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As noted in the debate, openness theology must be tested by the implications it produces.

I'm inclined toward the openness model, as it has enormously increased my time in prayer.
James Shelton
Greenwood, South Carolina

Billy graham probably would have remained an obscure itinerant evangelist had William Randolph Hearst not insisted editors feature Graham's 1948 Los Angeles campaign in his newspapers. If Christianity Today had not featured the openness theology in two issues, would it have gone beyond the boundaries of a single denomination, or eventually vanished into the oblivion of history?

Any person who has been a Christian for very long has to explain the conundrum of personal tragedy, and even has to come to grips with it firsthand.

I find and give comfort in knowing that although God's ways are mysterious, they are perfect and absolutely certain. I find the ability to go on in the certainty that though my dreams are shattered, God's ways are still perfect.

Where is the motivation to pray to the God who acts out of nothing more than informed guess work? Let's call the theology what it is, heresy, and minister the grace of a sovereign God to those whose lives are shattered by unexpected tragedy!
Glenn Griffis
Vestal, New York

Christopher Hall and John Sanders share a key assumption that all but forces them into opposed camps. That assumption is that foreknowledge and predestination are two sides of the same coin.

Hall begins with an unshakable belief in God's foreknowledge and therefore must proceed to an equally unshakable belief in predestination. Openness theologian Sanders, starting from the other side of the coin, begins by affirming human choice and freedom (against predestination) and therefore must conclude that God does not have perfect foreknowledge of the future.

This impasse is not a necessary one. From our limited human view, foreknowledge does necessitate predestination, but God lives outside of time and space in a realm where all is eternally present. As C.S. Lewis (after Boethius) has argued in many of his works, God does not, technically speaking, foresee anything. To foresee suggests that the viewer is locked into a temporal system of past, present, and future. God sees the future in the same way that we see the present.

With this vital distinction, an interesting proposition emerges: If my seeing of a present event does not determine it, why should God's eternally present seeing of a future event (future to us) determine its outcome? Or, to put it another way: Since God's knowledge is ever and always a present knowledge of our present choice, our freedom is not violated.

Such a view suggests that openness theologians can carve out a niche for human choice, freedom, and dignity without having to throw into doubt God's knowledge of the future or compromise in any way his sovereignty.
Louis Markos
Associate Professor, English
Houston Baptist University
Houston, Texas

Prof. Markos's suggestion that God has exhaustive knowledge of an eternal present is helpful. But Prof. Hall's argument did not proceed from foreknowledge to predestination. In classical theology, meticulous foreknowledge does not require predestination as its logical conclusion, as the Arminian controversy demonstrated. That argument was not over foreknowledge per se, but over whether knowledge held logical priority over election or vice versa. —Eds.

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August 6 2001, Vol. 45, No. 10