Gregory Boyd, Open Theism
January 13th, 2010Boyd made a few comments on Open Theism in a recent blog post.
…if it’s logically impossible for God to create a world in which the future is partly open, then those biblical authors who depict God as speaking and thinking about the future in terms of what might and might not come to pass (e.g. Ex. 13:17) or as changing his mind (e.g. Ex. 32:10-14) or as experiencing surprise and disappointment (Jer 3:7, 19; Isa 5:1-5) must also be asserting a logical contradiction, even if we interpret these depictions as “mere” anthropomorphisms. (Even anthropomorphisms must be logically coherent.) It is certainly difficult to see what it is about these depictions that’s logically contradictory, but not as difficult as it is to explain how passages presumably inspired by God could contain such impossible pictures of him in the first place.
If the above argument is valid, then the assumption that an omniscient God must by definition know the future as eternally and exhaustively settled is demonstrably false. God could create a world with an open future if he wanted to. The unique claim of Open Theism is that, not only is this kind of world possible, but scripture, experience and sound philosophy give us compelling reasons to think that, as a matter of fact, this is precisely the kind of world God created.
I don’t know much about open theism, but the little I have read intrigues me.
Looks like I have to sic Bill to straighten Mike out. I have to send him a copy of this blog on his cell phone.
You might have better luck with the pony express.
Mike, enjoyed reading your article in the latest Remnant. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story has always puzzled me. He understood so much, yet compromised to “wrest the steering wheel from the ‘mad driver’” Hitler. I’m not sure what I would have done in his situation though.
I wish he would have lived. He was never in a position to say why he did what he did. The Cost of Discipleship is a moving book, and his life course is so hard to understand once you have read it.