Brian Martin

 

A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE RELIGIOUS ADEQUACY OF OPEN THEISM: TOWARD AN OPEN THEISTIC THEOLOGY OF PETITIONARY PRAYER*

 

 

§1 INTRODUCTION

 

§1.1 The arrival of open theism

            With the publication in 1994 of The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God[1], Evangelicals in America began discussing God with increased interest. In it authors Pinnock, Rice, Sanders, Hasker, and Basinger proposed a re-examination of how God and humans relate and in so doing ignited a debate which continues unabated today. The questions addressed by the authors are hardly new. Christians have long been debating God’s nature and attributes. One specific question raised by these issues is evident in the attempt to affirm both exhaustively definite foreknowledge and the efficacy of petitionary prayer. It was a popular issue of debate in Origen’s day and has been addressed by Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and others down to the present. The Openness of God reinvigorated this conversation and cast academic questions in a new and common light.[2]

Open theism attempts to articulate an understanding of God’s relationship to creation that is biblically sound, philosophically convincing, and existentially fulfilling. In the simplest terms, the open view claims that the future is partly settled and partly open and that God, being omniscient, knows it as such.[3] As we shall see, what the future is and how and what God knows about it, ostensibly ‘open view’ issues, have turned out to be in effect only the specific field of battle on which competing views of divine providence face off.

 

§1.2 The popularity of open theism

            After the release of The Openness of God, theologians, educational institutions, and whole denominations became engrossed in the debate over what has come to be known as “open theism.”[4] The importance of the view, arguably, was evident in the effect the debate had on a general lack of interest in doctrinal questions among average believers. People inevitably want to know what relevance a belief has for their day to day concerns. What difference does it make? is ultimately the question believers put to theological issues. And where believers fail to see the practical relevance such questions have for life’s relationships, decisions, and vocations, they fail to engage those issues for any length of time.

With the publication of The Openness of God, the practical implications of one’s beliefs about God and the world were being discussed passionately even by those outside the academy. Where people were reluctant to engage theological questions about God’s nature and attributes because the language in which the conversation was conducted made the conversation inaccessible to them, The Openness of God and other early publications related theological questions to these everyday concerns in terms people could grasp, successfully fusing academic questions to the everyday issues of Christian believers—prayer, guidance, and suffering. In light of the increasing popularity of the open view and the intensity of the opposition it faces, I hope to clarify relevant issues and encourage further discussion and research on the relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘praxis’ in general and the practical implications of open theism in particular.

 

§1.3     The challenge of open theism

            The debate over open theism can be described as carried out in terms of Wesley’s quadrilateral—the rational/philosophical, the biblical/theological, the traditional, and the existential/pragmatic, the latter of which shall be the concern of this thesis. It is an approach to life that open theists argue for. As Paul Sponheim says:

 

…we have spoken of ‘making a difference’…We have argued that vital lessons for living follow from Christian faith in God. We have claimed that if what Christians say in speaking of the presence, power, and action of God is true, life will be seen differently. It comes down to that: life…to that ‘bottom line’ matter of living…The faith we express in our God-talk makes a difference in how we see life. The question is: does it make a difference in how we live?[5]

 

Opponents of open theism have claimed that the effects of the open view are ruinous and will inevitably shipwreck faith in God for those who embrace it. Open theists have argued that their views make better sense of our existential intuitions, provide a better existential fit, and that of all the available views of providence on the market, that espoused by open theists is already assumed in practice by the manner in which Christian believers actually live their lives.[6]

 

§1.4 Proposed thesis

            How ought open theism to affect one’s understanding of prayer? In response to this and related questions, I propose (a) to examine the implications which open theism has for one’s understanding of petitionary prayer as a means by which God accomplishes his purposes in the world and then (b) to ask whether or not this understanding of prayer is religiously adequate. In focusing on the implications which a belief has for our understanding of prayer, we bring belief to bear upon one of the most practical every-day concerns of religious persons and thus have an opportunity to judge the existential argument for open theism.[7]

The underlying question regards the relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘praxis’, i.e., how we relate what we believe about God and the God-world relationship to the practical concerns of daily life. Theology matters, so all theists seem to agree, and open theists have confidently made ‘adequacy claims’ about the practical advantages of their beliefs. At the same time, opponents equally object to the open view on existential grounds, insisting that the view undermines one’s confidence and trust in God, God’s word, and God’s ability to achieve his purposes.

The existential matrix (the inter-relating intuitions, a priori beliefs about the world, experiences, decision-making processes, etc.) by which we evaluate the truth of a claim is a complex and fallible guide. I hope to explore this matrix, examine the validity of pragmatic, outcome-based arguments, and make some suggestions regarding how existential concerns and assumptions might determine the religious adequacy of open theism’s approach to petitionary prayer. I shall argue that prayer is the primary existential stage upon which any theology may be examined and judged. Given the open theist’s core claims, how are we to understand the purposes and place of petitionary prayer? If one cannot divorce the question of what God is like from the question of how we pray, then open theism’s proffered revision of the traditional view of God is most relevant and deserves continued and rigorous consideration.

 

 

 

 

§2 METHODOLOGY AND ASSUMPTIONS

 

§2.1 The nature of adequacy claims

            Let us first clarify what sort of question we are dealing with. When one argues that a belief is best believed to be true (or not) because of the practical effects of believing it, a particular sort of claim is being made, one that is notoriously difficult to evaluate. Professor of religion Christopher Heard has attempted to assess the evidentiary status of the effects that follow from believing or disbelieving in open theism, a form of argumentation he calls an appeal to outcomes or argument from affect.[8] After reviewing the debate, Heard concludes that God’s defining attributes are independent of human desires and opinions. Simply put, “God is what God is, whether humans like it or not.”[9] Heard argues that outcome oriented arguments reduce to arguing one’s “personal preference” and thus are ultimately useless in determining truth. He writes:

 

This points to one of the weaknesses of outcomes-oriented argumentation: the larger debate lacks an objective, consensual framework within which individual outcomes can be assessed as relatively worse or better than other possible outcomes. Because outcome-oriented arguments are inextricably linked to human preferences, and because human preferences differ, outcome-oriented arguments will typically succeed only with those who already agree with the arguer’s implicit value system which allows the arguer to categorize certain outcomes as good or bad, beneficial or harmful, and so on.

Even if such an objective, consensual framework were available, however, outcome-oriented arguments would still suffer from a fatal flaw, in that human preferences do not determine the divine reality.[10]

 

Even if it is true that God is responsive in the sense of adapting to us, Heard says, it would still not be the case that “we can reshape the reality of God simply by proclaiming one theological alternative ‘better’ than another and assuming that God conforms to what (some!) humans consider to be ‘better’.”[11] Agreement or disagreement on which divine attributes are “better” than others, Heard argues:

 

…would not prove that those attributes actually characterize God. If God’s foreknowledge is in fact exhaustive, then it is exhaustive, whether or not we judge that state of affairs to be better, more comforting, more helpful, or more exciting than some other possible state of affairs; and if God’s foreknowledge is in fact limited or probabilistic, then it is so, whether or not we judge that state of affairs to better, more comforting, more helpful, or more exciting than some other possible state of affairs. God is who God is, and human beings do not enjoy the privilege of defining what God ‘must’ be and assuming that God lives up to that definition.[12]

 

Heard suggests that the principle “God is what God is, regardless of human value judgments about the quality of the divine nature” undermines the evidentiary force of existential arguments proposed in the debate over open theism. At best, such arguments can show what practical implications a particular theological approach on this question may have.

 

§2.2 The difficulty with adequacy claims

            Three observations in response to Heard seem appropriate. First, neither side in the debate suggests that our views of God actually “shape the divine reality” as Heard argues. Open theists agree that God’s self-determining existence and nature are logically prior to and independent of all non-God actualities. Undermining belief in God’s aseity is not what existential arguments for (or against) open theism are about. What such arguments are believed to do is offer a kind of argument from design. That is, assuming God has purposed and designed us for truth, it is at least safe to reason abductively[13] from our experience of ourselves and the world to the plausible truth or falsity of those beliefs responsible for life’s functioning as it does. So although outcome oriented arguments involve a subjective element that makes them difficult to assess, they simply cannot be dismissed given our assumptions regarding the unity of truth and its role in our properly relating to God and the world.

Second, if the best outcome based arguments can legitimately do is establish what the practical implications of a view are, and if these practical implications have no part in determining the truth of the view in question, as Heard appears to claim, then one wonders whether or how the implications matter at all. Surely what is ‘legitimate’ about the implications of a belief is their contributing something to the determining of the truth of the claim. Heard, however, appears to affirm the importance of a belief’s implications while denying that the implications impinge on the truth-value of the belief in question.

Lastly, with Heard we can agree that it is a weak argument which claims simplistically that since believing some claim seems at the moment to meet a perceived need, the claim is therefore true. On the other hand, Christian believers will hardly want to deny the intuition that what is true about God and the God-world relationship will best explain our experience and best enable our existing in the world with and for God. Truth is, on a Christian account of things, intended to enable, enrich, and verify our living for God. This conviction grounds the usefulness of outcome based arguments or adequacy claims. Doctrine must prove itself by demonstrating its power to transform life. It is a kind of living that God is after. So the truth about God and the world, I shall assume, ought to secure belief states that enable our living our lives in the honor and enjoyment of God.

 

§2.3 The relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘praxis’

            Our understanding of the relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘praxis’ is expressed well by Bruce Epperly:

 

I believe that good theology integrates: 1) an affirmative, hopeful, and convincing vision of God and the world; 2) a promise that our deepest beliefs can be experienced as we grow spiritually and ethically; and 3) practices that enable us to experience the theological vision that we affirm. The faith we affirm is profoundly concrete and can be a matter of life and death for persons and the planet. Accordingly, our theological visions must always be tested in relationship to the concrete practices and experiences of faithful persons as well as seekers. They must be tested in terms of whether they inspire reverence, gratitude, and a heart-felt ‘yes’ as we contemplate the universe and our role as companions in God’s holy adventure. [italics mine][14]

 

We can agree with Heard, then, that existential arguments are difficult to evaluate. But we disagree that the lines of influence travel in only one direction—from doctrine to how we live. Theological truth cannot be determined independently of pragmatic concerns. We simply do not function this way. The lines of influence move in both directions—from doctrine to how we live as well as from how we live to verifying what is true.

Heard argues that both sides in the open theism debate should spend less time on existential arguments and return to the role of Scripture in revealing truths about God. To learn what God is like, Heard suggests that we “move from biblical statements about God to theological statements about God” and then undertake the “careful exegetical and theological studies necessary to elucidate God’s character as revealed in the Bible.”[15] In response, I submit that while Scripture is of primary importance, it is at the same time the case that Scripture’s truth is a truth designed for our living and to which our living best conforms. Thus the practical/existential dimension informs our interpreting and theological systematizing by limiting the set of possible interpretations or claims to existentially meaningful ones.

Finally, while outcome based arguments are somewhat subjective, they can be more than mere arguments from “personal preference.” The ‘praxis’ for and from which open theists argue is that of shared experience. An individual experience that remains the experience of a single person can hardly be the grounds upon which a community understands and expresses itself. But shared human experience cannot but be the basis upon which a community understands and expresses itself. And it is a shared human experience that open theists offer as the basis of the existential fit of their views.

 

§2.4 Assumptions regarding the usefulness of existential arguments

            We have good reasons, then, to conclude that outcome based, or existential, arguments, while limited and fallible by virtue of their individual subjectivity, can be useful in determining truth by grounding meaningfulness in the shared experience of a community. This is a fundamental pragmatic insight.[16] The point of existential arguments is not to say that whatever I find ‘convenient’ is therefore ‘true’, but rather to say that (a) whatever are the natural consequences of a belief, those consequences are that belief’s meaning for us, and that (b) whatever beliefs are true (theologically in our case), they will make possible a truly livable existence on the assumption that God has designed us to function best in truth. In the end, all of us conclude the truth or falsity of claims based on the difference that believing or not believing makes.

