Dr. Bruce A. Ware: Challenging Voice to Open Theism

Dr. Bruce A. Ware, Professor of Christian Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), took some time to talk to the Christian Post about Open theism from an opposing viewpoint on June 3, 2005.

What is your view of Open theism(OT) and how does it relate to the traditional Free will theism that has been in conflict with Calvinism for centuries?

OT is a version of Free will theism. Calvinism view - God is in control of everything that happens in the universe including human actions and decisions and He exercises in a way in which no creatures feel freed. Freedom as in Calvinistic understanding is not the same as it is understood in the free will theist tradition or the Arminian tradition.

Freedom for Calvinists is the ability to do what one wants most to do apart from constraint or coercion. Thus, Calvinists hold that it’s compatible and it’s called compatiblist freedom - that God can control what happens, what free creatures decide. And yet, they do so freely because they do what they most want to do. God can be in an ultimate sense in control of factors that have to do with what constitutes their desires to do what they most want to do.

They hold that the determination of God or the control of God is comprehensive - sometimes it’s called meticulous providence - and that people, moral creatures, do what they do, what they most want to do. Hence, they act freely and those things are compatible.

Free will theism is any version of notion that God created moral creatures with libertarian freedom and the libertarian freedom, sometimes called contra-causal freedom, is the view that – that term simply means that when you cause one thing to be the case, you could’ve caused something contrary to that. If you chose A, you could’ve chosen B. So contra-causal freedom is simply the notion that we’re free when we make a choice and we could’ve chosen otherwise.

Or another way to put it is we have the power of contra-causal choice and of course the classical Arminianism holds to this and so it would be a version of Free will theism. OT holds to this. It would be a version of OT. Process theology holds to libertarian freedom and it would also be a version of Free will theism. So Free will theism is a very broad category that affirms, that would include within it a number of theological models. But what they have in common is their advocacy of libertarian freedom.

Calvinists deny libertarian freedom and hold instead to what it’s called compatiblist freedom.

What distinct feature of OT sets it apart from the rest of theological models adhering to libertarian freedom?

There’s a distinguishing feature of OT that really sets it off from classical Arminianism and from every version of Christian theology through the history of the Church - Catholic, Greek, Russian Orthodox, you name it. It is that God knows the future with exhaustive and indefinite understanding or that God has exhaustive, indefinite knowledge of the future.

They [open theists] deny that and hence, that’s where the word OT comes from. The future according to these people is “open” as far as it isn’t decided yet what is going to happen. God doesn’t even know what you’re going to have for dinner tonight until you choose to have it. You might have pizza. You might have spaghetti. When you choose, that’s when God will know. Process theologians hold this view also, but they’re very unorthodox in many, many ways. In terms of orthodox theology through the history of the church – Catholic and Protestant versions, Orthodox versions, all taken together, no one, no movement in church has ever denied what open theists deny, which is that God knows the future with exhaustive, indefinite foreknowledge.

That’s what is distinctive about them. And of course, one of the main reasons they deny that God has exhaustive and indefinite foreknowledge is fundamentally because they believe that God knows everything that’s going to happen in the future and nothing that happens in the future can be different from what God knows what will be. If that’s the case, how can we be free?

An example is eating dinner tonight. If God had known from all of the eternity that tonight you were going to order a pepperoni pizza, are you free to have spaghetti? You’re not because you cannot choose other than God knows you will choose. If that’s the case, then you’re not free to choose otherwise. Since you’re not free, you don’t have libertarian freedom.

Hence, OT has concluded that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with libertarian freedom. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.

Arminians have argued for centuries. Actually, there was a heretic group called Socinians in the18th century, who also argued that God cannot know the future exhaustively. In that sense they held the same view as OT on that question, but they were heretics. They denied the trinity, the deity of Christ, and a lot of other things.

Is OT viewed as heresy?

Some do, I do not. Of course you can imagine a lot of people have concluded it as it was a heresy. I have not, however. I think it’s dead wrong, but anyway, because of this Socinian view, there have been Arminians who have responded to the same idea over the past couple centuries. What they have argued is that the two things - freedom and foreknowledge - are not incompatible simply because God knowing what we’re going to do doesn’t determine what we do.

God knowing that you’re gong to choose pizza tonight for dinner if that’s what in fact you choose, doesn’t cause you to choose pizza. In fact, if you end up tonight choosing spaghetti, God would have known that instead. So it’s your choice that determines what God knows in most cases, not the other way around. Or your choice causes God’s knowledge to be what it is. So the cause is your choice. The effect is God’s knowledge. God’s knowledge is conditioned upon what you decide. So the Armenians hold that there is no incompatibility. Open theists disagree with that very strongly. There’s a ton of literature written about this - a lot of it by philosophers.

Open theists are so convinced that the freedom and knowledge are incompatible that they see a very strong reason to give up exhaustive foreknowledge.

