In this essay, titled “Some Practical Consequences of Open Theism,” author Eric S. Lasch argues that open theism “undermines confidence – confidence in God, confidence in prayer, and confidence in the face of suffering and trials.” I would like to respond to some of his arguments and statements.
“Constantly modifying his purposes to adjust to humanity’s choices, their god is often caught off guard by the unexpected, disappointed by how things work out, vulnerable, mistaken in his expectations and open to failure.” I do not think that saying God modifies “his purposes to adjust to humanity’s choices” is quite accurate. God certainly adjusts the methods of achieving His ultimate goals, but His ultimate goals do not change. Some of His more immediate goals might change, as we see in the story of Jonah, when God changed His mind and relented of the disaster He intended to Ninevah after they repented. And God is only open to failure in areas where success could only come by removing the freedom of His creatures.
Lasch considers God’s sovereignty, explaining the open theist position on God’s general sovereignty. “Such a weak, vacillating king could not even begin to rule heaven or earth, much less bring man’s rebellious heart into submission, obedience or godly fear.” The very nature of kingship is not a puppetmaster-like control of one’s subjects but rather a broad leadership of the corporate group or nation’s future. The latter clause of the sentence presupposes the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity, which the Bible does not teach (see my Human Nature and Depravity).
“But then, irresistible grace has no place in openness theology since, in their view, it would be equivalent to divine rape (i.e., nonconsensual control).” The doctrine of irresistible grace need not be seen as rape to be tragic. In essence, open theists understand irresistible grace as precluding an authentic relationship/companionship between God and man. In scripture, we see that one of God’s main purposes (if not the only purpose) in creating at all was to “be with” His human creatures, not to control them.
“Furthermore, open theists inflame the pride insist that we are partners with God in shaping the future, collaborators with God in achieving the divine project.” I dare say that open theism does not desire to inflame human pride, but rather to come to a better understanding of why God created us and how God loves us.
“Their false view renders man sovereign and is nothing short of idolatry.” Man is not sovereign in open theology. Open theists recognize God as omnipotent, but God also created man with potency of their own. God has the ability to delegate power. Open theists also maintain that God made man free, thus delegating power – yes, considerable power – to humankind, but not sovereignty. (See my Man’s Finite Freedom.)
“It serves to undermine sanctification, humility and wisdom.” God’s delegation of power and freedom to humans is a gift, yes, but it does not undermine sanctification, or humility and wisdom but reinforces them. God will sanctify a holy race, but not without their volition.
Lasch also talks about God’s omniscience, and open theism’s view thereof: “One implication of such a belief [that God does not know the whole future with certainty] is that the promises and predictions in Scripture dealing with the future events are built on the sand of possibilities.” Not necessarily. God may have decided to set certain perimeters for what His goals are and also leave open the routes to that destination. Or He could, if He so desired, take unilateral control of a situation and bring about His will.
“For instance, if we think specifically about the future return of Christ, we would have to conclude that it might happen or not, depending on the free choices of men.” Open theists do not teach that God leaves open these kinds of possibilities. Whatever God wishes to divinely ordain to bring about, He can do so, in a variety of ways. (See my Possibility of Satan’s Victory in Open Theism?)
“If the cross were a contingent event, maybe the return of Christ is also and God’s prophetic statements concerning it are mistaken.” There is a difference, I think, when God promises something and when He simply states something, that is more obviously contingent on certain human decisions. For instance, when God told Ninevah through Jonah that He was going to destroy the city, it is obviously a conditional statement. However, when God promises to bless all families of the earth through Abraham’s seed He became determined to see it through, even if using free human beings to accomplish this goal. Open theists do not view God as incompetent or rash. He is infinitely smarter than humans are, even while there are some things that are impossible to know.
“A god who doesn’t control the future might have difficulty orchestrating something as stupendous as the return of Christ.” This statement tells me that the author does not understand open theism, or at least does not care to explain how an open theist would respond to such a claim. God is sovereign, but He is also omni-resourceful and all-wise. He does not necessarily have to intervene in creaturely freedom to accomplish His goals, but He certainly has that ability.
“A second implication is that God might leave us or forsake us. Such an unconditional promise in Hebrews 13:5 is meaningless if God doesn’t know or control the future. God might respond to a besetting sin or failure in our lives by forsaking us for someone else.” As I said before, open theists differentiate between a conditional statement by God and a promise. God has promised to never leave us nor forsake us.