Granted, we are finite and fallible. With Heard we can agree that our experience itself can neither determine the divine reality (aseity) nor alone establish truth for a community. But these are not necessary to existential arguments per se. The usefulness of such arguments does not require an infallible individual subjectivity that makes individual experience an absolute judge of truth. Rather, as suggested here, we best look to the shared experience of a community to tell us what a belief ‘means’ and then admit this into whatever other arguments (exegetical, biblical/theological, traditional) are at play in order to determine theological truth-value.[17] We do not, with Heard, first establish truth on grounds that admit no influence from shared experience and then seek to accommodate ourselves to it.[18]

To conclude our survey of issues related to the nature of adequacy claims, I offer the following four guidelines for evaluating such claims. First, the pragmatic maxim grounds the meaning of a belief in the practical effects that belief has and so makes it impossible to determine the truth-value of claims apart from their practical effects.[19] Second, the practical effects must constitute the shared experience of a community before they can be admitted into the hermeneutical process by which that community understands and expresses its identity and mission. No one individual’s experience should be elevated to the status of being the measure by which the community is defined.[20] Third, Scripture possesses a God-given authority that makes it an ultimate judge of human beliefs and experience, not visa versa, and this conviction must guide our reading of experience. This is easier said than done, however, for by our first guideline above, the practical effects a belief has in our life are what that belief can be said to ‘mean’. We are bound to live in the tension of this dialectic. Lastly, adequacy claims are still subject to the rules of logic and meaningful argumentation. No ‘experience’ in itself constitutes an ‘argument’. It remains for us to argue the place that some shared experience has in our larger theological framework in a logical and coherent manner.

 

§3 ESSENTIAL CLAIMS OF OPEN THEISM

 

§3.1 The defining claim: divine epistemic openness regarding future contingents[21]

Having defined the sort of question we face and briefly outlined four provisional guidelines for establishing religious adequacy, let us clarify open theism’s defining claims. There is significant diversity among open theists, something that is often overlooked by opponents. I shall summarize this diversity in due time, but let us first state what core values and commitments appear to be common to all open theists.

The defining claim of the open view states that the future is epistemically open for God so far as it is in fact causally open and epistemically closed for God so far as it is in fact causally closed, a conviction open theist philosopher Alan Rhoda calls the epistemic thesis (ET).[22] To say the future is causally closed in some respect is to say that what occurs is causally entailed by antecedent states of affairs. To say the future is causally open in some respect is to say instead that what occurs obtains indeterministically; that is, it is to deny that what occurs is causally entailed by preceding states. In either case, God’s knowledge of the future follows accordingly, so that to say the future is epistemically closed for God in some respect is to say God knows that some event ‘will’ or ‘will not’ occur, that is, God knows the future as “certainly this will occur” or “certainly that will occur.”[23] Theological determinists maintain that the future is both exhaustively causally closed (because God determines all things) and correspondingly exhaustively epistemically closed for God (because God knows his own determining will).

On the other hand, indeterminists argue the future is causally open in some respects. There is genuine indeterminacy in creation. Indeterminists disagree, however, over what follows from this for God’s knowledge of future contingents. Traditional Arminians and Molinists agree that though the future is causally open in some respects, it is nevertheless exhaustively epistemically closed for God. God eternally knows all that shall ‘freely’ occur in the world. God’s foreknowledge is, thus, ‘exhaustively definite’.[24] Open theists disagree with their fellow indeterminists and argue with determinists that definite foreknowledge is incompatible with causal indeterminacy, affirming Rhoda’s epistemic thesis (ET), viz., that the divine mind is epistemically open with regard to future contingents. In this case God does not know how future contingencies will turn out, though he does know how they might and might not turn out.[25]

Open theism is thus essentially the conjoining of (i) Christian theism (i.e., Trinitarianism and creatio ex nihilo, to distinguish it from process theism), (ii) causal indeterminism, and (iii) divine epistemic openness regarding future contingents. To affirm these three would, so far as I have been able to research the question, make a person an ‘open theist’.

 

§3.2 Supporting convictions of open theism

            Apart from asserting divine epistemic openness with respect to future contingents, open theists typically share a number of other supporting convictions which account for the truth of this central claim. These supporting claims are ‘love with respect to divine purpose’, ‘freedom with respect to creation’, and ‘risk with respect to providence’. While the defining claim of divine epistemic openness essentially defines open theism, these three convictions play a crucial role in shaping how open theists view providence and prayer, in what sense they trust God to engage the world in response to their prayers, and how they understand what they may and may not legitimately expect in a fallen and conflicted world.

 

§3.2.1 Love: the divine purpose for creation

            The primary model that maps open theists’ understanding of God and the God-world relation is ‘love’.[26] God is love and freely creates out of the overflow of God’s own loving, personal, trinitarian self-related actuality. In the words of Jüngel:

 

To think [of] God as love is the task of theology. And in so doing it must accomplish two things. It must, on the one hand, do justice to the essence of love, which as a predicate of God may not contradict what people experience as love. And on the other hand, it must do justice to the being of God which remains so distinctive from the event of human love that ‘God’ does not become a superfluous word.[27]

 

God has purposed creation for loving, personal, sociality. God loves creation and the human beings that populate it. John Sanders expresses this core conviction as well:

 

According to openness theology, the triune God of love has, in almighty power, created all that is and is sovereign over all. God has freely decided to create beings capable of experiencing his love. In creating us, the divine intention was that we would come to experience the triune God’s love and respond to it with love of our own, freely coming to collaborate with God toward the achievement of his goals.[28]

 

All open theists share the conviction that “God is love” constrains both our understanding of God’s own nature and self-relatedness on the one hand and our understanding of the nature of creation and God’s purposes for us on the other.[29] Whatever else open theists might go on to conclude about the God-world relationship, it all proceeds from the fundamental conviction that God is love and that God’s relationship to creation is defined, motivated, and directed by divine love, which open theists view as constitutive of the divine essence or nature itself.[30] In the words of Boyd:

 

Throughout its narrative the Bible shows us that God created the world out of his triune love with the goal of acquiring for himself a people who would participate in and reflect the splendor of his triune love. More specifically, God’s goal from the dawn of history has been to have a church, a bride, who would say yes to his love, who would fully receive this love, embody this love, and beautifully reflect this triune love back to himself.[31]

 

Thus we are created to experience, enjoy, and reflect (or replicate) the love of the trinity—in relating to God, to others, and to the created order. Once again, Boyd explains, “The goal…is for the perfect triune love of God to be manifested to people, replicated in people, and reflected back from people…The whole creation is meant to express and embody the eternal triune love that God is. It exists to glorify God.”[32]

 

§3.2.2 Freedom: the necessary context for contingent love

            The next two central convictions shaping the open theist’s worldview follow necessarily from the primacy of love. Boyd asks:

 

If love is the goal, what are its conditions? What must creatures be like if they are to be capable of participating in the love of the Trinity?…Agents must possess the capacity and opportunity to reject love if they are to possess the genuine capacity and opportunity to engage in love.[33]

 

It is the metaphysics of creaturely love and moral responsibility which necessitate libertarian freedom as the context for loving creaturely personhood. Once God determines to purpose us for loving relations with God and others, endowing us with an appropriate capacity to determine ourselves is the metaphysical price-tag. God cannot reach his goals apart from such risk-taking. Creation, Boyd argues, must possess a certain “order” to be a “stable medium” in which humans can grow responsibly into relationship with others and God.[34]

We must say something here about the open theist’s view of God’s relationship to time. It is a complex question but central to the open theist’s view of creation as an appropriately free context for human choice and true becoming and God’s real relatedness to it. Open theists agree in three important respects regarding the question of time. First, time and temporal becoming are genuine and objective features of creation. Thus, open theists are A-theorists with respect to time. Second, God is viewed as temporally eternal and not as absolutely timeless. Here one must exercise some caution to distinguish between God’s relationship to time sans creation and God’s relationship to time since creating, for the question of God’s relationship to time sans creation remains a matter of debate among open theists. However, because creation is believed to be (temporally) dynamic and not static, God is seen as temporally related to creation and thus as dynamically omniscient. His knowledge of the universe changes as the universe changes.[35] Lastly, open theists agree that what is at stake in the debate over God’s relationship to time is the integrity of divine-human relations and God’s knowledge of tensed facts. These require, in the view of open theists, the abandonment of the timeless view of God in favor of temporal eternity.[36]

 

 

 

§3.2.3 Risk: the implications of freedom for the God-world relation

            The existence of creaturely freedom has important consequences for the God-world relation—for the world because freedom constitutes the indeterminacy which open theists argue is incompatible with exhaustively definite foreknowledge, and for God because such freedom is also incompatible with it being the case that God can always guarantee that his will is fulfilled. God, open theists believe, respects our freedom in those situations where our acting freely constitutes the necessary conditions for our achieving the purposes for which God created us. But if love requires freedom, what does freedom entail? It entails ‘risk’. And so the reality of ‘risk’ becomes the third in a trinity of convictions that support open theism’s defining claim of divine epistemic openness regarding future contingents.

Several open theist authors address the question of divine risk-taking and its implications for our understanding of divine providence and in turn the implications that form the object of this thesis—the practical effect which such beliefs have upon believers, specifically our understanding of petitionary prayer.

One open theist who has addressed the question of divine risk from a biblical/theological point of view is John Sanders, whose chief contribution to this debate is aptly titled The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence. Sanders categorizes all views of divine providence under two models, the “no-risk” view and the “risk” view. Meticulous, or specific, providence, that manner of relating to the world in exclusively deterministic ways, takes no risks. Sanders responds:

 

…if God is in some respects conditioned by his creatures, then God takes risks in bringing about this particular type of world. According to the risk model of providence, God has established certain boundaries within which creatures operate. But God sovereignly decides not to control each and every event, and some things go contrary to what God intends and may not turn out completely as God desires. Hence God takes risks in creating this sort of world.[37]

 

Divine conditionality, Sanders argues, is the watershed issue dividing “risk” and “no-risk” views of divine providence. If God engages in “dynamic given-and-take relationships with us, God is conditioned by our freedom in some ways, and this implies that he runs the risk that his intentions are not always fulfilled.”[38]

Another key contributor to the defense and development of a theology of divine risk-taking is Gregory Boyd. Boyd figures risk into a biblical worldview, what he calls the trinitarian warfare theodicy (TWT). It rests upon six theses that form the core of his theodicy. The second of these theses (TWT2) states that ‘freedom implies risk’. Risk is just the metaphysical price-tag God must pay to get the sort of loving creation he desires.[39] As Boyd states, “God could not have created a world in which creatures possess a measure of self-determining freedom without risking some loss. His free creatures might not choose as he wants them to choose.”[40] Boyd summarizes:

 

If the case…for a partially open future is accepted, it is possible to ascribe risk to God for the sake of love without concluding that God is not in control of the world. While Scripture assures us that the overall objectives of history are secure…it also teaches us that the fate of any one of his free creatures is unsettled until they themselves choose to enter into the saving covenant with him. This is the ultimate risk the Lord takes in creating a world with the purpose of sharing his triune self with others.[41]

 

Another open theist who discusses the meaning and implications of divine risk-taking is William Hasker.[42] Hasker defines divine risk-taking as follows: “God takes risks if he makes decisions that depend for their outcomes on the responses of free creatures in which the decisions themselves are not informed by knowledge of the outcomes.”[43] What determines whether God’s actions are risky or risk-free? Hasker answers, “God is a risk-taker if he endows his creatures with libertarian freedom; otherwise not.”[44] Open theists would agree that what creates risk in the world is the existence of libertarian freedom. However, an open theist could argue that Hasker has not captured what is at the heart of risk-taking, the notion of purpose. It is conceivable at least that I make a decision which depends for its outcome on responses of free creatures but where none of the possible outcomes constitutes a risk of loss. The point is that loss can only be defined in terms of purpose. And while every choice is made for a purpose, not all choices that depend for their outcome upon responses outside my control necessarily entail risk. It might be that none of the possible responses that lie outside my control presents a risk. One would have to relate possible outcomes to stated purposes in order to establish risk per se. Still, open theists, Hasker included, argue that it is often the case that the fulfillment of some purpose of God depends for its fulfillment upon the free responses of creatures and that this can and does constitute a risk for God.

