.
The Openness writers have also failed to take into consideration
the profound implications of the difference between the created
and the uncreated. That is, a word must mean for God, the exact
same thing as it does for a human, forgetting that human words
are subject to God and not God being subject to human words.
That is, we must not think that we can impose our creaturely
limitations onto God who made us as though we had made Him. This
is otherwise known as creating God in your own image. The fact
that we still do not understand the mysteries of the Godhead,
does not mean that we can just impose our own reason and
understanding onto God thinking that He will adjust to our
thoughts of Him. Instead we are called to have the mind of
Christ and adjust our thinking to God, not Him to us. What a
pathetic God He would be if He was restrained by our measly
reasoning. We cannot limit God by what we are able to
understand. In this way the writers deny one aspect of God (His
sovereignty) in favour of another (our human responsibility).
One without the other is God in our own image, for God by nature
is both. Sadly not much can be taken seriously in their writing
for this very reason.
We need to affirm God's infinite power and his sovereign love.
In openness theology, prophecy is reduced to divine wishful
thinking without any real guarantee that what God says is not a
divine mistake in his calculations of future probabilities! It
is also then an "oops theory" as it means that if plan A doesn't
work God needs to turn to plan B and thus this leaves them no
grounds to deal with eschatology that good will win over in the
end. But the "open God" can never guarantee that it will!
This view of God is very far off the awesome, holy, unsurprised
and yet always surprising God that I know and love. I applaud
the authors of this book in their endeavour to make God more
accessible to us in this day and age, but it seems they have
devised a rather user-friendly God instead of just letting God
be God.
It seems to place God in a box of time, in which He is limited
to the past and knows nothing of the future or even in fact the
present where future decisions are constantly being made. If God
does not know the future how are we to understand Romans 8:28,
how can God possibly work out all things for our good if he
cannot know the future or the present and can only make
calculated guesses of the future? The answer is that He can't.
The reasoning goes like this, within the limits set by God, an
individual may choose to do things that are totally opposite of
God's will and purpose. Thus when one person hurts or kills
another, we cannot look for the purposes of God in that event.
That person is morally responsible for the killing or hurting of
the other, but how can God work it out for our good if he
decided to act outside of God's intended purpose. Foreknowledge
is needed, in fact required for the working out for our good.
Hebrews 12:3-11, the teaching of this passage seems to be that
the persecution of Christians is a necessary discipline that God
turns around for our good, teaching us and training us in Christ
for a purpose. Nothing we go through is meaningless or
unredeemed of God unless you disregard foreknowledge and accept
death and pain as a result of the erroneous exercising of
anothers will. Instead (Hebrews 12:5 says of hostility by
sinners) "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the
Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the
Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every Son whom He
recieves. It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with
you as with sons." And for what purpose? (vs.10-11) "[God]
disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. All
discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful;
yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields
the peaceful fruit of righteousness."
God is so supremely in charge of this world that all that
happens too Christians are ordered in such a way that they serve
our good. Tribulation and distress and persecution and famine
and nakedness and peril and sword all work together for the good
of those who love God. So the hope of the believer is not that
we will escape these things but that God will be faithful within
them. "You meant it for evil," Joseph said to his brothers who
had sold him into slavery,"But God meant it for good." In
openness theology, God's knowledge is "dependant upon the
creature." So God cannot possibly know the good or bad decisions
of the people He creates until He creates these people and they
in turn create their decisions. This does not seem all that open
when compared with the mainstream Christian belief that "In
God's sight all things are open and manifest, his knowledge is
infinite, infallible, and independent of the creature, so as
nothing is to Him contingent, or uncertain."
The first statement limits God and makes a more "open" reality
for man. The second statement makes God limitless and yet still
leaves man with a free will with a moral obligation to God and
to his fellow man. The first is primarily about us, the second
is primarily about God.
It seems that the openness of God is an attempt to humanise God
and deify man. The idea that man can ever be free of God and His
will at work in the world is an idea that is not supported by
either history or scripture. Yes man has a free-will, but it is
not free of ultimate accountability to God. Nothing can separate
us or give us autonomy from the love of God which is expressed
in Christ Jesus, not even an idea that God is guessing at the
future as much as we are. God's foreknowledge of the future is
an intrinsic part of his glory. We seek guidance from God
precisely because we believe He has a firm grasp on the future.
We don't pray to change God's mind, we pray to gain His mind.
Prayer and meditation is being attuned to God not trying to help
Him see things our way!
