For a while now I’ve been reading (and will soon review) the book Chosen Nation by Braden P. (Brad) Anderson. There are a variety of topics in the book that I’m going to want to engage, but one in particular caught my attention last night. In Chapter 7, Brad discusses the work of two writers, Stephen H. Webb and Richard John Neuhaus, both of whom are proponents of a popular notion in which the United States is somehow under a covenantal blessing from God rather as Israel was in the Old Testament. Consequently both, but particularly Webb, hold that the U.S. has not only the right, but even the duty, to act as sovereign on the world stage–and that the Church is duty-bound to support her.

Webb, as related by Anderson, builds much of his case on the notion of “Providence,” the notion that “God rules the world through the work of nations” (Webb, American Providence, 72, quoted by Anderson, 203).  Essentially, the idea is that the nations do what they do because God has so ordered it in order to accomplish his grand design in history. Webb sees a particularly providential role for America, says Anderson, in that “America has been chosen to fill the role of sovereign in the world today, as evidenced by its hegemony” (p.216). As characterized by Tim Beach-Verhey, “Webb argues that American religious, economic, and political institutions and values are dominating the world, which could not happen apart from God’s will, which means it must be in accord with God’s good and benevolent intentions for the world” (Beach-Verhey, as quoted in Anderson, 207).

Anderson does a good job of showing how the Biblical model of God’s kingdom is wrongly co-opted by Webb and others, but what he does not do is address the underlying philosophical assumption of Webb’s claim, which I suggest is a form (or at least a close cousin) of the “Is/Ought” problem first articulated by the 18th-century philosopher David Hume (here’s a brief summary). Hume’s own statement was this:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation,’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it … [I] am persuaded, that a small attention [to this point] wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.”

This statement has been reduced in philosophical usage to the statement “you can’t prove an ought from an is,” and numerous writers then refer to any such conclusion as an “ought-is fallacy” — essentially, the notion that what “ought to be” can never be derived through logic from empirical observations (what “is”) alone, and therefore any argument which does so is fallacious.  Google around a little, and you’ll find that philosophers (or at least those who presume to put philosophy on the web) fall into essentially two (vastly oversimplified) camps.  The first says that ought-is reasoning really is fallacious, and that consequently there is no such thing as morality derived from observation–that in fact, a prescriptive “ought” or “ought not” statement simply doesn’t fit into the categories of “true” and “false”.  These thinkers can come to the conclusion that morality is not, in fact rational at all (though by no means all conclude thus).  Another group disagrees, and says merely that one can’t get to a conclusion of morality (or perhaps any judgment of value) if all one’s premises are merely empirical.  In other words, if one’s inputs (premises) include a moral judgment, then it’s possible to infer further moral judgments from that set of premises (see this article by Dr. Charles Pidgin for an exploration of this).

Now all the discussions on the “Is/Ought problem” that I’ve found seem to circle around the concept of deriving imperatives or norms (what one ought to do) from some set of empirical premises.  What I see in Webb is actually a somewhat different type of inference–not one that (directly) tells us what we ought to do, but rather one which informs the “rightness” of what is.  For want of any source I can find on the subject, I’ll phrase it this way:

Thus it is, therefore it thus should be

which I think sounds cooler in Latin:  Sic est, ergo esse debet

(if anyone wants to correct my Latin I’d welcome it)

This is a far-more-comprehensive idea than simply whether or not one can make a value judgment on a particular action, norm, or command.  Rather than examining the basis for moral judgment, this position seems to be used largely as a foundation to silence dissent, to preclude any prophetic or moral evaluation of our nation’s actions.  If God has willed everything “we” do, then no one can challenge “us” without challenging God.