By definition, then, love must be freely chosen. Creating us with the capacity for saying “yes” to loving God also meant creating us with the capacity for saying “no” to God. If we can’t say “no” to God, open theists argue, we can’t love God. Creating a world capable of genuine love and intimacy, therefore, involved a risk on God’s part that we might choose not to love him. On the open model, the choice to love or not to love God responsibly and with integrity cannot be predetermined by God (contra Calvin), nor can it be eternally foreknown as certain by God (contra Arminius).

 

§3.3 Various relevant diversities within open theism

            Having surveyed the defining claim and supporting convictions of open theism, I shall now note a few relevant diversities. Not all open theists agree on the best way to argue God’s knowledge of future indeterminacy. Four versions, or articulations, are presently argued by various open theists.[45] These may each be understood as falling along a two-fold continuum representing ‘bivalent/non-bivalent omniscience’ on one hand and ‘voluntary/involuntary nescience’ on the other, as follows:

(1) Voluntary Nescience. The future is epistemically open for God because he voluntarily chooses not to know truths about future contingents. In this view, there are truths describing what we shall freely do, but God chooses not to know them. Dallas Willard espouses this position.[46]

(2) Involuntary Nescience. The future is epistemically open for God because truths about future contingents are by definition unknowable. In this view, there are truths describing what we shall freely do, but no one including God can know them. William Hasker represents this version of open theism.[47]

(3) Non-Bivalent Omniscience. The future is epistemically open for God because propositions about future contingents (or future indeterminacies) are neither true nor false. In this version there are no truths God does not know (either voluntarily or involuntarily) because propositions positing future contingents are neither true nor false. Thus, not knowing them doesn’t undermine omniscience since there are no truths God does not know. J. R. Lucas argues this view.[48]

(4) Bivalent Omniscience. The future is epistemically open for God because propositions positing future contingents in terms of what “will” or “will not” occur are in fact false.[49] What is true in the case of future contingents is that they “might and might not” occur. Greg Boyd, Alan Rhoda, and the present author espouse this position.[50] In this view, bivalence is believed to hold universally (or at least for propositions describing future contingents), omniscience is held to mean “knowledge of all truths,” and God is believed to be omniscient. However, the scope of future-tense propositions is enlarged from exclusively “will” and “will not” type propositions to include “might and might not” type propositions, so that the three together are the jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive ways of describing the future.[51]

 

§4 THE PROPOSED PROVIDENTIAL CONTROURS OF OPEN THEISM

§4.1 The reality of spiritual warfare

            We now have firmly in hand open theism’s defining claim of divine epistemic openness and the essential convictions that ground this claim. According to openness, the triune God of love has freely created the world and purposed it for personal, loving relationships wherein God is most glorified as creatures freely choose to replicate that love throughout the cosmos. To this end God endowed humans with libertarian free will, a commitment which entailed a certain risk for God and creation, but a risk God deemed worth taking given his purposes.

Before directly considering the implications these convictions have for our understanding of petitionary prayer, I shall sketch the general providential contours of open theism, for these determine the game and rules that define the field of play upon which open theists believe us to be engaged when we pray. Boyd asserts:

 

Scripture certainly encourages the believer to find consolation in the fact that Christ suffers with us when we suffer…It admonishes us to trust that God is always working to bring good out of whatever circumstances we find ourselves, however tragic…It encourages us to be steadfast when we are persecuted for our faith and when the Lord uses trials to build our character…Finally, as we just argued, the Bible certainly teaches that we can derive a peace that passes all understanding from the fact that our eternal fellowship with God in his kingdom will more than make up for our sufferings in this present age…But I do not believe that Scripture teaches us to find consolation in trusting that everything that occurs has a divine reason behind it.[52]

 

Boyd expresses the fundamental difference between Calvinistic and Arminian versions of providence on the one hand and process and open theistic versions of providence on the other. That difference is whether or not we assign to everything that occurs in the world a specific divine ‘reason’ or ‘purpose’. As we shall see, whether or not we make this assignment transforms our understanding of prayer.

Sanders has argued that the entire open view debate is essentially not about divine foreknowledge at all, but rather about competing views of divine providence:

 

Our rejection of divine timelessness and our affirmation of dynamic omniscience are the most controversial elements in our proposal and the view of foreknowledge receives the most attention. However, the watershed issue in the debate is not whether God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge (EDF) but whether God is ever affected by and responds to what we do.[53]

 

Indeed, it is far easier to lose sight of foreknowledge when discussing love, freedom, and risk than it is to avoid the question of providence when discussing these. Open theism is a belief about divine risk-taking before it is about divine foreknowledge. Since one’s beliefs about what sort of relationship God has with the world and what sort of actions God may or may not take in pursuing the fulfillment of his purposes determine whether, why, and how we prayer, the foundation of any theology of prayer begins with one’s understanding of the nature and scope of God’s providential actions.[54]

 

 

 

Among open theists, Boyd has most thoroughly argued the reality and nature of spiritual warfare, constructing what he calls a “warfare worldview.”[55] The reality of warfare conditions everything about our lives, including the open theist’s understanding of the nature of providence and its relationship to prayer. We are engaged in a genuine war facing real risks, not a mock exercise which is either the inevitable consequence of an unconditional divine decree involving secondary causation or specifically permitted in its minutia based on definite foreknowledge.

 

§4.2 Acceptable risk

            We have seen that open theists all believe that God has purposed the world for loving relationship and endowed it with the requisite freedom. This freedom in turn, argue open theists, entailed the risk that agents would choose contrary to God’s will. This belief shapes the open theist’s understanding of providence. If God takes certain risks, then some of his purposes may not be fulfilled, in which case we cannot assume that all that occurs in the world happens as it does because God is purposefully behind it either by decree (Calvinism) or specific permission (Arminianism). Boyd characterizes both these understandings as sharing a ‘blueprint’ worldview, for they both understand God’s governance of the world to mean the world is always precisely what God decided it should be (either be decree or specific permission).[56]

The belief that divine providence is compatible with both a warfare worldview and divine risk-taking has serious consequences for our approach to prayer. There may be occasions when we pray as we ought in which God responds favorably, but the desired outcome will fail to actualize because of factors outside the immediate control of God and those praying. As Basinger explains, “it is always possible that even that which God in his unparalleled wisdom believes to be the best course of action at any given time may not produce the anticipated results in the long run.”[57]

In examining the models of divine providence, John Sanders focuses on what he calls the major traditionalist models that affirm omnipotence and divine involvement in the world. He names and compares six such models: Augustinian-Calvinism, Thomism, Molinism, Calvinistic-Molinism, Mystery/Antinomy, and Freewill Theism. The latter in turn is divided into traditional and open view versions.[58] Sanders comments:

 

Openness agrees with traditional freewill theism regarding libertarian freedom, the rejection of meticulous providence, that some of God’s decisions are conditioned by what the creatures decide (e. g. conditional election), and that, at times, God’s will is thwarted. Proponents of openness emphasize that God has chosen to establish reciprocal relationships with us based upon the eternal love shared by the Holy Trinity. There is genuine give-and-take with God. In love God takes risks that we will not respond appropriately to the divine love.[59]

 

The three supporting convictions earlier mentioned—love with regard to purpose, freedom with regard to creation, and risk with regard to providence—together lay the foundation for the open theist’s understanding of divine agency in the world. While some non-openness models embrace the first two, open theists are unique in positing diving risk-taking. This means that prayer will not always issue in the desired outcome even when God wishes to favor us by acting in response to our request. On such occasions, for God to grant our request means God agrees to act on our behalf with a view to bringing about the desired state of affairs. It does not guarantee that the desired state will obtain.

 

§4.3 Rules of engagement

            What sort of conditions must there be if the world is the sort of place where God can wish to bring about a state of affairs and act with a view to bringing about that state but the desired state fail to obtain? And does this not decimate any hope that prayer is efficacious? Boyd answers these concerns by appealing to the multifaceted nature of the conditions or “creational variables” under which we live and pray. We might say these constitute the “rules of engagement” sovereignly designed by God to govern the God-world relationship. Boyd argues that whereas traditionally the church has claimed it understood creation well and posited the mystery of evil in God, it is rather in the complexities of creation where we ought to locate the fundamental mystery (about evil, pain, suffering) and God’s character and loving intentions which we ought never to doubt.

What interfaces between a predictably loving God and the complexities of an unpredictable and fallen world that might account for the failure of an omnipotent God’s will on occasion? Boyd suggests that we understand God’s relationship to creation to be guided by conditions God freely set in place when God created but which God covenants to honor for the sake of his purposes. The entire project of creation is held together and governed from beginning to end by overarching purposes and a correspondingly appropriate creaturely context (our capacities and the capacities of the physical universe to behave freely). This context is required for the fulfillment of God’s purposes.

We understand that the material universe is an ordered system governed by laws that apply to material entities (motion and gravity for example). Similarly, Boyd suggests, there are metaphysical laws that govern the God-world relationship. Several of these can be known by us, but we can never comprehend the whole of it. One creational variable, Boyd argues, is prayer. Prayer (or the lack of it) is one of the influencing factors which constitute the totality of relations that determine outcomes on any specific occasion, but it is not the only factor. This is at the heart of what makes faith and prayer both comforting and frustrating.

 

§4.4 God’s infinite intelligence and the governance of the world

            One last contribution of Boyd’s is necessary to fill out our understanding of the providential contours of open theism. Boyd has offered what he calls the Infinite Intelligence Argument to explain how foreknowledge under the open model provides God a providential advantage in governing the world. It is argued against the open view that if God does not foreknow that some particular evil will occur at a particular time, God cannot act providentially to prevent it. He must wait until things occur to discover anything about them. Hence God is caught off guard, as it were. Providence then becomes a matter of damage control as opposed to wise preparation.

Open theists have made two responses to this, one relative to determinism and one relative to traditional simple-foreknowledge. To the former it is admitted that a God who unconditionally decrees all that occurs exercises the greatest possible level of control and takes no risks. Indeterminists, including open theists, have objected that viewing God as exhaustively determining all things is unacceptable on biblical/theological, philosophical, and existential grounds. I shall not here present these arguments. I shall only comment that open theists concede that theological determinism offers us a view in which God exercises the greatest possible control. However, for such a God, the notion of ‘preparing’ for the future would be precluded on the basis of the fact that all that occurs is equally unconditionally decreed by the one divine will.

To those indeterminists who embrace either timeless knowledge or simple-foreknowledge, it has been shown that these would be providentially useless to God.[60] There is nothing a God who possesses such knowledge can do that a God who does not possess such knowledge cannot also do. The challenge is to understand what sort of foreknowledge would provide God a basis upon which to act providentially in ways not equally foreknown. This Boyd does with his Infinite Intelligence Argument.

God’s ability to deal with what happens, the argument goes, is not in the least affected by the fact that God faces a future comprised of “possibilities” and “certainties” as opposed to one comprised exclusively of “certainties.” The answer lies in appreciating the infinite intelligence of God. As an infinitely intelligent person, God would eternally foreknow all possibilities, all the possible story lines, including all the possible responses he might give and all the possible counter-responses of people. Being infinitely intelligent, God is able to attend to any number of such possibilities as if each was the only thing that could happen. When any possible event becomes actual, Boyd insists that God was perfectly and eternally aware that things might happen this way and so was perfectly and eternally prepared, no less so than if this was the only thing God had to contemplate from all eternity.[61]

We humans possess finite intelligence. This means that our ability to think, plan, and prepare for the future is limited the more we have to consider. Suppose we have ten, fifty, or a hundred possibilities to contemplate. We are necessarily less prepared for them the greater their number, for our intelligence is divided among them. But God is infinitely intelligent. His intelligence is not “spread thin” or “divided” among the possibilities. God can bring all his attention and preparation to bear on each of any number of possibilities and thus not be any less prepared than if he were to anticipate one certain story-line. In the open view, then, God does not under-know the future, he over-knows it.

