down Herod and not Hitler? Why destroy all the non-Jews in Egypt, but not Auschwitz? If X is evil, and God could stop X miraculously but chooses not to, is he not somehow choosing to allow X? If not, why not?

Sustinence. It’s actually worse than that, because God is not only choosing not to stop Auschwitz; he is sustaining it. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. He provides rain and sunshine for it. He causes the heart of the Oberst-Gruppenführer to keep beating. He sustains the whole cosmos, including the Zyklon B. By choosing to continue doing these things, God is just as implicated in the ongoing existence of evil as he would be in a more orthodox view. Isn’t he?

Names. If, as is often said, God knows what he is going to do but not what we are going to do, how did he know, centuries in advance, what the parents of the Persian king Cyrus were going to name their son (Isa 44:28; 45:1)? I choose this example because the parents’ choice of name clearly has no bearing whatsoever on the history of redemption, so we cannot put it in a special category of its own. If God knows a human decision as apparently trivial as that, why should we think there are any human decisions he does not know about?

Comfort. If you are Reformed or Arminian, and you face a situation of intense difficulty, you can be comforted with the truth that God knew this was going to happen, and it has not caught him by surprise. (I’m speaking from experience here, obviously, as many can.) If you are an open theist, you cannot say that; in fact, you will probably assume that he has only just found out, just like you. Somehow that is far less reassuring.

Providence. Again, faced with suffering or opposition, a Reformed person will say some version of what Joseph said to his brothers—“You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, that many lives should be saved”—and then go and read the Heidelberg Catechism. An open theist will have to say: no, God didn’t mean it for good. In fact, he didn’t “mean” it at all.

Agency. If God in no sense wills the evil that is brought about by Satan and/or wicked human beings, then how do we make sense of the fact that both God and Satan incited David to take a census? Or that both God and Satan are said to be behind Job’s sufferings? Or that both God and Satan moved Judas to betray Jesus? Or that Paul’s thorn was a messenger of Satan, yet was given in order to make Paul depend on grace? What do we do with those texts (Ex 5-10; Isa 10; 45; Lam 3; Acts 4; etc) which explicitly attribute actions both to wicked human beings and to God?

Trinity. If love is necessarily risky (this claim is one of Boyd’s central propositions in his “Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy”), then how can the Father, Son and Spirit all love one another?

Hell. Why are advocates of open theism so frequently drawn to either annihilationism or purgatory, or both? (This isn’t a mere ad hominem; views on hell and openness are explicitly connected in the works of a number of open theist writers.) Is the traditional view of hell incompatible with open theism?

Paul. In a number of places, Paul presents a picture of divine and human action that looks very different to open theism, a point which I encountered regularly in my PhD studies. Not only does God know what we will choose to do; he is himself somehow active in what we choose to do (1 Cor 10:12-13; 15:10; Gal 2:20; Phil 2:13-14; and so on). John Barclay coins the term “energism” to reflect Paul’s thought here: God is active within the human subject. So if we try to rescue God from being aware of (or active in) free human choices in advance, we may find ourselves also rescuing God from Paul’s theology.

Lewis. If you can stretch from fourteen words to twenty, then C. S. Lewis put it best in his Mere Christianity: “Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.” Sometimes a dose of good old-fashioned English common sense is what you need.

As I said at the start, there is far, far more that could be (and has been) said about all this, so this is very much a brief introduction to a whole range of issues associated with open theism. But since it is coming up a bit more in my immediate experience, I thought a sketch like this might be helpful to others.

Does God Ever Change His Mind?

but that is not always possible. On this issue, it is important to lay the groundwork to provide a satisfactory, biblical answer and to do that necessitates serious study and application of the Scriptures. Let’s take a look at this question from a few different angles.

Hermeneutics is the science of biblical interpretation. One among many sound principles of interpretation is that we should base our view of God on the didactic (teaching) portions of scripture rather than the narrative (story) or poetic portions. This is why although the Bible says we can hide under the shadow of the Most High and under His wing find refuge, no Bible scholar expects God the Father to be a winged bird in heaven. This is obvious picture language where God uses images to speak to us highlighting the fact that just as a young bird finds refuge in the warmth and comfort of its mother’s wings, we believers can find refuge in the Lord. The Lord is our rock and fortress, but that does not mean God is a literal rock or castle; or that because the Lord is our Shepherd and the Psalmist wrote, “your rod and your staff, they comfort me” God the Father has a literal rod and shepherd’s staff that He uses with regularity in heaven. No, it is obvious picture language to describe something very meaningful about His relationship with His people, even though it is not to be viewed in wooden, literal terms.

