Christian love and academic dialogue: A reply to Bruce Ware

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2002 by Boyd, Gregory A

I enjoy healthy dialogue and robust scholarly debate. But try as I might, I cannot imagine this essay fitting into this category. Among other things, the trademark of academic dialogue is a willingness to sympathetically get on the inside of your "opponent's" position, understand it from the inside, and critique it in its strongest possible form. Ware's essay consistently gave openness views their worst possible (and often inaccurate) spin, and his critique rarely engaged seriously with ways openness proponents have already responded to the very criticisms he was raising. Consider, much of what I have written in this essay (and I would wager, much of what is in Sanders's and Pinnock's essays) has been written before-and Ware has read it. He undoubtedly finds our responses implausible, as he undoubtedly finds this one. But at least we should be engaged in what we perceive to be our strongest arguments.

Casting a position in its weakest possible form and using alarmist and inflammatory language is not the way to deepen understanding and to further academic and Christian dialogue. But then again, it does not seem that deepening understanding and furthering dialogue was what Ware had in mind in presenting this paper to the ETS. Indeed, its express purpose was to help bring an end to dialogue within the ETS with openness proponents. In short, it was, it seems, a political work. And hence, the objective was not understanding and dialogue: the objective was to win.

Understood with this objective, the alarmist and inflammatory language of the essay was quite appropriate and masterfully constructed. Undoubtedly, to people who are uninformed and/or deeply unsympathetic to the openness view, it may have had a significant influence. Whether Ware and those who side with him ever succeed in their political objective or not, it deeply saddens me that a Christian academic society was ever brought to this point.

Where politics reign, love and mutually beneficial dialogue are squelched. But love is the most essential thing that qualifies us as Christians, and mutually beneficial dialogue is the most essential thing that qualifies us as academics.

1 See my Satan and the Problem of Evil (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001) 85-144, where I spend two chapters contrasting the open view with the classical EDF (exhaustively definite foreknowledge) perspective.

2 It is, of course, true that God does gain a providential advantage if he controls everything as opposed to knowing and anticipating possibilities. But defending Calvinism is not the stated concern of Ware's essay. As a matter of fact, however, I would argue that most of the (in my view, misguided) concerns Ware raises against open theism apply as much to classical Arminianism and can only be avoided by embracing Ware's own determinism.

3 While some open theists would disagree with me on this point, I have elsewhere argued that open theism can be construed as a variation of Molinism. See J. Beilby and P. Eddy, Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001) 144-48, as well as "Neo-Molinism and the Infinite Intelligence of God" (paper presented at the ETS annual meeting, Nov. 2001). In both systems, God knows the truth value of all future-tense statements, including counterfactuals of free acts. The central difference between the two views, I argue, is that the open view distinguishes between "would-counterfactuals" and "might-counterfactuals." While many evangelicals think that the very definition of omniscience rules out all "might-counterfactuals," they actually are logically implied in the affirmation that God knows "would-counterfactuals." The logical antithesis of "agent x would do y in situation z" is not "agent x would not do y in situation z." It is rather, "It is not the case that agent x would do y in situation z" which is logically equivalent to "agent x might not do y in situation z." If "would counterfactuals" have truth value to an omniscient mind, therefore, so must "might counterfactuals." Hence there is no logical reason why an omniscient God could not create a world that includes "might counterfactuals" if he wanted to. The distinct claim of openness theology is that it affirms that this is in fact the kind of world God chose to create.