Now, I’m not entirely sure if the principle that what happens is what ought to happen necessitates any sort of Prime Mover who wills it (a position categorically different from mechanistic determinism), but maybe some of my readers can help me out here.  In any event, it is certainly true that many Christians (and, I rather suspect, theists of other faiths as well) do make this claim all the time.  As I have previously written (see here and here), I believe the assertion that whatever happens is God’s predetermined will is an error founded primarily on a misunderstanding of the meaning of God’s sovereignty, one that conflates sovereignty with absolute control or determinism.  But I don’t have to commit myself either to logic or to faith to call out Webb’s rationale as fallacious.  At the bottom, the claim that everything happens as it is destined or determined to happen does not follow from logic (Greg Boyd makes a nice case on this here); nor does it follow from the Biblical account of God, who for example, genuinely regretted having made Saul king of Israel (see this post on God’s immutability for more).

More importantly from a Biblical standpoint, it is instructive to compare 2 Kings 24, in which a variety of Chaldaeans, Syrians, Moabites, and Ammonites all attack Judah (see 2 Kings 24:1-4), and yet these very groups are punished for their actions (see Amos 1 & 2).  If one accepts that the wars of nations are tools in God’s hands, as a literal reading of 2 Kings would suggest, then Amos informs us that being God’s tool may not be such a great thing after all.  If, on the other hand, one holds that God works around and through evil human actions (that is, actions that in themselves run counter to God’s will) for his own good purposes, one cannot then conclude that because God used a situation, he willed it or (more to the point) God’s people ought to support it.  Yet this is precisely what Webb does.  Simply, Webb’s claim that what the United States is doing on the global stage is the right thing (and the church should therefore support it without question) just because whatever the nation does is God’s will, is completely fallacious (and somewhat circular) whether you believe in the God of the Bible or not.  I’m a little surprised Anderson didn’t call him on it.

Disclaimer:  in case any true academic student of philosophy comes across this post, let me say that I do not claim any credential in this regard.  I’m trying to make reasonable inferences from some philosophical literature, but I am a layman and claim nothing else.  If you want to clarify or correct my reasoning, I welcome it, but please understand that I freely admit to being an outsider in the discipline.

Greg Boyd tweeted out earlier this week that a friend of his has amassed quite a bit of historical evidence proving the open view was supported by Arminian theologians in 1642.

He is working to get data published from Thomas’s work whether in the form of a book or a paper. These findings are significant because much of the claims against those who criticize open theism do so because they wrongly believe the idea has no historical groundings and is the result of “new” thinking.

This new evidence would bring to light that even those who were doing important reformation theology work did not discount the open view as biblically plausible.

From my perspective I in no way shape or form need to be right about open theism. It is the view I have decided to land on in order to reconcile elements of the text that I feel Calvinism and the Arminian view can not logically reconcile. I can see how and why others resonate with views opposite of Open Theism and I have no problem with that.

What I have a problem with is when people tell me that open theism borders is not a biblical possibly view to land on or even worse that it borders on heresy. Those claims are deeply ignorant in way to many ways for me to even begin to get into.

I am looking forward to seeing this work by Thomas Lukashow as I am hoping it gives us the needed historical evidence to help open theism be recognized as a biblical possibility with key historical roots.

For over 15 years I had been deeply involved in one particular faith based institution. I had given a great deal of time and energy to do everything I could to inspire people to follow Jesus more fully and completely with every aspect of their existence.

The last few years of my involvement in this church I had been doing some teaching at the many adult bible classes and it had been going quite well. Toward the end I started doing more teaching in the college group to fill a void that had been created.

As a part of this class it was my desire to teach the students that it’s ok to ask tough questions about the bible and that we shouldn’t fear these questions. One other desire was to teach the students that it’s ok to disagree theologically and that we shouldn’t let those issues divide the body, especially when they have nothing to do with salvation.

Is this all we are to God?

OK, so you know by now that the authors of this blog subscribe to the Open View of God, also called Open Theism.  It’s one of the four points of our ROCK summary of faith distinctives.  A key point all Open Theists make is that God does not know a settled, determined future–not because God’s knowledge is limited, but because no settled, determined future exists to be known.  I agree.  But in its place, prominent Open Theists describe God as knowing the vast combination of possible choices his created agents may make, comprehending and planning against these possibilities rather like an “infinitely intelligent chess player” who knows all the possible moves on the board, and has expert strategies to deal with all of them.  I’m not so sure about this part.

