Storms Tough Topics

Biblical Answers to 25 Challenging Questions
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3496-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Will there be sex in heaven? Are miraculous gifts for today? Does God ever change His mind? Such difficult questions often intrigue us, readily confuse us, and sometimes disturb us. Drawing on nearly 40 years of teaching and ministry experience, pastor-scholar Sam Storms answers 25 challenging questions Christians are often too afraid to ask, addressing thorny issues ranging from the eternal destiny of infants to the roles of demons and angels. The robust, thoughtful answers provided in this book offer a helpful alternative to relying on simplistic explanations, and will encourage you in the search for truth and clarity on such tough topics.

Sam Storms (PhD, University of Texas at Dallas) is the founder and president of Enjoying God Ministries and serves on the council of the Gospel Coalition. Sam served as visiting associate professor of theology at Wheaton College and is a past president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is the author or editor of 37 books and blogs regularly at SamStorms.org. Sam and his wife, Ann, are the parents of two daughters and grandparents of four.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Storms, Sam

Leseproben

2

What Is Open Theism?

Has it ever occurred to you that nothing ever occurs to God? You may want to take a moment and reflect on that question. It reminds us that nothing takes God by surprise. Nothing suddenly occurs to him that he did not already know. Nothing takes place that he has not already planned. Nothing catches him off guard. At no time does some unforeseen event happen, such that God (figuratively speaking, of course) slaps himself upside the head and exclaims, “Wow, I never saw that coming!”

However, in recent years there has appeared a radical departure from this understanding of God that denies his exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events. According to what is commonly called the openness of God theory or open theism, God does not, indeed cannot, know with absolute certainty what will be the free choices of men or women. Although there are numerous components in this new view of God, its fundamental principles are as follows.

Components of Open Theism

First, proponents of the openness doctrine believe that the classical or traditional view of God in which he is portrayed as knowing all future events is derived not from Scripture but from Greek philosophical concepts that corrupted Christian theology in the first few centuries of the church’s existence. They also reject both the classical doctrine of divine immutability and divine timelessness, insisting that these, too, reflect more the emphasis of Greek philosophy than Scripture.

Second, according to open theism God does not know in advance everything humans will do. He knows human decisions only as they occur. He learns from what happens. God’s experience of the world is “open” in the sense that he becomes aware of developments in the world and responds to them as they unfold. He is “open” to new stimuli and new experiences. God is thus a risk taker, for he neither knows nor controls the decisions and actions of humans.1

Third, proponents of this doctrine insist this “open” view of God is the only way that he can engage in a both meaningful and loving interpersonal relationship with his creatures. For this sort of interaction to occur, the future must be utterly contingent (nonfixed, uncertain) both for God and for mankind. Open theists contend that if God knows the future in exhaustive detail, the future is certain. And if the future is certain, there can be no genuine, loving, caring involvement of God with us in a give-and-take relationship in which we respond to God, God responds to us, and so on.

Fourth, some have charged these men with embracing process theology (a charge that they would strongly deny). According to process theology, God is himself in process even as humans are. God is growing and developing and changing and adapting and becoming something he didn’t used to be. God is learning new things every moment, of which he was ignorant before. God is constantly being surprised and is always discovering things heretofore unknown.

In other words, the best that God can do with the future is guess at what might happen based on his wisdom and his vast experience of the past and what he has gleaned from his interaction with human nature and human behavior. God is like a chess grandmaster who is playing against novices. His understanding of the game and the possible moves enables him to win, but the outcome is not absolutely certain. According to this view, God is constantly changing his plans as well as his mind, is reevaluating his purposes, is altering his intentions, is always and ever adapting to human decisions that he could not foresee or anticipate. Openness advocates would deny that they are process theologians, but it is hard to see the difference. They would contend that, since they believe God’s moral character (love, goodness, mercy, grace, holiness, etc.) never changes, they are in a different category from process thinkers.

