The affirmation of libertarian free will immediately negates the divine determinism that is characteristic of classical theism. But it also (though this is less widely recognized) negates the doctrine of God as timelessly eternal. To assert that humans possess libertarian freedom implies that there is a fundamental, ontological difference between the future and the past. The past consists of events that have already occurred, and are now and forever more unable to be prevented. The future, in contrasts consists in large part of events or better, of the possibilities for events that have not occurred, and may turn out in one way or another. This means that there is a real, objective, difference between past and future, separated as they are by a unique, though ever-changing, present moment. But this claim – that there is a unique moment that is literally and objectively – now stands in deep tension with the view of God as timeless. To see this, it suffices to point out that, if there is a unique present moment, a timeless God cannot know what moment that is. For in order to know which moment is really now, really the present moment, God would have to change, since the truth about which moment is present is itself constantly changing. But change is precisely what a timeless God cannot do. A timeless God cannot know what is happening right now. I believe that almost all theists, once they come to recognize this, will see it as an unacceptable compromise of divine omniscience. A God who has granted true freedom to his creatures must be a temporal God!

This same line of reasoning leads readily to the conclusion that contingent future events – those that are really able to turn out one way or another – cannot be known with certainty even by God. For it is true of God as of human beings that we exist only in the present, not in the future, which does not itself exist. At present, the future is a realm of possibilities for what may or may not come to exist, and is knowable only as such. To be sure, an infinite Mind will know incomparably more about these possibilities, and the likelihood of their being realized, than is knowable to any human mind. And an almighty Being may choose to guarantee that certain events will take place, and in so doing render events certain that would otherwise be mere possibilities. But a Mind that is perfect in knowledge will know all and only that which is inherently knowable, and this means knowing many future events as possibilities and not as guaranteed actualities. That this is so is the most characteristic, and also most controversial, assertion of open theism; it implies that for God, as for us, the future is open, still containing multiple possibilities.

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The notion of divine repentance is pivotal for the differences between classical theism and open theism. If God repents, then God undergoes change. If so, then God is not absolutely unchangeable, and certainly is not timeless. Divine repentance is closely associated with expressions of divine sorrow and regret over a decision previously made, or at least over the consequences that have flowed from such a decision. But a God who can experience such sorrow and regret is emotionally affected by his creatures; he is by no means impassible. Furthermore, divine repentance is typically a response to actions and decisions made by human beings which were not in accord with God’s intentions. If this really occurs, then God is not all-controlling but rather has placed some of the control in human hands – control that, in this instance, has been exercised contrary to what God wished to have happen. And finally, divine repentance of this sort strongly suggests that a previous divine decision has had unforeseen consequences. But if this is true, it negates the view that God has certain and comprehensive knowledge of the entire future. It is entirely understandable, then, that the proponents of classical theism have found the biblical references to divine repentance to be problematic, and have mustered all their interpretive resources in order to dispose of them in some acceptable manner.

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This article was taken by permission from Process Studies, “The Problem of Evil in Process Theism and Classical Freewill Theism,” Vol. 29, Number 2, Fall-Winter, 2000: pp. 194-208.

No topic in the philosophy of religion seems to be so universally engaging as the problem of evil. This problem can be counted on to hold the attention of practically any audience, regardless of their degree of philosophical sophistication. During the past several decades there has probably been more writing on the problem of evil than on all of the theistic proofs put together, and the flood shows no sign of abating.

This problem is generally regarded as the most powerful weapon wielded by atheists in their attacks on theistic belief. But it also comes into play in the internecine controversies among theists, where different conceptions of God are judged acceptable or otherwise in no small part because of their ability (or lack thereof) to provide a satisfactory solution for the problem of evil. In particular, this is true of the debate between process theists and traditional or “classical” theists. It would be no exaggeration to say that many process theists regard the phenomena of evil as providing the decisive reason why traditional theism should be rejected and their view preferred in its place. Many traditional theists would agree that process theism enjoys a certain advantage at this point, while holding that other benefits of traditional theism are more than sufficient to outweigh the advantage of process theism with respect to the problem of evil.

I have come to see, however, that there is one version of traditional theism that is very much on a par with process theism in its treatment of the problem of evil. The version in question has been described by David Griffin as “classical free will theism”; its adherents usually refer to it as the “open view” of God, or simply as “free will theism.” ¹

In what follows I shall begin by briefly characterizing the two views in question; then I shall proceed to examine their respective implications for the problem of evil. For the process approach I shall be relying mainly on the writings of David Ray Griffin, probably the best exponent of the process view of this topic. It is by no means my intention to provide a complete theodicy; but I will be giving special attention to those aspects of the problem where the two types of theism might seem to show major differences.

I. Free Will Theism and Process Theism

We begin with classical free will theism, a view that is closer to the mainstream of the theological tradition. In common with the tradition, this view holds that God is both omnipotent and omniscient. Omnipotence may be defined as God’s power to do anything that is neither logically incoherent nor inconsistent with God’s moral perfection. A singular exercise of divine omnipotence is found in the divine creation of the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing; omnipotence also entails the ability to perform miracles, actions that lie beyond the natural potentialities of created beings. Omniscience, similarly, means that God knows everything that is capable of being known. In contrast with the majority of the tradition, free will theism in its most consistent form holds that contingent future events are inherently unknowable and thus do not fall within the scope of omniscience, any more than it falls within the scope of omnipotence to create a square circle. ² Chief among the reasons why some future events are inherently unknowable is that they will come about through the free actions of creatures, where freedom is understood in the libertarian sense such that the agent is fully able, under the existing circumstances, to perform some other action in place of the one that is actually done. To be sure, God retains the power to “overrule” creaturely actions, but for the most part he graciously refrains from doing so, preferring to grant to the creatures a genuine, though limited, power of self-determination.

Process theism understands divine omniscience in a way that is similar to that described above, but its conception of divine power and its exercise is very different. The mode of God’s activity is formally the same in each and every event that takes place. God provides the “initial aim” for each momentary “occasion of experience”; this initial aim represents, one might say, God’s “ideal will” for that particular occasion. But the occasion then exercises its inherent power of self-determination in selecting its “subjective aim”; in so doing, it may follow closely the initial aim provided by God but it also may deviate widely from that initial aim. It is particularly important to see that God has no ability to control which of these actually occurs. God’s role in the situation is strictly limited to the provision of the initial aim. This means that the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo must be abandoned; the metaphysical structure of reality is such that God is always, and necessarily, confronted with an “other” which he must persuade, shape, and “lure” in the direction which he sees as being best and as leading to the richest fulfillment of experience. Process theists generally do not describe God’s power as “omnipotence,” but they resist vigorously the suggestion that God as they conceive of him is weak or ineffectual. God, they say, does not have all the power that there is, but he has the most power that any being could possibly have, and to see this power as weakness is gravely to underestimate the ability of persuasive love to gain its ends, given sufficient time and patience.

With these thumbnail sketches in place, we are in a position to consider the implications of the two views for the problem of evil. That problem may be simply stated by asking, How can we reconcile the supposed existence of a loving God with the many and grievous evils that afflict the world God has created? On the face of it, it would seem that this problem is far less acute for process theism, simply because God’s control over the events of the world is so much less. God provides the initial aim for each occasion, and that aim, we are assured, is for the best that is attainable in the given situation. If however the subjective aim pursued by the occasion deviates from the initial aim, resulting in pain and suffering, this is not God’s fault, and God can do nothing about it except to continue the process of loving persuasion in the hope of a better future.

Classical free will theism, in contrast, attributes to God a far greater degree of control over worldly events. God created the world ex nihilo, with no prior constraints apart from those of logical consistency. Creation, to be sure, need not take the form of the instantaneous production of a universe such as we see today. But even if the creation involved a very long and gradual developmental process, God has the power to control such a process and to assure its resulting in the very sort of world he intended to produce. It appears, then, that God carries a much greater share of responsibility for the evils of the world than would be the case on the assumptions of process theism. Process theists, to be sure, welcome the emphasis on libertarian free will for creatures, and consider this a major advance over the theological determinism that is characteristic of such classical theologians as Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin. In spite of this, however, they maintain that God’s assumed ability to intervene supernaturally, and to exercise unilateral control over the course of events when necessary, leaves the free will theist with an intractable problem of evil.

We can see, then, why it has seemed plausible to process theists that their view is less troubled by the problem of evil than is any variety of classical theism, and why many classical theists have tended to agree with this assessment. Nevertheless, I shall maintain that, where the alternative view in question is classical free will theism, the perception of an advantage for process theism is largely an illusion. In order to see this, we must review in detail specific aspects of the problem of evil. ³

II. Moral Evil

Charles Hartshorne once wrote that the “only solution to the problem of evil ‘worth writing home about’. . . uses the idea of freedom, but generalizes it” (13). About the generalization (to natural as well as moral evil) we will be speaking shortly. But the reference to freedom points to an important area of commonality between process and free will theism. Both views agree that a vast amount of the world’s evil and suffering is traceable to the morally wrong actions of human beings. Both views hold that these actions are free in the libertarian sense, meaning that they are not predetermined by any prior circumstances. Both views agree, then, that the primary responsibility for these actions lies with their human perpetrators and not with God, who has in some way provided the circumstances in which the decisions are made but does not control the decisions themselves.

So far, then, there is agreement, but process theists are likely to think that their view still holds an advantage in dealing with moral evil. One possible line here is to point out that, on the assumptions of classical theism, God has deliberately chosen to endow his creatures with this kind of freedom; thus God, even though not directly responsible for the individual choices, bears a heavy responsibility for turning loose upon the world a freedom that has had such devastating consequences. For process theism, on the other hand, freedom is not the result of a divine choice; it is rather an essential component in the metaphysical structure of the world.

The argument in this form cannot succeed. Freedom in some form or other may be necessary according to process theism, but the complex and sophisticated variety of freedom involved in human agency is not; God could have refrained from “luring” the world in the direction that led to the development of such freedom. Or, freedom in this form having entered the world and having proved too costly, God could simply allow the world to revert to its earlier, less highly evolved state. So the existence of human beings possessing both free will and the capacity to use this to create great goods and great evils is indeed the result of a divine decision. Free will theists will agree with David Griffin, and with other process theists, that “God’s purpose . . . is to bring forth creatures with ever-greater capacities for realizing and influencing others in terms of the higher forms of positive value,” and that “this purpose necessarily means evoking into existence beings with ever-greater capacities for using their power in ways that are contrary to the will of God” (Cobb and Griffin 34). Which is to say: both in free will theism and in process theism it is God who is responsible for the existence of creatures who have the freedom and power to bring about great evils.

A more subtle form of this same argument is deployed by David Griffin when he points to a “serious objection” to the standard free will theodicy:

This objection takes the form of doubt that freedom is really such an inherently great thing that it is worth running the risk of having creatures such as Hitler. If it were possible to have creatures who could enjoy all the same values which we human beings enjoy, except that they would not really he free, should God not have brought into existence such creatures instead? In other words, if God could have created beings who were like us in every way, except that (a) they always did the best things, and (b) they thought they were only doing this freely, should God not have created those beings instead?

This argument seems convincing, given its premises. But process theology rejects its premises. (Cobb and Griffin 74) ⁴

Griffin goes on to point out that the correlation, noted previously, between a creature’s capacity “for realizing and influencing others in terms of the higher forms of positive value” and that same creature’s capacity “for using [its] power in ways that are contrary to the will of God” is on his view necessary rather than contingent, so that the process God could not have brought into existence beings with the positive capacities of human beings but lacking their potential destructiveness. A God endowed with classical omnipotence, however, would not have been limited by such a necessary correlation; such a God could — and, Griffin implies, should — have created rather the beings described in the quotation above, able to enjoy the positive values we now experience but endowed with a freedom which is illusory rather than real.

