The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God

Rating:
Summary: hon o yonde itta hito wa, 'moron' desu neh....
Review: 'milo kuroshiwa' to tte hito-san, naze hatsuon de 'l' o tsukaimasuka. Nihongo wa, 'l' no hatsuon ga nain desu.
Naze waratte iru no ka na....

Rating:
Summary: no more than a rant against hyper-calvinism few embrace
Review: After reading the essays in this emotionally charged book, the conclusion is it's nothing more than a recoiling reaction against the most extreme, taken-beyond-reasonable-intent form of Calvinism held by a micro-minority which is not really worth all this ultra-arminian/pseudo-processistic fuss in response.
In attempting to rescue the Traditional View of God's Attributes from freezing to death, this uses a blowtorch and melts any semblance of Biblical understanding into a puddle of lukewarm bathwater. At the same time, this response is eminently understandable. When the pendulum is perceived to have swung so far to the right of Bible, it is only human to try and overcorrect. In this case, the pendulum swings so far left as to be Devangelical. Where the Bible makes ample provision for God's Wrath on Jesus-rejectors, the sentimental gospel of this book uses God's Love as not just overarching attribute, but eclipsing any hint of eternal punishment for the willfully obstinate who reject Christ's Love.

Balanced, moderate, Biblical antidote that fairly examines ALL Scripture data to combat hyper-calvinism? See Millard Erickson's WHAT DOES GOD KNOW AND WHEN DOES HE KNOW IT?

Openness is closed with an Open Bible.

Rating:
Summary: Embarrassed for Shoreview, MN
Review: I just finished this book. It was required reading for my study course. In my class review, I gave it a low rating which is what I give it here.

This book just skips over Isaiah section Chapters 41 through 47 and does not address the comparison between the LORD God and the idols Israel worshiped.

Isaiah clearly says God declares the future. There is embarrassment for Shoreview who misunderstands what Scripture is saying about God's knowing for certain what will come to pass.
She quotes it being FUTURE TENSE, yet misses the point that God knows all TENSES: Past, Present, Future equally. Isaiah makes no distinction about God knowing ONLY what He shall do, not what Israel or Gentile nations or individuals shall certainly or certainly not do.

If there is anything Bible College has taught me, it is to read the Bible texts carefully before expounding erroneous ideas about
what Scripture actually says and means.

I grieve for Clark Pinnock and those authors who mislead people with Openness of God. He is open relationally to us with no limits on His divine foreknowledge of all our free futures. We are free to act out the futures He knows for a fact we shall and shall not choose. The future is open to us, but not to the LORD Who declares it before it comes to pass - KJV, NKJV, NASB, NIV.

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Summary: Relational Theology Defended
Review: Pinnock joins four other authors to provide one of the more hotly debated books on the doctrine of God amongst Evangelical Christians. At the root of the vision of deity they designate the "Open God" is their shared conviction that love is God's chief attribute, and all other divine attributes must not undermine the primacy of love.

In order to offer a coherent doctrine of God, essayists address issues of divine transcendence, immanence, power, omniscience, mutability, and passibility. At the core of his proposal is his account of divine loving activity that includes God's responsiveness, generosity, sensitivity, openness, and vulnerability. In fact, Clark Pinnock contends that "love rather than almighty power is the primary perfection of God" (114).

Essayists in The Openness of God argue that no doctrine is more central to the Christian faith than the doctrine of God. Laying out a coherent, livable, biblical doctrine is crucial for the practical and theoretical aspects of theology. Many Christians, however, observe an inconsistency between their beliefs about the nature of God and their religious practice. For example, Christians ask God to act in a certain way when they pray, although their formal theology may suppose that God has predetermined all things. A major factor in assessing the viability of a theological scheme, then, is the piety question: How well does this "live?"

"How can we expect Christians to delight in God or outsiders to seek God if we portray God in biblically flawed, rationally suspect, and existentially repugnant ways?" asks Pinnock (104). In his attempt to avoid rationally suspect hypotheses, Pinnock seeks to offer a coherent doctrine of God, i.e., each divine attribute "should be compatible with one another and with the vision of God as a whole" (101).

The Openness of God authors share the basic conviction that love is the principal theme in Christian theology. Pinnock insists, for instance, that love is the primary perfection of God. Richard Rice, who assumes the task of offering biblical support for the open view advanced in the book, claims that the open view expresses two basic convictions Scripture supports. First, love is the most important quality humans attribute to God. Second, love is more than care and commitment; it also involves sensitivity and responsiveness. Rice further notes that, from a Christian perspective, love is the first and last word in the biblical portrait of God. When one enumerates God's qualities, one must not only include love on the list, but, to be faithful to the Bible, one must put love at the head of that list. A doctrine of God faithful to the Bible must show that all God's characteristics derive from love. Rice concludes: "Love, therefore, is the very essence of the divine nature. Love is what it means to be God" (19).

