Clark Pinnock, who coauthored the book entitled: The Openness of God (Intervarsity, 1994), says that evangelical theology is going through a paradigm shift that begins with the doctrine of God and will sweep through how we think and live. At the heart of this revolution is the idea that God is self-limiting for our sakes. Clark argues that God’s self-limiting can be seen through how God is referenced as “changing his mind,” “repenting” and “repenting that He had made man.” Of course this idea creates a more human view of God and does, to Pinnock’s satisfaction, explain how finite words can grasp infinite and give meaning to a real relationship with God. The authors feel that God cannot be infinite and personal at the same time. To deal with us personally, rather than harshly and machanically, God must either be finite or, at least, refrain from employing such infinitude.

However, any good student of church history will quickly cry foul by remembering that the church has always understood and recognized the analogical use of language (i.e. that there are both similalarites and differences when the same word is applied to created and uncreated beings). In Saint Thomas Aquinas’s legendary Summa Theologiae, stated rightly that human words are subject to God, rather than God being subject to human words. Saint Hilary of Pointiers (fourth century) in De Trinitate stated, [if we] “are to discourse of the things of God, let us assume that God has full knowledge of himself, and bow with humble reverence to his words” (1:17).

Human reason and words must adjust themselves to God’s being and not the reverse. In using words that describe God in a univocal sense (i.e. the definition of words is equal and the same for God and man), the authors of the Openness of God actually reinvent a God that becomes one of us with all all our frailty and weaknesses. In the end, He may be good to talk with but helpless in coming to our aid. The Bible states God in His infinitude and yet employs words to help us grasp His range of feeling with words that are themselves finite for our sakes. How else could the infinitude communicate with the finite? Would we really want it any other way?