Consider the game of chess as an analogy.[62] Suppose I challenge Kasparov to a match. Kasparov doesn’t possess definite foreknowledge of my moves, but he does possess knowledge of the possible moves I may make (and in certain circumstances throughout the match he will be able to predict with certainty some of my moves). Because he is far more intelligent than I, Kasparov is able to anticipate and prepare adequate responses to any move I may make. Is there any question who is in control of the game? Is there any question who will win? None whatsoever. Kasparov is not put at any disadvantage by having to consider possibilities as opposed to certainties.

Let us grant for the sake of argument, however, that Kasparov does possess a printout of the entire match, including all of my and his moves, in a manner analogous to traditional indeterminist notions of divine foreknowledge.[63] Would this knowledge give Kasparov any advantage? Would he be able to make use of this knowledge in order to determine his moves ahead of time? The answer, of course, is no. There is no advantage to be gained (and some problems created) by Kasparov’s having definite foreknowledge of every move in the game. On the contrary, such knowledge could not at all explain how it is that Kasparov is able to prepare for the game or how he is able to interact during the game.

One might argue that the simple-foreknowledge model is nothing more than pre-recorded open theism. Consider, the simple foreknowledge model believes that we live in a world where God responds to us in dynamic mutual relations, where we are libertarianly free to choose, where our prayers make the required difference to God, and where things might sometimes genuinely be different than they are. Open theists also believe we live in this kind of world. The only difference is that advocates of simple foreknowledge believe that everything about this world exists eternally in God’s mind. And, it is argued, our trust in God’s providential care rests in this being the case. But open theists ask, What difference would such knowledge make? What providential advantage would God gain by possessing this kind of foreknowledge as opposed to knowledge of all possible story lines? None whatsoever. But if such knowledge is of no practical value to God, believing that he possesses such knowledge can be of no practical value to us.

 

 

§4.5 Consequent ambiguity

            Once we posit a universe of intersecting and sometimes competing divine, angelic, and human wills, together with genuine risk and warfare under a myriad of creational factors we cannot comprehend, we have an entirely different approach to the problem of evil. We can know that for any given evil, God, being perfectly loving, always does all God can do to maximize good and minimize evil, but we also know that given the metaphysics of freedom and risk, how much good God is able to actualize on any given occasion is conditioned by these creational factors. Thus, we can never know enough about the complexities of creation and the contributing factors that determine specific outcomes to judge precisely which variables played which determining roles. Consequently the world presents us with a good deal of ambiguity, not with respect to the divine character or intention (which open theists insist is loving and good), but with respect to the intersecting creational variables.

Open theists generally admit that God can and does on occasion guarantee outcomes. They also admit that God can and does on occasion make compatibilistic use of evil. Consequently, given our ignorance of the complexities and the hidden variables, we are consigned to ambiguity regarding specifics. We can never know whether some specific evil was opposed by God as such, given all the variables that are part of any event in the world, or whether God was specifically permitting or making use of agents in their evil intentions in a larger attempt to minimize evil and maximize good in the world. We must, open theists urge, wean ourselves of the need to know and therefore of our tendency to judge.[64]

 

§4.6 Consequent assurance

            This ambiguity just considered relates to creation, however, and not to God’s character or his loving purposes. We can never comprehend the totality of divine and creational influences under the rules of engagement established by God, but we may enjoy profound assurances. First, we may know that God always does all God can do given his purposes and the context in which God finds himself, to maximize good and minimize evil in the world.[65] Here “all God can do” does not equal something like “flex all the muscle God has” or “exercise all the power God possesses.” It rather means God always exhausts all the available avenues for achieving his highest glory and the good and perfection of creation within the constraints he freely put in place to achieve the desired relationship with creation. Within this context, God does all he can to maximize good and minimize evil. That is his nature.

A second assurance is that however grave may be our suffering, we can rest in the confidence that God is resourceful enough to redeem our circumstances when we cooperate with him (Rm. 8.28-29). There is no horror so great that God cannot redeem good and beauty from it. God is always redemptively engaged in every occasion seeking to bring about the highest good and most loving state of affairs.

A third assurance we have in a risk-filled world is in the entrusting of our souls to God. With respect to our final state and our eternal enjoyment of God’s presence, we have an unconditional divine guarantee that those who trust God cannot possibly be disappointed[66] whatever else may occur in this life.

 

§5 CONTRIBUTIONS OF OPEN THEISTS

 

§5.1 Open theists on prayer

            Having laid an adequate foundation for an open theistic theology of prayer by noting the nature and limits of existential arguments, the defining claims and convictions of open theism, and the general contours of God’s providential actions in the world, we are now ready to examine specific open theist contributions to an understanding of petitionary prayer.

Let us begin with David Basinger’s contribution in The Openness of God[67] since it marks the beginning of a debate that has continued unabated for over ten years now. Basinger sketches the practical implications which follow from this view of God and the world. He notes that most Christians believe that whether God directly intervenes in our world depends at times on whether we petition God to do so.[68] In other words, many times it is the case that “we have not because we ask not” in the sense that “certain states of affairs that God can and would like to bring about do not occur because we have chosen not to request that he intervene.”[69] God, in the open model, intends us to become morally mature persons, and our shaping the world in partnership with God through prayer is part of that process.

Basinger points out the crucial difference between petitionary prayer as viewed by theological determinists and process theists on the one hand and open theists on the other:

 

…it is also possible for proponents of the open model to conceive of    petitionary prayer as efficacious in the crucial sense in which it is not possible for proponents of either specific sovereignty or process theism to maintain that it is. Since proponents of specific sovereignty believe that God always ensures that we freely make the exact decision that he would have us make, and since process theists deny that God can ever unilaterally intervene in earthly affairs, those in neither camp can justifiably maintain that petitionary prayer initiates unilateral divine activity that would not have occurred if we had not utilized our God-given power of choice to request such divine assistance. However, since we who affirm the open view deny that God can unilaterally control human decision-making that is truly voluntary but affirm that God can unilaterally intervene in earthly affairs, it does become possible for us to maintain justifiably that petitionary prayer is efficacious in this sense—that is, to maintain justifiably that divine activity is at time dependent on our freely offered petitions.[70]

 

Not all open theists agree on just how God ought to be viewed as “intervening” into the lives of those for whom they pray. All open theists would agree that God as a general rule does not override a person’s freedom to determine that she perform some action. But what if we assume, Basinger asks, that what is being asked when we prayer that God intervene on behalf of someone in a troubled marriage, for example, is that God only “influence their lives in such a way that it will be more likely that things will work out for the best”? Basinger answers:

 

The answer depends on what we who affirm the open model mean when we say that God loves all individuals in the sense that he is always seeking the highest good for each. For some of us this means that God would never refrain from intervening beneficially in one person’s life simply because someone else has failed to request that he do so. And, accordingly, we naturally find prayers requesting even non-coercive divine influence in the lives of others to be very problematic.

Other proponents of the open model, though, see no necessary            incompatibility in affirming that God always seeks what is best for each of us and that God may at times wait to exert all the non-coercive influence that he can justifiably exert on a given person until requested to do so by another person. And thus they readily acknowledge the potential efficacy of prayers of this type.[71]

 

Another open theist who treats prayer is Boyd. In the second of his trilogy on evil, Boyd develops his view of prayer within an open-warfare worldview, beginning with the affirmation that “God miraculously intervenes in world history and responds to the prayers of his people.”[72] Given this conviction, and the thesis that God’s exercise of power to direct events as he wishes is restricted by free agency,[73] what can petitionary prayer contribute? Boyd explains:

 

One could argue that [petitionary prayer] is pointless, for if what a person prays for is something that is best for God to do, it seems God would already by trying to do it whether or not that person prayed. On the other hand, if one naively prays for something that is not best for God to do, then it seems that a God who always does the most good he can would not do it, regardless of the prayer. In other words, if what one is praying for is best, praying for it seems either unnecessary if God can carry it out or pointless if he cannot. Moreover, if what one is praying for is not best, God would not carry it out even if he could. So what is the point of petitionary prayer?[74]

 

We shall consider how others have addressed the problem of petitioning a perfectly good God. For now we can summarize Boyd’s own answer:

 

I submit that the problem is solved if we understand prayer to be part of the morally responsible potential, the spiritual say-so that God gives free agents in his desire to have a creation in which love is possible. I have argued that God is restricted in terms of what he can unilaterally carry out by the domain of irrevocable freedom he has given to agents. I have further argued that this entails that the short- and long-term implications of agents’ behavior for all other agents must be allowed to unfold, for better or for worse. We may understand prayer as a central aspect of this moral responsibility. By God’s own design, it functions as a crucial constituent in the ‘givens’ of any situation that makes it possible for God more intensely to steer a situation toward his desired end.[75]

 

Thus Boyd defines prayer as “creaturely empowerment” and sets it within those “variables” that define the “givens”[76] of any particular situation, givens that just are that situation to which God relates and within which he must work. That is, among all the variables God respects in relating to the world (God’s loving purposes, the irrevocable freedom they require and God endows, the laws of nature, the specifics of any actual situation, and many other variables we can’t possibly fathom), prayer is fundamental. It is a variable that, along with other variables, defines the contexts in which God sometimes gets what he desires and other times does not. And this arrangement is God’s own sovereign design. It is how we help shape ourselves and the world we live in.

This, Boyd argues, makes sense of prayer as we see it in Scripture, as an activity that influences God and contributes to outcomes that might otherwise not have been. In Boyd’s words, “the effectiveness and urgency of petitionary prayer as it is commanded and illustrated throughout Scripture only makes sense if we are asking God to do something he would not otherwise do and if God at least sometimes does this.”[77]

But why should God design the world this way? What is the divine rationale for such an arrangement? In Satan and the Problem of Evil, Boyd suggests three reasons. First, such prayer “preserves our personhood.” Interpersonal relationships require that the persons involved be empowered over and against one another. Where one party exhaustively determines the other, the dominated party is depersonalized.[78] Thus, we must possess the capacity to determine and shape ourselves and the world we live in if our relationship to God is to possess personal integrity. Second, mutual interdependent relationships are maintained and encouraged through personal communication. By making much of the good God truly desires for us and the world dependent in part upon our petitioning God, God weaves into the fabric of the cosmos the sort of interdependent communication necessary to the thriving of divine-human relationships. Third, Boyd suggests that prayer is an essential part of our learning to reign with God. God wants us to share in his universal reign by being vice-regents through whom his loving jurisdiction is mediated throughout the universe. Thus, this life is a kind of probationary training grounds, as it were, where we learn to employ those gifts and authorities by which we will forever rule with God. God could not have the desired result without endowing us with the required capacities and leaving us free to mature into their proper use. Petitionary prayer, freely offered, is an exercise of creaturely power fundamental to our growing into God’s eschatological aims for us.[79]

Lastly, Boyd discusses variables related to prayer. These variables are always present. They define the context in which we pray and influence outcomes, though as noted, we are often confined to ambiguity regarding specifics. Boyd lists nine such variables: God’s will, the faith of those prayed for, the faith of those praying, the persistence of prayer, the number of those praying, human and angelic free will, the number and strength of spirit agents, and the presence of sin. These, Boyd explains, are only some of the variables we are aware of which influence prayer’s effectiveness.