Ben said it this way last post on open theism:  “So does God know what i’m going to have for lunch in 15 years. Yep, he knows I will have x, or x, or x, or x, or x etc and he knows I won’t have x, or x, or x, or x etc – absolutely. Divine foreknowledge is foreknowledge none the less regardless of the manner in which it is known.“  Hold that thought…we’ll be coming back to it.

When discussing open theism with those who have a problem with it, the idea or fear of control always seems to come out. The argument is that if God does not know the future as one set of eternally settled facts how is he in control or ultimately sovereign? Not only is there all kinds of logical problems with this fear but its rooted in the false thinking that, in the open view, God can be surprised or learns something new as a result of human action. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

I’ll explain by looking at this using absolute terms. The proponent enters the path of thinking that God either settled the future as in the Calvinist view, or simply knows it but did not cause it as in the Arminian view. The assumption is that one can only truly know the future if the future is known in absolutes.

I’ve said before that Greg Boyd has produced some really good arguments on the Open View of God.  Greg’s got a great post on his blog from about a month ago (OK, so I’m a little behind) briefly outlining three really good reasons why determinism (a la Calvinism) is logically untenable.  Go check it out!

Greg is actually responding to a previous New York Times article entitled Do You Have Free Will?  Yes, It’s the Only Choice.  This amusingly-titled report looks at some recent psychological experiments that suggest that people seem to believe in a moral responsibility for one’s actions that only works if one had, at least at some level, a choice whether to do them or not.  They have shown that people who are convinced they have free will, tend to behave better (that is, more socially-acceptably) than people who are convinced they have no choice.  It’s an interesting study.

Of course, my favorite summary of the whole argument is:  “You have chosen to believe in predestination, and I am predestined to believe in free will.”  Drives my Calvinist friends nuts!

In my previous post on this subject, I examined a number of Biblical references commonly used to promote the idea that God is unchanging.  We saw in those scriptures, that the issue being addressed centered largely on the premise that God can be depended upon to keep his word…in other words, unlike humans or other gods of legend, he’s not capricious or fickle.

On the other hand, however, there are numerous accounts throughout the Old Testament, in which God is clearly stated to have changed his mind.  One of these is the verse that first gave my good Calvinist friends heartburn and ignited this series:  1 Sam. 15:11, in which God states “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments.”  My friend stated that God could not possibly really regret having done something, because it all took place according to his will, and because regret would mean God was changing his mind.  And yet this is what the passage says…God made Saul king, Saul did not live up to God’s expectations, and now God is sorry that he chose Saul for a king.

Last week in Sunday School we had a big discussion (started by yours truly, I’m afraid) as to whether or not God ever changes his mind.  It came out of the account in 1 Sam. 15:11, where God states that “I regret that I have made Saul king…”  Our teacher stated “well, we know God can’t really regret anything he did, because God doesn’t change his mind.”  His defense, of course, was that God doesn’t change, period, and the Bible says as much.

Well, it does and it doesn’t.  In this post I’m going to look at some of the “proof texts” that suggest God DOESN’T change, and in the next one I’ll examine “proof texts” that suggest he DOES.  My hope is that by looking at the context for both, we can get a consistent picture besides “the Bible is paradoxical on this point” (although that, too, would be a valid conclusion).

So, let’s have a look.  Since this was a Presbyterian church, I’ll start with a prooftext  linked from the Westminster Confession of Faith, James 1:17 (all quotes ESV):

 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

 This sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?  But what does it say in context?  Take a look at the whole passage, James 1:2-17.  James is contrasting God’s not changing, with the “double-minded man” of verse 8, and even more so he’s objecting to the notion somebody must’ve promulgated, that God might actually tempt someone (verse 13).  In this context, James is saying that God doesn’t pull the dirty trick of tempting someone to violate a divine law…rather people’s own desires lead them to sin (v. 13-14).  “God doesn’t change” here is evidence that God doesn’t pull a fast one on his people.

