Theology is an "all the way" discipline. In it, we take reality "all they way" up (or down, back or forward) to God. It is intrinsically the investigation of the world at its deepest levels of meaning, for we are dealing with God, the source of all being, the Maker and Savior of the world, of the universe. Alister McGrath, in his monumental Scientific Theology, discusses the nature of reality as a stratified reality. This gives rise to a hierarchy of disciplines, with theology at the bottom, or most "foundational" level, a level beyond psychology or sociology, biology or physics. Whereas these other disciplines, although legitimate and "complete" in their own way, are only "part way" disciplines, which must, if rightly understood, encounter boundaries. Theology, on the other hand, is an all the way discipline. We cannot ever go beyond it. We are not asserting that our knowledge or understanding of theology will ever be complete, or that God's mystery will be removed in our investigations here and now, but that theology means taking ideas to their conclusions, and means finally seeking the meaning of this reality in which we live.
The openness of God is a movement that has gained much attention, and some assent, within evangelical circles over the past decade. Its proponents have spent great energy in expounding on this vision of God's nature and activity, with numerous publications of books and articles. It truly is taking Arminianism to its conclusions, as Clark Pinnock, one of openness theology's leading proponents, asserts. The openness movement doesn't see itself as an innovation, a charge feared by many evangelicals who desire to remain within the great gospel tradition of the faith, but instead sees itself as standing within a long line of theologians who have asserted human freedom and divine limitation. They are simply extending these insights a bit further than most have, asserting that, for instance, if God gives humans true freedom, God cannot know the outcomes of their decisions, because they cannot be predetermined. This calls for a reunderstanding of omniscience and foreknowledge. Likewise, openness theologians assert that genuine human freedom means that God must undertake risk, as John Sanders' provocatively titled The God Who Risks intimates. It is certainly true that openness theology is theology going "all the way." But, is it also theology "gone too far?"
Openness theology has been critiqued on many grounds. Kevin Vanhoozer, a contemporary evangelical theologian, has turned one of its own critiques against it. At the core of the critique leveled agains orthodox Christianity by open theists is the assertion that traditional, orthodox Christianity is too weded to Hellenistic philosophy with its understandings of perfect being and static divinity. They instead assert that God is a being who loves and relates to His creation, and this means that God is a mutable being: a "most moved mover," in Pinnock's words, as opposed to Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. Vahnoozer turns this critique around, saying, "Indeed one could imagine the openness view as a species of 'perfect being' theology with one important difference: in the context of contemporary thought and sensibility, 'perfection' is now understood not in terms of unrelatedness but of 'most-relatedness.'" While openness theology may make useful critiques of orthodox theology and have some important contributions to make to theological reflection today, as a system, it is no better than the view it seeks to criticize, and in fact, it weakens the orthodox view in many ways, decreasing the power and love of God, even as it seeks to uplift God as one who loves. |
