Ron Highfield
RESPONSE TO GREGORY A. BOYD
In responding to Greg Boyd’s view of divine providence, I feel like the elephant who, with the best of intentions, attempted to come to an understanding with the whale. However much the land dweller tried, he could never get close enough to the ocean creature to engage in a meaningful conversation. 381 Compared to the traditional universe I inhabit, the open theist world is rotated ninety degrees to the left. The earth, moon, and constellations are recognizable, but I am looking at them from a skewed angle. To change the metaphor, every word in the new open theist dictionary possesses a meaning different than the words in the old one I still use. The words “God,” “providence,” “freedom,” “love,” “Creator,” “Savior,” “Lord,” “omnipotence,” “omniscience,” “grace,” “eternity,” “wisdom,” and many more have been retained, but their meanings have been revised. If you think in the traditional theological vocabulary, you must not assume that the following sentences (if derived from the open theist dictionary) possess the meaning that naturally arises in your mind when you hear them: “The eternal God is the omnipotent Creator of heaven and earth” or “God is the omniscient Lord of history” or “The infinitely wise God will most certainly achieve his eternal plan for creation.” To understand their meaning, you will need to have your open theist lexicon handy.
In view of the near incommensurability between Boyd’s model and my understanding of God’s providence, I cannot hope to respond to every argument, unspoken assumption, or definition contained in his chapter. Just creating a bilingual (open theist—traditional) dictionary to translate one language into the other would occupy a whole volume. Instead, I will limit my critique to a few decisive differences that may enable the reader to weigh the merits of life in one universe as opposed to life in the other. I will begin by assessing the overall vision of God I see in Boyd’s chapter and then examine what I consider the most decisive arguments of each section.
The Open Theist Vision of God
In my view, the open theist teaching about God’s attributes and activity falls far short of how we ought to think and speak of God. Because of his understanding of freedom and his metaphysical doctrine of relationality, Boyd implicitly rejects and everywhere ignores the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, that is, the idea that God is his nature, that he is identical to his attributes. To reject divine simplicity is at minimum to postulate a real distinction between God’s existence and his essence. This postulate implies that the Lord is God because his existence conforms to the concept of deity. The idea of divinity and the concepts of love, possibility and impossibility, power, knowing, and all the rest are not defined by the living reality of God; they define what sort of God can exist. In principle, God relates to the concept of deity the way I relate to the concept of humanity. God does not exist as God because he wills to do so any more than I exist as human because I will it. God’s deity is his fate. 382 Without guidance from the doctrine of divine simplicity, the philosophical concept of relation, which demands that two related things inhabit the same causal space and hence both be subject to being changed by the relation, is freely applied to God’s relationship with his creation. 383 For Boyd, the concepts of love, power, and relation apply to God in the same sense that they apply to creatures. This allows him and other open theists to read the limitations of creatures into God. God is temporal, changeable, and passible because he is related to temporal, changeable, and passible creatures. For God to relate to the temporal phases of creatures, he must live his life also in temporal phases; to relate to suffering creatures, God must suffer; and so on.
So God is not eternal in the sense of Boethius’s famous definition, which traditional theologians found so apropos to God: Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life.384 God too has a future and relates to his future as we relate to ours. God does not possess his eternal life simultaneously because some of it no longer exists and some has not yet come to be. 385 For God, the future exists not as actuality but only as possibility, and the move from possibility to actuality depends not on God alone but also partially on the choices of free creatures. God knows the future only by knowing everything about the present, that is, by believing propositions about states of affairs that “can or cannot” or “will or will not” or “might or might not” come to pass. However, God knows the truth-value of all propositions about what will or will not be only insofar as he determines unilaterally to bring about certain states of affairs, no matter what creatures do. 386 Hence, with the exception of those states of affairs God determines unilaterally, God cannot know which present possibilities will be actualized and which will be left behind.
In the open theist lexicon, “divine omniscience” means that God knows everything that is possible for any knower to know. At first, this definition sounds impressive, and Boyd claims that it is just as all-encompassing as the traditional understanding. But this is not true. It clearly places natural limits on God’s knowledge and power by postulating a ground of what is possible and impossible for God other than God himself. God finds himself situated in an eternal world of concepts and laws387 —expressible as propositions that can be manipulated logically by finite human beings — some of which are incompatible with each other. This world defines God’s divinity and constrains his actions. Eternally and necessarily, God cannot create a world where creaturely freedom and love are possible and everything happens according to his will by the power of his will. And why can God not do exactly what he wants? Because God wants two logically incompatible propositions to be true at the same time. God is forced to choose between two good things, each of which is possible in itself. God chooses freedom and love, leaving unrealized a world where his will is accomplished perfectly by the power of his will.
