A few thoughts on Open Theism
For those who don't know, Open Theism is a theological movement which attempts to reinterpret the biblical data and move away from what it views as "Classical theism," by understanding God in more dynamic, personal, "open," terms. It does so for numerous reasons, some historical, some philosophical, but for many of its proponents (especially Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, and Gregory Boyd) it is, they claim, for largely biblical/exegetical reasons (and this, of course, is a major separation between Open Theists and Process Theologians)
I sympathize with many of their claims and I want to take them very seriously both in their intellectual positions and as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Open theism has become something of a hot topic within Evangelical churches (though to be honest, and this might be due to my own biases, it appears to have subsided some as of late) and I think, as in all matters where tempers can flare, charity and cool heads must prevail.
That said, and to put my cards on the table, I find Open Theism very unconvincing. Any sort of systematic refutation would go well beyond my expertise (not to mention my patience) so here are just a few thoughts and observations that I have noticed in my reading.
1.) An interesting aporia arises (alliteration!) when we come to their doctrine of Incarnation. I of course say "their" loosely; even united as a general "movement" obviously individual thinkers will vary. In this instance I generalize from Clark Pinnock's position. The basic idea of Open Theism is, of course, that God is "Open"; which is to say they attempt to take, for example, the images of God "changing his mind," or "repenting," in scriptures (and various other examples of dynamic change, as in interpersonal relationships, human freedom, etc...) very seriously (read: literally). As Bruce McCormack points out in his near-monograph level essay "The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism," in the volume edited by McCormack Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives the general problem in this approach is that it first attempts to construct a general doctrine of God, and only then moves on to how this applies to Christology. In other words their doctrine of Incarnation and Christ is an extension or application of an otherwise established general doctrine of God (this is, in essence, reminiscent of Rahner's criticism of Aquinas' separation of the treatises "On the One God," and "On the Triune God," where, so Rahner argues, the Trinity begins to look like something of a speculative appendix to an already established picture of God.)
Open Theists (in this case Pinnock) run into an interesting problem. Aside from falling on the wrong side of the so-called "Trinitarian renaissance" of the last fifty years, in that they hardly allow the Trinity any sort of conceptual driving force within their thought, they run into a specific Christological problem. Their general doctrine of God says, of course, that God can (in specific and limited ways) change in relation to the world. For example, God chose to restrict his own omnipotence in order to allow room for human freedom. This is the whole point of Open Theism. When they come to the doctrine of the incarnation, however, they run ashore of a more ancient dilemma: does the Logos, the Son, remain what He eternally is while also being man? If they say no (which would seem to be a reasonable answer given the general thrust of their theological musings) like the early German kenotic theologian out of Erlängen, Gottfried Thomasius (who argued for the temporary renunciation of "relative" divine attributes like the myriad of "omni-whatever" attached to God) or his opponent G.W. Gess (who went as far as one could go before in essence becoming Hegel, and thought Christ reduced himself absolutely to the conditions of human finitude) then they seem to in effect deny the very truth that the concept "Incarnation," is supposed to uphold, namely that Christ is God in the flesh.
As Feuerbach pointed out in The Essence of Christianity one cannot in the case of God so easily divorce attributes from knowing the Person Himself, to change the attributes is also to take away the mode of identification. And in the case of God, essence and existence are identical. Therefore to take away the essence is also to deny God.
Yet to say The Son does not change in the incarnation, on the other hand (which is Pinnock's claim) is a very counter-intuitive claim within the system of Open Theism. All of this is to say (along with McCormack) that a more Christocentric view of God must be established to help counter the Open Theists more abstract account.
2.) I mentioned briefly above that one of the claims of Open Theism is that God limits his freedom and omnipotence in order to make room for true, finite, human freedom and choice. In this sense they attempt to distinguish their own position from positions closer to Process Theism, which subordinate God to a more general principle of "Process," thus indicating that God doesnt really have a choice in the matter, He is going to be affected by the cosmos whether he likes it or not. By this idea Open Theists attempt to underline both that God is, in fact, responsive to human freedom, while yet retaining a more or less "classic" view of omnipotence. That is: God is affected by us, but this is itself a function of omnipotence, because this "openness" is essentially a function of God's own will that it should be the case. One can see analogies to Moltmann's famous concept of "zimsum" (of simsum or zimzum, its spelled in a million different ways) which he borrowed from the mystical writings of Jewish kabbalah: since God in the beginning is all there is, God "retracts," or "recedes," into Himself to make "space" for creation.
