Questions to an open theist

The God of classical orthodoxy - that is to say, the God of Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformers, the Puritans and so on - is a dynamic, relational, infinitely alive God.

However, in recent years a group of ex-evangelical writers who call themselves 'Open Theists' and 'radicalised Arminians' have claimed that the traditional Christian understanding of God makes him static, remote, detached and unfeeling. The debate between orthodox Christians and open theists proceeds apace and is producing a vast literature. The questions that follow are intended to highlight in summary form some of the leading inconsistencies and dangers of open theism.

Those wishing to pursue in more detail the issues raised here will find much food for thought in the following four books. The first two are presentations of Open Theism by two of its leading proponents. The next two are devastating critiques of open theism:

Gregory Boyd, 'God of the Possible' (Baker, 2000)
Clark Pinnock, 'Most Moved Mover' (Paternoster, 2001)
John Frame, 'No Other God' (P&R, 2001)
Bruce Ware, 'God's Lesser Glory' (Apollos, 2000)

1. Does God know everything? An easy first question: it is one of the pillars of open theism that God does not know everything. You believe that God is unable to know the 'contingent future decisions of free moral agents'. And you will know that the Evangelical Theological Society at its special meeting, held in November 2001, affirmed, against the arguments of the leading open theists, that 'the Bible clearly teaches that God has complete, accurate and infallible knowledge of all events past, present and future including all future decisions and actions of free moral agents'.

2. Can you conceive of God being unwise? I ask because Clark Pinnock says that God's only essential attribute is love. An essential attribute of God is one without which he could not be God. In other words God could not be God without being loving. An unloving God would be a contradiction in terms. But if love is the only essential attribute of God then God has his other attributes 'as it happens' rather than as an inevitable, could-not-be-otherwise feature of his being. Someone who holds that God's love is his only essential attribute is able to think of God as loving (essentially) and wise (as it happens). But they are therefore also able to think of God as loving (essentially) and unwise (as it happens). Another reason for asking would, of course, be the notorious claim of a leading open theist that, on occasion, since he does not know all things, God gives unwise guidance to his people - guidance which he later regrets having given. How does your belief, that God makes mistakes in guidance which he later regrets, square with the Psalmist's confidence in the rightness, righteousness and wisdom of God's ways ?

3. Where in Scripture did you get the idea that a certain formulation of 'freedom' is the paramount value to God? Clearly freedom is an important blessing which God bestows and if the Son makes you free then you have true freedom. But open theists take one philosophically disputed definition of freedom (called 'the liberty of indifference') - one for which there is no Scripture warrant - and then claim that this is a value so important to God that his protection of it accounts for all the suffering in the world.

4. How do you decide on interpretation? Scripture speaks of God analogically - saying that he is a lion, a rock and a moth; saying that he has nostrils, an arm and ears; saying that he walks and listens and forgets. You know that since God is the uncreated Creator of all things, any likening of him to something within creation will have an 'it is like this' element and an 'it is not like this' element. How do you decide in what ways God is and in what ways not like a lion? How do you decide in what ways God does and does not walk, in what ways God forgets and does not forget? The reason for asking is because you like to portray orthodox Christian believers as being unserious about the language of Scripture. If an orthodox Christian says that the word 'repented' in the sentence 'God repented' does not mean the same thing in every respect as the word 'repented' in the sentence 'the people of Israel repented' then you accuse them of sitting light to the plain teaching of Scripture. Yet you will clearly say that the word 'lion' in the sentence 'God is a lion' does not mean the same thing in every respect as the word lion means in the sentence 'that animal in the cage is a lion'. We are all involved in the vital task of carefully interpreting Scriptural language according to principles which the Scripture itself provides.

5. Where in Scripture did you get your definition of 'relationship'? You know that relationship between two persons in time involves action and reaction, and mutual responses which are chronologically sequenced and which therefore also involve change on the part of both persons. That is a far cry from demonstrating that the relationship between one who is the infinite creator of time and one of his time-bound creatures must necessarily take the same form.

6. Do you think that God is in time and will one day have more knowledge, greater wisdom and fewer disappointments than he does now? So that God is not now what once he was, not now what he one day will be, does not have the entirety of his life now and is dependent upon his relationship with creation to arrive at fullness of Godhood?