In describing his understanding of prayer within a “risk” (open) model of providence, John Sanders emphasizes the sense in which God acts in the world “because” we request him to do so. “Does it make sense,” asks Sanders, “for proponents of specific sovereignty to claim that God grants something because of or in response to the request made?”[80] He notes Paul Helms’ understanding of prayer within a deterministic worldview. Helm comments that in a “no-risk” model of providence “intercessory prayer is not one means of settling God’s mind on a course of action, but one of the ways in which the already settled mind of God effects what he has decreed.”[81] Thus, though God has unconditionally determined outcomes and the means (prayer) by which they are to come about, Helm claims we can still agree that God answers ‘because’ we pray. Petitionary prayers are efficacious in the sense that God wills them as the means by which determined ends are to be actualized. Sanders argues that this sense of ‘because’ is clearly different than the sense of ‘because’ which attributes contingency to our requests and God’s responses. Sanders argues:

 

…the God of specific sovereignty is not actually prevailed on by prayer. God never responds to us or does anything because of our prayers because this would imply contingency in God. In this model it is difficult to make sense of James’s statement that ‘you have not because you ask not’ (Jas 4:2) because if the God of specific sovereignty wanted you to have it, then he would ensure that you asked for it. If God’s will is never thwarted in any detail, then we can never fail to receive something from God because we failed to ask for it.[82]

 

Sanders goes on to summarize the “risk” model of prayer:

 

Our prayers make a difference to God because of the personal relationship God enters into with us. God chooses to make himself dependent on us for certain things. It is God’s sovereign choice to establish this sort of relationship; it is not forced on God by us….Our failure to practice impetratory prayer means that certain things that God wishes to do for us may not be possible because we do not ask.[83]

 

Sanders also addresses the debate among open theists over the objection that God, being omnibenevolent, must always act to bring about the best possible state of affairs in any given situation whether or not he is requested to do so. Sanders makes two points in reply to this objection. First, he points out that it is not clear that the notion of a “most valuable state of affairs” is coherent.[84] God, Sanders suggests, would have any of several alternative actions to pursue. Second, if what God holds to be “most valuable” is the personal relationship with other persons, then his actualizing all possible goods independently of our asking him to do so (at least on occasion) would undermine the integrity of the sort of relationship God wishes to have with us.[85] The first of these two seems less than convincing. Surely it is coherent to suppose that on occasion there is one best, most loving option to pursue even if there is no one best possible world to create. So the question remains, what are we to expect of perfect love in such instances? Sanders’ second point, however, provides what I think is a most fruitful way to understand why God would sometimes make his actions in realizing good in the world contingent upon our petitioning him.

The open view approach to prayer is further argued by Clark Pinnock who holds petitionary prayer “to be a good indicator of the interactive nature of our relationship to God.”[86] In his words:

 

In prayer the practicality of the open view of God shines. In prayer God treats us as subjects not objects and real dialogue takes place. God could act alone in ruling the world but wants to work in consultation. It is not his way unilaterally to decide everything. He treats us as partners in a two-way conversation and wants our input….[87]

 

Thus prayer validates the open view of God because it so adequately reveals the interactive nature of the God-world relationship. Pinnock argues this is crucial to providing a proper sort of motivation for prayer. “People pray passionately,” he says, “when they see purpose in it, when they think prayer can make a difference and that God may act because of it.”[88]

Terrence Fretheim has had an enormous effect on open theism.[89] He describes prayer as “creating openings (relational space) for God in the world.”[90] In his review of prayer in the Old Testament, Fretheim notes that “silence on the part of the people means that God is not able to be God for them in a way that God would like to be.”[91] Likewise, “what is possible for God in responding to prayer in a way that is in the interests of all concerned may vary from one situation to the next.”[92] With Boyd, who describes prayer as “creaturely empowerment,” Fretheim notes that “prayer has to do with that which brings the human and the divine factors into the fullest possible power-sharing effectiveness.”[93]

The tabernacle provides an example in physical terms of creating space in the world for God. Likewise, the prayer that is offered in this house of prayer creates space wherein God dwells and acts in the world. J. Gerald Jenzen, agreeing with Fretheim’s approach, comments:

 

It is of the utmost significance for both theological reflection and the practice of prayer that this mystery of unity [between God and humankind] as mutual indwelling is embodied in an act of prayer, the prayer of Jesus as high priest bearing on his shoulders and his heart the names of his followers and, ultimately, of his whole creation. To pray as a Christian, then, is to enter with Jesus into that space, as the space God has freely opened up for the world to be, a space within which it is safe to invite God, and the company of God, into the space of one’s own internal freedom.[94]

 

Fretheim’s fundamental insight into prayer as our “creating space for God in the world” expresses well what is at the heart of open theism’s approach to prayer. Prayer is that “relational space” we create in response to God’s invitation and in so doing create an opportunity, a space, for God to move in the world.

Samuel E. Balentine has offered a most thorough review and commentary on prayer in the Old Testament,[95] and his work deserves more review than we can here give. Balentine argues that prayer in the Old Testament is a means of delineating divine character. He points to prayers that appear in the text not merely as an individual’s prayer on this or that occasion (insignificant in terms of the theology that motivates it), but as prayers “put into the mouths of certain pray-ers for the purpose of conveying the ideological and theological concerns of the editors.”[96] Balentine further shows how prayer reveals the dialogical nature of the divine-human relationship. God chooses to engage humanity in a relationship of reciprocity. “The texts I have examined,” concludes Balentine, “repeatedly present God with reality-depicting metaphors as speaking and acting toward humanity, and as listening for, hence inviting, human response.”[97] Balentine further concludes:

 

The central point here is that covenant relationship is fundamentally dialogical. Two parties are mutually bound to one another in a relationship that is desirable and important to both. Both parties have a voice and a role to play; neither can disregard the appeals of the other and maintain the relationship as it is intended to be. If either God or Israel does not participate in the dialogue, then communication fails and the relationship is impoverished by silence.

To sharpen this point with respect to the discourse of prayer, covenant partnership means that God cannot and does not use the divine prerogatives of power to reduce Israel’s response to monotones of praise, submission, or silence. Such limitations on human response effectively eviscerate genuine covenant relationship, substituting instead enforced obedience and passive devotion.[98]

 

Thus, for Balentine, prayer is a constitutive act of faith that creates the potential for newness in both God and humanity.[99] Neither party in the relationship can remain unaffected after prayer is offered. The view of God that emerges from the Old Testament is of a God who is personal, accessible, loving, powerful, and compassionate.

Let us further consider the work of Robert Ellis.[100] After summarizing both the Old and New Testament evidence regarding prayer, Ellis has a helpful review of the history of interpretation on relevant texts and issues. It is when he discusses prayer and the doctrine of God, however, that Ellis makes very fruitful contributions, arguing the link between our doctrine of God and our understanding of prayer. Ellis also focuses on Christ as the definitive word on what God is like. Thus, a Christocentric theology of prayer views God as “Christlike.”[101] In drawing together the evidence from both the Old and New Testaments and the contributions of history, Ellis concludes that prayer is fundamentally a “participation in the action of the Trinity in the world.”[102] The Trinity is crucial for Ellis because it suggests that prayer is not so much something we offer to God as it is something that takes place within God. God draws us into himself, into an experience of his triune love and purposes. Furthermore, God’s being complex (triune) suggests that God values synergy and sociality (both crucial elements in an open view theology of prayer). For prayer to reflect these trinitarian values God and humans must mutually engage one another; humans must be sufficiently autonomous persons in their own right.[103]

Consider one last contribution to open theism’s understanding of prayer, that of Vincent Brummer.[104] Our concerns take us to three issues taken up by Brummer: the nature of impetratory prayer as constitutive of personal relations; issues involved in praying to an omniscient God, and problems faced by claiming a perfectly good God would make his performance of some good dependent upon the prayers of less than perfectly knowledgeable and perfectly good agents.

Regarding the first of these, Brummer argues a two-way contingency that characterizes the relationship between us and God. Petitionary prayer makes sense as a free engagement occurring between personal agents. Brummer places petitionary prayer’s efficacy in the space between those actions impossible for God to perform (because they are logically impossible or incompatible with God’s holy character) and those which God performs inevitably by virtue of his nature and character.[105] Constitutive of impetratory (petitionary) prayer is the presupposition that:

 

God does what is asked because he is asked. In this sense the petition itself is a condition for God’s doing what he is requested. On the one hand, however, it is not a sufficient condition making it inevitable for God to comply with the request. In that case prayer would become a kind of magical technique by which God could be manipulated by us…On the other hand, although the petition is not a cause which makes God’s response inevitable, it is the reason for his response.[106]

 

Thus we must reject divine immutability as understood by Aquinas, for:

 

…not only would all events in the world be inevitable and therefore not the sort of things that could meaningfully be objects of petition, but God would not be the sort of being to whom petitions could meaningfully be addressed. If his intentions are immutably fixed from all eternity, he would not be able to react to what we do or feel, nor to the petitions we address to him. He could not be said to do things because we ask him to do them.[107]

 

Second, Brummer considers the problem of petitioning a God who is believed to know precisely how future contingents will obtain. Were God to infallibly foreknow every event and human choice, “no event could take place differently from the way it in fact does, and no human agent could act differently from the way he in fact does, for that would falsify God’s infallible foreknowledge.”[108] So far as we know, Origen was the first Christian to take up this question.[109] And his answers were not novel. He adopts standard Stoic explanations.[110] Boethius also urged, “If God foresees all things and cannot in anything be mistaken, that which his Providence sees will happen, must result.”[111] Brummer declines Boethius’ own solution to this problem (divine timelessness) and instead concludes:

 

God…could of course have created a deterministic universe, in which case there would have been only one possible course future events could take. In that case it would have been coherent to claim that he knows with absolute certainty what course all events will take—since there would be only one. However, we all know from personal experience that this is not the sort of universe which he has in fact created. He has rather created a world with an open future in which various possibilities could be actualized.[112]

 

Prayer cannot, then, be approached with the understanding that God is somehow informed by his knowledge of future contingents in determining how best to answer our prayers. That is quite impossible on a presentist, indeterminist cosmology. This does not contradict the claim that God knows all things, however. Brummer contends that God knows all things as they are, not as they are not.

Brummer’s third concern is the problem generated by supposing both that God is perfectly loving and that God makes the provision of our good dependent upon our petitioning him. This problem has been addressed by both Boyd and Sanders and will be consider again under §7.2 in response to Stephen Roy’s criticism and David Basinger’s concern. I shall only mention here that Brummer’s reply is similar to that which I give in §7.2. The problem with many of the proposed solutions to the problem, claims Brummer, is that these aim petitionary prayer at stimulating either God or the petitioner himself to action. This is misleading in that it does not take into account the “relational character of prayer” or the “mediate nature of divine agency.”[113] God acts through the actions we perform.

As will be seen, I am in fundamental agreement with Brummer on this last issue. Both the relational and mediate nature of divine agency is where we must find a solution to the problem posed by praying to a perfectly good God. What is needed, moreover, is a sufficient rationale for justifying a perfectly loving God’s making his loving provision dependent upon our prayers. I address this in §7.2 and again in the eight concluding theses of §8.1.

 

§5.2 Summary of contributions

            There are other contributions we could include, but the foregoing will have to suffice in representing what open theists generally perceive to be the nature of divine action in the world and the role of petitionary prayer.[114] To temporarily summarize these contributions, then, we can say that open theists:

●     view the God-world relationship as a covenant in which God pledges to achieve his loving purposes for creation in partnership with human beings.

●     understand that our shaping the world with God through prayer is constitutive of the order and synergy required by the sort of loving relationship for which we were created.

●     define prayer as God-given “creaturely empowerment” by which we “create space” in the world for God to act.

●     see prayer as one of many variables that determines what we and the world become, part of the morally responsible potential God grants us in making possible the sort of free and responsible world that reflects God’s own triune loving personhood and that is required for us to develop the capacities necessary to reigning with God throughout eternity.

●     acknowledge the necessary ambiguity that characterizes the world and limits our ability to judge why things happen as they do or why they do not always happen as they might have.

