Closing the Door on Open Theism “…for I am God, and there is no other; I am God and there is no one like me, Declaring the end from the beginning And from ancient time’s things not yet done…” (Is. 46:9-10) It is the claim of open theists that they are doing a service to the Church by rescuing it from the perils of Greek philosophy. In reality, I believe that open theists are imposing modern philosophy upon revelation and diluting orthodoxy. According to open theism, God does cannot know the future, since if he did we would no longer be free. Notice here that the burden of proof lies upon the open theist to show that God necessarily cannot know the future and that foreknowledge prohibits freedom. The irony of the claim here is that for the first time in the Christian tradition, philosopher/theologians have discovered how it is that we are truly free. It’s quite simple. One has to go – either human freedom or God’s foreknowledge. Thus, in the spirit of humanism, God does not have foreknowledge and the earlier belief that he did is the result of Plato and Aristotle infiltrating theology. Anyone acquainted with the Scriptures and the Fathers will immediately realize a deep-seated relation between the two’s conviction that God knows future events. The early Fathers who wrote on God’s foreknowledge in actuality did not need to rely on Greek philosophy at all and generally do not. Rather for them, the concern was to express the God who had revealed himself. Consider then that rather than Aristotle hijacking Christian theology, modern philosopher/theologians are brushing God’s revelation of himself under the rug and using Aristotle as their scapegoat. It is apparent to me that open theists who claim that the traditional view is too complicated and contradictory ought rather to admit that what God knows and how he knows, is not a problem with a theological idea but rather a problem with the limitations of human reason, and in this case, perhaps particularly with their own. Good theology is concerned with expressing the God revealed through critical interpretation of his self-disclosure. Psudo-theology applies ideas to God thus creating him in our image, using reason as the canon for acknowledging and determining orthodoxy. After the dismembering process, it is a wonder that it is still called revelation at all – the unaided philosopher could have told us as much. In the attempt to humanize God, it is no coincidence that the proof-texting of open theists depends largely on the anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the mythic narratives to make their case. While even in these writings, God is revealed as one who knows future events is denied adequate expression. This suggests a theological injustice driven by a philosophical agenda where when faced with two ideas in a text, where God is described anthropomorphically, the God who knows the future is blotted out. Christians, in the study of God, need to live in the integrity that we are called, not simply out of reverence for God but because theology ceases to be theology when we read the texts while shutting our eyes when we come across an idea that we cannot understand or dislike. It is another way of basically saying, “I am not going to take this seriously.” If God knows the future, it testifies to his transcendence and our limitation, not necessarily to a defeater of the Biblical idea. Why should we be able to know what God knows? Indeed, if it could be known, we would not be considering the God of the Bible.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 02:02:28 +0000