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It is important to appreciate what is at stake here. On the face of it, the thesis that one ought to examine is the claim that God takes risks. On the traditional view, which Sanders wants to revise radically, God is immutable, perfectly knows the future, and, on some standard accounts, foreordains it exhaustively. The questions of God's power and love, eternity and impassibility are all implicated. Sanders wishes to argue that God takes risks. He does not perfectly control the future. He could if he wanted to, but voluntarily enters into a free, loving, reciprocal relationship with his creatures. They, like him, are genuinely free. God has intentions and desires, but he risks their nonrealization. He is genuinely surprised and disappointed, as we learn from the very earliest chapters of Scripture (Genesis 6) and Jeremiah 3:7, for example. But he is infinitely resourceful, guarantees the occurrence of at least some things, and can be entirely trusted to bring the whole story of salvation to a resounding conclusion through the cooperation—or despite the noncooperation—of his creatures.
This is our God, and Sanders's reading of Bethlehem and Calvary follows from this. Despite the subsequent philosophical discussions, the basis for theology is putatively biblical, so Scripture is the first and important port of call. Its language about God repenting, being disappointed, changing his mind and not knowing, must be taken as it stands. We have no right to make it mean something else in light of some other principle for reading the texts. Scripture itself nowhere gives us permission to do so. The project of deterministic theology, to which Sanders opposes his divine risk theology, is driven by a philosophical tradition that has excessively influenced our reading.
On the face of it, we have the issue laid out before us here. And this is no maverick idiosyncrasy within current evangelicalism. While pointing out that differences exist among the theologians concerned, Sanders is participating in a project associated with others, such as Clark Pinnock, which presses for a truly relational theism, a nondeterministic outlook on the relation of God to humans, a relation that must be truly reciprocal and that cannot be so if God controls everything. Those who take different sides in the debate agree on its importance: the way we see God decisively shapes the ethos of our lives, our words, and our worship. We must try to get things right.
If this is what it is all about, then the natural response is a direct theological assessment of the claims. Back we go to those things that occupied Augustine and Pelagius, Calvin and Arminius, Wesley and Barth. True, some of us will also conclude that most of what can be usefully theologically said probably has been said; that renewed exegesis per se will not settle the question; that analytic philosophy will not solve it. Still, we'll join the fray.
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