 

§6 THE EXISTENTIAL CASE AGAINST RELIGIOUS ADEQUACY

 

We have now discussed the nature and difficulty of adequacy claims (2.1-2) and suggested that open theists ground such claims in the pragmatic maxim, the light of Scripture, and the shared experience of a community (2.3-4). We have noted divine epistemic openness regarding future contingents as the defining claim of open theism (3.1), reviewed love, freedom, and risk as the three essential supporting convictions shared by open theists (3.2), and noted various relevant diversities within open theism (3.3). We then surveyed the main providential contours of open theism relevant to a theology of petitionary prayer (4.1-6) and surveyed the representative contributions open theists have made to an understanding of prayer. It remains only to engage specific objections (§6 and §7) and in response lay out what appear to be the building blocks of an open view theology of petitionary prayer (§8) that is religiously adequate.

 

§6.1 General objections

            Objections to open theism cover a wide range of issues, including biblical/theological questions, philosophical objections, the question of church tradition, and of course the practical effects.[115] Objections to the practical effects of believing open theism to be true generally claim that the view results in a loss of trust and therefore of hope in God and his word. Consequently our confidence in God with respect to guidance, prayer, and suffering is undermined and faith is eventually shipwrecked.[116]

John Piper has been unambiguous in his opposition to open theism, listing fifteen grounds for dismay, which include claims that open theism undermines the Church’s  “common vision of…God,” holds that God “makes mistakes,” attributes ignorance to God, is pastorally harmful, and undermines the believer’s hope.[117] Thomas Ascol has similarly criticized the pastoral implications of open theism, urging that open theism undermines confidence in Scripture, God, faith in Christ, the efficacy of prayer, and confident living.[118] If God does not know what the future holds in every respect, and if God’s will is not always triumphant, then prayer at best is only accidentally efficacious, nothing like a robust biblical portrait of prayer.

Bruce Ware has argued similarly that open theism’s God is unworthy of worship and unable to answer prayer.[119] The open view undermines one’s confidence and hope in God and adds despair to human suffering.[120] Ware urges evangelicals to beware of open theism because “the very greatness, goodness, and glory of God” and “the strength, well-being, faith, hope, and confidence of Christian people in and through their God” are at stake.[121]

Anit-openness rhetoric like the above constitutes a competing contrary existential argument that makes essentially the same claim. Much of it lacks any logical sophistication in the way of formal argumentation, but three authors have offered more sophisticated arguments against open theism based on the perceived adverse effects it has upon petitionary prayer, and to these I shall now turn.

 

§6.2 Bruce Ware: Their God is Too Small

            Bruce Ware’s most recent response to open theism is concerned entirely with the practical implications of the view.[122] Previous of his works engage this question, but we shall here engage his most recent arguments.

Ware lists three difficulties with open theism and its view of prayer.[123] First, it issues from a modern psychologized culture which encourages an inordinate estimate of personal self-importance. Modern culture caters to what we want and places the “customer” first. Open theism is infected with this consumerism which in turn distorts prayer’s purpose and role. The view has only managed to grow in popularity, Ware insists, because of the immensely low view of God and the unrealistically high view of self that characterizes Christian culture in the West. Second, because God knows the past and all my present thoughts and desires that go into the formation of my petitions, there is no sense in which God can interact with me in them. They cannot represent the sort of reciprocal relationship open theists claim they do. And third, since in open theism God does not know how future contingents will actualize, God lacks the knowledge he needs to know best how to answer our prayers. Ware is here responding to Basinger’s explanation of the general providential contours of open theism. Basinger explained in The Openness of God that divine guidance from an open view perspective cannot mean discovering “exactly what will be best in the long run” but rather a means of determining what is “best for us now,” because within the providential contours of open theism “it is always possible that even that which God in his unparalleled wisdom believes to be the best course of action at any given time may not produce the anticipated results in the long run.”[124] This is intolerable for Ware, who responds:

 

On the one hand, because God knows the past and present exhaustively and accurately, he is simply too knowledgeable and wise to learn anything from our prayers. But on the other hand, because he lacks exhaustive definite knowledge of the future, he is not knowledgeable and wise enough to answer our most urgent and pressing prayer in the ways that are, in fact, best.[125]

 

Ware also offers four points toward understanding prayer more biblically. First, he considers the Lord’s prayer (Mat. 6.9-13). Ware believes this prayer assumes God’s mind is “made up” regarding God’s will. We are not asked to pray “Your will be formed,” Ware interprets, but rather “your will be done.”[126] The assumption is that the God-world relationship assumed by Christ here precludes our prayers affecting God in the sense open theists claim they do. God’s will predates our prayers. Thus, “we must never approach prayer,” urges Ware, “or think of God in terms of what we contribute to God.”[127] Second, Jesus teaches us that “your heavenly Father knows what you need before you ask him” (vv. 7-8). Before we bring our requests to God, Jesus says, God knows what we need. It follows that we can never tell God something God does not already know and did not anticipate. Ware believes this contradicts open theists’ claims. Third, Ware argues from Exodus 32.11-14 (a favorite open theist text used to show that God “changes his mind” regarding destroying Israel in response to Moses’ petitions) that God need not be thought of as having changed his mind. Could Moses have brought God some new insight or perspective that caused God to change his mind? Ware shows that all the points Moses offers to God as reasons for not destroying Israel are believed by open theists to be known by God independently of Moses’ petitions. Ware then inquires:

 

On which of these points would God have responded to Moses and said, “Say, Moses, good point. I just didn’t understand it that way. Thanks for the insight—and for the reminder! I can hardly believe that I almost forgot about the covenant!”? But isn’t it clear that, to understand this text in a way in which God literally changes his mind, something like this must be envisions?[128]

 

Lastly, Ware inquires into what sense our prayers might “make a difference” to God. It cannot be that God ever changes his mind in response to human actions or that we “contribute” to God. In what sense then do our prayers make a difference? Ware answers:

 

Simply put…God has designed that his good and perfect will be accomplished, in some respects, only as his people pray and first ask for God so to work. The role of prayer, then, becomes necessary to the accomplishing of these certain purposes, and our involvement in prayer, then, actually functions to assist in bringing these purposes to their fulfillment.[129]

 

 

 

§6.3 Stephen Roy: How Much Does God Foreknow?

            Stephen Roy has recently offered a comprehensive engagement of the open view that makes a substantive attempt to establish the religious inadequacy of the view based on four problems that result from an open view approach to prayer.[130] The first regards how the God of open theism decides whether he should answer my prayer in the way I ask.[131] Various crucial events in the future that would, Roy supposes, make a particular answer to my prayer wise and loving are unknown to God. Roy cannot see how, given divine epistemic openness regarding future contingents, God can know how best to answer our prayers. Second, Roy objects that since there is nothing we can tell God in prayer that he does not already know, our prayers contribute no new information to God, in which case it is difficult to see how our prayers make a genuine contribution to God.[132] More specifically, it is difficult to see how prayer contributes to a “genuine and mutually responsive relationship between God and his children as open theists claim.”[133] The point is that God knows too much about us for his relationship with us to be genuine and real (presumably in the open theist’s sense of ‘genuine’ or ‘real’).[134] Since what we contribute in prayer is the present product of our past experience and present understanding, and since God knows these infallibly, the sort of “mutually interactive, mutually instructing relationship with God in prayer that is often promoted by open theists would seem to demand not only that God not have exhaustive foreknowledge but also that his knowledge of the present and past be limited as well.”[135]

Third, God’s commitment to respect our libertarian freedom means that with respect to prayers whose answer depends on the free exercise of wills other than God’s, God has limited himself to whether and how he will answer those prayers. This is unacceptable to Roy.[136] Lastly, Roy suggests that open theists who insist God’s love is universal and impartial (admittedly a core value for open theists) have a hard time squaring this with their belief in the efficacy of petitionary prayer. Roy wonders how a God of such love is justified in withholding any good gift simply because he has not been asked to bestow it. If open theists place a high value on the efficacy of petitionary prayer so that God’s actions in maximizing good in the world are sometimes dependent upon our prayers, it becomes difficult, insists Roy, to consistently claim that God’s love is genuinely universal and impartial. On the other hand, if open theists do justice to the universality and impartiality of divine love by insisting that God always actualizes the greatest possible good, then it becomes difficult to consistently maintain an efficacy to petitionary prayer.[137]

 

§6.4 David Ciocchi: “The Religious Adequacy of Free-will Theism”

            A more logically formal argument for the religious inadequacy of open theism is offered by David Ciocchi.[138] Ciocchi challenges the claim that open theism supports a rich religious life. He advances an understanding of ‘religious adequacy’ and then argues that open theism fails to be religiously adequate with regard to petitionary prayer because it fails to honor beliefs implicit in the way ordinary Christian believers pray. Ciocchi first defines religious adequacy. A position is ‘religiously adequate’, Ciocchi suggests, “to the degree that it comports with the common beliefs and practices of ordinary believers.”[139] Religious adequacy is thus, in Ciocchi’s view, a measure of the “intellectual fit” of a position vis à vie “the actual lived faith of most believers.” [emphasis mine] Ciocchi then makes two central assumptions. First, the implicit belief of common believers that Ciocchi believes open theism fails to honor is the presumption of divine intervention in response to petitionary prayer (PDI). Furthermore, Ciocchi argues, prayers must be ‘appropriate’.[140] Thus PDI is the presumption of divine intervention in response to the petitions of appropriate prayer.[141] In Ciocchi’s view, a position’s religious adequacy requires accommodating PDI. Second, Ciocchi defines “petitioning God” as “mak[ing] a request of an agent who may say ‘no’ but who cannot be blocked from granting the petition if His answer is ‘yes’.”[142] William Hasker, whose response to Ciocchi will be noted shortly, terms this second assumption of Ciocchi’s the supplementary requirement, or SR, and formulates it as follows: “(SR) It is impossible for God to be prevented from granting a petition he wants to grant.”[143]

Given PDI and SR, then, Ciocchi’s basic argument follows rather simply: Many (most) ‘appropriate’ petitions depend for their fulfillment upon the free actions of persons other than the pray-er. And since libertarian free will is such a value to open theists, and since open theists allow for the possibility that God may act in view of granting a petition only to have his will frustrated by free agents, open theists cannot affirm PDI, in which case their view fails Ciocchi’s test for religious adequacy. Open theists should acknowledge that their views on prayer diverge dramatically from the beliefs and practices of ordinary believers and that open theism is in fact religiously inadequate.

 

§7 RESPONSES TO EXISTENTIAL OBJECTIONS

 

§7.1 Response to Bruce Ware

            Ware’s three criticisms of open theism’s effect upon one’s prayer life were: (1) It issues from our modern western consumerist’s mentality that fosters an unrealistically high view of self; (2) it cannot represent the kind of mutually reciprocal and interpersonal relationship open theists claim since our petitions offer nothing to God in the way of new ‘information’; and (3) not knowing how future contingents will turn out, God cannot now know how to best answer our petitions. He also offers comments on the Lord’s prayer and Moses’ appeal to God in Exodus 32.

It is difficult to know how to respond to Ware’s first charge. Undoubtedly western consumerism exerts its influence on us all. But has Ware actually argued his point or has he simply claimed that it is so? Establishing a causal link between consumerism’s emphasis upon the priority of the customer and open theism’s insistence upon the value of the individual would require much more than Ware offers. One could argue that open theism’s insistence upon individual responsibility and the value of a person are rooted in biblical concerns—Ezekiel’s emphasis upon the ‘individual’ (Ez. 18.13, 18, 20) and Jesus’ overwhelming declarations of God’s love for humanity (Jn. 3.16). One could also reply that much of non-openness Evangelicalism, including Ware’s articulation of the gospel, is the result of western consumerism’s influence as well. After all, Ware does not deny that believers enjoy a ‘personal’ relationship with God, and his emphasis upon the ‘individual’ can be as easily attributed to western consumerism as Ware insists is the case with open theism’s emphasis upon the individual. How does Ware distance the personal dimensions of his own faith from such consumerism while implicating open theism’s personal dimensions? Ware doesn’t say. And then lastly, Ware’s criticism could apply to his own theology in another sense. One could argue that Ware, unable to live with the truth that God’s will is sometimes not accomplished, has embraced a theology that feeds the consumer’s craving for personal security and hence offers as a ‘product’ a risk-free creation and the all-controlling God.

