The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (1994) is an introduction to “open theism”, known to some “dynamic omniscience”.

For those new to the concept: open theism is the idea that the free future choices of accountable moral agents (read: humans) are not in any meaningful sense knowable—if future choices were known with any certainty (as in Augustinianism or Molinism), then they could not be free future choices. It relies, then, on an intuitively linear view of time in its metaphysics. Time as measured by us is a mere construct; but time as a directionality and causality is basic to all existence, including God’s, and it would be logically absurd to argue that anyone was ever “outside time”. Time is not a physical reality that you can enter or exit. Open theism, then, involves both philosophical and theological considerations, and both are handled at some length in The Openness of God.

The Openness of God, despite its length, felt to me like a fly-by. The biblical chapter did not have many new things to say to me, as someone who had reviewed these arguments for many years, but the “historical considerations” was much more relevant to me since I am weak in that area.

The writers argue that certain attributes of God in “classical” theism were derived from Greek philosophy, not from the Bible or Judeo-Christian thought. This is a key argument, because followers of the early church father such as Augustine have maintained for many centuries that God is outside time, and some regard this as the only orthodox position.

The research probably benefits from multiple authors, but I also felt that it made the discussion feel slow, and sometimes repetitive. The book is organized around the different kinds of arguments used to defend open theism.

I did not like that in some chapters the discussion is framed around “rejecting” or “accepting” universal foreknowledge as such. I prefer the language of Samuel Fancourt, who must have been the first Englishman to articulate open theism in the 1720s. He denied that God foreknew our free moral choices in advance, but he always maintained that God’s foreknowledge is absolute. Open theists simply have a different view of time, so certain things cannot be foreknown. (Edit: In a 2021 podcast, Greg Boyd and Thomas Jay Oord have agreed that the grounding fact of open theism is not that God voluntarily limits his omniscience or omnipotence, but that God does not need to predict what is merely possible, not certain.)

If you want to think about ideas like the suffering of God and how we see God’s activity in time, I would recommend something more practical and biblical. Many authors (as I mentioned above) have written on these topics without making dogmatic arguments that tend to remove focus from the application of biblical truth. This is an important debate, but it is primarily important because we need to balance our metaphors about God in the same way that the Bible does and live in light of that truth. Expository writing can meet those goals. However, this book is intended as a theological introduction to a way of thinking. I guess it would meet that goal pretty well if you wanted a clear introduction to “open theology”; though, something like Michael Saia’s Does God Know the Future? or Greg Boyd’s Letters from a Skeptic might be less time-consuming and more palatable for those who are not academics.

This review was written around 2013 and posted in 2021.