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If these texts are not hermeneutically significant, then what do they mean? Williams never says what "God changed his mind" means. I claimed such texts were "reality-depicting" metaphors. Williams asks why I don't then take the metaphors of divine body parts literally as well. Well, the "arm of the Lord" is a metaphor for God's ability to deliver. God as the "husband of Israel" is a metaphor of the type of relationship Yahweh has with Israel. God "repenting" is a metaphor for God taking a different course of action from the one previously declared. Metaphors have meaning. What does Williams think grieving, repenting, and responding mean when applied to God? In 1 Samuel 13:13 God declares there would have been no "line of David" had King Saul followed the Lord. Read straightfowardly, this seems clearly to imply an open future, dependent to some degree on human choices in the sphere of freedom that God has granted to his creatures.
Because Williams understands Isaiah to teach exhaustive foreknowledge of future contingent events, he believes that it is impossible for God to grieve, repent, or respond.2 Now I agree that if Isaiah taught exhaustive foreknowledge it would render such actions impossible, but I believe that Isaiah is saying God declares the future and brings it about—unlike the other gods—because of Yahweh's power over creation, not because of some timeless knowledge. In my view, there are two kinds of scriptural texts of importance here. First, numerous texts portray God as declaring and/or predetermining certain future events. Second, numerous texts portray God as changing his mind, grieving, and not knowing certain de tails of the future. Williams believes the former cancel out the latter. That is, the repenting, grieving texts do not reveal God as God truly is but only as he appears to us. The approach of the openness of God view is to develop an understanding of God that does justice to both sets of texts, forming a coherent theological model.3
The third issue raised by Williams is God's relationship to time. His statements about this, however, are extremely difficult to decipher. What are we to make, for example, of the talk about God's spending an "infinite number of half-hours" in any given half-hour of time? And what conclusions are we supposed to draw from all this, other than that we are free to dismiss any biblical statements about God we don't like as "accommodation"? Most likely, this sort of talk is Williams's way of getting at the traditional doctrine of divine timelessness—at least, so I shall assume. In The God Who Risks I cited several classical studies of God and time by biblical scholars who conclude that the biblical writers did not understand God to be timeless. Moreover, I cited numerous theological and philosophical studies by esteemed Christian scholars such as Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, and William Hasker who reject divine timelessness. Indeed, the past 40 years of scholarship has witnessed a huge debate on timelessness, so I am puzzled why Williams thinks I'm saying something new. Williams expresses his "worry" over my "lack of any embarrassment" regarding this understanding of God. I wonder if Nicholas Wolterstorff feels embarrassed? It seems not, since he has recently said, "If God really responds, then God is not metaphysically immutable; and if not metaphysically immutable, then not [timeless]."4 Williams is within his rights to believe God never responds to our actions and prayers, but I see no compelling reason why those of us who do should be embarrassed to affirm what we believe the Bible teaches.
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