Regarding Ware’s second criticism, it seems to misconstrue what open theists believe to be at the heart of mutually reciprocal personal relations. Ware makes such relationships entirely about ‘information’ and assumes that two persons cannot transact personal loving relationality unless one is ‘educating’ the other by introducing information previously unknown to the other. But in fact open theists have agreed that petitioning God cannot be about ‘informing’ God.[144] Ware’s assumption about information’s relevancy to personal relationships is entirely unfounded and without analogy. Even human-human relations can be mutually reciprocal in a fully personal sense without one party having to ‘educate’ the other.

One line of thought that sheds light on this point is speech act theory.[145] The fundamental insight of speech act theory is that the paradigmatic function of language is to do things, not to say things. We all intend our speech to do something, to accomplish something. Likewise with prayer. To petition is to perform some ‘act’, an act that is not reducible to a transfer of information from the petitioner to another party. Information doubtless counts for something. We are, after all, communicating with language. But we perform a linguistic “act” in terms of speech act theory. Thus Ware’s objection that since we are not ‘educating’ God of our needs, our petitioning God cannot amount to the kind of personal act wherein we engage God and God in turn responds, is ill-conceived.

For open theists, the “act” of petitioning another creates its own reality. It transcends information per se. Open theists thus do not suppose God responds to our prayers because they believe they have brought to God some new bit of information about the world which they believe God did not already know. On the contrary, it is the “act” of engaging another through petition that creates a personal, social dynamic (or disposition) wherein an exchange of life (the mutual sharing of thoughts, feelings, and desires) occurs. Consequently, outcomes are defined in terms of this personal exchange. Take some specific good G. God may provide G independently of our requesting it or God may act to provide G in response to our undetermined prayers. I submit that G is not identical in both cases. God’s acting ‘in response to’ our undetermined request gives definition to G. Thus G achieved synergistically is more complex and so a more beautiful (more ‘good’) or more lovingly relational state of affairs. If the beauty of such loving relationality is at least part of what God is after in creating, then it is simply not available to God via unilateral action.

Lastly, Ware’s claim that if God were not to know future contingents he would not know how “best” to answer our petitions begs the question. Ware is doubtlessly assuming a notion of “best” that entails his own beliefs about the meticulous sort of providence he believes God exercises. “Best” for Ware just is his way of viewing God’s relationship to the world. But where there are real indeterminacy and risk in the world, “best” is to be understood in probabilistic terms. Does this mean God’s will is sometimes thwarted? Yes. Does this mean, as Basinger explains, that sometimes even God’s attempts to secure our petitions may fail to produce the desired outcomes? Yes. But it is no argument against this that it fails to satisfy a definition of “best” on some other construal of providence. That is rather to be expected.

Before moving on, let us consider the two biblical passages Ware introduces, the Lord’s prayer (Mat. 6.9-13) and Moses’ petition of God (Ex. 32.11-4). Ware argues from the Lord’s prayer that (a) God’s will predates our petitions and that this therefore precludes our “contributing to God” in the sense argued by open theists, and that (b) since God knows what we need “before” we ask, our prayers do not inform God and so cannot be the means of the sort of mutually influential relationship open theists believe prayer represents.[146]

Given what we have seen thus far, an open theist response to Ware here is not difficult to imagine. Open theists do not suggest that God’s mind and will are entirely undecided until we settle them through prayer. On the contrary, open theists assume God has desires for every occasion and that he pursues them regardless of human contribution. The question is whether or not the fulfillment of the aims God pursues are ever at risk because their fulfillment depends upon the free prayers of believers. Far from precluding such a view, Jesus’ admonition, open theists argue, expressly makes fulfillment of the will of God contingent upon our requesting it. It is not the determining of God’s will that open theists here suggest is our contribution to God. It is rather the accomplishing of his will. And open theists argue (Basinger excluded) that some purposes of God for us are of metaphysical necessity dependent upon our free cooperation.

There is then Ware’s suggestion that since God knows our needs before we petition God, prayer cannot be about informing God of our needs. But no open theist argues that we ‘inform’ or ‘educate’ God when we present our needs to him. The efficacy of petitionary prayer for God is not information driven, and to construe exhaustively definite foreknowledge from God’s knowing what we need before we pray is to misread the passage. All that is implied by Jesus is God’s perfect knowledge of our present needs. He knows our needs “before we ask,” not “before we need them.”[147]

Lastly, what of Ware’s comments regarding Moses’ prayer to God in Ex. 32? He objects to open theists’ use of this passage to argue a genuine response on God’s part to Moses’ appeal. Again, Ware grounds any possibility of response in Moses’ informing God of something God did not previously know. Ware cannot imagine any other basis upon which personal responses to requests can be made. But we every day respond to requests that introduce no new information to us simply because the request presents us with an opportunity to value others and realize states through cooperative agreement rather than unilateral action. Consequently we adjust a course of action in response to requests in order to pursue a future that yields more relational complexity and love, and so more beauty, by virtue of being achieved interdependently. We do so because we value the aesthetic satisfaction of relating and working synergistically. I shall say more of the value God places upon the beauty of jointly achieved aims in §7.2.

 

§7.2 Response to Stephen Roy

Roy presented four problems facing the open theist’s understanding of prayer, the first two of which are identical to Ware’s second and third criticisms which I have already addressed. Let us then consider Roy’s third and fourth objections, which are: (3) God’s commitment to respect our libertarian freedom means that with regard to prayers whose answer depends on the free exercise of wills other than God’s, God has limited himself to whether and how he will answer those prayers; and (4) open theists cannot affirm both God’s universal and impartial love (by which Roy believes God would not make his provision for some good dependent upon our petitioning him) and the efficacy of petitionary prayer (by which God’s actions in maximizing good in the world are sometimes dependent upon our prayers).

In response it should be obvious that open theists plead guilty to (3). Roy has simply accurately stated the open view position, not argued against it. Given the providential contours of open theism (genuine indeterminacy with its consequent epistemic openness, risk, and ambiguity), it is indeed the case that God has limited himself to whether and how he will answer some of our prayers. But for open theists this arrangement is just the metaphysical price-tag for the sort of loving, personal, and morally responsible world God wishes to achieve.

Roy’s fourth objection is more serious and deserves attention. As noted earlier by Basinger, placing divine love at the center of our understanding of God and his actions in the world leads to one of the basic tenets of open theism: “God always desires our highest good, both individually and corporately.”[148] Elsewhere Basinger restates this conviction as follows, “an omnibenevolent God is obligated to maximize the quality of life for those beings he chooses to create.”[149] Consequently, Basinger argues, “God would never refrain from intervening beneficially in one person’s life simply because someone else has failed to request that he do so.”[150] This leads to the problem Roy notes.[151]

For Basinger, then, the belief that an omnibenevolent God always seeks to maximize good and minimize evil (something on which all open theists appear to be in agreement) entails the notion that God would never refrain from intervening beneficially in one’s life simply because someone else failed to request that God do so. But is the latter entailed in the former?[152] One might respond to this as Keith Ward does:

 

It is not sensible to complain, that, if I fail to pull my neighbor out of a ditch when I could easily do so, God is responsible for leaving him there. It is no more sensible to complain that, if I fail to pray for my neighbor when I could easily do so, God is responsible for not doing what my prayer might have effected.[153]

 

But Ward is too quick. Suppose a second neighbor is aware of my first neighbor’s plight in the ditch and has the ability to help but refrains from doing so unless I ask him. Who would excuse this second neighbor for refraining from helping simply because I had not asked him to do so? What possible constraints could my requesting him to help place upon my second neighbor that would excuse him while implicating me? An articulation of a rationale for such constraints, freely entered into by my second neighbor, is what Basinger is after.

I have noted responses to this supposed impasse by both Sanders and Boyd. Boyd affirms that God as love entails God’s always doing all God can do—given the creational variables he sovereignly established—to maximize good. Limiting certain outcomes to the petitions of believers is part of the morally responsible “say-so” believers must possess and exercise if they are to grow into their eschatological ends. Sanders adds to this that if the good we suppose God pursues as a matter of character includes a personal relationship with us, then God is properly speaking incapable of unilaterally achieving every possible good. Basinger fails to take the metaphysical nature of the constraints seriously enough.

Basinger is unconvinced. He does “not believe that a perfectly good God could justifiably refrain from granting any believer’s essential needs, even if she has consciously decided not to request God’s help.”[154] But in his response, Michael Murray exposes this as problematic. Murray responds:

 

If Basinger means to adopt this as a general principal which follows from the conceptions of God’s obligations he endorses, then serious trouble looms. And the reason is simply that if (a) God exists, and (b) the principal is true, it would follow that (c) no believers would ever die from starvation, exposure, or, presumably, death on a cross. Since they do, we have an argument against not only efficacious petitionary prayer, but theism itself![155]

 

Basinger’s claim seems excessive. It makes it difficult to affirm with James that believers “have not because they ask not” or any number of other essential goods we know God is desirous to grant but for which we are told to petition God.[156] Basinger objects that none of the rationales offered thus far are the sort of goods that would justify a divine policy of making provision of essential needs sometimes dependent on our petitioning God for them.

I submit that Basinger’s essential concern expresses a sound conviction but that he has misconstrued the matter a bit. That is, God ought to be viewed as ‘maximally involved’ at all times, in all circumstances, seeking to bring about the most good possible given the variables that define each circumstance. Thus, it is never the case that God “refrains” from performing goods simply because he was not petitioned. Where I believe Basinger is mistaken is in limiting the “good” that an omnibenevolent creator would pursue to the good of “the individual” understood independently of other considerations. Along these lines I suggest that there is a “good” to be had in synergistically achieved aims that cannot be achieved by unilateral divine action, that such good is that for which the cosmos has been designed, and that our individual “goods” are implicated in the interdependence necessary to achieving this larger “good,” which is simply the consequent beauty of loving relationality, the relational (divine-human and human-human) synergy reflected in outcomes cooperatively achieved. As noted above, some good G achieved synergistically is essentially different than G achieved unilaterally. The contingent cooperation of freely offered petitions shapes the identity of outcomes and makes them more aesthetically pleasing or beautiful to God. This is what loving relationships produce.

Consider the accomplishing of any task a person may want to undertake and introduce personal relations into the context, so that the task is transcended by the relations, that is, the greater task becomes the enjoyment of relational intimacy. An example from my personal experience will suffice. Some years ago I moved with my wife and children into a new home, and my daughter’s room needed painting. My daughter (then 12 years old) loved art and wanted to paint the room, or at least be a part of painting the room. But I was pressed for time and preferred to do the job myself. I knew I could get the room done quicker, more efficiently, and more neatly if I did not have to accommodate my daughter. I knew involving her would mean greater risk of spillage and a less professionally looking job. But I also loved my daughter and valued our relationship more. Painting the room with her and not just for her or through her, allowing her to hold the brush in her hand and not determine its every movement to insure a neater job, would (a) accomplish something between us that could not be gotten were I to paint the room in any other way, and (b) give definition to the room that reflects this relational intimacy.

This analogy suggests a way of understanding how nurturing the divine-human relationship is the ultimate task at hand and that this relationship transcends the specific creational contexts in which those relationships reside. Basinger objects that a loving parent would never make her provision of a child’s essential needs (food, shelter, clothing) contingent upon the child’s petitioning for such needs. Considered purely in terms of this-worldly individual needs, Basinger may be right. But this begs the question. God’s purposes and agency in the world are best conceived cosmically and eschatologically, and no individual’s ‘good’ can be conceived of or realized independently of ‘the whole’. Since God always seeks on every occasion to maximize good (i.e., the relational beauty ‘of the whole’), synergy must be sought. This just is the good which open theists ought to insist God necessarily pursues. Basinger misses this point I believe. It is not as if God “refrains from intervening beneficially” when we fail to petition God. God is doing all God can do given the failure of prayer, so there is no “refraining” from doing what perfect love by definition does, viz., seek the highest possible good in every circumstance. Nor is “intervention” an appropriate description of God’s part of the divine-human venture we call prayer. That assumes that God is sometimes not fully engaged until we petition him. On the contrary, however, God doesn’t ‘intervene’ in this sense. God ‘supervenes’ as it were. He actively ‘inhabits’ every occasion and is thus always maximally involved, seeking to bring about the most beautiful state possible given what he has to work with.[157]

As noted earlier, Boyd’s and Sanders’ essential point is that our petitions create avenues, “space” (to use Fretheim’s word), wherein “all that God does” in that instance is able to achieve more, not less, good. But this means that on occasion “the most that God can do” fails to achieve what it might have had we prayed. But this is not to say God “refrained” from anything.

