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I am grateful to the editor for permission to clarify some things in relation to my review of John Sanders, The God Who Risks ["What God Doesn't Know", November/December 1999], to which John Sanders responded in the last issue ["Theological Lawbreaker?", January/February 2000]. As my original review provoked an attack by Alan Padgett in the correspondence columns of the January/February issue both on my review and on this magazine for publishing it, it makes it the more important to address these matters for the readership of BOOKS & CULTURE.

Firstly, if John Sanders thought that my review made his book seem naive, I apologize for having given that impression. Such was not meant to be conveyed, and such was not my reaction to the book. Please forgive me for any carelessness on that front, John. At the same time, I must plead that I am myself less naive than the reader of his response will think. Sanders (to revert to the third-person form) chides me with not being familiar with the work of the "eminent British philosophers" Geach, Lucas, and Swinburne. In the present context, it is in order to confess that in a previous life I was a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at Oriel College in Oxford, where Richard Swinburne is and was to be found, so I am not only familiar with the work but, in Swinburne's case, the man himself.

Sanders's response shows that he much misunderstood the review; I am not interested in apportioning blame for this but if it is a case of mea culpato any degree, let me apologize for that too. In commenting on the three points that are at issue the aim is to remove these misunderstandings.

1. Contributors do not always select their subtitles and sometimes neither own nor disown them, so our disagreement here may be narrowed! Still, Alan Padgett is wrong when he says that I suspected I had caricatured. In relation to Mary, I entirely grant that Sanders has more than one explanation of prophecy from the openness point of view. But how is one to read his account of Mary? In Sanders's response he says that "God knew Mary's heart so thoroughly that God could be quite certain she would comply even though she retained the freedom to refuse God." However, what he says in the book is: "If Mary had declined … then God would have sought other avenues. After all, it is doubtful that there was only one maiden in all of Israel through whom God could work." I took this to be saying that the Annunciation is a case of God forecasting "what he thinks will happen,"1and this seems to me to be the natural reading of Sanders's text. I take it that God's thinking that something will happen is different from God's knowing and being quite certain of something. But on any interpretation, my rendering from Luke was meant to show the problems entailed on Sanders's account for such things as the utterance of Micah and the role of John the Baptist. What he calls "satire" was not meant to demean; it was a non-prosaic way of trying to tease out logical difficulties.

2. Sanders says that I claim that passages on God changing his mind, regretting things, grieving over sin and responding to prayer are not hermeneutically significant and that I base this claim on two grounds. Firstly, I just intuit it. Secondly, passages in the latter prophets should rule out passages in the earlier ones. However, Sanders has misread me here and I shall clarify.

In the review, I repeatedly indicate that I am not issuing an opinion on the issues that are prima facie at stake. More than once, I point out that I do not wish to foreclose certain theological issues—and Alan Padgett's identification of my Calvinism here is extremely wide of the mark, for my personal position on Calvinism never enters into the review. This is not because I dismissed these issues as being ones on which we should be intuitively clear. It is for the exact opposite reason: things can be argued cogently in more ways than one. I say that challenging some traditional beliefs is one thing and that portraying God as Sanders does is quite another, and that the latter is my concern.

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