A second passage that was quoted by one of our class on Sunday was Malachi 3:6-7:

For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts…

 Of course, all my friend read was the first half of verse 6:  “I the LORD do not change.”  But the context makes it clear that God’s not talking about some overarching notion of immutability here, but about the fact that he keeps his covenants (see Malachi 2:4-5).  God, unlike the faithless Israelites (see Mal. 2:10-11).  So here again, God’s unchanging nature is set in clear contrast to human fickleness and faithlessness.  “I do not change” here means “I keep my word.”

My friend also quoted Numbers 3:19:

God is not man, that he should lie,
or a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Has he said, and will he not do it?
Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?

 Actually, here again my friend only quoted the first half of the verse.  The second half makes the statement far more clear, and specific.  God says the truth, and does what he says.  This is actually part of Balaam’s oracle.  Remember that Balaam was hired by Balak the king of Moab, to come out and curse Israel so that they (Israel) wouldn’t kick their (the Moabites’) butts the way they had the Amorites (see Num. 22:1-6).  After a truly funny story about Balaam’s misadventures, he gets up to the cursin’ place and blesses Israel.  Balak, not surprisingly, is peeved, and asks Balaam why he didn’t do what he was paid to do.  Balaam’s answer is that God doesn’t go back on his word and curse those he promised to bless.  So again, we have a pattern here.  God sticks to his promises.

There are more verses to look at, I’m sure.  I chose these because they were represented in several articles, people’s Bible footnotes, and in my discussions, as the classic proofs that God can’t possibly change.  Taken in context, I’d have to say, if this is all the better they can do, I’m not convinced.  As some wag has said before, a proof text is a text lifted out of context as a pretext.  Restoring the context, at least in these verses, suggests to me a much more limited interpretation for the passages…and a very consistent one:

I will preface this post by saying that from a point of discipleship, what I’m about to say is meaningless.  It’s also a place where I have no problem if people disagree with me, as long as they are actually considering the foundation of their disagreement.  However, it’s a point I’ve encountered in the middle of a variety of discussions on predestination, free will, and other such stuff, and I think it’s a good example of people assuming a point as given without the proper consideration.

I refer to the relationship between God and time.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that time–the actual sequential experiencing of things, not merely our units for measuring it–is a part of creation that we experience, but that God himself exists outside of time.  Therefore, the notion of whether God foreordained something (say one person’s belief or another’s unbelief) is actually somewhat academic since God sees past, present, and future in some timeless sense whereby the very notions of past, present, and future don’t actually apply to God’s experience.  It’s how at least some folks explain the paradox in Romans 8:29 where God predestined (implying choice) those whom he foreknew (implying awareness of another’s choice).

There’s really no biblical evidence I can think of that supports this notion, which derives largely (I have heard) from Plato who did believe the ideal God was immutable (that is, unchanging/unchangeable), impassible (that is, unaffected by outside forces, so nothing can influence him) and extra-temporal.  In contrast, though, the biblical account is full of instances of God interacting with his creation in ways that clearly show creation influencing the creator–for example Moses’ arguments persuading God not to blow the Israelites to smithereens, or God’s relenting from the disaster promised to Nineveh–and this in ways that rather clearly suggest that God intended or said one thing but as the circumstance unfolded he went a different way.  Such accounts make very little sense in the context of a timeless and immutable God.

But what if time, rather than being a created thing, is rather an element of God’s nature itself?  Before you get all freaked out on me, let me clarify.  I’m not suggesting that time is divine, or that there is a divinity like  Father Time of legend.  Rather, what if God’s nature is to experience an unfolding reality rather as we do, albeit on a much grander and longer scale?  God can still be eternal (existing from eternity past, will exist into eternity future) even if he experiences that eternity in an unfolding, progressive sense.  But if God actually knows a past, a present, and the possibility of a future just as we (after all, his image-bearers) do, it does put these questions in a completely different light.

