Page 1

Horton

Evangelical Theological Society

Colorado Springs, CO
November 15-16, 2001

When God Lisps:

An Analogical Account of Divine Repentance

Michael S. Horton, Ph.D.

Westminster Theological Seminary in California

The goal of this paper is to contrast Reformed theological method with that of open
theism, in an effort to demonstrate that it is here, at the beginning, where the two
theologies diverge. We will attempt this by briefly (I) analyzing the assumption that
classical theology is "Hellenistic" rather than biblical; (II) marking out the key features of
Reformed method and (III) comparing and contrasting this method with open theism. We
will limit our scope to John Sanders' The God Who Risks (IVP, 1998) and Clark
Pinnock's Most Moved Mover (Baker, 2001).

1[1]

I. Hellenistic or Hebrew?

The late nineteenth-century historical theologian Adolf von Harnack advanced his thesis
that nearly everything we regard as Christian "orthodoxy"--"the Catholic element"--is
in fact the result of "the acute Hellenization of the church."

2[2]

But Harnack could

apparently relativize every period but his own, as the earliest and therefore most authentic
elements of Christianity were curiously well-suited to the dynamic, Hegelian worldview
of fin-de-siecle intellectual life in Germany.
But long before Harnack, the Socinians, according to Genevan theologian Francis
Turretin, reproached classical theism on the same basis; viz., that "the whole doctrine is
metaphysical" rather than biblical.

3[3]

Responding, Turretin writes, "The necessity of the

immutability we ascribe to God does not infer Stoic fate," since it neither imposes an
internal necessity upon God nor interferes "with the liberty and contingency of

1[1]

Cf. Clark Pinnock, "Theological Method," in New Dimensions in Evangelical Thought: Essays in

Honor of Millard J. Erickson, ed. David S. Dockery (Downers Grove: IVP, 1998), 197-208.

2[2]

Adolph von Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 1, translated from the third German edition (Boston:

Little, Brown and Company, 1902), 48ff.. A similar tack may be discerned in the Arian attack on the
doctrines of the Trinity and deity of Christ. On the basis of a literalistic reading of Proverbs 8:22-23
(Wisdom personified speaking: "The Lord created me" and "before the ages established me"), Arius denied
the Trinity of God and the deity of Christ. But, as Pelikan notes, it was exegesis "in the light of a particular
set of theological a prioris which produced the Arian doctrine of Christ as creature," The Emergence of the
Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 194. Among those
presuppositions was the mathematical oneness of God. Although this was itself a presupposition of his
neoplatonism, many modern historical theologians have made Arianism into "'a final, mighty upheaval' of
an angel Christology that had come down from late Jewish and early Christian apocalypticism and was
making its last stand `against the new, hellenized christology,'" although Pelikan rightly judges that this
characterization is unsupported (ibid., 198).

3[3]

Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1, tr. George M. Giger; ed. James T. Dennison, Jr.

(Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), 191