This argument abounds in problems. If it is acceptable to substitute the illusion of freedom for actual freedom, why not the illusion of knowledge for actual knowledge, and the illusion of love for actual love? Why, for that matter, shouldn’t God take on the role of a beneficent Cartesian demon, and create for each one of us an illusionary paradise within the recesses of our own minds? Descartes, it will be recalled, introduced the demon precisely because he was unable to suppose that God, who is “most good and the fountain of truth” should be capable of such deception. It seems to many of us (but not, apparently, to Griffin!) that Descartes was right in holding it impossible for God to engage in a policy of massive deception. ⁵

Perhaps, however, Griffin’s argument could be modified so as to dispense with the notion that created persons are to be deceived about the sort of freedom they enjoy Perhaps rather than being given the illusion that they enjoy libertarian freedom, created persons could be content with the possession of “compatibilist freedom,” freedom which consists in the ability to act upon one’s own inclinations, without being compelled by external forces. (After all, there are a good many people who even now persuade themselves that this is all the freedom we have, and all we really need.) So the argument would go as follows: The God of process theism, who is constrained by the inherent metaphysical structure of the world, could not create beings possessing the positive capacities of human beings but lacking in libertarian freedom. But God as conceived in classical theism, not being limited by such metaphysical necessities, could have done just that, and morally ought to have done so. So there is indeed a moral objection — a problem of evil — for classical free will theism that process theism is not subject to.

This version of the argument is more plausible than those canvassed previously, but it is still far from unproblematic. For one thing, free will theists would not endorse the view that all of the higher values enjoyed by human beings could be available to creatures lacking libertarian freedom. For example, all free will theists hold that libertarian freedom is essential for moral responsibility. Many would also assert that there could not be a genuinely personal relationship between God and human beings, if God were to exercise the sort of unilateral control over human actions postulated by Griffin’s argument. Thus, one of the crucial premises needed for the argument is not available.

It is also noteworthy that the process theist, if she espouses the argument just described, is in effect putting herself in the position of a disappointed Calvinist! That is to say: she thinks it would be better, all things considered, if God had been able to exercise complete, unilateral control over the world, exactly as postulated by Calvin and other theological determinists. In fact, however, God (the process God) is unable to do this, so she (and God!?) are obliged to settle for second best — for a universe containing the potential for all of these positive values, but also containing the peril and potential destructiveness of libertarian freedom. I suspect that very few process theists will upon reflection find themselves comfortable with such a stance.

In order to test this claim, I invite the reader to join me in a thought experiment. Imagine yourself then, as a prospective parent shortly before the birth of your first child. And suppose that someone has offered you the following choice: On the one hand, the child will be one that, without any effort on your part, will always and automatically do and be exactly what you want it to do and be, no more and no less. The child will have no feeling of being constrained or controlled; nevertheless, it will spontaneously carry out your wishes on any and every occasion. Or on the other hand, you can choose to have a child in the normal fashion, a child that is fulls’ capable of having a will of its own and of resisting your wishes for it, and even of acting against its own best interests. You will have to invest a great deal of effort in its education, with good hopes to be sure, but without any advance guarantee of success. And there is the risk, indeed the near-certainty that the child will inflict on you considerable pain and suffering, as you strive to help the child become all that he or she can be and ought to be. Which do you choose?

Such a choice is admittedly deeply subjective, and it may well be that some readers will choose the first alternative, to have a child that is always and automatically in compliance with their wishes for it. It is my hope, however, that many readers will agree with me in saying that it is far better to accept the challenge of parenting a child with a will of its own, even at the price of pain and possible heartbreak, than to opt for an arrangement in which the child’s choices will all really be my choices made for it, its life a pale reflection of mine lived through the child. I will hazard the conjecture, furthermore, that almost all process theists will End themselves in this latter group: if their preferences were otherwise, they would most likely have been Calvinists all along.

I conclude, then, that none of the arguments we have considered concerning moral evil affords process theism any advantage over free will theism. In both versions of theism it is God who is responsible for the existence of creatures who have the freedom and power to bring about great evils, and both versions of theism must hold that this choice of God’s is worth the risk it entails.

III. Natural Evil

Critics of theism often take the view that natural evil presents an even more intractable problem for theism’s defenders than does moral evil. David Griffin agrees with this: he asserts that classical free will theism “is even less able to explain natural evil, in the sense of evil produced by nonhuman nature than to explain humanly caused evil. The free will defense, he goes on to say, “provides no help with the problem of animal suffering, at least insofar as this suffering has not been due to human agency. [Free will theists] have not, therefore, given any explanation for the vast majority of the suffering that has occurred during the history of our planet” (“Process” 16-17).

What is the right way to view animal suffering? ⁶ My own view is that the world of nature, human depredations aside, is indeed the good creation of God, and that animal suffering, an inescapable part of a world so constituted, does not negate the world’s goodness overall. Griffin evidently disagrees with this, but what is the precise nature of his complaint? One possible view is that the world of nature as we know it is a bad thing, so bad that its existence is worse than its non-existence, and a good person would never have brought it into being. This, however, is profoundly inconsistent with the ecological consciousness, involving a celebration of the world of nature, that Griffin, along with John B. Cobb Jr., and many other process thinkers, thinks we should cultivate. It is also inconsistent with the process idea that God has “elicited” the existence of this very world by his guidance of the evolutionary process.

Griffin’s view, then, must be a different one. The most plausible alternative is that the world of nature, though not bad overall, is nevertheless distinctly inferior to alternative worlds we can envisage which a God endowed with classical omnipotence would have brought into existence in preference to the present one. Such a perspective is often thought to be plausible, but I believe it faces at least two serious objections, one derived specifically from process theism and the other quite general in its application. From the standpoint of Griffin’s process theism, it is hard to see why the world of nature should not have come out very much as God wanted it to be. In the chaos preceding the present cosmic epoch, according to Griffin, “the divine influence, in seeking to implant a set of contingent principles in the universe, would have no competition from any other contingent principles,” and would thus be able to “produce quasi-coercive effects” (“Process” 30). And what this means is that the fundamental laws of nature, established in the first moments of this cosmic epoch, will be exactly as God desires them to be. ⁷ Subsequent to this, evolution takes over, but an evolution that is not explainable along exclusively Darwinian lines. (About that, at least, Griffin and I are very much in agreement!) The “saltations,” or major advances in the evolutionary process, are brought about by “a specific form of divine creative-providential activity” (“Process” 29). Since it is these evolutionary “jumps” that determine the new types of creatures that appear, and these jumps are the direct result of special divine activity, it seems likely that the new forms are very much as God wanted them to be. And it is, of course, these new forms that determine the future lines of evolutionary development and thus, ultimately, the overall shape of the natural world God is luring into existence. It is conceivable, to be sure, that in some instances the creaturely response to the divine initiative was not what God desired, and things went awry as a result. It seems implausible, however, that the major sources of natural evil can be accounted for in this way. Consider, for instance, the origin of predators: Perhaps God was trying to produce a super-antelope, and a saber-toothed tiger emerged instead! But how plausible is this? I conclude that, on process assumptions, it is quite unlikely that the world of nature is radically different than God intended it to be. ⁸

The other objection to the theory in question (that the world of nature, though not bad overall, is less good than other worlds we can see to be possible) is that we just do not know anything like enough about possible alternative systems of nature to have any reliable views about what is and is not possible and/or desirable. Science-fictional fantasies and idyllic paintings of the “peaceable kingdom” just aren’t enough to go on here. In fact, our best present knowledge strongly suggests that even minor modifications in the fundamental laws of nature would result in a universe in which human life, and any form of carbon-based life, simply could not exist. ⁹

While Griffin’s assault on free will theism seems unsuccessful, Hartshorne’s suggestion about generalizing the free will defense to include natural evil may have considerable merit, and its sphere of application need not be limited to process theism. (the physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne has made a similar suggestion, quite apart from any commitment to process thought.) There is good evidence from physics that natural processes are inherently indeterministic, and our experience of living creatures certainly suggests to us that they exercise a genuine spontaneity rather than being deterministically controlled. If we add to this (as free will theists should) that God generally refrains from exerting direct control over such indeterministic natural processes, we arrive at the view that non-human nature does operate to a significant degree without being immediately controlled, though to be sure it does not exhibit moral agency as such. Thus we need not hold (for example) that God directly decreed the existence of the AIDS virus; no doubt viruses, like higher-level organisms, evolve so as to occupy an available ecological niche. The full development of these thoughts, however, must await another occasion.

With respect to all these considerations, process theism and free will theism seem to be very much on all fours with each other. (And both of them, let it be said, enjoy major advantages compared with other views such as Calvinism and Molinism.) If we are to find any distinct advantage for process theism, we must look farther.

IV. Divine Intervention

The most promising topic in this regard is undoubtedly divine intervention. According to process theism divine intervention, in the sense of God’s bringing about events that lie beyond the inherent powers of natural agents, is an impossibility. God’s role in the world is strictly limited to the provision of the “initial aim” for each occasion of experience, and in doing this God always selects the best possible aim for the occasion. Quite literally, God is doing all he can; the rest is up to us and to our fellow-creatures. That this is so is not, perhaps, in all respects a ground for rejoicing. It has often been pointed out, for example, that on this view any future triumph of God and of goodness is at best a conjectural possibility, resting on the hope that at some time in the future the overall response to God’s lure may be a great deal more favorable than has been the case up to the present. But it does mean that, with no possibility for God to do more, there is also no remaining question as to why he does not do more; on this topic, then, there is no problem of evil for process theism. ¹⁰

With classical free will theism, things are much different. God’s modality of acting in the world is not limited as it is for process theism. God can do anything that is logically coherent and consistent with his own moral perfection — and to our eyes, at least, there is a great deal that could use doing. So, why does God not intervene, or do so more frequently, to prevent great evils? Let us call this the problem of divine non-intervention.

On this point, then, a distinct difference emerges between process and free will theism. And it is clear that there is an initial advantage for process theism, in that there is a question that free will theism needs to answer whereas for process theism there is no such question. Whether this initial advantage turns into a permanent advantage will depend on whether an effective answer is forthcoming. In order to focus the discussion I shall proceed by stating and defending four propositions which together constitute an answer to the question on behalf of free will theism.

1. The problem of divine non-intervention is a serious difficulty for free will theism only if it is clear that there are situations in which God ought to intervene but fails to do so. This should be evident, but it needs saving because we may tend to assume the opposite. The mere fact that there are cases in which we might wish for divine intervention but none is forthcoming is not evidence that something is amiss in the government of the world, any more than the fact that we are shocked by some instances of predation shows that there is something wrong with the constitution of the natural world. What is needed here is a sober argument, one which is compelling after mature reflection, showing that a powerful and morally good being would of necessity intervene.
2. Frequent or routine divine intervention would negate many of the purposes for which the world was created in the first place. Clearly this is a very large topic, and a full discussion would go far beyond the scope of the present essay, But a little reflection will show the plausibility of this contention. If part of the purpose of creation was to bring about a rich, intricate, closely-interrelated natural order, then it would be a sign of failure if that order required frequent interference in order to function properly (Consider in this regard Newton’s conjecture that God must intervene frequently in order to maintain the stability of the planetary system.) Furthermore, some of the natural occurrences we might think most in need of restraint are demonstrably essential to the functioning of the system as a whole. There could be nothing like the ecosystem as we know it without extensive predation. Monsoons and hurricanes cause destruction, but also deposit much-needed rainfall in what would otherwise he regions of perpetual drought. Natural selection, an essential part of the process by which organisms evolve into richer and more complex forms, inevitably involves a great deal of suffering, death, and general failure of organisms to flourish.It should not be forgotten that we are directing this answer, in the first instance, to the process theist. It would be intelligible that someone might think that the world of nature as we know it is bad overall — that a good God would not have created such a world, and would certainly not have used an evolutionary process involving natural selection. Such a challenge, if made, would require to be answered. But the challenge cannot sensibly be made by a process theist who believes that God has in fact lured into existence the present system of nature, using an evolutionary process in order to do so. One might, to be sure, suppose otherwise — could the process theist not maintain that, while an evolutionary process was the only option available for the process God, a God endowed with classical omnipotence would rather have chosen to short-circuit the process by instantaneously bringing about the universe in its present state? This, however, would be in effect to maintain that the world of nature is a bad thing — one whose existence at present must perhaps be tolerated as instrumental to the existence of moral agents, but whose past existence during the vast epochs of evolutionary development (both cosmic and biological) is on balance a bad thing which had better have been eliminated. But this, let me say once more, is profoundly at odds with the advocacy of an ecological consciousness, and of love and reverence for nature, which forms an integral part of the process perspective.