For one thing, it makes the possibility of free will truly free.  The usual outside-of-time, sees-past-and-future-as-one construct really can’t escape the notion that everything we do is in some sense predetermined (I would go so far as to say that I can’t really see much room for a middle ground between absolute deterministic Calvinism on one hand and Open Theism on the other).  One cannot foreknow an outcome unless that outcome is fixed and therefore subject to knowledge, and no amount of multidimensional babble frees us from that trap.

But it also brings a whole new meaning to prophecy, as I implied before in my post on God’s sovereignty.  By this I mean that when God foretells the future, he’s doing so, not because he “knows what’s going to happen” in any passive sense of the word, but rather because he has purposed that this is going to happen. True future-telling prophecy, then, is merely the result of God tipping his hand about something he intends to accomplish; or what is far more likely, God decreeing what he has determined must be.  It is true, not because of God’s omniscience, but because of his sovereign power.

What do you think?  How else would a notion of a timely God rather than a timeless one, impact your theology or world view?

In my last post I criticized Greg Boyd’s otherwise-excellent arguments in “God of the Possible” as giving insufficient attention to God’s sovereignty as an important key to understanding his foreknowledge. I suggested that while Boyd correctly answers his objectors toward the end of the book, by saying that the Open View of God does not diminish–and may in fact enhance–the view of God’s authority, he could have applied the fact of God’s sovereign nature to the question at hand to far greater effect. In this post I will elaborate on why I think it matters.

The classical view of God’s foreknowledge, which Boyd describes well, seems to me to imply that part of the foundation of God’s authority rests on the fact of his settled foreknowledge about all that will happen. Though I am vastly oversimplifying, in essence the thought seems to be that God’s power and/or authority depend at least in part on God’s omniscience–his ability to see the end from the beginning–to “know all things.”

I submit this is getting the cart before the horse, and the fact that Boyd does not point this out complicates his own explanation about the future being “partially open” and “partially settled.” I suggest rather that God has settled in his mind that there are certain things he’s going to do, and certain outcomes that he is going to ensure take place. Those things are “settled” for the simple reason that God has resolved that he will do them. Isaiah 45:23 is a great example of this, where God says “I swear by myself” that one day everyone will acknowledge he’s the only God. This is not conditional on anything, but nor is it a passively-settled future event. It’s something God is going to accomplish, and he knows he can and will do it. His foreknowledge, therefore, is absolutely settled because God the omnipotent can deliver on his commitment.

In the same vein, however, those things that God in his sovereignty has delegated to his creatures to decide, remain uncertain until his free moral agents choose among the possibilities. Here Boyd makes a very plausible case that God, being infinite in knowledge, can forsee all of the possible choices we might make, and even rank them in probability based upon our character and the character of other players, environmental factors, etc. that lead us to decide as we do. This perspective permeates the book, but one good place to see it is in his question 6 discussion on pp 126 and following, where he offers the analogy of God as the “infinitely intelligent chess player” who can anticipate all our possible moves. As Boyd correctly points out, this actually requires a lot more intellectual horsepower than simply to know the one fully-determined script that everything is going to follow, and thus an open view of God actually posits a more intelligent, more wise, more glorious perspective for God than that of exhaustive, settled foreknowledge.

Even if the choice we make from among the possibilities is one that God did not expect or desire (and Boyd makes an unambiguous Scriptural case for this happening), this does not diminish the fact of his sovereignty in the slightest, because regardless of the outcome of our choices, he is confident in his power (and so ought we to be) to take whatever mess we make and still accomplish his good purpose. Put crudely, we have the ability to screw things up because that’s one of the possible consequences of the freedom to choose, which God has granted. However–and this is cause for joy–we don’t have the ability to screw them up beyond repair. THAT is God’s sovereignty (and his grace) in full force!