Preliminary Thoughts: Open Theism

“ Such an impotent view of God understandably strikes fear, if not revulsion, in the hearts and minds of many believers who hear it. In reality, I will now argue, the charge could hardly be further from the truth. I will contend that if we truly believe God is omniscient, possessing unlimited intelligence and knowledge, there is no basis for concluding he is less "in control" if he knows the future partly as a realm of possibilities than he is if he knows the future exclusively as a realm of eternally settled facts. In fact, I shall argue that any view of God which thinks God gains any significant providential advantage simply by virtue of knowing the future exclusively as a realm of eternally settled facts (rather than as partly comprised of possibilities thereby concedes that it has a limited view of God. More specifically, ironic as it sounds, I shall argue that this charge is premised on a denial of God's omniscience.” - G. Boyd

To respond simply to this initial argument of one of Greg Boyd's extensive treatises on 'Open Theism'; it seems to me that Boyd here is engaging the wrong question entirely. This isn’t an issue of figuring out what would make God ‘most providential’; and building a theology to fit that human ideal. It is about coming to understand God as He ACTUALLY IS, as he has freely revealed himself to us, and allowing that God to shape our thinking, not vice versa. This is the God who could describe himself no better than ‘I AM’, the God who ‘WAS and IS and IS TO COME’; the ‘creator AND SUSTAINER’. The essence of this revealed God is nothing short of the act of BEING itself. God is not a static, esoteric reality; God is an EVENT, an UNFOLDING. God is LIFE itself. And apart from this ESSENTIAL life from which all else that is living derives their CONTINGENT life, there is nothing.

‘I AM’; apart from He who is, nothing is. Even the continued existence of the enemy of our souls is contingent upon the sovereign will and pleasure of God. God, we are told, created out of nothing. As such, all that exists is held by the very will of God over that chasm of nothingness from whence it came. If God were to will that the enemy did not exist, he would simply cease to exist. Period. He is utterly dependent on He from whom he would seek to rebel. This is why he is a defeated enemy, his only recourse in the hardened bitterness of his own rebellion but to lead God’s beloved creatures to ‘exchange the truth of God for a lie’; namely that lie that there is ANYTHING of substance apart from God, and that true freedom is NOT that blessed freedom of infinite possibility and potential that God placed before mankind in the Garden, but only the freedom of contrary choice.

For the enemy, if we can’t choose AGAINST something (namely, God), then we aren’t really free. This is the lie from the pit of Hell itself. Taken to it’s fullest expression, it would have us revile the ‘Tyranny’ of a God who has denied us freedom because he did not ask us whether or not we would like to exist! (this is, in essence the assumption underlying ‘The Great Divorce’)
We come to realize that God then, as the source and sustenance of all that IS; past, present, and future; the one in whom we ‘LIVE and MOVE and HAVE OUR BEING’, is fully aware of ALL that he is actively engaged in sustaining. We are told that the hairs on our head are numbered, that God knows every sparrow that falls to the ground. The contents of our very hearts are transparent to this God. He knows all of this, because apart from his upholding, sustaining will, none of it would BE at all. Even to that which is now opposed to him; that which breaks His heart, he continues to lend existence. This is the profundity of the divine LOVE.

To the question of open theism, then, we may now turn. Open theism would propose that, despite the fact that the future, in all its details and intricacies, has NO EXISTENCE at all apart from the conscious decision of God to actively create and sustain it, God is somehow UNAWARE of the full nature of that which he is creating and sustaining. Either, it seems, God is somehow UNABLE (too short sighted or too stupid) to be aware of these things, or He is UNWILLING; purposely covering up something over which he has every ability to be fully aware, but has decided to keep, as it were, from himself. What is the philosophical motivation to propose such a thing? The open theist would answer, because, if God already KNOWS; if our parts are already effectively WRITTEN, then we aren’t truly FREE. If God already knows what we are going to do before we do it, then this all must be one big arbitrary chess match between God and himself, with mankind caught in the middle, unable to do any other than that which has been already decided.

