Biblical Theology and Openness

My year at Westminster Theological Seminary was interesting and enjoyable, in part because I was raised according to a traditional Arminian theology in a tradition that is militantly non-creedal. A reformed, confessional seminary was truly a different experience for me!

I can still remember how some of the students would light up when they found out I wasn’t reformed. They would school me in the finer points of reformed theology, waiting for me to acquiesce to their superior system of belief. I might have been compelled if I had still been holding on to the traditional Arminian system with which I was raised, but I had abandoned that before I ever left for WTS and faced the reformed challenges to Arminian theology.

I remember finding two quotes from two different professors at WTS and putting them side by side, and then sharing them with some of my friends at WTS in an effort to legitimize my own theological leanings. The first quote comes from Peter Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament:

…the entire narrative structure of the Old Testament is fueled by the back and forth, give and take between God and Israel.  The Old Testament portrays God as a being who can be acted upon, a being whose actions are in a meaningful sense of the word contingent upon what his people do: if they obey, then God will bless; if they disobey, then God will curse. [...] So, for the Old Testament to speak of God as changing his mind means that this is his choice for how he wants us to know him. (Inspiration and Incarnation, 105-06)

The second quote comes from Vern Poythress’ book God-Centered Biblical Interpretation:

Since God is our standard and his word is our standard, there is nothing more ultimate than this revelation of himself.  We believe that God is true.  He truly reveals himself, not a substitute or a mirage.  We believe it because God says so.  Hence, we believe that God is in conformity with what he reveals. (God-Centered Biblical Interpretation, 43)

I was told that I was misconstruing what these professors were saying by placing their quotes alongside each other and that neither of these professors would agree with how I was using their quotes. I can’t speak for how Poythress would respond (though I can surmise he would take exception to what together they imply), but Enns has recently addressed this very issue in an exchange over his book I&I with Bruce Waltke  in the Westminster Theological Journal. Both articles can be accessed at Enns’ blog. He writes:

All of Scripture is covenantal, all of it is a condescension by God to stoop down to speak to his people. There are no parts of Scripture that get ‘‘closer’’ to what God is ‘‘really’’ like than others. What we get in Scripture is the ‘‘God of the Covenant,’’ what he is really like, brought to its fullest expression in Christ. As I say in I&I, in Scripture we have the God of the scenes, not behind the scenes. But Waltke seems uncomfortable with how God is presented in Scripture. He says that there are statements in the Bible that only ‘‘seem to entail that God’s knowledge is restricted or that he changes his mind’’ (my emphasis). But these biblical statements do not ‘‘seem to entail’’ anything; they directly state that God’s knowledge is indeed limited and that he changes his mind in those narratives (such as the Flood story, the binding of Isaac, etc.). This is how the wise God has chosen to make himself known, time and time again, in Scripture. These sorts of statements are not there to test how skilled we can be to glance past them to get at the ‘‘real’’ God. Scripture, all of it (in its redemptive historical, Christotelic coherence), gives us the real God on a silver platter. The question is whether we will accept this gift. (“Interaction with Bruce Waltke,” 108)

From this quote, it seems as though Enns would agree with the pairing I made of his quote from I&I with Poythress’ from GCBI.

It is interesting, then, that while Open Theism continues to receive significant theological criticism, some of what open theists have been keen to point out is being taken seriously by scholars who are not themselves open theists. Of course, it would be unfair not to recognize that before open theists pointed these things out, people like Terence Fretheim was in books like The Suffering of God (see esp. chapter 4). I recently had the privilege of listening to Dr. Fretheim speak (his Feb 21st lectures can be accessed here), and he confessed that he himself was not an Open Theist. He kept referring to John Sandars, author of The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence who was present at the lectures as the “systematician” who dealt with these issues.

Like Fretheim, Enns is highly interested in matters of biblical theology. Another biblical theologian, John Goldingay, has attempted to address some of these very same concerns in his own theology which I look forward to reading this summer. Chris Tilling posted this quote from the first volume of Goldingay’s OTT wherein he addresses this controversial topic:

Sometimes God manifests supernatural knowledge, and no doubt God could know everything, including everything about us, whether we are willing for this or not (cf. 1 Chron 28:9; 1 Jn 3:20). But even God’s supernatural knowledge of us comes about through discovery, through “searching out”, rather than because God possesses this knowledge automatically (e.g., Ps 33:15; 139:1-6). Stories about Babel and about Abraham (Gen 11; 18; 22) will concretely show God taking steps to come to know things. They will again show that God has extraordinary knowledge, but will incorporate no declaration that Yhwh is omniscient, and preclude that by the way they portray God acting so as to discover things: “I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether in accordance with the cry that came to me. If not, I will know” (Gen 18:21). “Now I know that you are one who reveals God” (Gen 22:12) … Talk of God acting to find something out is anthropomorphism, but like talk of God having a change of mind or loving or speaking, such anthropomorphisms presumably tell us something true about God’s relationship with the world. (137)

In my next post, I plan to address some of my own observations and reflections regarding these quotes and biblical theological scholarship.

To be continued…

References

Enns, Peter. Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

______ “Interaction with Bruce Waltke.” Westminster Theological Journal 71 (Spring 2009): 97-114.

Goldingay, John. Israel’s Gospel. Old Testament Theology vol. 1. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Poythress, Vern. God-Centered Biblical Interpretation. Philipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1999.