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Defining Evangelicalism's Boundaries Theologically:
Is Open Theism Evangelical?
Bruce A. Ware
Senior Associate Dean, School of Theology; Professor of Christian Theology
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky
Paper delivered at the 53
rd
Annual Meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society
Colorado Springs, Colorado, November 15, 2001
Introduction
Clark Pinnock is exactly right. After noting (correctly) in his Most Moved Mover that
Arminians and Augustinians have co-existed throughout much of the church's history, and
further that a number of evangelical theologians today (and not just open theists) are working
toward refinements in an evangelical doctrine of God, "Why," he asks, "draw the line at
foreknowledge?"
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A few pages later, he returns to this question: "In raising the issue of the
divine foreknowledge, we have not transgressed some rule of theological discourse and placed
ourselves outside the pale of orthodoxy. Why can an evangelical not propose a different view of
this matter? What church council has declared it to be impossible? Since when has this become
the criterion of being orthodox or unorthodox, evangelical or not evangelical?"
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What does Pinnock mean when he says that open theists have raised the issue of divine
foreknowledge? Simply this: Open theism affirms God's exhaustive knowledge of the past and
present, but it denies exhaustive divine foreknowledge, in that it denies that God knows or can
know the future free decisions and actions of his moral creatures, even while it affirms that
God knows all future possibilities and all divinely determined and logically-necessary future
actualities. As William Hasker explains, "Since the future is genuinely open, since it is possible
for a free agent to act in any of several different ways, it follows that it is not possible for God to
have complete and exhaustive knowledge of the entire future."
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So, the specific denial of
exhaustive divine foreknowledge is embraced in open theism as central and essential to its own
identity.
And essential it is. For to open theists, the very notion of the future's `openness' is only
viable if future free choices and actions are both fully unknown and fully unknowable to God.
Were God to know some future choice, say, of what you will have for dinner this evening, since
God's knowledge is infallible, it must be the case that you will have for dinner what God knows
you will, in which case, you are not free to choose otherwise. As central and essential as
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Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001) 106.
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Ibid., 110.
3
William Hasker, "An Adequate God," in John B. Cobb, Jr., and Clark H. Pinnock, eds., Searching for an Adequate
God: a Dialogue between Process and Free Will Theists (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) 218.