   The point is if anything even more clear where moral evil is concerned. If it is of great inherent value for persons to exercise free moral choice (as the free will defense postulates), then that value — and free will itself — would be negated if God were to interfere each time a wrong action is about to be performed. Furthermore, were God routinely to intervene to prevent evil from being done, there would be far less incentive to form effective human communities, a large part of whose function is to encourage good behavior and to restrain evil. Much more could be said, but it really should not be necessary to belabor the point further.

   It is, however, important to stress what has not been said here. It is not claimed that the observations in this section constitute by themselves a complete answer to the problem of divine non-intervention. Much less is it claimed that, in view of these considerations, no divine intervention in the world’s affairs is possible. But it does seem that frequent and routine intervention — the sort that would be needed to substantially reduce the world’s evil overall — would not be consistent with what we reasonably assume to be God’s creative purposes.

3. In order for the problem of divine non-intervention to be an effective objection, we must be able to identify specific kinds of cases in which God morally ought to intervene but does not. That this is so may not be immediately evident, but a little reflection shows it to be correct. We have a situation in which a great many serious evils are constantly occurring, and God is believed to have it in his power to prevent any or all of them. It is clear, however, that for God to do this on a routine basis would undermine God’s purposes in creation. In fact, it seems that the amount of special intervention that could occur consistent with those purposes maybe rather small; almost certainly far less than would be needed to materially affect the overall balance of good and evil in the world. Now, it still might be the case that we can identify certain specific evils, or certain classes of evils, such that a wise and good God could not permit those particular evils to occur. But if not, we must remember that we are (by hypothesis) dealing with a God of infinite wisdom, and we must be prepared to defer to that wisdom concerning the suitable occasions for special intervention. So the principle stated above holds, and those who would employ the problem of divine non-intervention as an argument against traditional theism need to be looking for a strongly supported criterion by which to discern the situations in which intervention would be mandatory.
4. The needed criterion cannot be provided by supposing that God must prevent all “gratuitous” evils. At this point our argument departs from the conventional wisdom on this topic. It is often supposed that we can define a category of evils that are “gratuitous” in the sense that God could prevent them without incurring any equal or greater evils and without losing any goods that would be sufficient to outweigh them. It then seems reasonable to assume that a good God would of necessity prevent all such gratuitous evils, while allowing those evils that could not be prevented without either incurring some equal or greater evil, or losing some commensurate good. Given these assumptions, opponents of theism will point to instances of evil that give every appearance of being gratuitous in the sense specified, while defenders must maintain that all of the evils that actually exist are non-gratuitous. The initial advantage in this argument pretty clearly lies with the critics; defenders of theism are left with a tough defensive battle. ¹¹

In contrast with these widely held views, I believe the attempt to construct an atheological argument from evil on the basis of gratuitous evil is doomed to failure: A strong argument can be made that a theist should not accept the claim that a good God would necessarily prevent all gratuitous evil in the sense defined. Unfortunately, the full argument for this conclusion is complex and cannot be reproduced here in its entirety, so for the present the following sketch must suffice. ¹² We have already seen that, if God were to prevent all evils whatsoever, almost all of our own incentive and motivation to deal constructively with situations conducive to such evils would disappear. But what would be the consequence if, instead, God were known to prevent all gratuitous evils — all those evils whose occurrence would not lead to any greater good? If we knew that this was God’s policy, would not our own motivation to prevent or alleviate the world’s evils be greatly reduced? For whatever the evil in question, we could be certain that, if the evil in fact occurs, it has been allowed to occur by God only because its occurrence will lead to some greater good, or to the prevention of some other equal or greater evil. By preventing some evil that would otherwise have occurred, we are most certainly not increasing the total goodness of the world, and may very well be causing the world overall to be worse than it otherwise would be! Thus, the claim that God does and must prevent all genuinely gratuitous evils runs counter to God’s intention to make of us responsible moral individuals; such a claim should not, then, be endorsed by any Christian believer. ¹³

It has not been shown that the requirement stated in (3) above could be met only by supposing that God must prevent all gratuitous evils. To my knowledge, however, this is the only plausible candidate for such a criterion that has been put forward, so that its failure leaves a very large hole in the argument based on the problem of divine non-intervention. And since that problem marked the only remaining significant difference between process theism and free will theism with respect to the problem of evil, I conclude that the two positions stand roughly at parity in their ability to deal with that problem.

Almost certainly, Griffin would not agree. Even if the points just made are successful on their own terms, he would contend that the essentially defensive nature of the strategy employed leaves the free will theist with a position that is psychologically unsatisfying and thus at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis process theism. He writes:

But surely “psychological appeal” is what theodicy is all about! The question is: Can the ways of God he justified to human beings? And that is a psychological question. If theodicy does not have psychological appeal, it has failed In any case, theodicy is not primarily a game played by philosophers of religion, in which one wins simply by showing that no rigorous disproof of one’s idea of God has been produced. The question is whether that idea of God lends itself to an explanation of the world, including its evils, that is psychologically convincing to thoughtful men and women. (Evil79)

Perhaps this is correct. If so, then may I respectfully suggest that we should consider which view of God, and God’s relationship with the world, has in fact proved most convincing to the vast majority of Christian believers? It is unquestionably true that there are some who find the explanation of evil given by process theism more satisfying than those that are given by more traditional versions of theism, including free will theism. But it is also true that a very large majority of Christians are unconvinced and unsatisfied by the process doctrine of God. The advantage in terms of pastoral and evangelistic effectiveness does not lie on the side of process theism.

To be sure, such considerations by no means settle the issue in favor of free will theism. One may hold (and Griffin clearly does hold) that the widespread preference for a more traditional concept of God is merely a product of the religious conditioning to which many in our culture have been subjected, ¹⁴ and one may hope that a future generation of believers will be more enlightened in their conceptions of the divine. What one cannot do, however, is invoke psychological appeal as a criterion for validating a theological position, and then disregard the actual track record of practical success for the positions being compared. ¹⁵

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In his reply William Hasker urges that while the theological tradition is worthy of respect, the kind of deference to tradition insisted on by Freddoso is excessive and unreasonable; in the past, such deference might well have prevented theological developments now recognized as beneficial and important. It may be desirable to characterize divine transcendence in a “deep” metaphysical way, but the lack of such a characterization by no means leaves the interpreter of Scripture at the mercy of subjective prejudice. Finally, he argues for the superiority of the reading of the parable of the good Samaritan offered by the open view of God in comparison.

It is a pleasure to continue a discussion with my friend Fred Freddoso that has been going on for a number of years, and from which I have profited greatly.^[1] Fred has rightly discerned ^[2] the general nature and purpose of The Openness of God–and it is, of course, unbelievably gracious of him not to take us to task for the many faults he enumerates! Furthermore, he indicates quite accurately the nature of the issues which he between us. In reading over his critique, I am reminded of the subtitle of the book: “a biblical challenge to the traditional understanding of God.” To be sure, it would be an oversimplification to regard our differences as simply a matter of “Scripture versus tradition.” Yet that element does enter into our disagreements, as we shall see.

Tradition

I’ll begin my response by underscoring what I wrote about Augustine in my article. Reading the Confessions and other works by him was for me a major spiritual as well as intellectual experience, and It brought about in me a love for Augustine that persists to this day. I can’t testify to a similar personal and spiritual impact from the writings of Thomas Aquinas, but I have nothing but respect and admiration for his enormous achievements in both philosophy and theology, as well as for his deep piety.

The difference between our approaches to these two men lies principally in the fact that I am, and Freddoso is not, willing to contemplate the possibility that, despite their sanctity and intellectual eminence, either or both of them may have been mistaken about some fairly important matters. I really have no choice but to think this possible, in view of my unavoidable rejection of Augustine’s doctrine of predestination (a doctrine, incidentally, that Freddoso also rejects, though apparently less vehemently than I do). I also reject Augustine’s contention that we humans, in dealing with tragic situations in life, ought to abstain from feeling grief over the suffering and death of persons close to us — an inference he draws from the doctrine of divine “impassibility.” (Fortunately, Augustine’s rich emotional nature prevented him from fully carrying out his own injunctions in this matter.) ^[3] And I emphatically disagree with the doctrine of both Anselm and Aquinas that God’s compassion consists in the fact that “God acts as we would expect a compassionate person to act-but the feeling of compassion forms no part of the divine life and experience.”^[4]

I must confess I don’t see why it is so shocking to suggest that the writings of these two men are affected by “philosophical elements contrary to the Christian Faith.” ^[5] Anyone who engages with philosophy at all is bound to come into contact with ideas originating from pagan thinkers. (Even if one decided, unwisely, to read only Christian philosophers, one would still be affected by the pagans at second, or third, or fourth hand.) Augustine was under no illusion that Plotinus was a Christian, nor did Thomas suffer from such an illusion concerning Aristotle. What this meant was, that both of these men needed to make a conscious effort to correct those elements in the philosophers’ teachings that were contrary to the faith–and the eminence of Augustine and Aquinas as Christian thinkers testifies to their considerable success in this endeavor. But to insist that no “philosophical elements contrary to faith” remained, is to insist that they were 100% successful in every case in removing all “alien” elements and in transforming the pagan systems of thought into something that is Christian without remainder. And that is a great deal to ask, even of such wise and holy men as Augustine and Thomas.

Permit me the luxury of a historical conjecture: If Thomas had been as deferential towards the past in his own day as Freddoso thinks we now ought to be, he would never have been able to carry through his major achievement, that of welding together Aristotelian philosophy and Christian thought into a unified system. This is no idle supposition. The new-fangled Aristotelianism of the thirteenth century was in conflict at important points with the tradition of Platonized Christian theology stemming from Anselm John of Damascus, and the Greek Fathers-and from Augustine. ^[6] In 1277, just two years after Thomas’s death, the bishop of Paris condemned a long list of “Aristotelian” propositions, including some endorsed by Aquinas. Even after Thomas had been canonized, the dominant Augustinian tradition continued to resist and to reject many of his most important insights. The preeminence we now attribute to Aquinas is more a product of retrospective appreciation than it is an accurate reflection of the actual situation at the time. ^[7] What a good thing, then, that Aquinas refused to be intimidated by those who reproached him for “setting aside some of the principal metaphysical claims” of the “brilliant and holy men” who were his predecessors!

Divine Transcendence

One of the things Freddoso finds lacking in the book (and indeed, in analytic philosophy of religion generally) is “a philosophically rigorous account of God’s transcendence.” It is important to see just what Freddoso is complaining about here. He is not denying that contemporary analytic philosophers have devoted energy and attention to producing careful, detailed, and sophisticated analyses of the various divine attributes, the characteristics which distinguish the divine being from all actual and possible creatures. In fact, an enormous amount of work has been done along these lines (some of it by Freddoso himself), and this work is reflected in The Openness of God to the extent that it contributes to the book’s purpose ^[8]

What Freddoso finds lacking is rather a “forceful metaphysical account” of God’s transcendence, one that would be comparable to Aquinas’s description of God as pure actuality (derived from the Aristotelian tradition) and as unparticipated being (derived from the Platonic tradition). Such notions as these characterize the ontological divide between creator and creatures in a “deep” metaphysical way, and they provide a principled basis for deciding which scriptural descriptions of God should be taken as literal and which as metaphorical. Lacking any such deep metaphysical account of transcendence, we proponents of divine openness are very much at the mercy of our own (highly fallible) metaphysical predispositions (or, to put it more plainly, our prejudices). “Why, for instance, do they cling to the idea that God is immaterial and thereby relegate a whole host of Scriptural descriptions of God to the realm of the metaphorical, given that immateriality is just another one of those ‘Hellenistic’ divine attributes that has little appeal for the modem mind.”