These expressions are what we call anthropomorphic language (taken from two Greek words, “anthropos” meaning human or man and “morphos” meaning form). God communicates with us in human words or form. When you think about it, that is all God has at his disposal when revealing His truth to us because as humans we can only understand human language. Birds speak a bird language to converse with each other and so too, human beings use a human form of communication.

Likewise, when God communicates with us, He uses terms and images that are easy for us to grasp, even though if He explained them in the way He understood them, the concepts would be so far and vastly above our ability to comprehend that they would appear meaningless to us. God is infinite in knowledge and we as His creatures are finite. God has to remedy this in some way when He communicates with us so that He might provide a bridge of understanding. Just as a father smiles and engages in “baby talk” as he stands over the cot of his new born child, so God stoops to communicate with us in “baby talk” using language we can understand. Everything He communicates is true and meaningful, but expressed in terms finite minds can fathom. Continue reading

Does God Take Risks?

Derek W. H. Thomas is senior minister at First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta. In an article from Tabletalk magazine entitled “Praying with the Patriarchs”, he writes:

Does God take risks? The question is not as silly as it sounds, and in present-day discussions regarding what is called “open theism,” it is the pertinent question to ask. But let’s ask the question again, from a different perspective. Is God’s knowledge of the future certain? Certain in the sense of being unchangeable, set down by an unalterable divine decree that cannot be changed?

The answer would seem, to orthodox Christians at least, obvious. But recently a flood of literature has emerged suggesting that the future is “open.” The so-called open theists take as one of their key texts Abraham’s prayer for Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18:22–33. On the face of it, Abraham’s prayer seems to change God’s mind over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah on the basis that fifty, then forty-five and eventually ten “righteous people” are to be found there. More pertinently for Abraham, his nephew Lot and his family lived there. The prayer is bold, even audacious! Frankly, if it wasn’t right here, in the Bible, we would not even think that such haggling (for that is what it sounds like) would emerge from the one whom the Bible calls “the friend of God” (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8).

The “God takes risks” proponents of providence have a field-day: Continue reading

Does the Bible Affirm Open Theism?

by John M. Frame (original source such as Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, Gregory Boyd, and William Hasker, seek to do justice to the “give and take” in Scripture between God and human beings. For example, in Ex. 32:7-10, God tells Moses he will destroy Israel for worshipping the golden calf and raise up a new nation from Moses himself. Moses intercedes, however, and in verse 14 God “relents.” God also seems to “change his mind” in Isa. 38:1-5, where Isaiah prophecies that King Hezekiah will die, but in response to Hezekiah’s repentance adds fifteen years to his life, and in Jonah 3-4, where God retracts an announcement of judgment in response to Ninevah’s repentance.

From these and other such passages, the open theists infer that God is a temporal being (not “above time” as in much traditional theology), that he changes his mind, that his plans are influenced by creatures, that he sometimes regrets actions that he has performed (as Gen. 6:6), and that he does not have exhaustive knowledge of the future. On their view, God’s regretting and relenting come about because human free decisions are utterly undetermined and unpredictable. So God must adjust his plans to the free choices of human beings.

We should not ignore these “relenting” passages. On the other hand, we should not forget either the pervasive biblical emphasis on God’s sovereign control of the world and his exhaustive knowledge of past, present, and future. God brings about natural events (Psm. 65:9-11, 135:5-7), even apparently random ones (Prov. 16:33). He controls the smallest details of nature (Matt. 10:29-30). He governs human history (Acts 17:26, Isa. 10:5-12, 14:24-27). If someone dies accidentally, it is because “the Lord lets it happen” (Ex. 21:12-13). Contrary to open theism, God brings about human free decisions, even sinful ones (Gen. 45:5-8, Judg. 14:4, 2 Sam. 24, Isa. 44:28, Luke 22:22, Acts 2:23-24, Rev. 17:17). He hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Ex. 4:21, 7:3), and others as well (Deut. 2:30, Josh. 11:18-20, 1 Sam. 2:25, 2 Chron. 25:20), for his own purposes (Rom. 9:17). He is also the source of human faith (John 6:37, 44, 65, Eph. 2:4-10, 2 Tim. 1:9, Acts 13:48, 16:14-15, 18:27) and repentance (Zech. 12:10, Acts 5:31, 11:18). So human freedom is not indeterminate as open theists maintain. We are free in that we do what we want to do; but behind our plans and desires are those of God (James 4:13-17).

