OPEN THEISM: A NEW PERSPECTIVE OF GOD

OPEN THEISM: A NEW PERSPECTIVE OF GOD

By: Daniel McMillin

AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF GOD: THE OPENNESS OF GOD

In 1994, the book that shook the evangelical world and radically shocked its readers was The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God, which included Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger where they introduced the doctrine of “open theism,” also known as “free will theism.” This doctrine has been defined in the following manner:

These men did not aim to radically depart from the traditional view of God willingly; instead, they were attempting to address issues like divine providence, freedom of the will, and the problem of evil. These men believed that these issues necessarily demanded an adjustment of the classically defined God since the God of classical theism is incredibly lacking. Hasker suggests that “A central concern of open theists is to maintain a robust realism concerning the character and activities of God attested in the Bible and to present such a view in a framework that is clear, readily intelligible and philosophically and theologically defensible.”[2] Additionally, he suggests that open theism best portrays the God of the Bible as a “risk taker” and describes the implications of this model for divine providence in relation to the problem of evil.[3] “When God describes to bring about a particular situation, one that involves his creatures in making free choices, it is impossible even for God to know with certainty how those creatures will respond; there is a genuine possibility that they will not respond in the way he intended and desired for them to do.”[4] The openness of God entails that, fundamentally, God takes risks, which appears to be central to one’s understanding of God, according to most open theists.

Since this is a relatively new doctrine that is not easily recognizable and is still under development, it is not easily the most natural way of reading the Biblical corpus, which is evident since no one throughout history has viewed God in this manner.[5] It is reasonable and responsible to ask, “Is there a Biblical basis for open theism?” Of course, open theists appeal to a plethora of texts, but it is still debatable whether or not open theists properly interpret these passages.[6] Ware categorized open theists supporting biblical texts as (1) “Growth in knowledge texts” and (2) “Divine repentance passages.” Each of these points assumes that God experiences change and has potential as they propose a God who has potential. The key component of God’s essence is His love (1 John 4:8), which they argue requires a dynamic and mutable relationship between God and man if He truly loves us. That is, God must really change for Him to relate to us properly; He changes us, and we change Him. the relationship between the Creator and the creature is one of “give-and-take.” Additionally, texts that seem to show a passible God who experiences alterations in emotions or feelings where He is grieved or angered by us. While this is used by open theists to affirm their view of God, it is uncertain why God’s emotions require His openness.[7] Another set of passages that are used are those that posit God changing His mind. They argue that these alterations in “divine intentions” create a “social and dynamic portrait of God.”[8] Also, God’s actions denote change in God’s nature since “the very concept of an act involves change.”[9] Those texts that appear to illustrate variation in God are best explained by the constant change of an open God. 

A BATTLE OF THE GODS: CLASSICAL THEISM VS. OPEN THEISM

The proposal of this new perspective of God is “a Biblical challenge to the traditional understanding of God.” The God of classical theism is said to be very static, while the God of open theism is more dynamic. According to Pinnock, the God of classical theism “never experiences novelty, adventure, spontaneity, or creativity.” He is an “aloof monarch, removed from the contingencies of the world, unchangeable in every aspect of his being, as an all-determining and irresistible power, aware of everything that will ever happen and never taking risks.”[10] The God of classical theism, for that reason, is a repulsive and undesirable version of the God of the Bible. Open theism is an attempt to preserve the relationality of God. As Hasker says, “The relationality of God is extremely important; God is ‘really related’ to us his creatures, and we are really related to him.”[11] However, this assumes that by redefining these classically defined attributes, the God of open theism is more relational than the God of classical theism or that the God of classical theism never was relational at all, and open theism resolves this issue. For God to be personal or dynamically related to us, He must limit Himself in some way. Of course, this assumes that to be personal requires limitations.