I must admit that I do not, at present, have any such deep metaphysical account of divine transcendence to put forward. And on the other hand, I am not of a mind to dismiss such a project as chimerical. At this point Freddoso’s reminder that analytic metaphysics is of fairly recent appearance on the philosophical scene is very much in point. So I am willing to accept his suggestion that the formulation of such an account deserves a place on the agenda of analytical philosophers of religion. ^[9]

But given that we are, for the time being, lacking such an account, does this leave us at the mercy of arbitrary prejudice? I think not. Somewhere, I have heard, it is written that “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth”; God is also referred to as “the King of ages, immortal, invisible.” ^[10] Even in the Old Testament, most of the biblical descriptions of God as possessing bodily parts seem to have been consciously metaphorical. There is, in fact, a fairly clear and consistent biblical tradition supporting the immateriality of God–something that emphatically cannot be said of the metaphysical attributes championed by Freddoso. There is not even a hint in Scripture of anything like the scholastic doctrine of divine simplicity, and the same is true of divine timelessness, in spite of misguided attempts to read this doctrine into such texts as Exodus 3:14 and John 8:58. ^[11] And the biblical affirmations of divine changelessness do not by any means support the metaphysical doctrine of immutability espoused by classical theologians; rather, they attest to the reliability of God, the fact that he, unlike changeable mortals, can be relied on to remain true to his intentions and constant in his character and capabilities.

I don’t mean to suggest by this that the search for a penetrating philosophical understanding of the various divine attributes is pointless; far from it. Nor do I mean to imply that all is clear sailing for those who seek in the Bible for an account of the nature and attributes of God. There is much difficult and demanding work to be done here, and on many points legitimate differences of opinion may remain. (As one says, the theory is underdetermined by the data.) My point is simply this: lacking such a deep metaphysical characterization of divine transcendence as is given by Aquinas, one is not left at the mercy of sheer prejudice; there remains the option-rather, the indispensable necessity-of interpreting Scripture by Scripture. And if we find, as I think we do find, that the formulas of the classical theologians force us to relegate too much of the scriptural witness to the realm of metaphor, then we need to look for better formulas-or if need be, to five for a time without formulas.

The Waiting Father

Finally, let us turn once again to the parable of the Prodigal Son — or as some have called it, the Waiting Father. As Freddoso correctly observes, “Hasker invites us to conclude that if the traditional conception of God is correct, then the parable of the Prodigal Son is at least in part misleading, since it portrays the father as having certain traits which are of central importance to the story and yet which a divine being could not possibly have.” As Freddoso views the matter, the key question here is whether, if God were to become human, he would be like the father of the parable. He observes that, if we knew of God only what has been said by philosophers ignorant of the Christian revelation, we would find it incredible that God in human form would be like the father. But as Christians “we have a pretty good idea of what our transcendent God would be like as a human being – namely, exactly like Jesus Christ.” And as a result, “We Christians hardly need to invent an ‘open’ conception of the divine nature in order to marvel at the ‘folly’ of a risk-taking, passible God; all we need to do is to contemplate Christ crucified.”

This strikes me as peculiar reasoning. In the first place, the issue with regard to the parable is not what God would be like if he were to become human, but what God is in fact like quite apart from any consideration of his becoming human. Jesus told the story about the Father, not about himself, and he told it to hearers lacking the faintest notion of the doctrine of the Incarnation.

But suppose we waive this point, and view the parable as Freddoso suggests. What exactly does he think we should learn from it? Apparently, we are to find in Christ crucified “the ‘folly’ of a risk-taking, passible God.” So, we learn from Christ that God-is indeed capable of suffering, and that God is a risk-taker? But that is exactly what the open view of God affirms; it can’t possibly be what Freddoso has in mind. Perhaps, then, the following sentence will give us a better clue: “According to the traditional Christian understanding of God, it is precisely in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ that the impassible, immutable, eternal and ineffably transcendent God becomes passible, mutable, and time-bound.” These words seem to suggest that God, who prior to the Incarnation was impassible, immutable, and eternal, underwent a change after the conception and birth of Jesus, so that now, if not before, the suffering and vulnerability of the father in the parable come to characterize the divine nature. But that can’t be right either; immutability, unchangeableness, is precisely one of the attributes Freddoso is most concerned to uphold. But in that case, what shall we understand him to be saying?

What is intended, of course, is that in Jesus we see God suffering and taking risks because Jesus is God; the human mind and body of Jesus constitute the human nature of the eternal divine Logos, the second Person of the holy Trinity. So far there is agreement between Freddoso and the friends of divine openness. But here is the question: What does this tell us about the divine nature itself? Freddoso’s answer to this has to be: virtually nothing. The divine nature – the nature of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-is and remains impassible and immutable. The humanity of Jesus is the human nature of the eternal Son. But Jesus’ sufferings concern only his human nature; the impassibility of the eternal Son means precisely that the sufferings of Jesus form no part of the divine life. In the end, the most Freddoso can say about the Waiting Father is what Anselm and Aquinas said about the divine compassion: God acts as such a father would act, in that he remains ready to forgive and restore the errant sinner, but the anguish, the hopefulness, and the emotional risk experienced by such a father play no part in the life of God.

But if the meaning Freddoso intends for his words is in the end unsatisfying, the words themselves suggest something much better. Indeed we have no need to “invent an ‘open’ conception of the divine nature.” But we may need to rediscover such a conception, and if so we can do no better than heed Freddoso’s advice and contemplate Christ crucified, holding fast to the deep conviction that in Christ’s sufferings we are coming to know the very mind and heart of the everlasting God.

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1. Introduction

Emulating Bill Hasker, I will begin with a few autobiographical remarks. Numbered among the half-dozen or so writers whom I have been most influenced by spiritually as well as intellectually are St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas. Having pondered at length the philosophical doctrines of God fashioned by these two brilliant and holy men, I find it difficult to entertain the idea that we moderns will be better positioned philosophically to make progress in our understanding of the divine nature once we set aside their principal metaphysical claims. Yet the authors of The Openness of God ^[1] urge me not only to entertain this idea but to embrace it wholeheartedly. Again, having tasted of the spiritual riches contained in the extensive Biblical commentaries of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, I find it difficult to believe that we moderns will be better positioned theologically to make progress in our understanding of the Scriptural portrayal of God once we recognize that these commentaries and others like them are tainted with philosophical elements contrary to the Christian Faith. Yet this is what the authors of The Openness of God ask me to believe.

What’s more, even though Hasker and the others impugn many of the attributes that enter into the traditional conception of God–to wit, simplicity, immutability, impassibility, eternality, total sovereignty, comprehensive knowledge of the future, particular providence ^[2] –the book does not contain (and, as far as I can tell, does not pretend to contain) any new arguments against these attributes. Instead, drawing from a wide array of extant sources, including their own previous work, the authors try to undermine the traditional conception of God by alluding to, and sometimes giving brief renditions of, a number of familiar objections to the attributes in question. Since I have never been convinced by these objections taken one by one, I am pretty much unmoved by their all being piled on top of one another within a single volume.

So despite the laudable intention of the authors to help us improve our understanding of God, I must confess to certain misgivings about their project. Still, I have greatly benefitted from the exercise of trying to turn my visceral reaction to this provocative book into an articulate response to the challenge it lays down. My hope is that others, the authors among them, might derive some corresponding benefit from the results of that exercise.

2. The book as a whole: style and intended audience

Though I will concentrate mainly on Hasker’s own chapter, entitled “A Philosophical Perspective,” I want to begin with a comment about the style and intended audience of the book as a whole, since the book’s genre renders certain types of criticisms inappropriate.

As I understand it, The Openness of God is not meant to be a scholarly treatise on the concept of God; nor is it aimed exclusively or even primarily at an academic audience. Instead, it reads more like a thoughtful exhortation–a meditative manifesto, if you will–that briefly spells out the main contours of the ‘open’ conception of God and provides an outline of the sort of historical, philosophical, and theological considerations that can be mustered in its defense. The book’s principal aim, it appears, is to win the initial sympathy of educated Christians and to lure the scholars among us into adopting as our own the research program it recommends.

If this assessment is correct, it seems unbecoming to take the authors to task for their lack of thoroughness. So, for instance, critics should not fuss about the fact that the chapter entitled “Historical Considerations” dispatches with Calvin in a little over two pages, Luther in a little over one page, and Thomas Aquinas in a little under one page. Nor should they linger over the fact that the authors have not given a suitably exhaustive reply to the problem of prophecy, or over the fact that Hasker has still not made clear exactly why the ‘open’ God, who is after all very knowledgeable about human behavior as well as very powerful, fares better than the “self-contained God of the classical tradition” (pp. 126-127) when it comes to reconciling moral atrocities with divine providence. ^[3] Again, it would be out of place to fret over the rhetorical excesses the authors indulge in.

How, then, should one reply? In broad strokes, to be sure. But where should the focus be? There are many inviting issues, but I will limit myself to two. First, I will raise some questions about Hasker’s contention that we contemporary Christian thinkers have a philosophical advantage over our classical predecessors when it comes to fashioning an accurate conception of God. Second, taking my cue from Douglas Kelly’s contribution to the Christianity Today symposium on the book, ^[4] and with St. Thomas as my guide, I will argue that the authors of The Openness of God owe us a philosophically rigorous account of God’s transcendence.

3. Their metaphysical predispositions versus ours

How could the Fathers of the Church and other classical Christian thinkers have gone so wrong with regard to the concept of God? And how is it that the authors of The Openness of God have managed to succeed where their classical predecessors, many saints among them, failed? We can glean Hasker’s reply from various remarks he makes in his own chapter of the book. Let’s begin with the following passage:

“Without a doubt a very large number of philosophical issues are involved in the difference between the divine openness view and the classical conception of God–far too many to discuss in a single chapter. My task is made somewhat easier, however, by the fact that many of the inclinations and preconceptions with which we today approach these issues are decidedly different from those which prevailed when the theological tradition was being formed. To be sure, the fact that a view was once widely held and has now been generally abandoned is not a decisive reason to reject it; truths can be forgotten and then rediscovered. But when we are assessing the merits of views supported by a long tradition, it is surely appropriate to consider the ways in which the assumptions that influenced the shaping of the tradition differ from our own” (p. 127).

Hasker then notes the pervasive influence of neo-Platonism on many classical Christian thinkers, an influence embodied (as he sees it) in their nearly unanimous bias in favor of the doctrines of divine simplicity, eternality, immutability, and impassibility. By contrast, our own inclinations carry us moderns in just the opposite direction. Take, for instance, the specific case of immutability:

“In the philosophical lineage stretching from Parmenides to Plato to Plotinus, there is a strong metaphysical and valuational preference for permanence over change …. And this bias against change has been powerfully influential in classical theology, leading to the insistence on an excessively strong doctrine of divine immutability …. For us moderns, this preference for permanence over change is scarcely compelling. Indeed, it is arguable that in our intellectual life as well as in our general culture the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, so that if anything at all remains constant for a while our response is one of boredom and impatience. Be that as it may, the extreme valuational preference for immutability has little hold on our thinking, and the appeal of theological doctrines based on this valuation is weakened accordingly” (p. 129).

The idea, broadly stated, is this: Christian thinkers toil within concrete cultural and intellectual contexts, and these contexts instill in them cognitive predispositions which, though defeasible, nonetheless serve as tacit measures of plausibility. Since the contexts within which we contemporary philosophers operate are quite different from those within which classical Christian thinkers operated, it is not surprising that our cognitive predispositions should diverge substantially from theirs. More specifically, given the striking contrast in style and content between the analytic metaphysical tradition in which many of us have been trained and the Greek metaphysical traditions into which classical Christian thinkers were initiated, our metaphysical predispositions can be expected to differ dramatically from theirs.

When we turn to the task of fashioning a Christian conception of God from the resources afforded us by reason and revelation, this difference turns out to be especially crucial. For, as Hasker sees it, in carrying out this task, orthodox Christian thinkers are all engaged in so-called ‘perfect being theology’, which, he tells us, “is operative, both explicitly and implicitly, at many, many points in the theological tradition” (p. 131). That is, we begin from the presupposition that God is an absolutely perfect being–a presupposition Hasker willingly embraces–and then we proceed to determine just which attributes are to count as divine perfections. Some attributes are relatively uncontroversial, but the traditional “metaphysical” attributes mentioned above are not among them. As Hasker puts it, “I do not think it should be taken as obvious, without long and thoughtful consideration, that it is ‘better’ for God to be temporal or timeless, mutable or immutable, passible or impassible” (p. 132). And it is precisely with regard to these abstract and esoteric attributes that the above-noted difference in metaphysical predispositions has its greatest impact.