Before I make my brief criticism I should preface it by saying: the God world relation is, obviously incredibly complex, perhaps even impossible, to conceptualize. Along with this comes the complexity of free will vs. determinism etc... I by no means, in this criticism, want to suggest that I have it all figured out or that those I disagree with are stupid, etc... They are all brilliant theologians who have in their own ways constructed beautiful systems in attempts to further our understanding of God. That said I must open by deferring to a quote by Herbert McCabe from God Matters: "God is not a separate and rival agent in the universe. The creative causal power of God does not operate on me from outside, as an alternative to me; it is the creative causal power of God that makes me."
Which is to say, as an "agent" (the scare quotes are meant to display that this can be understood only in a loose, analogous sense) God does not operate "on the same plane," as you or I. In this sense I agree with Pannenberg (surprise surprise!) when he writes in the first volume of his Systematic Theology: "The Infinite that is merely a negation of the finite is not yet truly seen as the Infinite....for it is defined by delimitation from something else, i.e the finite. Viewed in this way the Infinite is a something in distinction from something else, and it is thus finite. The Infinite is truly infinite only when it transcends its own antithesis to the finite. In this sense the Holiness of God is truly infinite, for it is opposed to the profane, penetrates it, and makes it holy..." The causal power of God is not merely "outside of me," as is gravity or the foreboding glare of your significant other, forcing you against your will into one activity or position or another. As David Bentley Hart likes to stress to no end in his wonderful essay "On the Infinite Innocence of God" our freedom is based in God's freedom, not in opposition to it. And this is because as an agent God is not merely quantitatively "more powerful," than us, but is "qualitatively" different. "In Him we live, and move, and have our being"
The upshot of this is that Open Theists, by insisting God limits himself by His own sovereign decision, appear to presuppose that God and the world are on the same causal-ontological continuum, or plane, because only in this manner would they ever "interfere" with one another, and would God then need to "limit" himself to allow the world space. In other words, in a sense, Open Theists presuppose a finite God by picturing God somewhat univocally along the lines of any other finite agent. And this can be attributed not just to an (apparently) "univocal" reading of language, but also Open theisms lack of Trinitarian conceptuality. God and the world are not merely juxtaposed as two different agencies separated by some "space," rather as Rahner somewhat obscurely writes “the difference between God and the world is of such a nature that God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest unity precisely in the differentiation.” And Jüngel writes in God as the Mystery of the World that the difference between God and the world is "constituted by God." In other words the difference is not like the difference between you and me, or between a rock and a chair. They are different because they are (among other things) separated by a space in which both dwell. The space between us and God is God Himself in the differentiated trinitarian agency. Thus the conceptual need for God to "limit" himself is questionable.
3.) Whats more, following the same line of reasoning above, God's simplicity is broken if in fact God can act in a way that does not fully express Himself. As David Bentley Hart, Thomas Weinandy, Paul Gavrilyuk, and others argue, this is the entire point of the concepts of apatheia (impassibility) and haplus (simplicity): God is wholly God in every act. He cannot be reduced, He cannot love less, be less "God," in any act. This may seem like an obscure criticism, but its importance cannot, I would argue, be overestimated. Not only (as is argued above) does it preserve an authentic view of the difference-in-unity of God and the world, but also it preserves the goodness of creation. If God must limit himself in the act of creation then creation itself is in some sense "Godless." (In fact Moltmann in The Trinity and the Kingdom uses this very term) More to the point, if God is, as I think Christians must affirm, our "barometer" (to put it crudely) of moral action, this idea that God can "limit" or "change" Himself becomes problematic, because God's acts, and thus also God's essence, are no longer convertable and wholly identified. If God can limit Himself that means his essence is not his existence, and vice versa. But this also means that any self-limited act, in destroying the simplicity of that conversion, allows God to produce an act not wholly expressive of God-self, and thus not wholly expressive of Goodness. This is, in effect, allowing Plotinus' concept of degrading emanation from a hieratic source (not to mention Gnosticism's various employments of the same theme) in the back door. Moreover this also seems to allow the basic thrust of protest atheism back in (a la Feuerbach): if the freedom of mankind is a good, but it involves a (self) denial of God, then human freedom is in some sense a negation or limitation of God. But this means that God is not the total source of the definitions of the good of man.
