Openness theology is a sort of halfway house between traditional Christian theology and process theology. Much of the motivation for it rests in its theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the occurrence of evil with the existence of an omnibenevolent God.
According to process theology, God is dependent on the world; as such, he is unable to directly cause any events, but can only "woo" free agents (free in the libertarian sense) to submit to his will. This absolves God of evil fairly easily: God doesn't stop evil because he can't. Such a view, however, can't be reconciled with Christianity, or even theism -- it's panentheistic rather than theistic. God cannot perform miracles, such as the creation of the universe or raising Jesus from the dead. It exchanges God's omnipotence for impotence.
Traditional Christian theology has claimed that God, being omnibenevolent, is not responsible for evil. Human beings, being free agents, are responsible for most of the evil that they experience. God, however, allows such evil, but then uses it to bring about good. Jesus' crucifixion is the paradigm for this: the one innocent human being that has ever lived was brutally tortured and executed. Yet, by his death, the human race is reconciled to God. In fact, this seems to suggest that the greater the evil, the greater the good that God can bring out of it.
Openness theologians and philosophers object to this scenario, since it would mean that God foreknows horrific evils and doesn't stop them. God knew the Holocaust would happen, recognized it as evil, and then let it happen anyway. By allowing evil to take place, God is culpable for it, and this is incompatible with his omnibenevolence. They consider this to be simply unacceptable. God must not know that evil will take place before it happens, and therefore he must not know anything before it happens. The future is "open". It is not already laid down for us in the divine mind. We are free to choose the evil or the good. Of course, traditional Christian theology says we are free as well, but openness theologians do not think this view of freedom is acceptable, partially, again, because it makes God bear much of the responsibility for evil.
But this raises enormous problems for openness theologians, not least of which is whether their theodicy really accomplishes what they think it does. First, although God may not know infallibly what will happen, does that mean that he has no idea whatsoever what the future holds? To deny this would seem absurd: human beings can often know what's going to happen before it actually does, and while this knowledge is certainly fallible, it still allows us to sometimes see evil approaching before it reaches us. Thus, openness theology does not deny that God may know with great probability what we will freely choose to do, he just doesn't know it with absolute certainty. But this raises the question, how often is God right? Wouldn't it be possible for God to know everything with such a high degree of probability that he's never wrong? If so, we're faced with the same problem of evil as traditional Christianity has wrestled with; if not, why not? If God's foreknowledge is not infallible, on what basis does the openness advocate determine the degree to which God can know our future free decisions?
So the openness theologian's claims would seem to suffer from the same critiques which he gave to traditional Christian theology: if God knows that a particular evil will probably transpire, why wouldn't he stop it? The only way out of this for the openness theologian that I can see is if every instance of evil goes against what God expected would probably occur. But surely this is preposterous; after all, Nietschze predicted that the twentieth century would be the bloodiest that humanity had ever seen, a prediction that was fulfilled. Would the openness theologian maintain that an atheist philosopher had more insight than God? (If so, the atheist philosopher would appear to be right. Perhaps Nietschze meant to say God is dumb instead of dead.) The point here is that human beings have some capacity to successfully prognosticate when bad things will happen, so it would seem absurd to deny God the same faculty. The difference is that God supposedly has greater motive and ability to intercede.
Even if God were surprised by every instance of evil, this would still leave openness theology with a less adequate theodicy than traditional Christian theology. After all, according to the latter, God allows specific instances of evil only to prevent greater evils or to produce good. In the openness view, God is surprised by specific instances of evil, has no purpose in allowing them to continue, but allows them to anyway. Openness theology claims it is completely implausible that God could have had morally sufficient reasons for allowing the Holocaust; it's more reasonable to think that God didn't know the Holocaust was going to happen. But if this is the case, why didn't God stop it once it started? Why didn't God intervene and stop the Holocaust when it first began instead of letting six million Jews be killed over several years? The traditional Christian theologian can claim that God had morally sufficient reasons for allowing the Holocaust. The process theologian can claim that God was incapable of stopping it. But the openness theologian must maintain that God had the capacity to stop the Holocaust, had no morally sufficient reason not to, but didn't anyway. In other words, their attempt to build a better theodicy has produced the very worst theodicy possible, short of maltheism.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
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God, being "the ground of all being," and "upholding all that exists," upholds both the evil and the good.
The truth of the matter is that God not only knows all the evil that human beings will ever do -- and knows all the evil that human beings may do if the accumulated free choices of human beings results in *this* potential future rather than *that* potential future -- but he also participates in the evil we do, just as he participates in the good we do.
God is not "up in heaven" watching history unfold as though it were an entertainment, he is here with us, living our lives with us.
Christ did not put himself into the hands of his creation *only* during the Passion; he has always been giving his life for his creation -- Christ's Passion and Resurrection particularizes the creative and sustaining work he has always been doing. In a way of looking at it, the Passion (and Resurrection) is the symbol or metaphor.
Traditionally evil has been understood as the privation of good. So to say that God participates in the evil we do means he participates in the privation of something. This is difficult to make sense of, because a privation is not a thing in and of itself, it is the absence of something.