I will return below to the claim that classical Christian thinkers were all engaged in ‘perfect being theology’; let us assume for now that they were so engaged. According to Hasker, their judgments about what constitutes perfection were unduly influenced by cognitive predispositions instilled by the now defunct neo-Platonic metaphysical tradition; we, on the other hand, are in a position to correct their mistakes and thus to rescue the Biblical portrayal of God from an outmoded metaphysics that forces us to interpret an excessively large part of that portrayal as metaphorical rather than literal. In short, having been freed from classical metaphysical prejudices, we can–and should–be true to our own metaphysical predispositions:

“It is in the end out of the question for anyone to ‘prove’ that a particular conception of God is the correct one. Rather, one simply finds that a particular way of understanding the things of God makes the most sense, and provides the greatest illumination, in the overall context of one’s thinking and living. And so we offer a challenge to the reader, to ‘try and see’ whether he or she cannot find a rich and satisfying understanding of Scripture, of the Christian faith generally and of our life in Christ, seen through the lens of the openness of God” (p. 154).

Several questions come immediately to mind, but I will raise just two of them. First, and most obviously, how have our metaphysical predispositions been formed? It has been fewer than four decades since analytic metaphysics re-emerged from the shadow of positivism and ordinary language philosophy, two of the most virulently anti-metaphysical movements in the history of philosophy. Even counting the earlier achievements of the likes of Frege and Russell, analytic metaphysics is thus in its embryonic stage, judged by the standard of the two thousand year tradition that ran from Plato to Suarez and into early modern philosophy. Moreover, we have still not recovered fully from the disdain for the history of metaphysics that marked graduate training in philosophy during the middle decades of this century. The result is that very few of us analytic metaphysicians received in graduate school any deep or systematic introduction to the history of our own discipline, especially the history of ancient and medieval metaphysics. And the resulting historical blindness helps explain why in many cases we have become “locked in” to ways of formulating metaphysical problems and of defining possible solutions to those problems that we are well-nigh incapable of recognizing as contingent and, I would add, highly questionable.

Here are some examples. Nearly all analytic treatments of causality take it for granted that events, rather than stable entities, are the relata of the basic causal relation. Again, nearly all analytic treatments of action take it for granted that if the concepts action, power, and agent causality have any application at all, they are applicable only in the case of free and rational beings. Yet only a handful of pre-Humean philosophers, most notably the occasionalists, would have had even the slightest inclination to accept either of these assumptions. Again, analytic philosophers of mind almost unanimously assume that Cartesian dualism is the only remotely plausible non-materialistic solution to the mind-body problem; and given the historically conditioned patterns of thought with which we have become comfortable, even the few of us who have heard of the Aristotelian alternative are as likely as not to pronounce it unintelligible.

This historical illiteracy is especially disheartening in analytic philosophy of religion, where ignorance of, or spotty acquaintance with, medieval metaphysics effectively cuts us off from the most comprehensive and penetrating reflection on the Christian Faith that has occurred in the history of the Church. And here, too, even those of us, myself included, who do, as it were, “dip into” the history of philosophical theology very often succumb to the temptation to force classical concepts and theories into the straitjacket of currently fashionable modes of thinking.

The most striking example is the contemporary literature on divine simplicity. Hasker tells us that “a strong majority of Christian philosophers” (p. 127) have abandoned the doctrine of divine simplicity; I submit that a “strong majority” of contemporary Christian philosophers do not so much as understand the doctrine of divine simplicity or the metaphysical background from which it emerged. In an important recent paper Nicholas Wolterstorff traces the futility of the contemporary discussion of simplicity to a largely unnoticed difference between styles of ontology–more specifically, between what he calls the “constituent ontology” characteristic of medieval metaphysicians and the “relation ontology” that marks contemporary analytic metaphysics. ^[5] And while Wolterstorff himself is no friend of either constituent ontology or the doctrine of God that historically developed from it, he nonetheless recognizes that a convincing case for rejecting the medieval tradition in philosophical theology can be made only from within by philosophers who understand deeply what they are rejecting. ^[6]

From these considerations I draw two conclusions. First, without the sort of systematic study that we are not generally trained for either linguistically or philosophically, we contemporary Christian philosophers are not in a position even to understand, much less to criticize intelligently, most of the work of those classical metaphysicians whom Hasker takes to task. For in order to grasp what these authors are saying, we must immerse ourselves in their works and, at least initially, humbly submit ourselves to their tutleage; but this is a project that most of us have neither the expertise nor the time nor the inclination to undertake. Second, given the realities of our peculiar historical situation, we have no good reason to believe that, with respect to the conception of God, the metaphysical predispositions engendered by contemporary culture and philosophical training are more reliable than those of the classical Christian thinkers.

The second question I wish to raise concerns the advice that we “try and see” whether the ‘open’ conception of God works for us. Hasker’s discussion of the parable of the Prodigal Son in the present paper is meant as a test case. Ask yourself: “Would the parable be as gripping if we imagined the father to be immutable and impassible, or to have comprehensive knowledge of the future?” I think we can agree that it would not be as gripping. But exactly why not? Well, to begin with, it is no perfection for a human father to be immovable and impassible concerning the fate of his own children–just the opposite, in fact. If the father in the parable were not anxious and yet hopeful, he wouldn’t be a very good father. Nor is it a human perfection to be omniscient, even though we can at least recognize omniscience as the limiting case of something that is a genuine human perfection.

But what conclusion should we draw from this? Hasker invites us to conclude that if the traditional conception of God is correct, then the parable of the Prodigal Son is at least in part misleading, since it portrays the father as having certain traits which are of central importance to the story and yet which a divine being could not possibly have. And, indeed, if all we knew about God were what philosophers ignorant of Christian revelation have been able to tell us, it would be very hard to recognize God in the father of the parable; to put it another way, it would be very hard to swallow the idea that if God were somehow to become human, he would be anything like the father of the parable (see 1 Corinthians 1:18-25). (Of course, if all we knew about God were what he had revealed of himself to Moses and the prophets, we would be astonished by the very suggestion that the transcendent bearer of the ineffable name of Exodus 3 might somehow become human–once again, see 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.)

Yet as Christians, illumined by divine revelation concerning the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, we have a pretty good idea of what our transcendent God would be like as a human being–namely, exactly like Jesus Christ, who dined with public sinners, thus exciting the murmurs that prompted the parable of the Prodigal Son. According to the traditional Christian understanding of God, it is precisely in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ that the impassible, immutable, eternal God becomes passible, mutable, and time-bound. We Christians don’t need to invent an ‘open’ conception of the divine nature in order to marvel at the “folly” of a risk-taking, passible God; all we need to do is to contemplate Christ crucified. ^[7]

Perhaps Hasker will retort that if we understand the divine nature in the traditional way, then it is impossible that any person should be both divine and human. But, as far as I can tell, the doctrine of the Incarnation would seem no less a folly to unbelieving metaphysicians if the ‘open’ conception of the divine nature were substituted for the traditional conception. After all, even according to the ‘open’ conception, God is an omnipotent and omniscient Creator, an immaterial, imperfectible, and transcendent Being without beginning or end. What’s more, the strategies available to Hasker and the others for countering the objection that no being can be both God (conceived of as ‘open’) and man will be just those strategies that classical Christian thinkers have employed to fend off the parallel objection to the thesis that Jesus Christ is both God (conceived of in the traditional way) and man. In a nutshell, as long as we stop short of reducing the divine nature to a merely human nature, the familiar metaphysical objections to the doctrine of the Incarnation will continue to arise, and the methods for dealing with those objections will continue to be the same.

So much for our alleged philosophical advantage.

4. Thomas Aquinas and divine transcendence

I want to close with a few remarks about the method by which St. Thomas arrives at his philosophical conception of the divine nature–remarks prompted both by Hasker’s claim that the classical theologians were engaged in ‘perfect being theology’ and by Douglas Kelly’s charge that the authors of The Openness of God “have failed to think through the profound implications of the difference between created being and uncreated being.” ^[8]

St. Thomas’s reflections on the divine nature can be divided into three phases: (1) the proof of the existence of a First Efficient Cause, i.e., a being which acts and is a cause of other things but is not itself caused or acted upon; ^[9] (2) the via remotionis, in which the First Cause is divided off from all other entities by denying of it various intrinisic modes of being and composition characteristic of created entities; and (3) the via affirmationis, in which positive perfections are attributed to the First Cause. (This triadic structure is clearly evident in Summa Contra Gentiles I, chaps. 10-102, but can also be discerned in Summa Theologiae I, qq. 2-26.)

Significantly, the thesis that the First Cause is a perfect being is the conclusion of Phase 2 rather than an initial assumption. It is only in Phase 3–the via affirmationis–that we see anything resembling ‘perfect being theology’. Yet several of the attributes impugned by Hasker–to wit, eternality, immutability, impassibility, and simplicity–are ‘negative’ attributes argued for in Phase 2, that is, before ‘perfect being theology’ kicks in. So, at least in the case of St. Thomas, Hasker’s remarks about the classical predispositions in favor of these four attributes are beside the point. St. Thomas is not judging on the basis of cognitive predispositions that these attributes, in contradistinction to their opposites, bespeak perfection. Rather, he is arguing–and the arguments are many and diverse–that these attributes follow from the concept First Efficient Cause (or, in the end, Creator), under which God’s existence was proved in Phase 1.

Let me expound on this just a bit. St. Thomas claims, pace St. Anselm, that in natural theology we do not begin with a direct positive (or ‘quidditative’) concept of God–that is, a concept which would allow us to situate the divine nature within a taxonomy of genera and species and thus to initiate a systematic inquiry into its positive properties. Instead, we are forced to reason discursively from certain evident features of the sensible world to the existence of a First Efficient Cause of those features, and then to argue from the descriptive concept First Efficient Cause to the conclusion that the being whose existence has been proved must be radically different intriniscally from the ordinary sensible entities that we do have direct positive concepts of. The upshot of this via remotionis is that the First Cause is “perfect in every way”. ^[10] It is only afterwards–in Phase 3–that we try to isolate a set of pure perfections which, if abstracted from the restrictive conditions under which they occur in creatures, can be attributed literally, albeit analogically, to the Creator.

In effect, then, the via remotionis constitutes an inquiry into the difference between Creator and creature. And within St. Thomas’s system a being capable of creating ex nihilo is ultimately characterized in two basic and, as I have argued elsewhere, ^[11] complementary ways, one stemming from the Aristotelian tradition (Pure Actuality) and the other stemming from the Platonic tradition (Unparticipated Being). Within their respective traditions, these are limiting notions which strain our cognitive and imaginative resources but which for that very reason provide us with a powerful characterization of the ontological abyss that divides the transcendent Creator of all things from the entities he creates. In the Thomistic system, then, there is no doubt about the utter “otherness,” incomprehensibility, and ineffability of the divine nature.

By contrast, even though the authors of The Openness of God affirm God’s transcendence, they have not as yet provided any correspondingly forceful metaphysical account of that transcendence. Unlike St. Thomas, they have given us no principled explanation of what sort of being is capable of creating ex nihilo, or of how such a being differs in its inner nature from created beings.

Why is this a serious omission? As indicated above, a metaphysical conception of the divine nature helps us divide the Scriptural descriptions of God into the literal and the metaphorical. The authors of The Openness of God object to the division made on the basis of the traditional conception of God; in particular, they claim that many Scriptural descriptions of God are unjustifiably classified as metaphorical by appeal to the negative properties (immutability, eternality, impassibility, simplicity) constitutive of the classical notion of divine transcendence. However, it is not at all clear on what basis the authors are making their own division into the literal and the metaphorical. Why, for instance, do they cling to the idea that God is immaterial and thereby relegate a whole host of Scriptural descriptions of God to the realm of the metaphorical, given that immateriality is just another one of those ‘Hellenistic’ divine attributes that has little appeal for the modern mind? The authors insist, after all, that God has genuine emotions, and many of us who reject Cartesian dualism think that in the case of human beings certain bodily changes are essential to the having of emotions properly so-called. What makes the authors think that this is not true in the case of God as well? One might even perversely suggest that the “whole emotional content” of the parable of the Prodigal Son is “profoundly altered” if we imagine that the father, because he has no body, is unable literally to embrace his son or to share the fatted calf with him.