            Many of the divine attributes that are affirmed by classical theists are rejected by open theists since they do not conform to the openness of God. “The traditional view that God is ‘pure actuality, lacking any element of potentiality, is very difficult to reconcile with the biblically based assertion that God has done many things that he need not have done and is capable of doing a great many other things that in fact he never does.” Hasker clarifies that the differences between open theism and classical theism does not concern “the truth that God is perfect but rather the question of what that perfections consists in. God, we say, is eternal, not in the sense of being timeless but in the sense of everlastingness: he always has existed and always will exist. God is unchangeable in his nature, but he undergoes changes of state, including God’s affective states; he genuinely rejoices when we flourish and sorrows when we suffer, especially when we suffer due to our self-imposed alienation from him.”[12] Here, it is clear that open theists redefine classically defined attributes to uphold their doctrine of God. The aseity, immutability, and perfection of God are either redefined, denied, or deficient within this framework. Pinnock has proposed that the God of the Bible is not accurately portrayed as the Unmoved Mover but rather as the “Most Moved Mover.”[13] He is a God that is subject to change in duration, intention, and activity. This begs the question, is the God of classical theism not relational? If God is the Unmoved Mover, is He somehow not “really related” to us? Open Theists interpret Scripture based on how He is related to or affected by us rather than on how He is apart from us. They primarily focus on the economic Trinity, how God acts in time to relate to us, to understand the divine essence, and then place that upon the immanent Trinity, how God is in and of Himself.

It is evident that the open theist’s position is a nonhistorical position since, throughout Church history, relatively no one conceived of God as open. Of course, open theists may propose, as some do, that Christians have been wrong before and can be wrong about this as well. One of the many reasons for rejecting classical theism is due to the “Hellenization of theology” theory that was first proposed by Adolf von Harnack.[14] The theory is that the God of the Bible was distorted by Greek philosophy which heavily influenced the theology of men like Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin. This theory allows the open theist to address the absence of this doctrine throughout church history by asserting that all of historical theology has wrongly viewed God and now has been rediscovered through its abandonment of Greek philosophy. Of course, this theory does not address the reasoning for rejecting divine characteristics that the Old Testament and Jewish tradition maintain, such as divine immutability (Mal. 3:6).[15] 

OPEN THEISM AND DIVINE OMNISCIENCE: DOES GOD SEE THE FUTURE?

The possible origins of open theism are due in part to the fact that many people are compelled by the vision of God’s openness after they are challenged by the apparent incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and human free will. Of course, this has been a topic that has mustered up much debate for centuries among Calvinst, Arminian, Molinist, and Process theologians. The new addition partners to this discussion are the theologians who ascribe to open theism. It may be profitable to ask, “How do they approach the topic?” Open theism takes a sort of bottom-up vs top-down approach to divine sovereignty and human freedom. That is, they begin with human free will and then force God’s sovereignty to conform to their understanding of how God relates to human freedom. And so, open theists hold a libertarian free will where “an agent is free with respect to a given action at a given time If at that time it is within the agent’s power to perform the action and also in the agent’s power to refrain from the action.”[16] propose what they call “flexible sovereignty.”[17] As a cosmic gambler or risk taker, God does not always get what He wants. Sometimes, God lucks out and wins, and other times, man is able to win one over on God. As Pinnock says, “What God wants to happen does not always come to pass on account of human freedom…there is no unconditional guarantee of success because there are risks for God and the creature.”[18] 

Pinnock suggests that “if the creature has been given the ability to decide how some things will turn out, then it cannot be known infallibly ahead of time how they will turn out. It implies that the future is really open and not available to exhaustive foreknowledge even on the part of God.”[19] If we have free will, then the future cannot be decided. “We hold that much (not all) of the future is known by God as what might happen, and as what will probably happen, but not as what will definitely take place.”[20] Some, if not all, open theists assert that there actually is no future. God exists in time; He has a past and exists in the present, but there is no future in God. In fact, if God had a knowledge of the future, then we could not have libertarian free will. The future is a realm of possibilities where God knows all the variables or alternatives. While they claim to uphold the omniscience of God, their understanding is radically different from the classical definition of God’s knowledge. Hasker defines “divine omniscience” as “any time God knows all propositions such that God’s knowing them at that time is logically possible.”[21] They assert God knows all things (which includes all future possibilities) but doesn’t know the future since the future is not exhaustively settled. Thus, “he knows everything that logically can be known.”[22] As such, God does not and cannot definitively know the future free acts of human beings. From an open theist’s perspective, God seems to know the future in one place but is uncertain of the future in others. In essence, they deny divine foreknowledge since God cannot know all the future.  God cannot fully know what we, as free moral creatures, will do. In other words, God cannot know for certain what we will do but can only guess or attempt to anticipate what we might do. When humans do things that are contrary to their normal way of living, they can surprise God just as much as anyone else. For instance, when I go to a restaurant with my friends, and I normally order Dr. Pepper and tacos, then one day I decide to order a beer and a chimichanga, God is just as surprised as my friends. And so, as Hasker suggests, “God knows an immense amount about each one of us—far more, in fact, that we now about ourselves—but he does not, because he cannot, plan his actions toward us on the basis of a prior knowledge of how we will respond. And this means that God is a risk-taker; in expressing his love toward us, he opens himself up to the real possibility of failure and disappointment.”[23]

