by gskern » September 6th, 2005, 11:53 am
Hi Leslie:
Thanks for posting this; I'm a little surprised that nobody has responded to you sooner, but I do appreciate your raising the subject...
My brother turned me on to Open Theology about a year ago, and I dove into it and started reading some of the material. I've been a Clark Pinnock fan for years, and many of his peers in the "movement" are excellent, too...
I don't have much to say, right now, on this, but I do want to touch on two quick points:
1. Part of the core set of beliefs in Open Theology is the idea that there are things God has chosen NOT to know...
This is curious: How can God -- or anyone else -- purposely choose NOT to know something? Wouldn't He have to first KNOW what He is choosing NOT to know? Or do they mean that there is a "subset" of All Possible Knowledge which He has labeled for Himself, "Don't Go There"? The problem I have with saying that there is *anything* God does not know is that that subset of Knowledge could contain things that would prove contrary to His very nature, His very existence (imagine God being destroyed by a Greater Power that He did not know about... sounds weird, impossible, unthinkable...)
2. God sees things from a singularly unique and vastly superior Perspective than we do; we can only surmise, deduce, infer, and make assumptions based on what He is willing to show us ("us" being Humanity in general), but it's no great leap of Logic to believe that we are seeing only PARTS of the grand scheme of things... for us to assert that there are things God does not Know seems to me to be an extremely presumptuous call...
Even those passages in Scripture where He seems to change His mind, or has a change of heart, can only be seen from our limited human perspective... maybe (for whatever reason) He want to give us that "impression", like a father feigning ignorance of how to put a model together so that the son will figure it out and assume it was his own thinking that fixed it...
Pascal said that God gives us "the dignity of Causality", but not necessarily because He did not already know what the best course would have been... perhaps He, too, wants to let us "figure it out"...
One other thing along these lines:
If we can even begin to get our minds around the reality that God is outside of (what we know as) Space and Time, then it doesn't seem like such a big leap to also add that there is nothing that CAN be known that He does NOT know...
Just my two centavos.