In Isaiah 41:22-23 God challenges the other false idols of the
age by saying,"Announce to us what is coming; declare the things
that are going to come afterward, that we may know that you are
gods." In this verse God is equating His ability to know the
future with His divinity and the difference between false idols
and demons and Himself. Satan is a created being as we are and
knows neither the future nor the present decisions being made.
Why would we want to bring God down to Satan's level unless it
was to edify ourselves?
Isaiah 46:9-10 "Remember the former things long past, for I am
God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like
me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times
things which have not been done, saying, "My purpose will be
established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure."
Now the argument could be made that God knows His purposes but
does not know the purposes of man or demons. But this assumes
that there are two classes of future events, those that God
predestines and foreknows and those that He cannot know are
coming, those that arise from human and demonic choice. But if
this were true then why does Isaiah not separate what God is
planning to do and what man or demon will choose to do.Virtually
all of God's judgements and deliverance's involve choices that
humans would make as instruments of God's plan, see the examples
above regarding Peter and Judas.
This is also where the first chapter of Matthew comes into play.
The genealogy of Christ is proof that God has foreordained the
birth of Christ and is directly involved in every aspect of it
throughout all the world and every generation. One wrong choice
in any of these generations and Jesus could never have fulfilled
the prophecies of the Old Testament. Even the prophecies of the
Old Testament show God's knowledge and foresight to be
conclusive.
Within God's plan there is still free-will and moral
accountability. Jesus' absolute knowledge that Peter would deny
Him, how often he would do it, where he would do it and that he
would repent never removes Peter's moral responsibility in the
least, which is made plain by the fact that Peter weeps bitterly
WHEN he remembers the words of Jesus' prediction. Peter didn't
say,"Well you predicted this sin, so it had to take place, and
so it can't have been an act of my free will, so I am not
responsible for it!!" Instead he wept bitterly. He was guilty
and he knew it. Jesus was glorious in the prediction, and Peter
was guilty. This is why Jesus said before in John 13:19, "I am
telling you before it comes to pass, so that when it does occur,
you may believe that I am." This was His glory, and therefore a
denial of Christ's foreknowledge would also be a denial of His
deity.
The other belief held in the openness of God is that God did not
foreknow the fall of man, or of angels and so could not know the
great things which would coincide as a result of these events,
such as His sending His son to die for the sins of the world.
Neither did God know that Jesus' incarnation, life, death,
resurrection and ascension of Christ, nevermind the meticulous
four thousand years before Christ came in which the world's
stage was arranged in preparation for His coming. Neither would
God foreknow Christ's second coming and the end of the age to be
able to allow John to write down the Revelation for God's chosen
people.
This cannot be chance, God knew it all along. God must have
foreknown the fall of Adam and it's terrible moral effect on
mankind. Paul says,"[God] has saved us and called us with a holy
calling, not according to our works, but according to His own
purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all
eternity." When you add this to the teaching of Paul in
Ephesians 1:4-6, we can see that God's glory is linked to His
foreknowledge and His deity. "[God] chose us in [Christ] before
the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless
before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons
through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention
of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace."
It is of course ironic that the desire of openness theology is
to have a God who can relate to us in time and space and have
the same limitations as we do. Indeed, if all we knew about God
was what he had revealed of himself to Moses and the prophets,
we would be astonished by the very suggestion that the
transcendent God that could not be looked upon had somehow taken
human form and begun to live among us. According to the
traditional Christian understanding of God, it is precisely in
the person of Christ that the impassible, immutable, eternal God
becomes passable, mutable, and temporal. We do not need to
invent an 'open' conception of the divine nature in order to
marvel at the "folly" of a risk taking, passible God; all we
need to do is to contemplate Christ crucified.
So if God does not know our future, or our present (for that is
where we actively bring our unknown choices from
conceptualisation into the past) or what decisions we or demons
make, He is actually very limited indeed. He is in effect
confined to the past, His own plans and musings and calculation
of the probability of future events. This leaves God in a
somewhat dire state. I would almost feel sorry for a God like
that. Would He inspire awe and entice me to worship Him? I doubt
it.
So how much does that leave to God? What percentage of the world
and the future does God really know. If we were to talk of
percentages, how much does that leave to God, 30%? This is the
problem for any person who believes that God is limited to time.
So the problem, then, is that God is cut out of the future
entirely and only has what is old to work with, as one man said,
all He has is fossils. It would be as foolish as us studying
dinosaur bones to try and discover the future of our world. So
He is confined to possibilities and probabilities, but He
doesn't know actualities nor future certainties.
I do not think that that is a God I would like to love and
serve.To do that would be to love only 30% of Him!.
"Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays."
Kierkegaard
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