This view of God forces the open theist to see God as one who is surprised by the fall and the cross. Significantly, open theists posit that the Father maybe knew He would send His Son to earth but was surprised by the cross. Additionally, God does not really know when the end will take place since He does not know the future. That is why the God of open theism is properly viewed as “the greatest conceivable guesser” contrary to Anselm’s proposition that God is the greatest conceivable being. The greatest conceivable being would know the future, and since the God of open theism does not know the future, He cannot be “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived” since we can conceive of a God who knows and holds the future.[24] 

The God of open theism is not truly omniscient since He does not possess divine foreknowledge since “what is foretold may not happen”[25] It is apparent that open theism depreciates predictive prophecy which is incredibly vital for affirming the inspiration of the Scripture, the authenticity of the prophet’s message, the divinity of Christ, and the realness of God. Chiefly, predictive prophecy is used as a test the reality of one’s Godness. In Isaiah 40-48, God gives us a test for all false gods.[26] If an idol cannot predict the future, it is not a god. The argument is that idols cannot do anything, much less foresee the future. “The true God knows and declares the future (including future free human actions) before it occurs, while those imposter rivals neither know nor declare any such thing.”[27] If God cannot predict the future, then He cannot be God. As such, if God cannot foresee the future then either God does not meet the standard of God, or He has set a standard so high for Godness that He could not reach. Since open theism denies God of His foreknowledge of the future it pulls the rug from under His feet by removing the basis for His divinity.

Stephen Wellum highlighted the open theist’s major departure from the Christian tradition when he said: “It is a major departure from historic theology’s view of God. With its denial of God’s ability to know future free choices; its affirmation that God makes ad hoc plans in history in response to us as the master chess player’ or ultimate psychoanalyst;’ and its over-emphasis on divine love at the expense of God’s holiness, majesty, and glory, open theism, if adopted, presents a serious challenge to Christian theology.”[28]

OPEN THEISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND SUFFERING

Open theists posit a unique view of the problem of evil and human suffering. In response to such questions as: “Where did evil come from?” “Why does God allow evil?” and “Is God responsible for or did God create evil?” Oord suggests that there could not be a world without evil since “God’s loving nature requires God to create a world with creatures God cannot control.”[29] Open theism springs forth to offer a theodicy that potentially supplies a proper defense for God against evil. An additional point to be made is that if God knew we would sin, then He is held responsible for our sins. To protect God from evil, they abandoned the classical doctrine of divine foreknowledge or omniscience. This doctrine aims to protect God from the problem of evil where God says, “I didn’t do that.” If God controls or determines all things, then God always gets what he wants, and that would inevitably entail all evil things as well. To open theists, the repulsive nature God of a deterministic deity is that he would be delighted with evil since he must be the cause of evil. However, if God does not know the future He is protected from the apparent problem of evil and may respond, “I didn’t know.” In defense of God, Hasker suggests that “the justifying reason for God’s permission of an evil consists essentially of some good that is made possible, or some evil that is averted, by God’s permission of the evil in question.”[30]

Within the framework of open theism, “God knows that evil will occur, but he has not for the most part specifically decreed or incorporated into his plan the individual instances of evil. Rather, God governs the world according to general strategies which are, as a whole, ordered for the good of the creation but whose detailed consequences are not foreseen or intended by God prior to the decision to adopt them.”[31] In response to the problem of evil, open theism posits that “the combination of a natural order theodicy for natural evil, and a free will theodicy for moral evil, constitutes an adequate answer to the argument from evil against the existence of God.”[32] While this may be a rational and compelling perspective on responding to this ancient problem, it seems to not explain how things will get better and evil will no longer abound in the eschaton.