“But how can we trust a god who changes in experience, knowledge, emotions and actions?” Open theists do not believe God’s knowledge ever changes. God is always all-knowing, but the nature of reality dictates that there are some things that exist only as contingents until they come into existence. Future free choices have not occurred yet, and are therefore not yet real. Thus, God cannot know with certainty these future choices. How well an all-knowing Being might be able to predict human behavior is admittedly debatable, however.
“Will God be overcome by some unforeseen event or contingency and cease loving me?” On what possible basis would God abandon His loved for one of His beloved creatures? If God so loved everyone in the world to send His only begotten Son to die for their sins and be reconciled back to Him, we have little reason to think God will abandon His investment due to what He would see as a petty whim. How do classical theists know that God does not, in His secret will, have in store for the future to abandon His children? The supposed “problem” goes both ways.
“If our free will is more powerful than God’s ability to preserve the saints, what would prevent us from turning away from the faith and forfeiting our salvation?” The Bible does indeed say that some have fallen away from God, and that salvation is our race to finish. It is not unbiblical to believe our salvation is secure as long as we are faithful. Conditional security is not about God’s faithfulness, for He has promised to always be faithful, it is about our faithfulness to Him.
“As such, he is dependent on the requests of his children even to the point of altering or reversing his own plans.” Open theists do not believe that God’s plans are dependent on His children’s prayers and requests, only that God and man’s prayerful interaction is a dynamic, give-and-take relationship. God can be influenced to intervene in nature in reaction to prayer, as seen when Joshua requested God to extend the day in order to defeat his enemies and Hezekiah prayed to request that God extend his life.
“If God is really dependent on humanity’s free will, he may be powerless to respond to your single prayer at the expense of someone else’s freedom.” This depends on the manner in which a person prays. If we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, God will not be asked to take away anyone’s freedom. If we request that God cause someone else to love us or ask for God to save everyone in the world, God has the right to decline our request.
“If God is not in control over the operations of nature and the conduct of men, there is little motivation to pray.” I’m assuming this objection is similar to the first one. There is indeed motivation to pray considering the fact that God can intervene in nature if it is His will. God can work miracles, He can bend the laws of nature. But I do not think He would have even created physical laws if He never intended to keep them, if He knew He was going to break them on a regular basis. For the most part, these laws of science are helpful to our daily lives, and in a greater sense, are essential to the existence of life on earth at all.
“If God exercises only general sovereignty, and not specific sovereignty, your issues are probably too small for him to be bothered with.” Open theists believe God is deeply invested in His children’s lives and their suffering and problems. Though God often lets nature take its course, as in the story of Lazarus, He often has a plan to make good of situations of suffering and death and other human problems. When we hurt, God hurts with us. When Martha and Mary wept for their brother, Jesus wept with them – Jesus loved Lazarus too. Why did Jesus let Lazarus die? Why does God let anyone die? Simply because God has something infinitely greater planned for them.
“If God cannot bring to fruition his own eternal purposes unless we pray, then our will is effectively supreme and God is dethroned. So why take time to pray?” First, open theists do not say that God’s ultimate plans are dependent on human prayer. Humans can help bring about God’s plans through prayer, but that is not the only way. Prayer is much more for the good of humans than it is for the good of God.
“If God’s purposes are changing every hour, what comfort is it to be granted a petition one day and then denied it the next day?” The author forgets the significance of the fact that God’s character never changes. There are over 40 instances in Scripture of God’s mind (or purposes) for earthly activity changing due to the dynamic relationship between Creator and creation.
“If God is finite with limited knowledge, it is possible that our petitions may be missed entirely amidst the millions of prayers offered every minute.” Christian open theists do not believe that God is either finite or limited in knowledge. They believe God is infinite and knows everything that is possible to know. The debate is not whether God is omniscient or not, as Greg Boyd and others have pointed out, it is a debate about the nature of reality and the future.
Next Lasch talks about the consequences of open theism amongst suffering, saying:
“If you are an open theist, your “comforting” response might go something like this: “God is as grieved (and surprised) as you are about the difficulties you are experiencing, and he too wishes things had worked out differently. Because God does not (and cannot) know, much less control, much of what the future holds, and because many things occur which are contrary to his good and loving desires, we must not blame God for the evil things that happen in our lives.””
First off, open theists believe God has exhaustive knowledge of the present, as well as foreknowledge of the countless possibilities present in the future. A tragedy would have to be extremely sudden for God to be “surprised” about it (even though He has extensive knowledge of every possibility and thus cannot really be “surprised” in the sense that Lasch is using it for).
Lasch says that open theism’s response to suffering and evil is the following: “Open theists maintain that the causes stem from the activities of Satan or the evil purposes of men with free will.” I would even differentiate between evil and suffering. Evil is moral, but suffering is not necessarily moral. Evil occurs when a free human misuses his free will for wicked or sinful purposes, but suffering is simply any stimuli experienced via the senses which causes us grief or anguish or pain.