What standard, then, are Hasker and the others invoking in the case of immateriality? More generally, what full-fledged alternative to the traditional account of transcendence can they offer us? I suggest that they put the formulation of such an account at or near the top of their agenda as they continue to develop their research program.

The post The “Openness” of God: A Reply to William Hasker appeared first on OpenTheism.info.

In this selection, William Hasker develops some themes from the book, The Openness of God, which he co-authored with Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders and David Basinger. After giving a brief overview of the book, he recounts the process by which, over a period of years, he came to embrace the “open view” of God. He then summarizes various stances on the nature of God’s providential governance of the world, and concludes with some arguments designed to show the advantages of the open view of God over its competitors. Mr. Hasker is Professor of Philosophy at Huntington College and former editor of Christian Scholar’s Review.

Note! You will find a response to the following article (also from Christian Scholar’s Review) by Alfred J. Freddoso, Professor of Philosophy at University of Notre Dame. You will find his response, here.

This article was taken by permission from Christian Scholar’s Review 28:1 (Fall, 1998: 111-139)

God is not remote, closed off, and self-contained. Rather, God is open to us his creatures, to the world he has made, and to the future. We in turn need to be open towards God and towards the future he is creating for us. These are the central themes of the book The Openness of God.^[1] The book is the joint product of five authors, each of whom had arrived at a similar understanding of the nature of God largely independent of the others. This general conception of God has been extensively discussed among Christian philosophers, and to a certain extent among theologians as well. But there has not existed any overall presentation of the view that is usable and accessible for students, pastors, and lay Christians. We aimed to supply this lack. We have been gratified by the reception of the book; many persons have expressed appreciation for the enlightenment and spiritual benefit they have received from it. Others, more attached to some of the traditional conceptions our approach rejects, have been strongly critical.^[2] We thank the editors of the Christian Scholar’s Review for the opportunity to continue the discussion in its pages. The first part of this essay will briefly introduce the book itself. The second part will trace, somewhat autobiographically, the development of my own views on these topics. The final section will reflect on the understanding of divine providence, and divine action in the world, presented in the book.

Section I

The book is subtitled, at the suggestion of the publisher, A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. That is a good description of the book, though how radical the challenge is depends on your point of view-in particular, on where. you locate the center of the tradition. We do reject such classical metaphysical divine attributes as simplicity, impassibility, absolute immutability, and timelessness. We reject Calvinism with its claim that God determines all that happens through his eternal decrees, and Molinism with its subtler view that God’s control is mediated by his knowledge of the “counterfactuals of freedom.” (A bit more will be said about Molinism in the next section.) All of us hold that comprehensive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with libertarian free will for creatures. We portray God “as majestic yet intimate, as powerful yet gentle and responsive, as holy and loving and caring, as desiring for humans to decide freely for or against his will for them, yet endlessly resourceful in achieving his ultimate purposes” (p. 154).

The first chapter, written by Richard Rice, presents biblical support for the “open view” of God. There is a great deal of such support; much more than we commonly think, accustomed as we are to reading Scripture through the lens of traditional interpretations. In particular, Rice lays a good deal of emphasis on the biblical notion of divine “repentance,” drawing on the work of Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim. I would not want to claim that Richard succeeds in resolving all biblical problems for our view-I doubt, in fact, that anyone has succeeded in doing that for any view-but he does establish the open view of God as one that has strong biblical credentials.

The second chapter, by John Sanders, begins by asking, “Why do we not usually read the Bible in the way suggested in the previous chapter?” (p. 59) The answer to this is found in a broad survey of the history of Christian thought, revealing the extensive influence within Christian theology of certain conceptions ultimately drawn from Greek philosophy. The sources of these ideas can be traced back to Philo Judaeus and Plotinus, among others, and they were mediated to mainstream Christian theology through such figures as Augustine and, especially, Pseudo Dionysius. Some criticisms of this chapter have misunderstood its intent. We do not contend that the theologians of the Church have “sold out” to philosophy,^[3] and we do not necessarily regard the influence of Greek philosophy on Christian theology as on the whole inimical. But even if, like me, you regard the availability of Greek philosophy to the early Church as “a manifestation of divine providence” (Openness, p. 194, n.1), it remains true that “great discernment was required in applying philosophical conceptions to the biblical God, and we need not assume that the church fathers made the correct decisions in every case” (ibid.). Nor is it a telling criticism to point out that major theologians of the church have already emphasized some of the themes we stress-for example, in Luther’s theologia crucis.^[4] We have no desire whatever to claim that what we are saying is completely novel, and unknown in earlier ages of the Church–quite the contrary, in fact. All too often, however, these authentic biblical insights have been overwhelmed by a theology which insists that the Bible cannot possibly mean what it seems to be saying.

The third chapter, on systematic theology by Clark Pinnock, is to my mind the heart of the entire book. In this chapter Clark spells out, briefly but very effectively, the conception of God and God’s relationship with the world which is the core of our view. I suspect that a person’s reaction to this chapter may well be determinative for her response to the book as a whole. If she finds this portrait of God unappealing, even repellent, then she is unlikely to be moved by the arguments and biblical texts presented throughout the book. But if she finds that the portrayal of God .speaks to her condition,” then she may well be willing to explore with us the various considerations, and the answers to difficulties and objections, which lead us to conclude that the picture is a truthful one. Let me add here that both in this chapter and throughout the book we take considerable pains to distinguish our view of God from the one presented by process theology, to equate the two^[5] is a serious-and, I have to think, culpable ^[6] misrepresentation of our view.

We come now to my own chapter, which reviews from the perspective of philosophical theology the various ways in which the open view of God differs from the classical theism of Augustine and Aquinas. I draw upon the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff, among others, for the themes of divine temporality and possibility, as well as on my own previous work. The latter part of the chapter reviews various options for understanding divine providence, ranging from deterministic Calvinism at one extreme to process theism at the other, and makes the case for the open view of God, sometimes also called “free will theism.”

The final chapter, by David Basinger, develops the practical implications of the openness of God, ranging over such topics as petitionary prayer, divine guidance, human suffering, and the social and evangelistic responsibilities of believers.

Section II

In this section I am going to introduce some of the key issues of the book in a somewhat unusual way. Often in reading various writers (especially when the views expressed are unusual and controversial), I find myself asking, “Now, why did she say that? What is going on here?” The answer to my questions will not necessarily be found in a recitation of evidence and arguments; rather, what I am asking for is insight into the actual thought-process that led the author to espouse those particular views. Since I suspect that others may ask the same sorts of questions, I will set down here a brief account of the way in which, over a number of years, I came to accept the “open view” of God. There is nothing normative about my particular history, of course, and if my coauthors were to tell their own stories they would all be somewhat different. Still, I hope that what I have to say will be helpful at least for some readers.

My story begins in the fall of 1952, about the time I entered Wheaton College as a freshman. I had been influenced by scientific notions about human beings to which I had been exposed, and I remember asking my parents just where inside our skins this “free will” they talked about was located. I also recall trying to think about moral responsibility along the lines of what I now recognize as compatibilism. (According to compatibilism, we can be responsible for. our actions and in some sense “free” even though our actions are completely determined by previous events and circumstances.) But sometime within the next year and a half or so I had given up this way of thinking, and had come to accept libertarian free will. (According to libertarianism, a choice is free only if another choice was really possible under exactly the same [external and internal] circumstances.) I can’t trace the details of the process by which this change came about, but undoubtedly an introductory course in philosophy taken from Arthur Holmes played a role in it. A major event in my junior year was a course in the thought of Augustine, also with Arthur Holmes. As a result of this course I read the Confessions, several of the minor works, and the entirety of The City of God-and the latter work, especially, precipitated a severe intellectual struggle. I was torn between my love and admiration for Augustine (which still persist today) and the deeply troubling aspects of his doctrines of election and reprobation. Eventually I concluded that the God of holiness, love, and justice in whom both Augustine and I believed simply could not be the author of an eternal, unconditional decree of reprobation. And in this conviction I have never wavered down to the present day. (I still have a copy of an exegesis paper on which Paul Jewett, my favorite professor at Fuller Seminary, commented acerbically on my Arminian exposition of Romans 9!)

A further result of this experience is that I seem to be permanently immune to a way of thinking which some of my fellow Christian philosophers find attractive. The persons I have in mind find any kind of determinism due to natural causes whether physical determinism according to natural law, or psychological determinism by the “strongest motive”-unacceptable and very much to be resisted. But with regard to the theological doctrine that God sovereignly determines everything that occurs, they think a different response is in order. God, they remind us, is not a “cause among causes,- another being who vies with us for control in the arena of creaturely activity. God is the Creator of all, and to be subject to his creative will is in no way to be compared with a bondage to mechanistic determinism. In fact, to deny that God exercises such control is very nearly to deny that he is our creator. I agree, of course, that God’s causal activity in the world is of a different sort than the causal activity that creatures exercise on each other. I also agree that determinism based on natural causes and theological determinism are logically independent of each other; either could be true without the other,^[7] both could be true, or (as I believe to be the case) both could be false. But none of this suggests to me that, of the two, theological determinism should be the more readily accepted. If anything, the difference runs the other way: it is far more readily intelligible that society should hold us responsible for actions produced by natural causes-causes, however, over which society has only limited control-than that a wise and just God should hold us responsible for actions which are, through and through, entirely controlled by his own decretive will. So my opposition here is to determinism as such; the particular variety of determinism involved is of secondary importance.

At this time I entertained no serious doubts about the compatibility of free will and divine foreknowledge; I comforted myself with the familiar (but ultimately inadequate) reflection that divine foreknowledge does not cause human actions to occur and therefore cannot keep them from being free. So you could say that my view was one of “simple foreknowledge,” but I also felt considerable attraction, under the influence of Augustine and C. S. Lewis, towards the doctrine of timeless divine eternity. Perhaps there was a slight tendency for the latter view to predominate in my thinking, but the tension between them was never really resolved, nor did I feel any pressing need to resolve it.

Finally, let me observe that it was sometime during these years-whether I was in college or in seminary at the time I can’t say-that I first became aware of the doctrine of divine middle knowledge. This theory, also known as Molinism,^[8] holds a special view about the nature of divine foreknowledge. God, according to Molinism, not only knows beforehand all the actual decisions that will be made by his free creatures; he also knows what any such creature would have done in any possible situation with which she might have been confronted, even if the choice is never actually made. (The statements describing these hypothetical free choices are nowadays referred to as “counterfactuals of freedom.”) Right from the very beginning, this theory struck me as being entirely implausible. When a person makes a free choice, it seemed (and still seems) to me, there is nothing whatever either in the circumstances involved or in the nature and character of the chooser that determines in advance the decision that will be made. So if God knows such a choice, it is the actual choosing itself that he knows, and nothing else. But if the choice is never in fact made, then there is no “actual choosing,” and thus nothing for God to know. And this perspective has remained with me ever since, through all my later study and criticism of the theory.

It was in 1973, at a summer institute in the philosophy of religion held in Grand Rapids, that I first became aware of Nelson Pike’s argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. The argument at once struck me as extremely compelling, and I have never wavered from that first impression. None of the ingenious ways of evading the argument has seemed to me at all satisfactory. Without doubt my acceptance of Pike’s argument was facilitated by the presence in my thinking of divine timelessness as a plausible back-up position. Surely, I thought, there can’t be anything unorthodox about believing that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free will, when Thomas Aquinas held the very same view?