After evaluating the openness of God and its relation to the problem of evil and suffering, it forces me to ask the question if it successfully offers a theodicy. Does open theism defend or justify God and evil or make Him more responsible than ever before? It appears to me that God is not protected by an open view but is disastrously less defended. If God creates (libertarian) free moral creatures who then choose evil, then God irresponsibly introduces evil by creating human beings that would choose evil. As such, the open theist’s view of the problem of evil, in my view, fails to adequately accomplish what it sets out to do in its theodicy.

END NOTES

[1] Pinnock, Rice, Sanders, Hasker, and Basinger, The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1994), 7.

[2] William Hasker, “An Open Theist View” in God and the Problem of Evil (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 59.

[3] John Sanders, God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007).

[4] Hasker, “An Open Theist View,” 60.

[5] For more on how open theism has developed since 1994 and its aspirations for the future, see Richard Rice, The Future of Open Theism: From Antecedents to Opportunities (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020).

[6] For a thorough treatment of this, see Richard Rice, “Biblical Support for a New Perspective” in The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1994), 11-58.

[7] By affirming a passible God, open theists demonstrate a further departure from the traditional or classical doctrine of God which affirms the doctrine of divine impassibility, that is, a God who does not suffer.

[8] Rice, “Biblical Support for a New Perspective,” 26.

[9] Rice, “Biblical Support for a New Perspective” 36.

[10] Clark Pinnock, “Systematic Theology” in The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1994), 103.

[11] Hasker, “An Open Theist View,” 60.

[12] Hasker, “An Open Theist View,” 59-60.

[13] Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2001). This is contrary to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, XI.

[14] Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma. See also, John Sanders, The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1994), 59-100.

[15] For a thorough defense of divine immutability see James E. Dolezal, All That Is In God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2017).

[16] Hasker, “A Philosophical Perspective,” 136-137.

[17] For more on this see, Greg A. Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2000); “Open-Theism View” in Divine Foreknowledge (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001); John Sanders, “Open Theist Perspective,” in Perspectives on the Doctrine of God (B&H Academic, 2008).

[18] Pinnock, Most Moved Mover, 44-45.

[19] Clark Pinnock, “God Limits His Knowledge” in Predestination and Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 150.

[20] Hasker, “An Open Theist View,” 60.

[21] William Hasker, “A Philosophical Perspective” in The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1994), 136.

[22] Hasker, “A Philosophical Perspective,” 151.

[23] Hasker, “A Philosophical Perspective,” 151.

[24] See Anselm, Prosogion.

[25] Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge, 194.

[26] See especially, Is. 41:23, 26, 29; 42:8-9; 44:6-7, 24-26, 28; 46:9-10. Open theists may interpret these as conditional prophecies, but there appears to be no basis for this assertion.

[27] Bruce A. Ware, God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000), 102. See also, God’s Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004); Their God Is Too Small: Open Theism and the Undermining of Confidence in God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003)

[28] Stephen J. Wellum, Systematic Theology: Form Canon to Concept, Vol. 1 (Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic, 2024), 556. For more on the criticism against open theism see, John Frame, No Other God: A Response to Open Theism (P&H Publishing, 2022); John Piper, Justin Taylor, and Paul Kjoss Helseth, Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003);

[29] Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 146. See also, Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas (SacraSage Press, 2021); Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being (SacraSage Press, 2022).

[30] Hasker, “An Open Theist View,” 61. See, David Basinger, “Practical Implications” in The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1994), 168-171.

[31] Hasker, “A Philosophical Perspective,” 152.

[32] Hasker, “An Open Theist View,” 76.