Of Human Freedom and the Sovereignty of God

How would you evaluate the basic tenets of Open Theism?

Wednesday, Jun. 24, 2009 Posted: 2:50:53PM HKT

Theologians throughout the centuries have wrestled with the question concerning the sovereignty of God and the free will of human beings.

Profound theological tomes have been written on the subject in conversation with Scripture and the doctrinal tradition of the Church. Most theologians would maintain that both divine sovereignty and human freedom must be held if Christians are to be faithful to Scripture, although there are sharp disagreements on how these two assertions may be reconciled.

In 1994, Richard Rice, John Sanders, Clark Pinnock, Hasker and David Basinger published a volume of essays with the title, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. As the sub-title of the book suggests, these essays were written to call to question the traditional conception of God, particularly His sovereignty and foreknowledge in relation to human freedom.

This book was followed by many others: The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (John Sanders); Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Clark Pinnock); and God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Gregory Boyd). The view propounded by these authors, most of whom are evangelical theologians, is popularly named “Open Theism”.

The main tenets of open theism are neatly summarised in David Basinger’s essay in The Openness of God. The main concern of open theism, it must be pointed out, is how the sovereignty of God and human freedom and the relationship between the two must be understood.

Dissatisfied with the Augustinian and Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty and human freedom (usually designated as the compatibilist view of freedom), open theists sought to present a version of the libertinerian view of human freedom. God, according to the open theists, has in His sovereignty created human beings with freedom over which He cannot exercise complete control. God prices human freedom so highly that He does not normally override it, even if He anticipates that it will produce undesirable results.

Open theists reject the traditional doctrine of the immutability of God, and maintain that God is deeply affected by what happens in human lives. In addition, because human freedom makes human actions unpredictable, God does not possess an exhaustive knowledge of the future. Thus although God may sometimes predict with some degree of accuracy what human beings will do in their freedom, He is not omniscient in that He does not really know the future, lacking in foreknowledge of human actions. Thus, together with His creatures, God faces an uncertain future.

John Sanders, a representative voice of open theism, has put this point across clearly: “Since God does not necessarily know exactly what will happen in the future, it is always possible that even that which God in His unparalleled wisdom believes to be the best course of action at any given time may not produce the anticipated results in the long run.”

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Dr Roland Chia
Christian Post Guest Contributor