A few points: First, before we start, we must agree that God IS as He IS, and not merely as we would like him to be for the purposes of our own sense of self-importance. Often it feels that open theism largely finds its impetus in a sort of disapproval in thinking of the sovereignty of God operating in such a way that would make me feel like I am not in CONTROL. Simply because we (Americans, especially) don’t like to think that we lack a certain amount of perceived ‘autonomy’ doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Second, KNOWING and explicitly CAUSING are not the same thing. God’s knowledge is not a static knowledge, it is not a merely factual knowledge; it is a PERSONAL knowledge. God knows EXACTLY what I will do in EVERY situation; not because he causes me to do it, but because he KNOWS ME and he knows the situation in such a profoundly complete way that my course of action is absolutely obvious to him, even when it’s not to ME. We laugh at how predictable small children can be; parents know their children personally at such an essential level that they can ‘predict’ the response of their child in a given situation. I may know that my small niece will always choose chocolate over any other flavor of ice cream, even if she herself doesn’t know that about herself. I know my real friends; I know my wife, in some ways better than they know themselves. My knowing how someone I know will act in a given situation doesn’t mean that I MAKE them do it. I just KNOW them. How much deeper and fuller is God’s knowledge?! Will we now sit back and claim that, because we are KNOWN completely, we are therefore not completely free? God is unable to be anything other than God, namely, the God who IS and who KNOWS; we are both free and known, and that is not a contradiction in terms.

Thirdly, what essentially lies behind ‘Freewill Theism’ is a broken and corrupted understanding of free will. Essentially, we have bought the lies of the enemy hook, line and sinker. We fully believe that the only real freedom is the freedom of the contrary. If we cannot choose AGAINST, than we believe that we have no real choice at all. In reality, the ‘free will’ that God invested mankind with as an imprint of his own freedom was that freedom to fully BE; to live fully into the infinite potential of the infinite ‘yes’s’ that God had placed before us. ‘But’ the enemy says, ‘this tyrant God didn’t ASK YOU if you wanted THOSE options… He’s just spoon-feeding you. That isn’t FREEDOM.’ The deistic concept of the battle between good and evil is an essentially inaccurate paradigm for the Garden. We like to picture mankind in a neutral state, in an open field; good to the one side, and evil to the other. If we didn’t have that choice, we say, we wouldn’t be free. Mankind was not, however, in an open field. We were, in fact, standing at the edge of a precipice; the fullness of everything which God had created us for stretching out before us, and nothingness - inhumanity, death, non-existence - behind us. ‘Of ALL of the trees you may eat…’ The enemy convinced mankind that they could, in fact, co-opt the essence of God himself, if only they might loose themselves from that which God had given them without asking their permission; namely, Life. Of course, we didn’t realize that was the choice before us; all we saw was AUTONOMY. REAL freedom. And so we fell. Into death. Into inhumanity. It was only God’s unsearchable love that broke this fall from it’s inevitable end. Because he knew, of course. He knew we’d walk away, and he knew we’d break his heart, and he knew that there would be nothing that we could do about it for ourselves, and he knew that he would have to pay the price for our inevitable transgression. And he went ahead with this whole hair-brained scheme anyway because he knew that, in the end, when he’d done for us that which we could not do for ourselves and finally enabled us to take hold of all that which he’d created us for in order that we might participate in his sovereign, holy glory, it will have been worth it. Every tear wiped away, every transgression forgiven. He knew, so he was able to confidently bear our burdens. He knows, so he is able to journey with us even today; because he already sees us for what we WILL be, and he knows the journey that will take us there.

In failing to grasp this, freewill theism is simply built open the same, essential, prideful lies of Hell that mankind has dined upon since almost the beginning of time. That unless my will is OTHER than God’s will, it isn’t really FREE will. True freedom, however, is quite different. It is when my will finds itself WITHIN God’s perfect, sovereign, all-knowing will that I am truly free to be all that my creator has intended me to be. To take a racecar into a mud pit isn’t freedom; it’s foolishness. It wasn’t built for that. The enemy has made a good living, however, on making us believe that freedom and foolishness are the same thing. May God help us.