Over the next several years, however, the difficulties involved in divine timeless eternity began to press in on me. When I began to write a paper exploring the difficulties of this doctrine,^[9] I fully expected to find in the doctrine some insuperable logical incoherence which would render it untenable. As I worked through the paper, however, I was impressed to find that plausible, apparently coherent answers could be crafted to meet all of the logical difficulties that presented themselves. The result was that, in my thinking, timelessness got a reprieve; the article ends in an indecision which was a true reflection of my state of mind at the time.

The reprieve, however, was only temporary; it came to an end with the rejection of timelessness in my 1989 book God, Time, and Knowledge.^[10] I still regard the doctrine of timelessness as coherent and intelligible–or at least, I don’t think it has been shown to be incoherent or unintelligible. But divine timelessness, for reasons I will explain presently, does not help any more than simple foreknowledge in enabling us to understand God’s actions in providence and prophecy. It clearly is not the biblical way of thinking about God; it can be read into a few biblical texts only after we have already settled, on other grounds, that this is the way God must be understood. For me personally, however, the decisive consideration was that a timeless God would be able to know us human beings only as timeless representations in his “eternal present”; this, it seems to me, detracts seriously from the personalism and intimacy which are so important to our relationship with God. My conclusion at this point is that the doctrine of timelessness is inadequately motivated apart from a neoplatonic-inspired metaphysic that few Christian philosophers, at this juncture, can bring themselves to embrace.

And this brings us down to the present. If God is not all-determining, as the Calvinists think, if he does not possess middle knowledge, as urged by the Molinists, if he does not possess “simple foreknowledge” of the actual future, and if, like us, he experiences the passage of time moment by moment and not all at once in the “eternal now,” then it follows ineluctably that God’s knowledge of the future, incomparably greater though it is than any knowledge we could possess, is not the complete, certain, and infinitely detailed knowledge posited by most of the theological tradition. Though this conclusion is not one that I am now reluctant about, it was arrived at with considerable reluctance and after extended reflection, as I trust the foregoing narrative has made clear. What remains is to work out the implications of this-and that is what we have tried to do in The Openness of God.

Section III

What, then, are the implications of this view of God for our understanding of providence?^[11] According to the open view of God, God is strictly omnipotent, in that he is able to do anything which is logically possible, and consistent with God’s perfect nature. It is worth stressing that God as so conceived is in no way deficient in power as compared with God as viewed by Calvinism.^[12] We hold that God is completely capable of creating a universe, every detail of whose history is solely determined by his sovereign decree. But it seems to us that a wise and good God would not want-and in fact, has not chosen-to create a universe such as this. We in turn would ask the Calvinist, “Is God as you conceive him unable to create a world in which there are free creatures who voluntarily enter into a relationship of love and friendship with him? Or does he prefer a world in which he alone monopolizes control, leaving nothing to be decided by his creatures? And why should we think that he would prefer a world like that?”

God is also omniscient, in that he knows everything that logically can be known. We believe, however, that it is logically impossible for God to have foreknowledge of creaturely actions that are truly free. (An argument for this will be given below.) Note, however, that God has a vast amount of knowledge about the probabilities that free choices will be made in one way rather than another. To be sure, God could have created a world in which he would have full foreknowledge of every detail, simply by creating a world in which everything that happens is fully controlled by his sovereign decrees. But it seems to us that God found such a world less desirable-less appealing to his creative goodness-than a world which contains genuinely free creatures.

We believe that the open view of God has important advantages over alternative views (such as Calvinism and Molinism) in conceiving our personal relationship with God. God knows an immense amount about each one of usfar more, in fact, than we know about ourselves-but he does not, because he cannot, plan his actions towards us on the basis of a prior knowledge of how we will respond. That is to say: he is not a manipulator, relating to us by “pressing the right buttons” to get the exact response he desires to elicit. And this means that God is a risk-taker; in expressing his love towards us, he opens himself up to the real possibility of failure and disappointment. God doesn’t, of course, “need” us in all of the ways we need one another, but he does genuinely and deeply care about us; he is saddened when we reject his love, and rejoices when one of us turns to him in repentance and faith.

We believe that the open view of God is substantially better off than alternative views in dealing with the problem of evil. According to this view God knows that evils will occur, but he has not for the most part specifically decreed or incorporated into his antecedent plan the individual instances of evil. Rather, God’s governance of the world is primarily in terms of general strategies, strategies which are, as a whole, ordered for the good of the creation, but whose detailed consequences are not foreseen or intended by God prior to the decision to adopt them. As a result of this, we are able to abandon the difficult doctrine of “meticulous providence,” ^[13] and to admit the presence in the world of particular evils God’s permission of which is not the means of bringing about any greater good or preventing any equal or greater evil. And this, we believe, is an important advantage for our view as compared with others.

Criticisms of the openness-of-God theory typically claim that God as we conceive him would be unable to do the kinds of things that Scripture represents God as doing. One such complaint deals with the subject of prophecy-if God doesn’t know everything about the future, how can he tell us about it? Obviously a full discussion of this topic is beyond our present scope (and also beyond my competence), so I must limit myself to a few summary remarks. We have available to us three different ways of understanding biblical prophecies, consistent with God’s openness to the future. Some prophecies-perhaps more than have generally been so recognized^[14]–are conditional on the actions of human beings. Others are predictions based on existing trends and tendencies, while still others are announcements of what God himself intends to bring about irrespective of the choices made by creaturely agents. We believe (though I cannot argue here in detaiI^[15]) that these approaches can lead one to a satisfying understanding of the phenomena of biblical prophecy. We will take time to consider here just one more objection against the open view of God. It is sometimes asserted that God as we conceive him would not be able to ensure the fulfillment of his plan even in the most general respects. If every single human being has it in her power to accept or reject God’s offer of salvation, and if God has no advance knowledge of how a person will respond, then it would be possible for every person without exception to reject salvation-and if this were to occur, there would be no “people of God,” no Church, and a key element in God’s plan would be frustrated. As things actually stand, to be sure, this has not happened, but it could have happened; that it has not, is attributable to nothing but “God’s luck.”

To answer this fully, we should have to know exactly what methods and resources are available to God in his providential governance of the world. But this is something we certainly do not know, and cannot expect to know-and without it, any answer to the objection must be based on speculation. We certainly should not underestimate the tremendous resourcefulness of God in adapting his responses to human actions even willful and disobedient human actions-so as to achieve his wise and loving purposes. But even if it is possible, on the open view of God, for all human beings without exception to reject salvation, still this might be overwhelmingly improbable o improbable that the risk of such an outcome is negligible. Consider a parallel: According to modem physics, there is a finite probability that all of the oxygen in a room should concentrate itself in a small volume, leaving the rest of the room devoid of oxygen and unable to sustain life. But the probability of this happening is so minute that rational persons can and do disregard the possibility in conducting their lives; I am completely confident that not a single one of my readers goes about with bottled oxygen in order to protect himself in the event of such an occurrence’ So why should our inability to show how God can logically guarantee that humans will respond to his love constitute a serious objection?

I will bring this discussion to a close by calling some arguments to your attention. First, let us consider an argument for the claim that comprehensive divine foreknowledge and human free will are logically inconsistent. The idea, roughly, is this: If God knows already what will happen in the future, then God’s knowing this is part of the past and is now fixed, impossible to change. And since God is infallible, it is completely impossible that things will turn out differently than God expects them to. But this means that the future event God knows is also fixed and unalterable, and it cannot be true of any human being that she is both able to perform a certain action and able not to perform that action. If God knows she is going to perform it, then it is impossible that she fail to perform it–so, she does not have a free choice whether or not to perform it. There are dozens of different versions of this argument; one of my favorites concerns a certain Clarence, known to be addicted to cheese omelets. Will Clarence have a cheese omelet for breakfast tomorrow morning, or won’t he? The argument proceeds as follows:

1. It is now true that Clarence will have a cheese omelet for breakfast tomorrow. (Premise)
2. It is impossible that God should at any time believe^[16] what is false, or fail to believe anything that is true. (Premise: divine omniscience)
3. God has always believed that Clarence will have a cheese omelet tomorrow. (From 1,2)
4. If God has always believed a certain thing, it is not in anyone’s power to bring it about that God has not always believed that thing. (Premise: the unalterability of the past)
5. Therefore, it is not in Clarence’s power to bring it about that God has not always believed that he would have a cheese omelet for breakfast. (From 3,4)
6. It is not possible for it to be true both that God has always believed that Clarence would have a cheese omelet for breakfast, and that he does not in fact have one. (From 2)
7. Therefore, it is not in Clarence’s power to refrain from having a cheese omelet for breakfast tomorrow. (From 5,6) So Clarence’s eating the omelet tomorrow is not an act of free choice.
8. (From the definition of free Will)^[17]

What this argument shows is that it is logically impossible that God should have foreknowledge of a genuinely free action. It follows from this that if there are actions which are free in the libertarian sense, it is logically impossible for God to know in advance how such actions will turn out. And in the light of our definition of omniscience, God’s failure to know what logically cannot be known in no way detracts from God’s omniscience. As soon as these truths become available, God will be the first to know them! (On the other hand, the definition of omniscience given in step 2 of the argument above is faulty, because it fails to allow for the possibility of truths which are intrinsically unknowable.)

Since it is out of the question to address all of the alternatives to the open view, my final two arguments will be directed primarily at what may be the most commonly accepted approach to these matters, the theory of “simple foreknowledge.” This theory accepts libertarian free will (unlike Calvinism), and rejects middle knowledge, but holds that God has complete and certain knowledge of the actual future.

Clearly there are reasons for the popularity of such an approach. It avoids the immense theological difficulties of Calvinism, and the logical and metaphysical perplexities of Molinism, yet it upholds what many perceive to be the irreducible minimum for an adequate doctrine of omniscience and foreknowledge. I maintain, however, that the advantages of this theory are less than meet the eye. In particular, there are no benefits whatever for our understanding of divine providence, of God’s action in the world, from the affirmation of simple foreknowledge. Let me explain why. Suppose God knows, in exhaustive detail, exactly what the situation on the earth will be as of a particular future date-say, April 11, 2003. Suppose, also, that there is something about that situation that displeases God-something he would wish to make otherwise. Could God not then act, at some time prior to the date in question, so as to bring about a situation on April 11, 2003, that is more in accord with his purposes? A little reflection will show this thought to be incoherent. For the future God knows is, by supposition, the actual future for that date; the supposition that God then acts so that what he knows to be the actual future is in fact not the actual future makes no sense at all. Reflection on this and similar scenarios will lead us to see that it is impossible that God should use a foreknowledge derived from the actual occurrence of future events to determine his own prior actions in the providential governance of the world. If simple foreknowledge did exist, it would be useless.^[18]

Let me add a couple of comments concerning the application of this argument. First, notice that it applies equally to simple foreknowledge and to the doctrine of divine timelessness. The argument makes no use of the fact that God knows the future before it occurs; the difficulty arises from the circularity in which knowledge of a later event is the basis for God’s action at a time prior to the event in question. Thus the knowledge of the future possessed by a timeless God, like that of a God with simple foreknowledge, would be providentially useless.

The second point is one which, I now realize,^[19] has not been stressed sufficiently in my previous discussions of this argument. Included among the range of divine actions which, according to the argument, could not be based on foreknowledge of events still to come, is the action of inspiring a prophet to predict the future.^[20] The giving of a prophecy is just as much an action as the causing of a plague, and can have effects that are equally great; indeed, the prophets were inspired to speak as they did precisely in order to cause their hearers to act in ways they otherwise would not have. So any problem about prophecy that may exist for the open view applies also to simple foreknowledge and divine timelessness. To gain relief from such problems (if relief is really needed), your only recourse is to turn to Molinism or Calvinism.

The final argument I’ll present is targeted specifically at those of you who accept most features of the open view, but can’t bring yourselves to give up simple foreknowledge. You hold, as we do, that God is temporal and genuinely responsive. And you believe, like us but unlike Thomas Aquinas, that God’s compassion really is compassion and not just compassionate actions carried out against a divine emotional background of imperturbable tranquility But for whatever reason, you balk at giving up total divine foreknowledge. Let me say, first of all, that we openness-of-God believers regard you already as much more an ally than an opponent. What unites us truly is far more important than what divides us; in this context, the debate over foreknowledge and free will comes to seem more a fascinating logical conundrum than a fundamental theological watershed. Still, the difference remains, and we would like to persuade you to come the rest of the way and join us. The previous argument shows that your view doesn’t confer some of the benefits you may have supposed; the argument I’m about to present exhibits a positive advantage of the open view of God.