In conclusion then, Roy’s claim that open theism provides an inadequate basis upon which to engage meaningfully in petitionary prayer because open theists affirm a notion of divine love that is incompatible with God’s making the provision of a person’s ‘good’ depend upon the prayers of others proves to be false. We have noted that there are conceivable circumstances and conceivable goods that justify God’s making his involvement in securing these goods sometimes dependent upon his being petitioned to act.

 

§7.3 Response to David Ciocchi

            William Hasker has responded to Ciocchi’s argument[158] for the religious inadequacy of open theism based on PDI and SR.[159] It is clear that SR must be true if PDI is to be satisfied. “If there is any significant class of requests that are ‘appropriate’ in terms of PDI, but that God could be prevented from granting,” notes Hasker, “then the satisfaction of PDI cannot be guaranteed.”[160] Hasker has only to demonstrate that relatively few believers upon reflection would affirm anything like SR, and this he does by showing how equally problematic SR is for other views of providence (simple-foreknowledge, timeless knowledge, Molinism, and determinism). Ciocchi’s argument is equally problematic for understanding petitionary prayer within these views on the assumption of SR. PDI and SR are, in Hasker’s words, “excessively strong claims,”[161] not at all implicit in the practice of ordinary believers.

Moreover, Hasker notes biblical examples of cases in which God’s desired outcomes are both pursued by God and yet fail to obtain. Jesus prays regarding Jerusalem, “How often I have longed to gather your children together…but you were not willing.” (Mat. 23.37) Other presumably “appropriate” prayers go unanswered. What of the petitions for “peace on earth” in the Gloria or that “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” in the Lord’s prayer? Hasker concludes:

 

…while some of those who pray the Gloria and the Our Father may for various reasons be insufficiently pleasing to God, this can hardly be true of all. On the contrary, some of the most devout believers have also been most assiduous in the use of these prayers. And given the very extensive use of both the Gloria and the Lord’s Prayer, petitions of this sort probably constitute a significant fraction of al the prayers that are offered; they are by no means exceptional. Yet we must confess that peace of earth—especially the spiritual peace that is primarily intended—and the doing of God’s will are rather the exception than the general rule. The reason, of course, lies squarely in the wills of creatures such as ourselves, who in very many cases are far from desiring what God desires and from willing to do God’s will. Examples such as these constitute compelling evidence that PDI as stated [by Ciocchi] is overly strong….[162]

 

Without SR, Ciocchi’s argument fails. Open theists can agree with Ciocchi, of course, that religious adequacy requires a certain existential “fit” between belief and practice and that this practice ought to be the shared experience of a community and not of an isolated individual (as I earlier argued). Indeed, this is urged by open theists themselves. Whether or not the required shared experience must constitute the ‘majority’ of believers before it can be considered ‘religiously adequate’ for a community is doubtful. Open theists will gladly admit, though, that open theism cannot meet the requirements set out by PDI and SR. But this is hardly fatal to the religious adequacy of open theism for those who reject SR, as Hasker argues, and these may in fact constitute a great many, perhaps the majority, of ordinary believers.

 

§8 TOWARD AN OPEN THEISTIC THEOLOGY OF PRAYER

§8.1 Eight guiding theses

            We are now at a position to state some essential theses arising from our study which guide open theism’s understanding of prayer within the larger providential framework already noted in this paper.[163] I state these in terms of eight guiding theses:

(1) Prayer is simply that personal, interdependent, mutually influential communication necessary to the establishing and flourishing of loving relationships. This grounds all else open theists might say about prayer.

(2) God is always doing all God can do given his purposes and the contextual variables of every given circumstance to maximize good and minimize evil. That is, God always and everywhere ‘supervenes’ upon/through/in creation, bringing all the influence that God can bring to bear in each circumstance within the creational constraints he sovereignly established (and discussed in this thesis) in order to achieve the most aesthetically satisfying, lovingly relational state of affairs possible.

(3) The ‘good’ God seeks in creation is the beauty of freely determined loving synergy. The fundamental conviction here is that an outcome brought about unilaterally by God is less good or beautiful than the same outcome achieved as a result of the synergy created by our petitioning God. Outcomes shaped synergistically represent a greater good than outcomes unilaterally achieved. Consequently, the outcome achieved in each of these two manners is not essentially the same ‘good’ after all. They are essentially different. This provides us with a divine rationale for God’s making his meeting essential needs on occasion contingent upon our petitioning him. Why pray to an omnipotent, omniscient, all good God? Because the beauty and love for which we and others were created is achievable at least sometimes through an interdependence of both divine-human and human-human relations, and that interdependence is free and risky. This is not to say that when the greater good of cooperatively achieved outcomes fails on account of a lack of prayer that God as a matter of policy settles for the next best thing, viz., bringing about the same outcomes unilaterally and thus somewhat less beautifully. It is to say the good of cooperatively achieved outcomes is only possible if there is a certain integrity to the conditions for such relationality, and this in turn involves a real commitment to risk and precludes God’s being able to guarantee the same outcomes minus the cooperative component.

Given (2), God is always maximally involved in seeking to redeem every occasion in the cosmos and to maximize its potential for loving relationality. But given (3), the nature of loving relationality limits both God and humans to a fundamental interdependence that links the ‘good’ of individuals to the larger ‘good’ of creation. Petitionary prayer is fundamentally an affirmation of this interdependence.

(4) The efficacy of petitionary prayer is grounded in the interdependence of God’s purposes for us and the metaphysical constraints those purposes place on the God-world relationship. God is ‘functionally’ finite in some respects with regard to achieving desired outcomes, and the God-world relationship possesses an integrity that cannot be undermined by unilateral divine (or human) action without destroying the very synergy by which God’s aims are to be achieved.

(5) The urgency and motivation for petitionary prayer are grounded in the worth and beauty of God which God created us to reflect.[164] As argued, synergistically achieved outcomes are more beautiful than unilaterally determined ones and worth the constraints of interdependence.

(6) The religious adequacy of open theism is grounded in (a) the shared experience of a community that testifies to the existential viability of believing open theism’s defining claim and core convictions, and (b) the confirmation this experience receives from biblical and theological considerations. In a word, open theists constitute a growing community of people who experience life and prayer as fulfilling in the biblical sense of the word.

(7) Prayer involves offering ourselves in answer to our prayers by committing actively to engage the fallen and conflicted structures in which we live.[165]

(8) Lastly, what open theists may justifiably petition God for is limited (as it would be in any approach) by the constraints of their view of God, his purposes, and the nature of divine providence. In open theism God is believed incapable of unconditionally determining the morally responsible behavior of agents, including whatever choices persons make that establish and develop their character relative to the sort of loving relationality they were created for. Thus, a request for God to “Save Uncle Frank’s soul!” motivated by a belief that Uncle Frank’s choice for God is something God can entirely determine, is incompatible with the open view, as would be any request that God determine a person with respect to loving relationality. This does not rule out our asking God to act in ways that provide Uncle Frank with greater opportunity, understanding, motivation, and awareness of God. But would not a perfectly loving God already be doing “all he could do” in this sense without having to be asked? Our answer to this (chiefly in §7.2) was “yes,” but we argued that what God’s “all” is able to accomplish is at least sometimes constrained by the contributions (actions and prayers) of believers because the fundamental accomplishment God seeks is the beauty of outcomes synergistically or cooperatively achieved. This is the love for which we were created. This consideration would figure into an open view missiology as well. The fact that a loving God is always maximally involved in every situation seeking the most relationally (loving) beautiful state possible does not rule out the belief that contingent, human involvement makes greater beauty achievable.

 

§8.2 Trusting God in a risky and ambiguous creation

            What can “trust” mean in such a risky world? What may we confidently expect of God when we offer our petitions to him in faith? Can a God who ever faces possible futures, whose expectations sometimes do not come to pass, whose will is sometimes thwarted, be trusted? We have here considered the place and urgency of petitionary prayer within open theism and have argued for the adequacy of viewing prayer as God’s invitation to us to participate with him in accomplishing his purposes. For such prayer to have integrity to it, open theists argue, it must be the case that we genuinely influence the outcome of events in self-determined ways. Many times the future God intends to actualize through us fails to come about as desired because we fail to respond as we might. The point is that things might genuinely have been different from God’s point of view had people made different choices. But if the potential difference which prayer makes is as real for God as we believe it is for us, then God faces a future that is in some respects open and unresolved and has freely decided to allow us a part in resolving it. Open theists simply point out that it is not resolved until we resolve it and hence cannot be eternally foreknown in its resolved state. Our lives make a difference to God and the world, and this difference possesses integrity for both God and us.

I submit that trusting God within open theism amounts to five things: (1) Resting in the confidence of God’s character and intentions. We can know that God’s intentions for us are unchangeably loving and good if we understand God to be, in Ellis’ words, “Christ-like.”[166] (2) Resting in the confidence that God always does all God can do, given the limitations inherent in his own freely determined purposes, to maximize good and minimize evil in the world. (3) Relying upon the supervening presence and resources of God. If God is everywhere present and actively seeking to maximize loving beauty and goodness in the world, then we trust that he is working to bring good out of every evil. (4) Knowing that our prayers participate in shaping the world though we may not always perceive the difference we have made. And then (5) rejoicing in the confidence of knowing that in the end God will win and his rule will be realized throughout all creation. Open theists need not agree that ultimate victory is something God cannot guarantee even if they agree that much about the journey is open.

Together these five express a robust understanding of what it means to ‘trust’ within the open view and to engage in petitionary prayer with hope and confidence. Much hangs in the balance of our praying or not praying, and our prayers make a material difference.

 

§9 CONCLUSION

 

Prayer and divine foreknowledge have together constituted a problem that has kept Christian thinkers busy from at least the early 3^rd century CE. Origen reports on those who gave up on prayer for failure to reconcile it to predestination and foreknowledge. Origen’s On Prayer was in fact composed in response to controversies of his day over the efficacy of prayer on the assumption that God either predestines or foreknows all to come. He describes the objection to prayer as follows: “First, if God foresees everything that will happen, and these things must happen, prayer is useless. Second, if everything happens according to the will of God, and His decisions are firm, and nothing that He wills can be changed, prayer is useless.”[167] Origen concludes that divine determination of all things would render prayer meaningless and so the former is to be rejected. But he concluded that divine foreknowledge does not equally affect prayer and is to be received. Later, in the classical philosophical tradition, prayer was seen as a means of effecting change in us, not God, or the decreed means by which God brings about decreed ends.[168] This classical tradition has been rejected by a great many today, open theists included, who seek a more coherent exercise of a faith that better reflects Scripture’s portrayal of the difference that praying makes to God and the world.

I have set myself in this thesis (a) to examine the implications which open theism has for one’s understanding of petitionary prayer as a means by which God accomplishes his purposes in the world and (b) to ask whether or not this understanding of prayer is religiously adequate in the hope of judging the existential argument for open theism. We have examined the open theist’s defining belief and essential supporting convictions. We have suggested eight guiding theses that define petitionary prayer within open theism. And we have suggested what trusting God in a risky and ambiguous world entails. Is this vision religiously adequate? May open theists engage meaningfully in petitionary prayer given their core beliefs? I have attempted to show that open theists can enjoy at least as vibrant and passionate a prayer life as other believers, and perhaps a more religiously adequate one in terms of the intellectual fit between faith and practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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