In general, God “works out everything in conformity to the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:11; cf. Lam. 3:37-38, Rom. 2:28, 11:33-36). And God cannot fail at anything he seeks to do (Ps. 33:11, 115:3, 135:6, Prov. 21:30, Isa. 14:27, 43:13, 46:10, 55:11, Dan. 4:35, Rev. 3:7).

Since God controls everything, he knows everything, including the future. Knowing the future is a test of a true prophet (Deut. 18:22) and indeed of a true God (Isa. 41:21-23, 42:9, 43:9-12, 44:7, 48:3-7). Through his prophets, God often predicts the future centuries in advance (as Gen. 9:26-27). Contrary to the open theists, who think God cannot anticipate human free decisions, he often predicts human behavior in detail (1 Sam. 10:1-7, Jer. 37:6-11, Matt. 26:34). He predicts the behavior and character of human beings in the distant future (1 Kings 13:1-4, Isa. 44:28-45:13).

How then should we understand God’s “relenting?” For one thing, God states as a general policy in Jer. 18:5-10 that if he announces judgment and people repent, he will relent; similarly if he pronounces blessing and people do evil. In other words, relenting is part of God’s unchanging plan, not a change forced on him by his ignorance. Further, God is not only transcendent, but immanent. He has dwelled on earth in the tabernacle and temple, in Christ, and in his general omnipresence (Psm. 139:7-12). When God interacts with people in time, he does one thing, then another. He curses, then blesses. His actions are in temporal sequence and therefore, in one sense, changing. But these changes are the outworking of God’s eternal plan, which does not change.

It is important, then, to see God as working from both above and below, in eternity and time, not only in time as open theists propose.

For Further Reading

John M. Frame, No Other God: a Response to Open Theism (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishers, 2001). A critique of open theism.

John Sanders, The God Who Risks (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-varsity Press, 1998). A favorable exposition of openness theology.

Does God Ever Change His Mind?

Pastor John, I have a theological question for you. What would you say to someone (who was an Arminian) if you were having a discussion with them about the sovereignty of God in salvation and they stated that God does in fact change His mind (Exodus 32:14 is an example)?

That is a very good question. Nowadays people like to have instant sound bite size answers to their questions, but that is not always possible. On this issue, it is important to lay the groundwork to provide a satisfactory, biblical answer and to do that necessitates serious study and application of the Scriptures. Let’s take a look at this question from a few different angles.

Hermeneutics is the science of biblical interpretation. One amongst many sound principles of interpretation is that we should base our view of God on the didactic (teaching) portions of scripture rather than the narrative (story) or poetic portions. This is why although the Bible says we can hide under the shadow of the Most High and under His wing find refuge, no Bible scholar expects God the Father to be a winged bird in heaven. This is obvious picture language where God uses images to speak to us highlighting the fact that just as a young bird finds refuge in the warmth and comfort of its mother’s wings, we believers can find refuge in the Lord. The Lord is our rock and fortress, but that does not mean God is a literal rock or castle; or that because the Lord is our Shepherd and the Psalmist wrote, “your rod and your staff, they comfort me” God the Father has a literal rod and shepherd’s staff that He uses with regularity in heaven. No, it is obvious picture language to describe something very meaningful about His relationship with His people, even though it is not to be viewed in wooden, literal terms.

These expressions are what we call anthropomorphic language (taken from two Greek words, “anthropos” meaning human or man and “morphos” meaning form). God communicates with us in human words or form. When you think about it, that is all God has at his disposal when revealing His truth to us because as humans we can only understand human language. Birds speak a bird language to converse with each other and so too, human beings use a human form of communication.

Likewise, when God communicates with us, He uses terms and images that are easy for us to grasp, even though if He explained them in the way He understood them, the concepts would be so far and vastly above our ability to comprehend that they would appear meaningless to us. God is infinite in knowledge and we as His creatures are finite. God has to remedy this in some way when He communicates with us so that He might provide a bridge of understanding. Just as a father smiles and engages in “baby talk” as he stands over the cot of his new born child, so God stoops to communicate with us in “baby talk” using language we can understand. Everything He communicates is true and meaningful, but expressed in terms finite minds can fathom.

All Scripture is equally inspired by God. Each passage has to be interpreted correctly and that means that even when we LITERALLY believe the Bible, we should interpret the parables as literal parables, poetry as literal poetry, the narratives as literal narratives, the historical genealogies as literal historical genealogies (rather than look for a secret hidden message) and on and on we can go.

