Perhaps the first major evangelical book regarding the teaching now being developed under the title of “Openness” was by Richard Rice: God’s Foreknowledge and Man’s Free Will. This book was published in 1980 under a different title.
The Thesis of Opennes is that God maintains a genuine, authentic relationship between Himself and mankind. This means that there is a real “risk” involved for God creating mankind and a limitation imposed on God because of the creation of mankind. When God committed to creating mankind, He entered into a possibility that He would not get what He wanted in any way. Mankind is a totally “free” creature and God is only able to deal with the effects of our decisions in order for a real, genuine relationship to exist.
Proponents of Openness see other belief systems as faulty in being genuine and able to sustain a vibrancy between God and His creation. If God has predestined everything, as the Calvinists say, there is no real freedom of man to act. Conversely, if God knows everything ahead of time, as the Arminian say, there is no real interaction between God and man.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
It is clear that those who ascribe to Openness do not believe God is in control of all the details of the universe. Gregory Boyd: “There is no single, all-determinative divine will that coercively steers all things. . .” (God At War, 20). Boyd: “. . . God, for whatever reasons, designed the cosmos such that he does not necessarily always get his way. . .” (God At War, 47). Why? Because, in the divine-human relationship, there must be “genuine give-and-take relations between God and humans such that there is receptivity and a degree of contingency in God” (Sanders, GWR, 12).
WHY DOES OPENNESS THEOLOGY EXIST?
It would seem that there are several real factors that have contributed heavily to the growth of Openness theology and the attempt to reconstruct the character of God.
The first factor is the heavy emphasis of God’s love. The concept that, above all else, God is love resonates strongly with Openness proponents. Richard Rice: “. . . love is the most important quality we attribute to God. . .(The Openness of God, 14). “Love is the essence of the divine reality, the basic source from which all of God’s attributes arise” (Openness, 21).“A new wave of critical reappraisal and competent reconstruction of the doctrine of God is sweeping over the intellectual landscape” (Preface to The Openness of God, 9).
My next entry will continue with more of the factors that have contributed to the spread of Openness theology.
Dan
your article helped me understand the theological definition of the opennes theology. thanks and may the LORD bless you!
Our attempts should not be to “reconstruct the character of God,” but rather to discover the true character of God through the means of general and special revelation.
If Paul’s understanding of the character of God matched that of the Openness proponents, then he would never have responded with the “who are you…?” statements in Rom. 9. Instead, he would have said, “who resists His will? Anyone who chooses to since God has taken this great risk and has made himself vulnerable to us breaking His heart.”