2 of 4

But there was more. One of the points my colleague made against Hartshorne was that because we are free agents—agents that act on our own—God cannot only not have the future as actual, he cannot have the present as actual either. The present is where you are doing your actualizing by your own free agency. So God only truly has your past. He has only fossils to work with.

Thirty percent would be God manifesting himself in these moments of creativity?

That's a pretty big loss. And so God is very limited. The question I raised in my book The Inexhaustible God was, What percentage of power, then, does God have in this scheme? Does he have 20 percent and the advancing world has the other 80 percent? Is it 30/70? And if that's the case, why is he worth worshiping? This is a big problem for any person who argues for a God who is limited to time.

Yes. God's consciousness relies upon our doing things to give him content and consciousness. Otherwise he's pure ideal. So the problem, then, is that God is cut out of the future entirely. He knows possibilities and even probabilities, but he doesn't know actualities.

What, if any, is the correspondence between process theism and the current openness of God theology?

Openness talks the same lingo, though openness theologians try to work out of a more biblical base. They say God, of his own will, has given up his ability to see the future so that he might have genuine relations with us. He can't have true relationships with us unless he's working with genuinely free agents, they say. Otherwise, if everything is predetermined by God, we're just robots.

Okay, he's disappointed. But why is this a problem?

But that creates a problem. Suppose God could limit himself in such ways and says, "Okay, I will not any longer know the future; the future is open to me. I will take risks for the sake of love." That means God is on a timeline and in our time. And because of his desire to have creative relationships with us, he can't know how we're going to react to the love that he shows us. So there's a risk. He's a God at risk. And he's been disappointed. The Fall was a risk and a disappointment for him.

Well, it carries all kinds of implications for prophecy, especially when it comes to Christ's coming and dying. The prophecy in Genesis 3:15, for example, about Christ being bruised on his heel and bruising Satan's head, would not be possible because God did not know at that point in time how the Garden of Eden thing was going to work out. By denying that there can be prophecy, you're eliminating a lot of the Scripture.

Some openness theists realize a problem here and argue that God doesn't foreclose all future knowledge and control. For example, God chooses to act as God in the Incarnation, so he knows that particular future as actual before it occurs; it is only the future responses of his creatures that he chooses not to determine. But now we're back in the percentage game if God acts as God only selectively. This is logically difficult, since historical events are interlocked. If you don't have the proper sequence of persons and their choices from Genesis 3:15 through Noah, Abraham and Israel, and a host of others, you don't get to Christ and the fulfillment of prophecy. Besides, if God can pop in and out with sovereign control selectively, he could also do it to eliminate evil if he wanted to. This is the logic of having your cake and eating it too.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

March 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 4