One rule of interpretation is to build all doctrine on necessary rather than possible inferences. A necessary inference is something that is definitely taught by the text. The conclusion is unavoidable. It is necessary. A possible inference is something that could or might be true, but not something actually stated by the text. Some refer to this as the distinction between the implicit and the explicit. An implication may be drawn from the text of scripture, but we then have to ask if the implicit interpretation is a NECESSARY ONE rather than a POSSIBLE one. We can all have our theories, and we do, but a sound principle we should employ is to not teach as DOCTRINE something that is only a possible interpretation. We should build doctrine ONLY on necessary interpretation.

In practical terms, to make these kind of distinctions are often a lot harder than it might first appear because it means we have to take a step back and analyze exactly why we think a verse teaches something. In other words, it means testing our traditions and doing a lot of thinking. Yet this is something we should do constantly. Paul exhorted Timothy to “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” (2 Tim. 2:7)

All of us should be prepared to hold up our preconceived notions to the light of Scripture to see if these assumptions are valid or not. The result of this process often involves the killing of some sacred cows, but that’s a good thing, if what we have held to be true cannot actually be supported by the biblical text. We all have our blind spots and traditions but we are not always aware of them. Therefore, the serious Bible student asks questions of himself and of the text constantly in order to determine what the sacred text actually says and then he builds his thinking on that.

Here’s one text as an example: John 20:19 says, “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

Many people read this narrative passage and conclude that Jesus walked through the locked door in order to present Himself to His disciples. But does the text actually say that? No, it does not. The text might be teaching that. It is certainly a possible inference drawn from the text, but by no means a necessary one. There are other possible explanations.

Concerning this verse the ESV Study Bible says (correctly in my opinion), “Some interpreters understand the doors being locked to imply that Jesus miraculously passed through the door or the walls of the room, though the text does not explicitly say this. Since Jesus clearly had a real physical body with flesh and bones after he rose from the dead… one possibility is that the door was miraculously opened so that the physical body of Jesus could enter, which is consistent with the passage about Peter going through a locked door some time later (see Acts 12:10).”

To state the principle again: we should build all doctrine on necessary rather than possible inferences, on the explicit and not the implicit. All else is speculation.

Another rule: Interpret the unclear passages in Scripture in light of the clear. Though all Scripture is God breathed, every passage is not equally clear (easy to understand). Even the Apostle Peter struggled with Paul’s writings at times, as he found some of it “hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.” (2 Peter 3:16)

When determining what the Bible teaches on a particular topic, find the passages which CLEARLY address the issue at hand and make this the starting point of your doctrine, rather than an obscure (or less than clear) passage. Once that which is clear is firmly grasped and understood, then proceed to study the passages which at first seem to be unclear, using the other hermeneutic rules.

In narratives, something may be implied from a story (as in the case above), but we should always ask if it is a necessary implication in the text and secondly ask if that possible interpretation is countered by something explicitly stated elsewhere in Scripture in the didactic (teaching) portions. We do this all the time naturally – which is why we dont think of God as a winged bird with feathers… why? because elsewhere (in the didactic teaching in John 4:24, God reveals Himself to be a Spirit rather than localized in one place with a physical body (He is omnipresent, etc, etc,).

This distinction I make is not mine in the way of origin. It is a carefully thought out method of interpretation employed by all sound teachers of the Bible. It is not a method of Reformed people to deny Arminians.

Of course, none of us follow our own interpretive rules consistently, which is why Christians and even scholars make mistakes, and why we dont all see things the same way. We ALL have our blind spots and traditions. Those most blinded to their traditions are those who dont believe they have any.

If there is a contradiction between two views, at least one of them is wrong.. If we could see our glaring mistakes personally, we would change our views instantly, but that is what theologians call one of the noetic effects of the Fall – we just dont think as perfectly now since the Fall of Adam… God is not confused even if we are.

When we read a biblical story, it is easy to “read into” it to interpret it in ways unintended by the author. This is why sometimes a parable only teaches one main truth and not every detail in the parable can be stretched too far.. the parable merely provides a window to reveal a certain truth – for instance, that men always ought to pray. Incorrect interpretation occurs when we view minor details in the story in the same regard as an explicit statement of doctrine. Great care is needed so that we base our belief system on what it explicitly taught by the didactic portions rather than merely perhaps implied in the narrative ones.

In reading certain narrative portions of Scripture, some have incorrectly concluded that God changes His mind. Yet the Bible is clear that not only does God not change in His essential nature (Mal. 3:6) but that He does not repent or change His mind. The Bible actually teaches this in a didactic portion. “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” Numbers 23:19.

For the sake of argument though, lets try to imagine God literally changing His mind. I want to explain how this concept is inseparably linked with God’s omniscience because for God to change His mind, He would need to make a decision and then be given new information He did not have before, so that He could either see the error of His ways, or choose a better course of action. It is important we see this. Continue reading