Related articles and links |  1 of 9

Note: This article originally appeared in the January 9, 1995 issue of Christianity Today.

The September 1994 issue of Colors, Benetton's oblique, oh-so-hip promotional magazine, began with brief answers to the question, Who is God? The respondents were of all ages and races from around the world; their answers ranged from the whimsical to the blasphemous. "My dad," a six-year-old girl from Ecuador answered. A car washer in Pakistan said that God "designs the lines of a Mercedes." God was variously defined as the wind, a waterfall, a circle, a couch potato. "I believe in science," answered a businessman in Beirut. A journalist in Bombay said, "I am God."

As Christians, we may respond to such answers with a mixture of sadness, anger, and uneasy laughter. Who is God? We know the right answers, the creedal affirmations; and yet that elemental, fundamental question is profoundly unsettling.

In the original preface to Knowing God, written in 1973, J.I. Packer suggested that "ignorance of God—ignorance of both his ways and of the practice of communion with him—lies at the root of much of the church's weakness today." With this issue, Christianity Today begins an occasional series exploring the nature of God. Our first installment considers a book that argues for a significant change in evangelicals' understanding of God's nature—a change, the authors contend, that will take us closer to the biblical conception of God. We have asked four theologically insightful scholars to assess this claim. Future installments will consider the nature of God from other perspectives.

The heart of the change is this: God is no longer to be understood as an immutable monarch controlling human history and individual lives, but rather is to be seen as a self-limiting, loving, and suffering father who allows himself to be affected by his creatures. But two caveats are essential: this is not just a lively new version of liberal process theology, nor is it merely a lively new version of evangelical Arminian theology. These authors set forth for the first time a sustained, biblically based, rational argument that the God of the Bible is with us in time and does not know the future in absolute detail.

The new paradigm is variously called "the open view of God," "creative-love theism," and "free-will theism." It is radical Arminianism—and more—but it stops short of process theology or Boston personalism (belief in a finite God). The authors claim that their model of God is not an accommodation to modern thought or sensibilities but is thoroughly grounded in the synoptic vision of the God who reveals himself in the Bible. It is a Hebrew-Christian model of God stripped of the deleterious effects of Neo-Platonism and other Hellenistic philosophies.

According to free-will theism, "history is the combined result of what God and his creatures decide to do," and its God is "always walking beside us, experiencing what we are experiencing when we are experiencing it, always willing to help to the extent consistent with our status as responsible creations of his."

How does this differ from process theology's "fellow sufferer who understands"? The authors of The Openness of God go to great lengths to show that it differs profoundly. Unlike the God of Alfred North Whitehead and other process thinkers, free-will theism's God is omnipotent in the classical sense: able to do anything that is consistent with his own nature and logic. In other words, the God of creative-love theism is the absolute ground and source of all creation (creatio ex nihilo) and could control his creatures if he wished to do so, but he chooses not to control by coercion or force, instead influencing by persuasion.

next page... |  1 of 9

May (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45