Saturday, June 18, 2011

Defending the Orthodoxy of Open Theism

This is an idea that occurred to me recently in the context of discussion about human freedom.  The idea might not be worth much of anything, but I think its at least worth floating here.  Open Theism is the theological claim that God does not know with certainty every even that will happen in the future because the future is “open” and might “change.”  Frequently this is lambasted by evangelical theologians as being an unorthodox view of God.  For instance, the polar opposite of Open Theism, the Reformed theological tradition, makes the claim that God knows with certainty every future event.  What is worth asking, however, is how God has this knowledge in Reformed theology, and the answer is that it is because Reformed theology is deterministic- in Reformed theology God knows every future event because God will personally bring about or orchestrate every future event.  With that in mind, I think we can construct two arguments for comparison:
Reformed Argument:
  1. God knows with certainty every event in the future that God will personally bring about or orchestrate.
  2. God will personally bring about or orchestrate all future events.
  3. Therefore, God knows with certainty all future events.
Open Theist Argument:
  1. God knows with certainty every event in the future that God will personally bring about or orchestrate.
  2. [Human freedom entails that] God will not personally bring about or orchestrate at least some future events.
  3. Therefore, at least some future events are not known by God with certainty.
The first thing we can notice is that both arguments have the same first premise.  The second thing we can notice is that the second premise forms the basis for the difference between the two arguments, with both conclusions following from the two premises.  So in evaluating these arguments, the real question is about the second premise of each.  Will God personally bring about or orchestrate all future events?  What I think this means is that the argument over Open Theism is not an argument about God’s omniscience but one about human freedom.  In other words, since both arguments have the same first premise, the question about the orthodoxy of Open Theism is actually a question about the orthodoxy of the second premise of the Open Theist argument- if “free-will” is considered an “orthodox” doctrine, then Open Theism is within the orthodox tradition, as “non-traditional” as its conclusion may seem.  Historically, it seems very apparent to me that free will is within the traditions of orthodoxy.  So it seems to me Open Theism can be considered an orthodox theological view.  What do others think?

NB:  This post is not a declaration that I am an open theist.  It is merely a thought experiment about whether or not open theism should be considered an orthodox "option" in theology.

6 comments:

  1. At the end of your post you said "Historically, it seems very apparent to me that free will is within the traditions of orthodoxy". Could you possibly give two or three examples where free will was clearly accepted within the first 1000 years of the church?

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    1. If your Calvinist opinion is right and free-will is not orthodox, then there's no point in arguing about free-will like you Calvinists endlessly insist on doing. If there's not free-will and we're just puppets, then you believe there is no free-will because that's what the puppet-master makes you believe and I believe there is free-will because that's what the puppet-master makes me believe. In fact, since we are just puppets, we don't really believe anything. Both our posts were written by the puppet-master; he's arguing with himself. Therefore, the whole doctrine of "no free-will" is a doctrine only a total moron could believe--even if its true, the only way you could believe it is if the puppet-master deemed to make you a total moron.

      --rey

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  2. Thanks for the comment, Antonio! To answer your question, yes, many examples can be given. Origen makes free-will a very significant part of his theology. I think we could argue for Athanasius and Justin Martyr being advocates of free will. Augustine's earlier works argue for a robust understanding of free-will. He later changes his mind in his attempt to solve the Pelagian controversy, but this shift doesn't really catch on till Luther and Calvin 1000 years later. Both Catholic and E. Orthodox theology still emphasize free will as a significant part of their belief system. "Reformed" Protestantism is really the only branch of Christianity that actively denies free will (or redefines it along "compatibalist" terms).

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  3. Alex,
    You seem to be defining open theism in a similar way to how Grey Boyd defines it, where future events are effectively divided into two categories: those which are fixed (that God causes and therefore knows about) and those that are open (i.e. dependent on free choices, and therefore outside of God's control, and outside of the totality of what God can logically 'know').

    The issue I have with this is that I struggle to see how these two categories can exist seperately in any meaningful way. For example, lets say that God eternally knew that he would call Moses from the burning bush. Before that event can take place, however, there were a number of prior events, which relied on free will. What if at some point in Moses' life, he had been attacked and killed by a criminal? What if his mother had chosen to take him somewhere else? etc. Basically, what I'm trying to say that future 'fixed' events rely on prior 'open' events to happen. I struggle to see how God can know about these fixed events without knowing about the open ones too, in which case I wonder whether they can be truly open. Either God's knowledge of the future dissolves into very general intentional statements, with malleable details (i.e. 'I will raise up a leader to free my people from Egypt), or it remains specific, but requires far more exhaustive knowledge than open theism can allow.

    The above may make no sense, so feel free to ignore it!

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    1. "What if at some point in Moses' life, he had been attacked and killed by a criminal?"

      To stop a criminal from killing someone, God would NOT have to change his will (and thus interfere with free-will). He could simply make a meteor fall on the guy's head, or give him a heart-attack, or make his arm freeze up. You might say "But how would he know before the guy did it if he doesn't have exhaustive knowledge of the future?" A split second before the arm raises the knife, his brain must send an impulse to the arm to make it move. As that impulse is still on its way, God knows it as something in the past/present. No exhaustive foreknowledge required to stop it.

      --rey

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  4. Thanks for commenting, Anton! I am more familiar with Clark Pinnock's presentation of Open Theism than with Greg Boyd's, but I think they say similar things. Your comment makes great sense and you make a very good point that I'm not sure how an Open Theist would answer, to be honest. I will have to think about that more and get back to you.

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