On Theological Misunderstandings: Clarifying the issue with John Sanders
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.
The key point is that “the beliefs reported at the beginning of this article are expounded in statements that will cut across the religious sensibilities of many sympathetic to some of the project.” I thought that a reader of my review would by this point be saying as follows: “Williams seems reluctant to be drawn on some things in the problematic Sanders is addressing and keeps saying that something else is at stake. For all we know so far he is closer to Sanders than to classical theism or traditional Calvinism; for all we know he is closer to those viewpoints than he is to Sanders. What exactly is bothering the guy?”
I answer the question: it is the portrayal of God that emerges in Sanders’s exposition. I then give four citations which portray God as (a) mistaken in his expectation, (b) having new experiences, © learning by experience in particular that he suffered more for judging the world than from the pain of human evil, (d) mistaken in expectation in particular about Israel. These have nothing to do with human freedom or divine response to prayer. If anyone were to claim intuitive certainty on the controverted points in these matters, I should react exactly as Sanders did, and despair of the possibility of reasonable argument.
Here I must have been too cryptic, though I confess surprise that Sanders did not pick up a consistent distinction I make between what seems to be and what really is at stake.
Let me try to clarify. Traditional Arminians, for example, as well as traditional Calvinists, will have plenty of difficulty with the four examples I cited. For all their differences, they will be united in the belief that God doesn’t learn things as parents do; that he does not turn out to have misjudged how Israel would have acted, etc. It is one thing to say there is an open future. It is another to say that God misjudges matters. The latter, not the former, business is where I brought intuitions into it.
I could have given this kind of example: Is it inconceivable that a shrewd and godly Israelite should have said: “Personally, given Israel’s track record, I rather doubt if Israel will return to God”? In which case, God, after Israel’s failure to return would be saying to the Israelite after the event: “Actually, you got it right—I got it wrong.” Doesn’t that intuitively strike Sanders as being off beam, in terms of the total biblical disclosure of God? Or, if it is felt that hypothetical instances do not help the case, I should ask whether we are really to believe that God said to himself: “I’ll not drown people in a flood again—for the first time I know what it feels like; it feels much worse than I thought it would and I’d better try something else next time”?
Sanders says that if I have problems with this, I am dismissively resisting what the texts say. But I say in the review that they cannot be dismissed: “Knotty problems arise with these early narratives and failure to address them here is not a sign that they should be suppressed.” I.e., in this review I am not going to try to say positively how they should be read. But I plead that hermeneutical control be granted to later passages, and that the Genesis passages should thus not be read as Sanders does as an account of the Christian doctrine of God. So Sanders has mistaken both the content of my intuitions and my claims about hermeneutical control. I say this here not to re-run the arguments, but to clarify their contention.
3. Sanders thinks that I uphold certain views on timelessness. But in this article, I do no such thing. For the re cord, I am agnostic on the relation of God to time (as on a number of contentions of classical theists) and personally inclined away from timelessness. Sanders says that I believe that God never responds to our actions. But I neither say nor imply that. To the contrary, I am explicit: “The point is not to deny directly (nor to affirm) that God leaves his options open in relation to our petitions. The point is that the temporal scene for God must be radically different from the temporal scene for us.” I try to draw implications from this. My contention, for better or worse, was this: Sanders’ proposal logically trades on a view of God which is excessively anthropomorphic. Specifically, I question the use to which (e.g.) Pentateuchal narratives are put in the service of his theological proposal.
I believe that a rereading of my view will show that Sanders had misunderstood its point of attack. On the one hand, when Alan Padgett also misunderstands, and when a third party also has, in a personal communication, suggested that I am obscure at certain points, I am bound to consider whether there was culpable unclarity. On the other hand, others in personal communications, whose opinions on Calvinism and classical theism range quite a lot, I should think, and who seem to sit light to traditional Calvinist/anti-Calvinist debates, have thought my points clear and well made.