7. How do you know that God won't 'take a turn for the worse'? Since, in your view, God can change and his holiness, righteousness, wisdom, justice and truth are not essential to his being, then there is no compelling reason in your 'system' to believe with certainty that God could not one day - under great pressure no doubt - become unholy, unwise, unjust, unrighteous and untruthful.

8. Were the Greek fathers unbiblical? Why do you caricature the early church fathers' doctrine of God as being a capitulation to unbiblical Greek thought when you know well that actually the early church fathers were astonishingly conscious of and careful about the anti-biblical nature of some Greek thinking and, frankly, in a better position than we are, to recognise how certain words were used and concepts understood ?

9. What is your relationship between theology and culture? Why, given that you are so trenchant in your criticisms of the early church fathers for surrendering to unbiblical Greek thought in the culture of their day, are you so uncritical of the relationship between your theological endeavour and the culture of your own day? Does it not strike you as suspicious that your views on freedom, on the suffering of God, on the development and growth and self-realisation of God and so on, are so very amenable to psycho-therapied Western liberal po-mos ?

10. Who keeps moving? Does the theological trajectory of Clark Pinnock, author of Most Moved Mover and one of open theism's key thinkers, give you cause for concern? It could be said that Pinnock himself is the 'most moved mover' - from an evangelical belief in the sovereignty of God and an inerrant Scripture in the 1960s through a denial of that sovereignty and inerrancy, to an inclusivist view of other religions and now to toying with the idea that God, as God (not the Son as incarnate), has a body.

11. The best language? Do you regret the language in which you describe the God whom countless brethren of yours claim to adore and serve - language such as 'metaphysical abstraction ... inaction ... an alienating substance, remote and unsympathetic'? A proper reading of Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformers, the Puritans and later evangelical writers shows you are being unscholarly, uncharitable or positively dishonest to write this way.

12. Can God deliver on his promises? How do you square your belief that God cannot certainly deliver on his promises with the teaching of Scripture? You say that God does not know everything about the future, that he has voluntarily limited the exercise of his sovereignty and that we can thwart his will. Given the interconnectedness of all things, then it is plain that your God cannot certainly deliver on his promises. He may well have a sporting chance of doing so since he is so clever (a Grand Chess-Master is your picture), but a sporting chance is not certainty.

13. Has God withdrawn from a part of life? Where, given the phenomenal detail given in Scripture of God's active sovereignty over all things - in nature, in kings' hearts, in the affairs of nations, in the details of life, even in the actions of the wicked, do you get the idea that God has withdrawn from a part of life, drawn a boundary around it and said, 'I will not enter that space'? That space is, of course, what you see as the unconditioned (and therefore ultimately random) free will of humans. But where does Scripture speak of God's sovereignty as something which he can or does lay aside?

14. How do you care pastorally for those in pain? How do you offer comfort in suffering when you are not sure whether this suffering is (as the orthodox believe) allowed/caused by a loving Sovereign Father who has righteous, loving and wise (morally sufficient) reasons for it or rather is suffering which God knows about (once it starts happening), wishes with all his heart were not happening, but which God is simply not able to prevent ?

15. What is your teaching about prayer? How do you know, when God doesn't answer your prayers whether this is because he lovingly won't answer or because he disappointingly can't answer? Maybe he knows better than you and is acting in love but maybe his will has been thwarted by a human being whose free decisions he did not know about ahead of time and would not allow himself to override or interfere with. How do you know which it is?

And all this, of course, leaves those adhering to an orthodox, biblical view of the God of Scripture with questions for themselves. If our God is the sovereign, loving, inescapably wise and righteous, promise-keeping, all-knowing, prayer-answering, guidance-providing, relational, wholly alive Father of mercies and God of all comfort, what have we said, how have we lived, what have we done that has made the enfeebled, changeable, ignorant, impotent, co-dependent God of the open theists so attractive to some of our fellow-Christians? There are failures of knowledge, of teaching, of living and of loving to repent of and confess. And, all glory to him, there is a great and gracious God whom we may and must press on to know and delight to serve.

David Field,
Oak Hill College,
Southgate, London
(davidf@oakhill.ac.uk)

Will anyone answer David Field's concerns?

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