Hellenistic or Hebrew? Open theism and reformed theological method

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2002 by Horton, Michael S

The third corollary is the distinction between the eternal decree and its temporal (redemptive-historical) execution. 23 This is why Calvin, like other Reformers, insisted we were not to look for our election in the "naked God" (i.e. his hidden decree), but in Christ (i.e. the revealed promise of the gospel in the covenant of grace embraced by faith). Probing God's secret predestination is like entering a "labyrinth" from which we will never escape. 24 Those who seek God out in his hidden decree will eventually come to believe in a god of arbitrary freedom (the potentia Dei absoluta), rather than the God in whom they can trust because they have his revealed promise conferred and sealed in his ordinary ministry (the potentia Dei ordinates).

Calvin attacked the "absolute power of God" asserted by late medieval accounts of predestination precisely because they substituted speculation for concentration on God's ordained power (i.e. the covenantal promise revealed). This emphasis on the absolute freedom of God, Calvin warned, would make us little more than balls that God juggles in the air. 25 "Omnicausality" is explicitly rejected by Calvin. 26 The truth of God's eternal decree (both in providence and election) is clearly revealed in Scripture and is comforting to believers in their trials. "Yet his wonderful method of governing the universe is rightly called an abyss, because while it is hidden from us, we ought reverently to adore it."27 "Meanwhile, nevertheless, a godly man will not overlook the secondary causes."28

As a result of these distinctions, covenant theology therefore focuses on the dynamic outworking of God's redemptive plan in concrete history, taking very seriously the twists and turns in the road-including God's responses to human beings. But it does so without denying the clear biblical witness to the fact that God transcends these historical relationships. Transcendence and immanence are not antithetical categories for us, compelling us to choose one over the other. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, Kant nor Hegel, Kierkegaard nor Cobb gives us a biblical model for either transcendence or immanence.

The final corollary we will consider is the "archetypal-ectypal" distinction, the epistemological corollary of the ontological Creator-creature distinction. Although it had been a category in medieval system, Protestant dogmatics gave particular attention to this distinction and made it essential to their method. Just as God is not merely greater in degree ("supreme being"), but in a class by himself ("life in himself," John 5:26), his knowledge of himself and everything else is not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from that of creatures. Theologians as diverse as Carl Henry and Langdon Gilkey have had trouble accepting this, claiming that it leads to irrationalism to say that God's knowledge of an object and our knowledge of an object are never identical at any point.29 And yet affirmation of this distinction is essential if we are to maintain with Scripture that no one has ever known the mind of the Lord (Rom 11:34, where the context is predestination), that his thoughts are far above our thoughts (Isa 55:8), and that he is "above" and we are "below" (Eccl 5:2)-if, in other words, we are to truly affirm the Creator-creature distinction.