Pinnock embraces the notion that God is like a loving parent when affirming these hypotheses. In this parental model, God possesses "qualities of love and responsiveness, generosity and sensitivity, openness and vulnerability" (103). God is a person who experiences the world, responds to what happens, relates to humans, and interacts dynamically with creatures.

Essayists reject the classic conception of God described as "an aloof monarch" removed from the world's contingencies, i.e., the entirely transcendent God. They reject the deity who is completely unchangeable, all-determining, irresistible, and does not risk. "The Christian life involves a genuine interaction between God and human beings," Pinnock contends. "We respond to God's gracious initiatives and God responds to our responses . . . and on it goes" (7).

Essayists also deny divine foreordination, divine foreknowledge of free creaturely actions, and the hypothesis that either divine foreknowledge or unilateral determination are compatible with creaturely freedom. God knows all things that can be known, but divine omniscience does not mean that God possesses exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events. Total knowledge of the future would imply that future events are fixed. "If choices are real and freedom significant, future decisions cannot be exhaustively known," Pinnock explains (123).

Thomas Jay Oord

Rating:
Summary: If You Want To Understand Openness, Start Here
Review: There's obviously plenty of reviews that either think Open Theism is God's greatest gift or it's worst heresy. Which of those is closer to the truth is sometimes hard to say. At the end of the day, I think that the overblown rhetoric tends to keep people on both sides from recognizing the helpful and problematic features of Open Theism. And there certainly are both of those elements in this movement. While some evangelicam modernists desperately cling to the Enlightenment and classical theism, I agree with Open Theists that we need a more biblically centered doctrine of God that takes into accound the whole biblical narrative, including those aspects of the narrative which portray God as relational, resposive and communicative.

However, I also am left thinking that there are ways for us to have all these things without reverting to a full-fledged Openess perspective. A good place to start is with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the relationality that is inherent in the communion of love which is the trinitarian life of God. Open Theism, however doesn't seem to start there. Rather, they start with libertarian freedom and build their doctrine of God around it. This, I think reeks of voluntarism and possibly even Enlightenment, and particularly American notions of freedom. The gospel, I am convinced, does not speak of freedom as the ability to do whatever I please. Rather the freedom of the gospel is having my desires rightly ordered toward God, living in communion with him and others. This is freedom, not simply having the ability to be our own tyrants.

On the whole, in regard to this volume, I would encourage the readers to neither get ticked off or to simply jump on the bandwagon here. There are important shortcomings in Open Theism, but there is also important lessons and theological creativity that have much to teach us. We must be discerning readers as we seek to rightly understand the God we serve.

For begining to study Open Theism, I can think of no better introduction than this book, which surveys Open Theist arguments from the Bible, Church History, Theology, Philosophy and Christian living. There are numerous problems with some of the chapters, particularly some glaring oversights in the biblical and philosophical chapters, but there is also much to learn from the ways in which the chapters on theology and Christian living have brought to light important relational elements of the gospel portrait of God. This is definately a mixed bag, and it requires a discerning reader.

Rating:
Summary: Shoreview strong on Old, weak on New Testament?
Review: This is one of the most disturbing books I have recently read.
I've tried to track with Open Theism, but it doesn't square with Scripture.
All the reviews so far are either to the point, or off track like Ms. Shoreview.Is what she writes considered book reviewing?

I don't find this book interacting with the John 13 passage at all. Notice Laika or whomever from Shoreview MN doesn't even address Jesus' exhaustive Prescience in her comments. She doesn't interact with this book at all or explain her position?

The Isaiah passage is clear: God knows the Future for a Fact in its entirety. Laika needs to read the entire context from Isaiah 40 - 48, where the LORD contrasts Himself to ignorant idols which do not know the future. It's not merely what God Himself chooses to do in the future (which obviously involves countless free human actions that He must know as well, or else how could He decide what He will do in relations with free beings? Does Laika imagine God operates/declares the future in a vacuum??).
God declares the future,period. His own. Ours. People's. Nations.
Prophecy. Sovereign Prescience. That's the whole point. That's what makes God God and not a useless idol.

The sad feeling I come away with from this book is idolatry. Those who embrace what Pinnock and others are peddling are making the same tragic error Israel did in Isaiah 40-48. May the words of Isaiah and Jesus (John 13) bring reclamation to wayward openism disciples. That's my prayer.

In all honesty, looks like Edina is right about John 13. And Laika from Shoreview has not addressed that in her latest post.
Why?

I'm sorry I rated this too highly at 1 star. But at least credit is given for the attempt at persuasiveness, operative word being attempt. It just fails to persuade.