There are also Bible passages which say that God has no part in evil, such as Job 34:10 and 1 John 1:5.
Moreover, evil has also traditionally been understood as the rejection of God in some sense. To perform evil is to deny God. So to say God participates in evil means that he rejects or denies himself. Again, this is difficult to make sense of, and it seems to contradict the Bible (2 Tim. 2:13).
Jim S: "Traditionally evil has been understood as the privation of good. So to say that God participates in the evil we do means he participates in the privation of something. This is difficult to make sense of, because a privation is not a thing in and of itself, it is the absence of something."
I know that what I said is difficult to grasp upon first exposure, and I know I haven't explained it well (in part because it hasn't been important enough to me to fully articulate it), but, come on ... it's really simple/straightforward logical deduction.
We could come to the understanding I tried to express in my previous post via purely philosophical means, as some of the ancient pagan Greek philosophers did ... it is at least implicit in the better philosophy which has come down to us.
Or -- seeing that we are Christians, with a religious-and-philosophical tradition of considerably more than 3000 years, and which takes as its axioms both reason and revelation -- we can reason to this understanding via what God has revealed to us.
Is not God existence itself? (Do we not know, both from revelation and from proper and logical reasoning, that God is existence itself?)
So: Can anything exist wholly apart from God? Is not that question logically equivalent to asking, "Can anything exists which exists-not?"
The Bible asserts that God (specifically, the person of the Son) creates all that is created; the Bible asserts that all things hold together in Christ; the Bible asserts that God (Christ) upholds the existence of all things; and it asserts that "In him [Christ] we live and move and have our being."
That is, nothing exists wholly apart from God; it's logically impossible ... for (pace Ayn Rand) existence is no more a thing apart from God than love is.
In the above quote it seems you are mostly making reference to "natural evil," that is, evil without a moral component; for instance, a rock-slide which buries a village, destroying all the lives within it. Is the rock slide wholly a privation or absence of something? Or, is there not at least some degree of positive ontological reality to it?
Jim S: "There are also Bible passages which say that God has no part in evil, such as Job 34:10 and 1 John 1:5."
And the Bible attributes to God the statement of Isaiah 45:7 (KJV)"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." (or, as the NIV translates it, "I form the light and create darkness: I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.") This, is, of course, to say nothing of all the verses addressing specific instances which attribute to God the claim that "I will bring evil on [this or that person, house, city, nation]," and other verses which may not use the word 'evil,' but rather name specific evils that God has or will bring down upon a city ... or a world.
So, is the Bible contradictory? Or, are we frequently thinking to woodenly or simplistically? Or, are we trying to "protect" God where he does not seek, much less need, our "protection?"
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Jim S: "Moreover, evil has also traditionally been understood as the rejection of God in some sense. To perform evil is to deny God."
Now you're clearly speaking of moral evil, of wickedness. Yes, wickedness is the rejection of God ... which is why "the wages of sin is death;" for, ultimately, to reject God is to embrace non-existence.
But, God created evil -- God created the actuality of "natural" evil, and he created the potentiality of moral evil (or wickedness).
What is the single-most distinguishing feature of the created order, whether the whole of Creation or any specific created entity? It is that it is/they are not God! In creating anything at all, God created that-which-is-not-God. In creating anything at all, God created privation-of-the-Good.
And, in creating rational beings, God created the posibility of the rejection of God.
Jim S: "So to say God participates in evil means that he rejects or denies himself. Again, this is difficult to make sense of, and it seems to contradict the Bible (2 Tim. 2:13)."
"In him [Christ] we live and move and have our being" -- that applies not only "the elect," but applies to all Creation, the living anf the non-living, the human and the angelic (and demonic).
I think you're misunderstanding "participation" ... and I can't yet think of a way that might help you past that. On a more human (less metaphysical) level, did Jesus participate in his own flogging? Well, of course he did ... and I don't mean that, being God, he "allowed it" and could have stopped it at any time ... I mean that he participated in it in the same way that the the thieves crucified with him participated in their floggings. What I'm trying to get at here is that "participation" can cover far more ground than merely the action of he who acts.
In any event, the wickedness we do is so wicked, so offensive to God, precisely because we, so to speak, choose to drag Christ through the mud with us.
When Jesus was tempted by Satan, was it a real temptation, or was the Son just, so to speak, putting on a shadow-play? The Bible asserts that it was a real temptation.
Was it logically possible that Jesus might have succumbed to the temptation? If it was not logically possible that Jesus might have succumbed to the temptation, then it was not a real temptaion. But, the Bible asserts that it was a real temptation.
If Jesus the Christ, who is God-the-Son, who "upholds the existence of all things," had succumbed to the temptation by Satan, what would that mean? Why, it would mean that Existence Itself contradicts itself ... it would mean that all things cease to exist -- God was not playing a game with the Incarnation.
Just in case you're interested in reading it, I've discussed these thoughts in the OP and comments of this thread on my blog.
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