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Horton
existentialist theologians have reason to worry about agnosticism, however, only because
they do not accept the authority of scripture to deliver trustworthy analogies. But if God
has authorized these analogies, why should we feel anxious?
Similar to Pannenberg's criticism of analogy above (fn. 29), Sanders seems to assume
a faulty (autonomous) standard for what counts as real knowledge. He must see the fit
between language and reality in order to know with apodictic certainty that it is accurate:
"If one suggests that there is an infinite difference between the analogates when speaking
of God and humanity, then the doctrine of analogy fails to give us any knowledge of
God" (286, fn. 43).
55[55]
We must see the fit ourselves in order to judge it (univocity) or
else know nothing concretely about God (equivocity) only if God has not spoken
(analogy).
56[56]
Here the analogy of scripture becomes essential. We might even call it, somewhat
awkwardly, the analogy of analogy. No single analogy, abstracted from the rest,
adequately represents God's character. Only taken together as one multifaceted self-
revelation do the analogies effectively render a sufficient knowledge of God. (The
analogy of scripture applied to theology proper, it should be noted, is the corollary of the
doctrine of divine simplicity, which open theism also rejects, reducing the diverse divine
attributes to one: love).
To summarize thus far, open theism affirms the Creator-creature distinction at least in
principle, distinguishing it from process thought. Furthermore, it tries to affirm the
correlative distinctions between God's being-in-himself and his being-for-us, and affirms
the role of analogies. But does it succeed in maintaining these in actual practice? This is
where Pinnock and Sanders appear to be tentative at best.
Methodologically, theological proposals must do more than offer an alternative to a
dominant position that nobody actually holds. For Pinnock, it is either "libertarian
freedom" or despotic "omnicausality," not even recognizing that Reformed theology (like
other traditions) affirms a fairly well-developed and well-known account of double
agency. Calvinism, according to Pinnock, envisions God as "the sole performer who
cannot make room for significant human agents" (158). It may be that Pinnock thinks
that this is what Calvinism amounts to, but the official confessions and catechisms of the
Reformed and Presbyterian family explicitly affirm double agency and stridently reject
any suggestion of the sort alleged by Pinnock.
57[57]
Perhaps he thinks that since his
55[55]
Sanders adds, "Furthermore, thinkers as diverse as John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, George
Berkeley, William Alston, Richard Swinburne, Thomas Tracy and Paul Helm all agree that there must be a
`hard literal core' or `univocal core' to our talk about God. There must be some properties that are used of
God in the same sense that they are used of things in the created order. Otherwise we will be back in the
cave of agnosticism. Anthropomorphic language does not preclude literal predication to God" (25,
emphasis added).
56[56]
It is worth pondering whether the dominance of the "mirror" as a root metaphor for the relationship of
language and reality is at bottom a rationalist presupposition, in contrast to the biblical emphasis on
"hearing" the (analogical) word. This is a point I develop at length in Covenant and Eschatology: The
Divine Drama (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). For a helpful description of the career and
influence of the "mirror" epistemology, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
57[57]
Although he sometimes cites the first part of the Westminster Confession 3.1 ("God from all eternity
did by the most wise and holy counsel fo his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes
to pass"), he has not yet, by my reckoning, quoted the entire statement: ...yet so as thereby neither is God