4.) A briefer criticism (though it is of utmost interest to me) is that in one way or another Open Theism decided to pursue its hermeneutic and ontology because of the apparent failings of what it deems "classical theism." I will keep this brief: I am not convinced. I believe that often "classical theism," indicates both an anachronistic reading of the tradition based off of later developments (as William Placher also argues in his book The Domestication of Transcendence) or it is a simple failure to deal with the original sources in their own context (as is argued by Gavrilyuk, Ayres, Barnes, et al). MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that the Nietzschean option is unviable, not only it itself, but because it rests essentially on a misinterpretation of history. I would argue much the same of Open Theism in regards to the classic Nicene and post-Nicene tradition.
I sympathize with many of their claims and I want to take them very seriously both in their intellectual positions and as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Open theism has become something of a hot topic within Evangelical churches (though to be honest, and this might be due to my own biases, it appears to have subsided some as of late) and I think, as in all matters where tempers can flare, charity and cool heads must prevail.
That said, and to put my cards on the table, I find Open Theism very unconvincing. Any sort of systematic refutation would go well beyond my expertise (not to mention my patience) so here are just a few thoughts and observations that I have noticed in my reading.
1.) An interesting aporia arises (alliteration!) when we come to their doctrine of Incarnation. I of course say "their" loosely; even united as a general "movement" obviously individual thinkers will vary. In this instance I generalize from Clark Pinnock's position. The basic idea of Open Theism is, of course, that God is "Open"; which is to say they attempt to take, for example, the images of God "changing his mind," or "repenting," in scriptures (and various other examples of dynamic change, as in interpersonal relationships, human freedom, etc...) very seriously (read: literally). As Bruce McCormack points out in his near-monograph level essay "The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism," in the volume edited by McCormack Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives the general problem in this approach is that it first attempts to construct a general doctrine of God, and only then moves on to how this applies to Christology. In other words their doctrine of Incarnation and Christ is an extension or application of an otherwise established general doctrine of God (this is, in essence, reminiscent of Rahner's criticism of Aquinas' separation of the treatises "On the One God," and "On the Triune God," where, so Rahner argues, the Trinity begins to look like something of a speculative appendix to an already established picture of God.)
Open Theists (in this case Pinnock) run into an interesting problem. Aside from falling on the wrong side of the so-called "Trinitarian renaissance" of the last fifty years, in that they hardly allow the Trinity any sort of conceptual driving force within their thought, they run into a specific Christological problem. Their general doctrine of God says, of course, that God can (in specific and limited ways) change in relation to the world. For example, God chose to restrict his own omnipotence in order to allow room for human freedom. This is the whole point of Open Theism. When they come to the doctrine of the incarnation, however, they run ashore of a more ancient dilemma: does the Logos, the Son, remain what He eternally is while also being man? If they say no (which would seem to be a reasonable answer given the general thrust of their theological musings) like the early German kenotic theologian out of Erlängen, Gottfried Thomasius (who argued for the temporary renunciation of "relative" divine attributes like the myriad of "omni-whatever" attached to God) or his opponent G.W. Gess (who went as far as one could go before in essence becoming Hegel, and thought Christ reduced himself absolutely to the conditions of human finitude) then they seem to in effect deny the very truth that the concept "Incarnation," is supposed to uphold, namely that Christ is God in the flesh.
As Feuerbach pointed out in The Essence of Christianity one cannot in the case of God so easily divorce attributes from knowing the Person Himself, to change the attributes is also to take away the mode of identification. And in the case of God, essence and existence are identical. Therefore to take away the essence is also to deny God.
Yet to say The Son does not change in the incarnation, on the other hand (which is Pinnock's claim) is a very counter-intuitive claim within the system of Open Theism. All of this is to say (along with McCormack) that a more Christocentric view of God must be established to help counter the Open Theists more abstract account.
2.) I mentioned briefly above that one of the claims of Open Theism is that God limits his freedom and omnipotence in order to make room for true, finite, human freedom and choice. In this sense they attempt to distinguish their own position from positions closer to Process Theism, which subordinate God to a more general principle of "Process," thus indicating that God doesnt really have a choice in the matter, He is going to be affected by the cosmos whether he likes it or not. By this idea Open Theists attempt to underline both that God is, in fact, responsive to human freedom, while yet retaining a more or less "classic" view of omnipotence. That is: God is affected by us, but this is itself a function of omnipotence, because this "openness" is essentially a function of God's own will that it should be the case. One can see analogies to Moltmann's famous concept of "zimsum" (of simsum or zimzum, its spelled in a million different ways) which he borrowed from the mystical writings of Jewish kabbalah: since God in the beginning is all there is, God "retracts," or "recedes," into Himself to make "space" for creation.
