What About the Tradition?
What About the Tradition?
Before getting to the philosophical debate, I want to comment briefly on another touchstone: the theological tradition. Not all readers can be expected to care, or care to the same degree, about what the tradition has to say on the matter. I do care; certainly the openists care.
The tradition is important to openists in two respects. In the first place, openists need to explain the tradition's endorsement of exhaustive foreknowledge, despite what they take to be the plain teaching of Scripture. They do this by alleging that the tradition was corrupted by pagan thought. Openists therefore look to the tradition for evidence of this corruption. In the second place (and running somewhat at cross-purposes with the first point), openists hope to uncover early openist voices—a “pilgrim church” of open theists who remained faithful to biblical Openism. If successful, this move might dampen criticism that Openism is a theological innovation.8
Regarding the first point, it is beyond dispute that the Fathers were, to varying degrees, influenced by the pagan philosophical heritage. (For anyone who doubts this, I suggest reading a few treatises from Plotinus's Enneads, followed by Augustine's Confessions.) Whether this influence amounts to corruption depends on whether, owing to this influence, the church fathers reached the wrong conclusions. This point, then, depends on the success of the openists' scriptural arguments (which we've already covered) and philosophical arguments (which we'll come to next).
As for the second point, the effort to identify a “pilgrim church” of openists is embarrassingly short on results. Exhibit A in the openist case is Chalcidius, who wrote that God “knows necessary truths necessarily and future contingent truths contingently.” A number of comments are in order here.
1. That's it: there is no Exhibit B (at least until the nineteenth century). Many early figures qualify as proto-Arminians but none rejects exhaustive foreknowledge.
2. Chalcidius (c. 400) is a rather late witness to Open Theism, much too late to represent an early, uncorrupted, preheretical church. (Think how many heresies emerged to confuse believers during the first four centuries.)
3. We just don't know much about him; though probably a Christian, even this isn't certain.
4. Interpreting Chalcidius as a proto-openist may also involve wishful exegesis: it's not at all clear that the phrase quoted above means what the openists want it to mean. Any Arminian, believing that God has knowledge of future contingents, should agree that God has this knowledge contingently. If the foreknown event is contingent, it might not have been true; if it might not have been true, God might not have known it; and if God might not have known it, the fact that He does know it is a contingent fact.
5. The strangest thing about the openist love affair with Chalcidius is that he's supposed to be someone who—unlike such theological giants as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and so on—had the discernment to resist the corrupting effects of pagan philosophy. This is strange because the little we know about Chalcidius implicates him thoroughly in pagan philosophy. Chalcidius was a Platonist; he translated Plato's Timaeus and wrote a treatise engaging Stoic arguments on fate. If the Fathers were touched by Platonism, this alleged openist was thoroughly implicated in it! Exhibit A is a bust.
Conclusion: The tradition goes decisively against Open Theism. Openists should frankly acknowledge that their position on divine foreknowledge is a theological innovation and focus on arguing that it's an innovation whose time has come.