Chapter 115 of 116

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1 The movement's manifesto, which brought it to the attention of the larger Christian community, is The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), cowritten by C. Pinnock, R. Rice, J. Sanders, W. Hasker, and D. Basinger. Controversy has dogged the movement ever since. In 1999 the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution against Open Theism, and in 2001, at its annual meeting, the Evangelical Theological Society did the same; two years later a move to expel two of its members for advocating Open Theism narrowly failed. A measure of its growing support in philosophical circles is the Open Theism and Science Conference hosted by Azusa Pacific University in April 2008.

2 This is at least implicit in G. Boyd's contribution to Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, eds. J. K. Beilby and P. R. Eddy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001); it also seems to fit best with the various things J. Sanders says—e.g., in The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence, rev. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), chap. 6. For a clear endorsement of this position, see D. Tuggy, “Three Roads to Open Theism,” Faith and Philosophy 24 (January 2007): 28–51. Another way to deny that there are any true future contingents for God to know is to hold that all genuine future contingents are false. For a defense of this variation of strategy one, see A. R. Rhoda, G. A. Boyd, and T. G. Belt, “Open Theism, Omniscience, and the Nature of the Future,” Faith and Philosophy 23 (October 2006): 432–59.

3 W. Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), chap. 10; D. Basinger, “Can an Evangelical Christian Justifiably Deny God's Exhaustive Knowledge of the Future?” Christian Scholar's Review 25 (1995): 133–45.

4 D. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 244–53.

5 Sanders, The God Who Risks, 133.

6 The three resources that follow are the ones Sanders summarizes in The God Who Risks, 138–39.

7 Beilby and Eddy, eds., Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, 21.

8 Both sorts of interest in the tradition are on display in Sanders's contribution to The Openness of God and in chapter 5 of his The God Who Risks.

9 Actually five, by my count, are particularly important, but space considerations compelled me to drop the one that is least prominent in openist literature. The essence of the objection is this: the more of the future one knows, the less of the future is open to one's agency (“one cannot deliberate over what one already knows is going to happen”); this is no less true of God than of human agents, but then maximal foreknowledge would render God maximally impotent. For more on this objection and my own suggestion for how to handle it, see my contribution to Beilby and Eddy, eds., Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, 91–96.

10 For a clear discussion of why truth should not be denied to future contingents, see W. L. Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2000, chap. 4.

11 Augustine's analysis appears in Book III, chapter 4. I argue on behalf of Augustine's solution in my “On Augustine's Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy 16 (January 1999): 1–26.

12 Readers interested in pursuing this objection further and thinking hard about some of the argument's premises, while avoiding the technicalities of an article or book written for an audience of professional philosophers, may find what they are looking for in my contribution to Beilby and Eddy, eds., Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, especially 72–91.

13 Hasker, God, Time and Knowledge, 55.

14 W. Hasker, Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (London: Routledge, 2004), 104.

15 I go into these matters in more detail in my “Divine Providence and Simple Foreknowledge,” Faith and Philosophy 10 (July 1993): 396–416, and in my contribution to Beilby and Eddy, eds., Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, 96–101.

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