Before I make my brief criticism I should preface it by saying: the God world relation is, obviously incredibly complex, perhaps even impossible, to conceptualize. Along with this comes the complexity of free will vs. determinism etc... I by no means, in this criticism, want to suggest that I have it all figured out or that those I disagree with are stupid, etc... They are all brilliant theologians who have in their own ways constructed beautiful systems in attempts to further our understanding of God. That said I must open by deferring to a quote by Herbert McCabe from God Matters: "God is not a separate and rival agent in the universe. The creative causal power of God does not operate on me from outside, as an alternative to me; it is the creative causal power of God that makes me."
Which is to say, as an "agent" (the scare quotes are meant to display that this can be understood only in a loose, analogous sense) God does not operate "on the same plane," as you or I. In this sense I agree with Pannenberg (surprise surprise!) when he writes in the first volume of his Systematic Theology: "The Infinite that is merely a negation of the finite is not yet truly seen as the Infinite....for it is defined by delimitation from something else, i.e the finite. Viewed in this way the Infinite is a something in distinction from something else, and it is thus finite. The Infinite is truly infinite only when it transcends its own antithesis to the finite. In this sense the Holiness of God is truly infinite, for it is opposed to the profane, penetrates it, and makes it holy..." The causal power of God is not merely "outside of me," as is gravity or the foreboding glare of your significant other, forcing you against your will into one activity or position or another. As David Bentley Hart likes to stress to no end in his wonderful essay "On the Infinite Innocence of God" our freedom is based in God's freedom, not in opposition to it. And this is because as an agent God is not merely quantitatively "more powerful," than us, but is "qualitatively" different. "In Him we live, and move, and have our being"
The upshot of this is that Open Theists, by insisting God limits himself by His own sovereign decision, appear to presuppose that God and the world are on the same causal-ontological continuum, or plane, because only in this manner would they ever "interfere" with one another, and would God then need to "limit" himself to allow the world space. In other words, in a sense, Open Theists presuppose a finite God by picturing God somewhat univocally along the lines of any other finite agent. And this can be attributed not just to an (apparently) "univocal" reading of language, but also Open theisms lack of Trinitarian conceptuality. God and the world are not merely juxtaposed as two different agencies separated by some "space," rather as Rahner somewhat obscurely writes “the difference between God and the world is of such a nature that God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest unity precisely in the differentiation.” And Jüngel writes in God as the Mystery of the World that the difference between God and the world is "constituted by God." In other words the difference is not like the difference between you and me, or between a rock and a chair. They are different because they are (among other things) separated by a space in which both dwell. The space between us and God is God Himself in the differentiated trinitarian agency. Thus the conceptual need for God to "limit" himself is questionable.
3.) Whats more, following the same line of reasoning above, God's simplicity is broken if in fact God can act in a way that does not fully express Himself. As David Bentley Hart, Thomas Weinandy, Paul Gavrilyuk, and others argue, this is the entire point of the concepts of apatheia (impassibility) and haplus (simplicity): God is wholly God in every act. He cannot be reduced, He cannot love less, be less "God," in any act. This may seem like an obscure criticism, but its importance cannot, I would argue, be overestimated. Not only (as is argued above) does it preserve an authentic view of the difference-in-unity of God and the world, but also it preserves the goodness of creation. If God must limit himself in the act of creation then creation itself is in some sense "Godless." (In fact Moltmann in The Trinity and the Kingdom uses this very term) More to the point, if God is, as I think Christians must affirm, our "barometer" (to put it crudely) of moral action, this idea that God can "limit" or "change" Himself becomes problematic, because God's acts, and thus also God's essence, are no longer convertable and wholly identified. If God can limit Himself that means his essence is not his existence, and vice versa. But this also means that any self-limited act, in destroying the simplicity of that conversion, allows God to produce an act not wholly expressive of God-self, and thus not wholly expressive of Goodness. This is, in effect, allowing Plotinus' concept of degrading emanation from a hieratic source (not to mention Gnosticism's various employments of the same theme) in the back door. Moreover this also seems to allow the basic thrust of protest atheism back in (a la Feuerbach): if the freedom of mankind is a good, but it involves a (self) denial of God, then human freedom is in some sense a negation or limitation of God. But this means that God is not the total source of the definitions of the good of man.
4.) A briefer criticism (though it is of utmost interest to me) is that in one way or another Open Theism decided to pursue its hermeneutic and ontology because of the apparent failings of what it deems "classical theism." I will keep this brief: I am not convinced. I believe that often "classical theism," indicates both an anachronistic reading of the tradition based off of later developments (as William Placher also argues in his book The Domestication of Transcendence) or it is a simple failure to deal with the original sources in their own context (as is argued by Gavrilyuk, Ayres, Barnes, et al). MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that the Nietzschean option is unviable, not only it itself, but because it rests essentially on a misinterpretation of history. I would argue much the same of Open Theism in regards to the classic Nicene and post-Nicene tradition.
