Category Archives: Open Theism

Carson on open theism

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I’m going to summarise a helpful review of open theism given by D.A. Carson in the following lecture:-

Openness of God Theology

1.  Definitions and key people

Leading figures in this movement include Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd, and John Sanders.

According to Sanders, there are no-risk and risk views of divine providence.  The no-risk (or classical) view is that God ordains everything.  But this would mean that God ordains evil, including suffering and death.  Open theism takes a ‘risk’ view of providence.…

‘The Openness of God’

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One of the earlier books seeking to articulate the new paradigm of ‘open theism’ was The Openness of God, by Clark Pinnock et al (1994).  The following year, Christianity Today published a response from Roger Olson, Douglas Kelly, Timothy George and Alister McGrath.

Roger Olson

In open theism, writes Olson,

‘God is no longer to be understood as an immutable monarch controlling human history and individual lives, but rather is to be seen as a self-limiting, loving, and suffering father who allows himself to be affected by his creatures.’

…

Open Theism and Quantum Physics

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It is as I suspected: open theists have recruited ideas drawn from quantum physics to support their view that indeterminacy is built into the deep structure of the universe, and that the future is unknowable in all its details, even to God.

From what I had read and heard, I expected the noted scientist/theologian John Polkinghorne would take such a view, and I now find this to be the case.  Open theist Greg Boyd has an article on Scientific Support for the Open View, and quotes Polkinghorne (in Science and Providence) as saying that notions of indeterminacy in physics

…emphasize how different time is from space [and] how seriously we must take its unfolding as a process of genuine becoming.

…

Open Theism

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Evangelical theologians have rarely proposed any significant revisions to the doctrine of God as understood to be taught in Scripture and handed down by Protestant thinkers.  There have been some differences concerning God’s eternity (with some seeing this as timelessness and others as everlastingness), and God’s love (interpreted differently by Calvinists and Arminians).  But, despite such occasional differences, evangelical scholars have in the past agreed that God’s omniscience includes infallible and exhaustive knowledge of the past, present and future. …