At the moment, this leads me to two conclusions provisionally. The first is that the review should have been clearer and less allusive. The second is that something deeper is lurking in the waters than is coming to the surface. Only so can I explain Alan Padgett’s communication including its generalization to my customary habits as a reviewer.2 What is going on here may have something to do with the way a British voice is heard on the current North American evangelical scene. However, let me try to make a little theological peace rather than essaying a conjecture.
Personally, I have lived for years with accusations (usually not to my face) of unsoundness. I am dangerously liberal on Scripture for refusing to affirm inerrancy and lukewarm in my Calvinism if, indeed, I am a true Calvinist at all. And worse than that lurks in my dark heart. I am far too prone to give the time of day, in classroom or church, to views which are liberal or radical. Whatever is the case with all this, both my instincts and my convictions tend toward breadth and not exclusivity, as far as I can tell, if generalization is possible. But Sanders’s book worries me. I just can not see how, in the light of the entire biblical revelation, we can read the accounts of God (e.g. in Genesis) as Sanders does. My fear is that a legitimate challenge and in important respects plausible account of God in relation to specific themes is simultaneously a break with the biblical portrayal of God which evangelicals should cherish not because it is evangelical, but because it is biblical. What I sought to say in the review was this: anterior to our adjudication of controverted issues, there are certain basic ascriptions to God which I think we must retain or reject irrespective of contestable features in Calvinism or classical theism. If the point was unclear, I am sorry. If the point is now clearer (even incipiently) I hope it will be taken to heart.
Stephen N. Williams Union Theological College Belfast, Northern Ireland
Deep Order
Aaron Belz’s article, “The Rules Have Stayed the Same” [January/February] is so timely for me. I will be going to Krasnodar, Russia in the spring to impose order on the Lampados Bible School library. I hope to use software—imposing a relational database into a traditional database. Belz’s article helped me put words to the concepts I need to use. I must digest them.
Also the author’s love for poetry drew me into the words he had to say. The psalm he quoted was also timely. Unless the Lord builds this library, my labor is in vain. But there is something in that psalm that has always puzzled me. It seems that the in vain’s switch from a positive to a negative. Why doesn’t the psalm say, “unless the Lord gives sleep to his beloveds, they rise early to toil going late to rest in vain”? Perhaps Mr. Belz or another reader has a clue to the meaning of this shift. (I wish that there was a better understanding of all the literary devices in Scripture! It would save us from some gross misunderstandings.)
Charlotte M. Gunther via e-mail
The LORD Scattered Them
I must be missing something. If the point of Robert Pennock’s book, Tower of Babel, is to provide evidence for Darwinism it seems to me that he undercuts himself. If Darwinists are now having to resort to such tangential proofs of their theory it suggests that the standard proofs are inadequate. You don’t see anyone writing books about the rapid expanse of information technology to try and prove the Big Bang. On the other hand if Mr. Pennock is trying to prove that the Bible is untrue, then we need to look at what the Bible actually says; the book, I mean, not the movie.
I assume that Mr. Pennock agrees with Genesis 11:1: “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” So we all agree that the Bible got at least this part right. I assume that we all agree that there are many different languages now. So the issue is by what mechanism did one language become many.
According to the Bible (Gen. 11: 7-8), here is what happened: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORDscattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city” [emphasis added]. The mechanism that the Bible appears to suggest is that the LORD scattered them abroad from thence. Surely Mr. Pennock is not suggesting that the changes in language occurred while the people who spoke the same language continued to dwell together? Perhaps he is confusing the movie with the book.
Greg Marquez via e-mail
1. While I am glad that it does not make a material difference, I note that I was guilty of quoting one word inaccurately here in the original review, from p. 131 of Sanders’s work.
2. Obviously, one can not defend oneself on that point. Readers of BOOKS & CULTURE may care to read my earlier review [“Pneumatologies Have Consequences,” March/April, 1999] in light of this description, and those familiar with other reviews may judge whether this earlier review was typical or untypical.
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