The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. - book reviews

Christian Century, May 3, 1995 by Gabriel Fackre

By Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger. InterVarsity, 202 pp., $14.99 paperback.

EVANGELICAL SOUL-SEARCHING is much abroad in the land. David Wells finds "no place for truth" in a self-absorbed piety obeisant to cultural trends. Carl Henry indicts modem evangelicalism for its loss of momentum and compromises. Mark Noll exposes the scandal of the evangelical mind." Clark Pinnock and colleagues join the chorus of self-criticism. But in contrast to many current calls to close ranks against the seductions of modern culture, these evangelicals plead for more porous borders, accent human possibility rather than fragility, and propose an evangelical "megashift" toward the openness of God.

The target of both of these books is a teaching with a long lineage: that God is "self-sufficient, impassible, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, timeless, ineffable and simple." This "classical theism" takes hyper-Calvinist shape among evangelicals, silencing, so these critics contend, scripture's witness to divine relationality and humanity's "libertarian freedom." Richard Rice begins the case in Openness with a survey of biblical passages in which he finds that "God grants human beings a central role in determining the course of history." Scripture witnesses to the "reactivity" of God, the divine changeableness, in response to human overtures or failing's, albeit always from within a love that "never changes." God both repents and relents, contra the "cast-iron molds" of a decretal theology.

The argument is continued in the "historical considerations" of John Sanders which trace the problem to the influence of a tradition shaped by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Philo and runs through the Greek and Latin Fathers to Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas. The Cappadocians introduced an element of relationality into the Trinity, but the Christian doctrine of God became largely "Hellenized." The Reformers, while "revising ecclesiology and soteriology ..., were deeply influenced both by Augustine's thought and by Scotist and Ockhamist tendencies that affirmed an absolute divine sovereignty." Sanders finds the same distant deity in the "two-layered" approach of many conservative evangelicals (Carl Henry, Louis Berkhof, James Packer) who treat the Bible's transcendent God as metaphysical but its references to divine immanence as metaphorical. Tillichian and process thought, while challenging this classical theism, drift toward an impersonal and static deity. However, some current voices, both evangelical (such as Stephen Davis) and mainline (such as Eberhard Jungel), bring trinitarian sociality and responsiveness to the fore.

PINNOCK TAKES up "systematic" matters, juxtaposing a model of God as a "caring parent" to that of an "aloof monarch." The former approach sees God as a social Trinity "involved in history, relating to us and changing in relation to us," while the latter is a creature of philosophical systems that emphasize divine pride and control. According to Pinnock, God "voluntarily limits the exercise of his power," invites the world to respond freely, and suffers on the cross in order to transform hearts by persuasion, not force.

William Hasker returns to philosophical analysis, arguing that Neoplatonic metaphysics has had inordinate influence on Christian theology. It works its wiles in various theories of providence that can be shown to be both biblically dubious and logically incoherent: Augustinian-cum Calvinist determinism, and "simple foreknowledge" err on the side of fixity and control. Some alternative approaches, such as process thought, deny God the power to accomplish divine ends. In contrast, "free will theism," which is recommended here, holds that "God governs the world according to general 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."

David Basinger concludes Openness by pursuing practical implications. He suggests that in petitionary prayer God gives humans a role in the outcome of events, refraining from "doing all he would like to do for us until we personally request such assistance." On matters of human suffering, the "open" view of God has affinities with process theology, including the shared belief that much suffering is gratuitous. But differences also are cited. For example, the open view believes that God may allow evil "in order to bring about some greater good."

Unbounded Love grew out of a 1990 article in Christianity Today by Robert Brow declaring a "megashift" in evangelical sensibility along the lines developed in The, Openness of God. Pinnock joins Brow in exploring four standard doctrines--God, sin, salvation, faith--expounding each with variations on the theme of unbounded love: "creative love," "caring love," "freeing love, "conversational love." The rubric is "creative love theism" and the refrain is "family," both figures taken from Brow's original article.