Alfred J. Freddoso University of Notre Dame 1. Introduction Emulating Bill Hasker, I will begin with a few autobiographical remarks. Numbered among the half-dozen or so writers whom I have been most influenced by spiritually as well as intellectually are St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas. Having pondered at length the philosophical doctrines…
William Hasker In this selection, William Hasker develops some themes from the book, The Openness of God, which he co-authored with Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders and David Basinger. After giving a brief overview of the book, he recounts the process by which, over a period of years, he came to embrace the “open…
Dr. Gregory A. Boyd Preliminary Considerations 1. All Bible Believers Hold that God IS Omniscient. God sees everything in creation simultaneously (Job 28:24; Ps. 33:13-15). God knows the number of the stars and angels (Ps. 147:4; Isa. 40:26) and hairs on your head (Mt. 10:29-30). God knows everything about the deeds, the thoughts, even the…
Dr. Gregory A. Boyd A Brief Outline of the Open View January 1999 In this essay I shall briefly state the Open view of God’s relationship to the future with the scriptural grounds on which it is based. I shall then briefly address the most common objections raised against it. The Open View It goes…
John Sanders This paper was given at a session honoring the work of Clark Pinnock at the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco, November 18, 2011. Canadian theologian Clark Pinnock was once a renowned defender of the doctrine of meticulous providence (where God tightly controls each and every event that transpires). He caused…
“Divine Relationality and Theodicy in The Shack” by Dr. John Sanders, Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas. Presented at the American Academy of Religion in Montreal Canada, November 7, 2009 I was asked to give this paper because some readers see a number of themes in the The Shack by William Paul Young that correspond well…
John Sanders Let me provide a brief overview of the history of the debate within evangelicalism. For many years the core ideas of openness had been buried in academic journals and I thought it was time to bring them to the attention of a broader public so I organized a team and we published The…
John Sanders Introduction: Overview of the issues and summary of Open Theism. Currently, in North American evangelicalism, there is a controversy regarding the nature of God and divine providence. The 1970’s witnessed the beginning of a prolonged reassessment of certain traditional divine attributes by some prominent evangelical philosophers. They reformulated, or even rejected, attributes such…
John Sanders Some misunderstanding has arisen regarding my view of the relationship between the church fathers and Hellenism and I would like to clarify my stance. In my chapter in the Openness of God (1994) I was more negative than I was when I covered the same material in The God Who Risks (1998), yet,…
Books containing opposing viewpoints that challenge open theism. Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace By Thomas R. Schreiner Scripture says that God is sovereign over all things, yet we have free will to determine our actions. So to what extent is God supreme? In this masterful examination of the sovereignty of God,…