An important characteristic of the open view is that it takes seriously what we may term the “emotional life of God”-in Abraham Heschel’s term, the divine “pathos.” To be sure, a flatly literal reading of the biblical descriptions of God’s emotions is implausible; surely there is much here of anthropomorphism-or, more precisely, “anthropopathism.” Nevertheless, when we read that “As a father pities his children, so the LORD pities those who fear him” (Ps. 103:13), we take this for a true description of the inner life of God. Now I submit that many of these descriptions exhibit the following two characteristics: (1) The emotion ascribed to God is connected with, and appropriate to, the particular situation of the human beings to whom God is related; and (2) the emotion would be profoundly different if we assumed it to be informed by a definite prior knowledge of the situation’s outcome. To take a single example, consider the well-loved parable of the Prodigal Son. As we know, the “waiting father” in the parable represents God, and the father’s longing for his son’s return-an experience to which many a human parent can relate-represents the heavenly Father’s longing for the return of an estranged sinner. And then the son appears, and “while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The father’s joy at this reunion is crucial for the parable as a whole. As Richard Rice observes, “the thrill of recovery is quite different from the satisfaction of a predictable achievement. . . . Losing something of value can inflict enormous pain. We feel the threat of permanent deprivation. The uncertainty as we search or wait to get it back can be agonizing. And then, if we’re fortunate, the moment of recovery brings a rush of surprise, relief and joy” (Openness, p. 41).

Now let’s try retelling the parable on the assumption that the father possesses foreknowledge of the outcome-he knows just when, where, and how his son will reappear. The father is still unhappy over his son’s absence, of course; to lose him from the family even for a limited time is a sad affair. But the father is spared any deep anxiety, nor will he stand day after day peering out in the hope that his son will reappear. Instead, on the appointed day he checks the calendar, glances at the sundial, and instructs the family retainer to break out the chariot: “Sonny will be showing up real soon now.” The whole emotional content of the parable is profoundly altered.

I wouldn’t expect this argument to have force for a classical theist like Anselm 123 or Aquinas. For them, all references to divine emotions are a mere manner of speaking, a way of communicating in terms of human-like emotions some distant reflection of the truth about a God who in reality is far above that sort of thing. But if, like me, you think God really does have an emotional life, then you may also feel you have some stake in being able to say that the emotions attributed to God in Scripture are emotions he really experiences. If that is what you want, the open view of God can give it to you-and so far as I can see, it is the only view that can.

^[1] In this selection William Hasker develops some themes from the book, The Openness of God, Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Downers Grove, III.: InterVarsity, 1994). which he co-authored with Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders and David Basinger. After giving a brief overview of the book, he recounts the process by which, over a period of years, he came to embrace the “open view” of God. He then summarizes various stances on the nature of God’s providential governance of the world, and concludes with some arguments designed to show the advantages of the open view of God over its competitors. Mr. Hasker is Professor of Philosophy at Huntington College and former editor of Christian Scholar’s Review.

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The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence

By John Sanders

In The God Who Risks, theologian John Sanders mounts a careful and challenging argument for positive answers to both of these profound theological questions. His powerful book not only will contribute to serious theological discussion but will enlighten pastors and laypersons who struggle with questions about suffering, evil, and human free will.

From the author:

A relational understanding of divine sovereignty. This book further develops the model of God described in a previous book: “The Openness of God.” According to the openness model (or relational theism) the triune God of love creates beings designed to enter into the divine love and to reciprocate that love. God enters into genuine give-and-take relations with us such that God not only initiates, but God also is able to receive from us and be affected by us. Because love cannot be forced, God sovereignly decides to make himself vulnerable to those he loves–God takes the risk that we may not respond to the divine love with love of our own. God risks that we may not love God, other humans and care for the creation as we should. All this is in opposition to the no risk view of divine providence in which everything that occurs in our lives is exactly what God wanted to happen. In the risk view, God has sovereignly decided not to tightly control everything. Hence, some things happen which God does not want to happen but works to redeem these situations. In the risk model, our actions and prayers, or lack of them, genuinely make a difference regarding our relationship with God.

A constructive view of God, highlighting the divine wisdom, love, responsiveness, power and faithfulness, is developed in order to show how God resourcefully works in human lives, taking into account our actions and our prayers.

The book includes lengthy chapters covering the Old and New Testament materials showing that God’s revelation teaches this understanding. It also includes an overview of church history detailing how this model of God agrees and disagrees with other Christian thinkers. Next, it interacts with philosophical sources in order to clarify what is meant by risk, sovereignty, love, omnipotence, omniscience and human freedom. The book concludes with an in-depth application of this model of God to the Christian life: salvation, suffering and evil, why our prayers really matter, and guidance.

Does God Have a Future?: A Debate on Divine Providence

By Christopher A. Hall & John Sanders

The nature of God’s knowledge of the future, sparked by the openness of God debate, is perhaps the most controversial issue in evangelical circles today. It has generated much heated discussion in venues like the Evangelical Theological Society. This book counters such intense discourse by pairing Christopher Hall, who affirms the historic Christian or classical view, with John Sanders, one of the foremost proponents of the openness view. For over a year, Hall and Sanders engaged in a friendly yet penetrating e-mail exchange responding to one another’s questions and concerns about God’s providence and foreknowledge. This book is a compilation of those inquiring e-letters, offering equal handling of both the classical and openness views. Motivated by the belief that evangelicals must learn how to disagree without becoming divisive, they display their respect for each other while vigorously disagreeing about important issues. The e-mail format has produced a series of to-the-point exchanges that make this complex topic more accessible and far more instructive and digestible than a pair of pro-con essays would have been. As such, it is the ideal introduction to the contemporary debate. This book is an expanded version of a two-part article that appeared in Christianity Today in 2001. All those interested in a serious, balanced presentation of the openness debate, without unfair caricatures, will appreciate this theologically sophisticated yet accessible book.

The Case for Freewill Theism: A Philosophical Assessment

By David Basinger

Can God intervene in this world, and if so, to what extent? If God intervenes, can we initiate such intervention by prayer? And if God can intervene, why is evil so persistent? Taking up such practical, but profound questions, a coauthor of the much-discussed The Openenness of God here offers a probing philosophical examination of freewill theism. This controversial view argues that the God of Christianity desires “responsive relationship” with his creatures. It rejects process theology, but calls for a reassessment of such classical doctrines as God’s immutability, impassibility and foreknowledge.

God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God

By Gregory Boyd

Does God really know the future? Does he ever change his mind? The questions are controversial, but the quest for answers can revolutionize your life, believes Boyd. This pastor-theologian invites you to examine the classical view of God’s foreknowledge and the alternative “open view,” referring to Scripture passages that appear to support the open-view position. 192 pages, softcover from Baker.

The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Overtures to Biblical Theology)

By Terence Fretheim

In this comprehensive and thought-provoking study, Terence Fretheim focuses on the theme of divine suffering, an aspect of our understanding of God which both the church and scholarship have neglected. Maintaining that “metaphors matter,” Fretheim carefully examines the ruling and anthropomorphic metaphors of the Old Testament and discusses them in the context of current biblical-theological scholarship. His aim is to broaden our understanding of the God of the Old Testament by showing that “suffering belongs to the person and purpose of God.”

God, Time, and Knowledge (Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion)

By William Hasker

“This outstanding book . . . is a genuinely pivotal contribution to the lively current debate over divine foreknowledge and human freedom. . . . Hasker’s book has three commendable features worthy of immediate note. First, it contains a carefully crafted overview of the recent literature on foreknowledge and freedom and so can serve as an excellent introduction to that literature. Second, it is tightly reasoned and brimming with brisk arguments, many of them highly original. Third, it correctly situates the philosophical dispute over foreknowledge and freedom within its proper theological context and in so doing highlights the intimate connection between the doctrines of divine omniscience and divine providence.”–Faith and Philosophy

“[God, Time, and Knowledge] is an elegantly written, forcefully argued challenge to traditional views, and a major contribution to the discussion of divine foreknowledge.”–Philosophical Review

“This is a very competent, thorough analysis of the conflict between free will and divine foreknowledge (or, on some acounts, timeless divine knowledge of our future). It is exceptionally clear.”–Theological Book Review

Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion)

By William Hasker

“Providence, Evil and the Openness of God is a timely exploration of the philosophical implications of the rapidly growing theological movement known as open theism, or the “openness of God.” William Hasker, one of the philosophers prominently associated with this movement, presents the strengths of this position in comparison with its main competitors: Calvinism, process theism and the theory of divine middle knowledge, or Molinism.” “In this collection of essays, the author develops alternative approaches to the problem of evil and to the problem of divine action in the world. In particular, he argues that believers should not maintain the view that each and every evil that occurs is permitted by God as a means to a “greater good.” He contends that open theism makes possible an emphasis on the personalism of divine-human interaction in a way that traditional views, with their heavy emphasis on divine control, cannot easily match. The book concludes with a section of replies to critics, in which many of the objections leveled against open theism are addressed.” Proviaence, Evil and the Openness of God will be essential reading for advanced students and academics in the fields of Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion and Theology.

The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God

By Clark Pinnock

That Greek philosophy at least partially influenced Christianity is generally accepted, since it formed the foundation of the culture the first Christians lived in. Many of the early church fathers even appropriated Greek philosophy in their attempts to evangelize the pagan world they found themselves in. But was the Greek influence good or bad? The question is not new; Tertullian asked, in the second century AD, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church?”

This book is an attempt to show that the Greek influence was, as Tertullian felt, dangerous. Why dangerous? Because, according to the authors, the Greek concepts of what God was like and how he interacted with humans were fatally flawed, and have resulted in a Christian theology which has pagan notions of perfection at its core. These concepts include immutability, impassibility, and omniscience (particularly in terms of foreknowledge of all future events).

The authors begin with the contention that God has granted humans a significant degree of freedom, and that He chooses to enter into a genuine relationship with them. They defend this position biblically, historically, theologically and philosophically, offering a well-balanced, comprehensive look at several familiar issues from a different, and they claim, more biblical viewpoint.

The unique interplay of the five authors in this book makes it a fascinating read. Richard Rice makes a compelling biblical case for open theism, while John Sanders takes a look at just how Greek our Christian theology is, and why contemporary theologians are generally unwilling to accept the validity of open theism. Clark Pinnock offers what can be termed a systematic theology of God’s openness and William Hasker offers a cogent philosophical defense of open theism. David Basinger then offers some practical implications of open theism, and compares them to the implications of both traditional classical theism and process theology.

You may not agree with the authors of this volume, but the discussion itself about these major issues is vitally important. Learn why each of these five authors came to believe in open theism, and what it means in their lives.

Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Didsbury Lectures)

By Clark H. Pinnock

Openness theology roots its popular appeal in the biblical picture of a God who is passionately loving and bent on rescuing the lost creatures he loves. Open theists believe that God responds to his creation and actually changes his plans as a result of how humans respond to him. In Most Moved Mover, Clark Pinnock argues that we need to have a view of God centered on God’s open, relational, and responsive love for his creation. That picture of God has important implications for prayer, for prophecy, foreschatology, and for believers interested in thinking about God in new ways.

God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation

By Terence E. Fretheim

Fretheim presents here the Old Testament view of the Creator God, the created world, and our role in creation. Beginning with “The Beginning,” he demonstrates that creation is open-ended and connected. Then, from every part of the Old Testament, Fretheim explores the fullness and richness of Israel’s thought regarding creation: from the dynamic created order to human sin, from judgment and environmental devastation to salvation, redemption, and a new creation.Fretheim brings theology into conversation with such fundamental issues as ethics, suffering, ecology, and God’s interaction with the world.

God’s Foreknowledge and Man’s Free Will

By Richard Rice

A brief treatise supporting the open view.

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