Lasch says the open theist response he described (above) is inadequate for at least two reasons:
“(1) It fails to provide lasting hope because it implies that no one is really in control of the moral government of the world.” I would respond by stating that God is the King of the universe, even in open theism, and He is sovereign and free. But best of all, God is good. If He allows for human freedom, He has a wonderful and beautiful, even self-sacrificial reasons for it. God is love, and He is always motivated by His love. God’s love, combined with His desire to be “with us” humans, results in a desire to know and love His children intimately and to have His children know and love Him in return.
“(2) It fails to inspire trust in a Being whose best intentions have been trumped down through the ages by the free will of creatures.” God sacrifices for love – we have seen it before in history, in the greatest act of love any individual could ever show when Christ went willingly to the cross. God allows His immediate will to be altered or thwarted by His creatures, for if He irresistibly decreed their actions He would effectively destroy any chance for their voluntary love. Just as classical theism, open theists respond to the problem of evil by explaining that God wants something more than to prevent this evil or suffering from occurring. Classical theists generally state then that God wants to pursue His greater glory through human suffering or evil human actions, but open theists would state that God wants to preserve His only chance at fostering a mutually loving relationship with human individuals by giving humans freedom.
“In denying that God has a wise and sanctifying purpose in the miserable calamities (injustice, oppression, heartache and pain) we endure on this earth, open theists undermine confidence in God and leave desperate counselees adrift in a sea of futility.” Really? Does it really take believing that God causes vast varieties of great and terrible pain and suffering, all to glorify Himself in ways that almost always ambiguous or unknown by the suffering individuals? And even if God will reveal the meaning of all pain and suffering and evil in Heaven, is God an “end-justifies-the-means” kind of God? Doesn’t the Bible that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 Jn 1:5b)? How can each and every “miserable calamity” have a “wise and sanctifying purpose” from God? It seems to me that some headaches, heartaches, depressions, and anxieties do not have any God-sent quality, and I would dare say I doubt even Eric Lasch thinks of them that way either.
And what about those instances of great suffering and evil which we have no explanation for? Why don’t we understand unambiguously the reason why God used the Nazis to torment and kill 6 million Jews and hundreds of millions of others? What is God’s sovereignly benevolent plan for a situation in which a mother loses her son who was an ardent unbeliever? What is a pastor who believes that God has sovereignly ordained that son to die without the security of salvation to tell the son’s mother? “It was God’s will”?
“The pillars of the early church, Peter, James, and Paul, apparently thought differently than the open theists about the problem of suffering and pain.” On the contrary, I believe each of them deny that god causes pain and suffering and evil, but that He can use those things to achieve His immediate will or further His ultimate will.
Paul writes in Romans 12:2 that God’s will is that which is “good and acceptable and perfect,” and elsewhere in the Bible God describes suffering and evil and pain as much less than “good and acceptable and perfect.”
As Peter points out, suffering can often be inevitable to accomplish God’s will, even while it is not sent by Him. “For it is better t suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil” (1 Pet. 3:17). “Therefore,” writes Peter, “let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (4:19).
James makes an excellent point too: “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:12-13). The verb form of the same Greek word for ‘trial’ in verse 12 is translated as ‘tempted’ in verse 13, indicating they are closely linked in meaning. God may test, but He does not bring on trials or temptations.
“Peter wrote in 1 Peter 1:6-7 that trials strengthen and test the genuineness of our faith and result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ appears. James wrote in James 1:2-3 to count it all and spiritual maturity. Paul wrote from personal experience in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 about his thorn in the flesh and saw in his weakness that the power of Christ rested upon him.” Indeed, Peter, James, and Paul considered trials and sufferings a blessing to learn and grow from, with God’s help, but none of them describe God as the cause of their sufferings.
“These passages present a view of God who does more than feel our pain; he has a plan and a purpose. His intent includes our spiritual growth and edification with eternal consequences.” We do not necessarily need to assume that God has to be the cause of our sufferings to believe that He can teach us something from them. On our own, we may learn some things from our pain and trials, but with prayer and meditation God promises to build our character and integrity.
“When sitting across that table from a suffering Christian, it is our duty and privilege to help them lift up their eyes to our Sovereign God, who ordains every circumstance, in whose sovereign care is the only source of true comfort.” On the contrary, I believe our duty and privilege as Christians to first assure that their suffering and pain is not God’s fault, but that God loves them grieves with them and will grow them, if they let Him, from this pain.
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