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Defining Evangelicalism's Boundaries Theologically: Is Open Theism Evangelical?

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Defining Evangelicalism's Boundaries Theologically: Is Open Theism Evangelical?
The following is used by permission of Bruce A. Ware, Professor of Christian Theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. All rights reserved by author.

Bruce A. Ware
Senior Associate Dean, School of Theology; Professor of Christian Theology The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky Paper delivered at the 53rd Annual Meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society Colorado Springs, Colorado, November 15, 2001

Introduction Clark Pinnock is exactly right. After noting (correctly) in his Most Moved Mover that Arminians and Augustinians have co-existed throughout much of the church's history, and further that a number of evangelical theologians today (and not just open theists) are working toward refinements in an evangelical doctrine of God, "Why," he asks, "draw the line at foreknowledge?"1 A few pages later, he returns to this question:

"In raising the issue of the divine foreknowledge, we have not transgressed some rule of theological discourse and placed ourselves outside the pale of orthodoxy. Why can an evangelical not propose a different view of this matter? What church council has declared it to be impossible? Since when has this become the criterion of being orthodox or unorthodox, evangelical or not evangelical?"2 What does Pinnock mean when he says that open theists have raised the issue of divine

foreknowledge? Simply this: Open theism affirms God's exhaustive knowledge of the past and present, but it denies exhaustive divine foreknowledge, in that it denies that God knows - or can know - the future free decisions and actions of his moral creatures, even while it affirms that God knows all future possibilities and all divinely determined and logically-necessary future actualities. As William Hasker explains, "Since the future is genuinely open, since it is possible for a free agent to act in any of several different ways, it follows that it is not possible for God to have complete and exhaustive knowledge of the entire future."3 So, the specific denial of exhaustive divine foreknowledge is embraced in open theism as central and essential to its own identity.

And essential it is. For to open theists, the very notion of the future's ‘openness' is only viable if future free choices and actions are both fully unknown and fully unknowable to God. Were God to know some future choice, say, of what you will have for dinner this evening, since God's knowledge is infallible, it must be the case that you will have for dinner what God knows you will, in which case, you are not free to choose otherwise. As central and essential as libertarian freedom is to open theism, so equally central and essential is its denial of exhaustive divine foreknowledge.

1 Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001) 106. 2 Ibid., 110. 3 William Hasker, "An Adequate God," in John B. Cobb, Jr., and Clark H. Pinnock, eds., Searching for an Adequate God: a Dialogue between Process and Free Will Theists (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) 218.