Fifth, although all proponents of the openness theory are Arminians when it comes to the doctrines of election and salvation, they deviate significantly from the classical Arminian concept of God. James Arminius himself, as well as John Wesley and others who have stood in that tradition, have always affirmed divine knowledge of the future.2

Sixth, while explicitly denying exhaustive divine foreknowledge, the openness theorists continue to affirm divine omniscience. Their argument goes like this: To say that God is omniscient is to say he knows all “things,” that is, God knows whatever can be known. But since the future has not yet happened, nothing in it is a “thing” that might be a proper object of knowledge. Therefore, the fact that God does not know the future does not mean he isn’t omniscient, because the future is, by definition, unknowable (because uncertain). Or again, “the reason God does not know the future is because it is not yet there to be known. . . . It is less like a rug that is unrolled as time goes by than it is like a rug that is being woven.”3 This is how they affirm divine omniscience (and thus retain the appearance of orthodoxy) while denying that God has foreknowledge. Clark Pinnock puts it this way:

The future does not yet exist and therefore cannot be infallibly anticipated, even by God. Future decisions cannot in every way be foreknown, because they have not yet been made. God knows everything that can be known [and hence is “omniscient,” so he says]—but God’s foreknowledge does not include the undecided.4

The reason open theists deny that the future (or events and decisions in it) is a “thing” that can be known is traceable to two arguments. First, openness theorists deny that God is timeless, that he in some way transcends the events and processes of temporal reality and thus is able to see all events in one eternal “now.” They argue, on the other hand, that God is both present in and a part of time and that he therefore sees and knows events only as they occur. Second, they deny foreknowledge because it requires foreordination. That is to say, God knows the future precisely because he has foreordained what will occur in it. But this they deny, for if future events are foreordained, they are certain to occur, and if they are certain to occur, man has lost his freedom. For man to be truly free, the future must be truly “open.”5

The evidence open theists cite in defense of their view is primarily twofold. They appeal to biblical statements that appear to affirm in one way or another that God is responsive to what happens in the world, that such events evoke emotions in him such as grief, sorrow, regret, anger, surprise, and even a change in his attitude, intentions, or plans (see, e.g., Gen. 6:5–7; 22:12; Jer. 26:2–3; Ezek. 12:1–3).

They also appeal to statements that assert human freedom. If God knows what I am going to do, it is certain that I will do it and not something else. If I were to do otherwise, then God’s knowledge would be in error. Thus if God has infallible knowledge of all my future decisions, I am not truly free for all my future actions must already be certain to occur. But if I am truly free, nothing about my future is certain, for there is always the possibility that I will choose to do other than what I planned or what one might expect. Therefore, God cannot know what my future choices will be, since I don’t know what they will be. Even though I might “intend” or “plan” to do something, the possibility always exists that I will change my mind and choose another option. Thus God does not, indeed cannot, know the future.

There may yet be two additional reasons for the emergence of this view of God, both of which openness proponents would no doubt deny. First, the majority of those who advocate open theism are professional philosophers. Why is this significant? Because, as Donald Bloesch has pointed out, “the predilection of philosophy is to overcome the polarities and ambiguities of life by arriving at a synthesis that perfects and crowns human reasoning. It cannot tolerate anything that defies rational comprehension, for this is to acknowledge a surd in human existence.”6 The mystery of compatibilism, according to which exhaustive divine foreknowledge (and therefore certainty) of the future and genuine human freedom coexist, is simply unacceptable to many philosophers.

Others have suggested that the theory is driven in some measure by a desire to maintain human autonomy in the presence of a sovereign God. Their solution is to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, God’s sovereignty so that it no longer poses a threat to unfettered human liberty. Open theists simply cannot conceive how God can know the future and exercise providential control over it even while humans retain moral responsibility for their actions (the doctrine known as compatibilism). Stephen Charnock would ask this question of the openness folk: “But what if the foreknowledge of God, and the liberty of the will, cannot be fully reconciled by man? Shall we therefore deny a...