Comments
As an open theist, I have to say that whatever it is that you have come across with regard to an explanation of what open theism is, something went wrong fast. And that is certainly not your fault. So for the moment, let's put aside the academics and philosophy and just use some simple common sense.
Open theism is nothing more nor less than this: not all of the future can be foreknown in an exhaustive sense, because not all of the future is, or can be, exhaustively settled. Otherwise there could be no freewill.
Open theism has nothing to do with God limiting his knowledge or with the incarnation or anything else like that. It is simply the belief, at core, that free will cannot co-exist in the same room with a fully determined (Calvinistic) or foreknown (Arminianistic future. Thus, part of the future must be open; that is, part (and obviously only part) of the future is yet to be settled and, therefore, not known by anyone, including God.
This doesn't mean that God is not omniscient, because omniscience only entails that God know all truths and believe nothing that is false. Well, if part of the future is open, then God knows this, knows this exhaustively, and isn't the least bit bothered by it...he made it that way!
In a nutshell, the minute we believe that God knows everything—-and I mean absolutely everythingm, no exceptions-—that we will ever think, say or do, we've walked right into a horrible contradiction of what it means to have freewill. For if I cannot choose to do differently (not in every case, obviously, but in many cases) what God says I'm going to do, then it ALL of my future is already determined / settled...word it however way you want, and I have no say about it, and that doesn't even make sense. It's not even close to reality. It's not the way the real world works. Which is why God would never be so foolish to attempt to tell me exactly (exhaustively) everything I'm going to think, say or do in, say, the next 10 minutes. He doesn't possess that knowledge, because if he did, I'd have absolutely no way to freely do otherwise.
It's that simple. You may disagree with this concept, and that's okay, but you deserve to at least have a sound understanding about open theism before deciding.
At any rate, this is what open theism is all about. Nothing else.
Thanks very much,
Keith R. Starkey
Gregory Boyd for example sounds very similar to what you are saying. Indeed part of the difference between what I was saying and what you are saying is exactly what you mention regarding God's knowledge. I was approaching open theism more from an ontological angle, i.e. what are the ontological presuppositions of who God is (nature of perfection, infinity, etc...) that must be entailed, or be implications of, and open theists view. Thus I humbly disagree with you when you say that this can be approached by "simple common sense" and that "this [i.e. the issue of knowledge etc...] is what open theism is about, and nothing else." Yes this is how it may often present itself, but in my opinion there are wider issues that are implicated in its decisions that go undiscussed.
But you are right, open theism does proceed in its discussions mainly from the point of view of foreknowledge etc...
And yes I think this is where we disagree. :) Quite frankly I think it is begging the (admittedly very difficult) question that if God knows the future, then determinism reigns and we are not free (I am, for lack of a better term, a Compatibalist). In fact it is my opinion that part of the problem is that the spectrum of issues is controlled by the Open/Determined spectrum; I believe that the binary between openness and determinism needs to itself be overcome. I think that Open Theism (and indeed even Open Theism's more Calvinist opponents) have a vast array of (possibly true, possibly not) presuppositions. You seem to be very informed so I wont pretend to convince you from a position you have obviously won through careful reading, but I for one (for example) have a great difficulty ascribing the future as "ahead" of God to which he is "looking forward." Gregory Boyd and many others who are not Open Theists but are, for example, Molinists or "Revised Molinists" like William Lane Craig, have gone to great lengths in articles published in Philosophia Christi for example using very complicated modal logic in order to demonstrate how God can know future possible-conditionals etc... in order to safe guard free choice, exactly what I think you were very cogently arguing Open Theism is about.
But in my personal opinion this whole modal logic discussion simply presupposes that God's agency is in effect just like any finite agency, just "more powerful," etc... thus God knows, understands etc...in the same manner as finite human knowing. I suppose the easiest way to summarize my discomfort is that I have a particular definition of how God is infinite, and Open Theism has a slightly different definition. But from my viewpoint the God presupposed or argued for in Open Theism is finite (or only extensively infinite, quantitatively, but not qualitatively, different from us).
Anyway thanks again for your comments, I appreciate your obviously informed opinion and I appreciate it even more that you are among the internet rarities who can express a differing opinion without being rude about it!