Can you elaborate on Calvinism’s compatiblist freedom versus libertarian freedom?

Most Calvinists agree that the divine foreknowledge renders the future absolutely certain. It cannot be other than it will be and hence, there is no libertarian freedom. Most Calvinists agree with that and of course that doesn’t bother them because they don’t believe in libertarian freedom. They don’t have a vested interest in trying to keep libertarian freedom. It’s kind of funny. Here is a point where Calvinists are criticizing the Arminian view the very same way the OT are criticizing the Arminian view. Anyway, you can’t have both exhaustive and indefinite foreknowledge and libertarian freedom.

Arminians have been saying the same thing for centuries - you don’t have to deny the exhaustive foreknowledge to have a model that emphasizes God created the world with libertarian freedom so people can love him freely. Being understood in a libertarian way, you don’t have to have foreknowledge to do that and so that’s one of my responses. All the Arminians who know about OT and have rejected it and don’t agree that you have to go the route of OT to have what they want.

Number two, I think it is passively false that God took a risk when he created the world. This is not the God of the Bible. He is the creator of heaven and earth who reigns over all that He has made who is in control all the good that happens and all the evil that happens in this world and He doesn’t take any risks at all in anything at all because He is omnipotent and sovereign. In Isaiah 45:7 I am the Lord there is no other. I’m the one who causes well-being and calamity, light and darkness. I’m the God who does all these things. I think this is the longstanding difference between Calvinists and all versions of OT.

You mentioned all the good and evil that happen in this world. What is the Calvinistic view of evil? Why is there evil?

God created the world in which He fully well knew and in fact intended that there be evil in this world. Although God is not in any way culpable, morally accountable for that evil because we do it and he permits what he could prevent. Is it possible for God to have created a world in which there was no evil? I think we all agree with that because heaven would be such a place. At least we hope so, don’t we? And yes, we’ll be free forever, won’t we? And yes, we’ll never be evil again. But, God chose to create a world in which there is both good and evil. He did so in order t demonstrate and make known His purposes of His and manifestation of His character could never have been done in a world that was good only. God, in an ultimate sense, is in control of all evil that takes place but he’s never morally responsible for the evil. He is always and only morally praiseworthy even when the evil takes place.

Can you give us an example from the Bible?

Joseph’s brothers is an interesting example in the Bible. In the first chapters of Genesis, Joseph’s brothers sell him into Egypt and clearly this is a wicked thing to do. They were jealous and revengeful and yet, we find out when Joseph talks to his brothers in Genesis 45:80 he says, “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” They certainly did send him there, but behind their sending him to Egypt, there was God. He sent him to Egypt through the brothers and we have a very interesting statement in Genesis 50:20 You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

Would you say that God was behind in the brothers’ selling of Joseph to Egypt??

Yes, absolutely, that in a way in which they did exactly what they most wanted to do.

These are the kinds of questions that require enormous amounts of time and careful thought and study of scripture and people often want them in little nuggets. Well, sorry you have to work at it. That’s all I have to say.

OT became an issue a few years ago at the Evangelical Theology Society, which you are a member of, regarding whether OT was in conflict with the ETS doctrinal statement. Is it?

Yes, that was what was in question. The statement has two parts to it. It affirms the inerrancy of the scripture and the other is trinity. So the questions was does OT conflict with inerrancy? It is very debatable whether or not OT is consistent with inerrancy. But after a lot of time spent on this, the majority of the membership decided that there is not a clear conflict with inerrancy and therefore, they were retained as members. Of course, many members differed with that. But nonetheless that was what the vote was.

Both Sanders and Pinnock were voted at the ETS meeting 1.5 years ago Nov. 2003 to be retained as members. They were both voted by the membership to be retained as members. They weren’t voted out.

Final remarks? What would you say to Christians regarding this topic?

This is a very complicated area. It is a very wrong and dangerous movement and I think Christian people ought to be warned against allurement rather than being enticed to it. I think many Christians who don’t know much about the Bible, theology can be easily enticed to OT because it says things that tag into our cultural value. We have a very high self-esteemed cultural. We put a lot of stock in what we think and OT tags into that. They would say things like God wouldn’t decide your future until he consulted it with you. And we think well of course because what I think is so important. I just don’t think Christian people - because there is so much biblical illiteracy out there - are very prone to be attracted to OT.

This is a very small movement of theologians and it stands against the entire history of the Church.

The esteemed theologian and author in the evangelical world, Dr. Bruce Ware, came to Southern Seminary from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where he served as Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biblical and Systematic Theology. Prior to this, he taught at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary and at Bethel Theological Seminary. Dr. Ware has written numerous journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews and, along with Thomas Schreiner, has co-edited The Grace of God and the Bondage of the Will and Still Sovereign. He also has authored God's Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism and Their God Is Too Small.

He grew up in a Christian home in Washington State and placed faith in Christ as a young child.