God’s choice for freedom and love necessarily forecloses the option of knowing exhaustively what will or will not come to pass in the future. Why? Because God knows only the present, and the present contains the future only by way of possibilities. And those possibilities can be described by propositions about what “can or cannot,” “will or will not,” and “might or might not” come to pass. The domain of “will or will not” truths is limited to states of affairs God unilaterally determines and excludes as meaningless statements about what free choice will or will not do. Future states of affairs brought about by human choices fall into the categories of “can or cannot” and “might or might not” propositions, which leave the future undetermined and hence unknowable.
Let us summarize. God exists eternally in a context where laws of thought and concepts such as relation, contradiction, justice, and love possess a type of being, necessity, and force independent of God’s will and, even in their most primitive form, can conflict with each other. 388This context makes it impossible for God simply to create the world he wants. If he decides to create, he is forced to choose from among many good options. Boyd contends that all the limits God experiences in relation to creation are self-limitations brought about by God’s free decision to create. They are not natural limitations. This is not true. The impossibility of God’s simply doing what he wants, his being forced to choose between logically incompatible (but good in themselves) options, is a natural limitation. Only the prior presence of a natural limitation explains why God must limit himself further to create free beings who can love. God finds himself limited by an eternal other that delimits his space. 389
Anselm of Canterbury famously affirmed that we ought to think of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”390 But a God who is the ground of his own possibility and who can never be forced to choose between goods is clearly greater than one whose ground of possibility is something other than himself and who can be placed in the dilemma of a forced choice by a necessity outside the scope of his freedom.
Boyd’s Four Christocentric Principles
Boyd presents his view of providence as an explication of four christocentric principles. In my view, however, Boyd’s doctrine of providence does not rise to the genuinely christocentric. A theory does not merit the designation “christocentic” just because it quotes texts about Christ’s work and treats a few topics discussed in Christology textbooks. Boyd’s four principles by no means articulate the cardinal truths of the revelation of God in Christ. A christocentric doctrine of providence would ask how God’s being and action in Christ provide a model for God’s working in the world. It would show how the saving work of Christ is intimately related to God’s work of creation and eschatological redemption in Christ. A christocentric doctrine of providence would look at the incarnation and the work of Christ for revelation of who God is and how he works to achieve salvation for humanity. It would take seriously the Son of God’s assumption of human nature without ceasing to be God and the human and divine nature of Jesus’ deeds. Such a theology would put central emphasis on the truth that God’s freedom and human freedom were completely realized in the same person and that Jesus freely refrained from sinning both as God and as man. A genuinely christocentric doctrine of providence would take into account that God defeated Satan, sin, and death with the free cooperation of only one human, Jesus Christ, who is also the eternal Son of God filled with the Spirit of God. Christocentrically understood, our deliverance from Satan, sin, and death is not dependent on our freedom, but our freedom is dependent on Christ’s free act of deliverance!
Spiritual Warfare
According to Boyd, the narratives of Jesus’ spiritual warfare against Satan, demons, and every form of evil indicate that evil possesses power not only against human beings but also against God. God can be defeated in at least some of his specific aims. Supposedly, open theism’s theory of divine self-limitation and the ability of creaturely free will to remain obdurate forever to God’s overtures explain why such vulnerability does not diminish God’s omnipotence. God cannot merely annihilate the cosmic evil forces since he must respect the freedom he has given to angels as well as to humankind. In view of the powerful influence of cosmic evil, we cannot expect that God will always be successful in persuading people to make good choices. But in response to this last point, why should we think that the Devil possesses greater powers of persuasion in relation to God than any other creature? Why shouldn’t God be infinitely better at persuasion than Satan, so that God wins every time? Hence, Boyd’s specific take on spiritual warfare adds nothing to his general free will explanation.
God Relies on Power and Wisdom
Boyd (mistakenly) defines God’s power as coercive, and as a consequence, since free will cannot be coerced, he contends that God must use wisdom rather than power to accomplish his will. 391 Rather than working through coercion, wisdom accomplishes its goals through manipulation and persuasion. God may choose to “outsmart” his enemies and, without coercion, thwart and redirect their actions to bring good out of evil. Or God sometimes attempts to persuade free agents in a variety of ways to choose wisely. But God is not always able to find a way to negate evil or to persuade every free being to act justly. And here lies the problem with Boyd’s theory: God wants everyone to choose the good always and uses all his wisdom to achieve this goal. Why, then, can God not achieve this end? Boyd’s oft-repeated answer is that it is logically impossible for God to give someone libertarian freedom for A without at the same time giving him or her freedom for ~A. That is just what libertarian freedom is. I will address libertarian freedom below. But let us consider here that the argument derived from the logical contradiction in the notion of a coerced freedom does not address the question of divine persuasion. Persuading an agent to choose A instead of ~A does not violate the agent’s freedom. Indeed, it violates no law of logic to say that God is able to persuade all free agents to choose the good freely on every occasion. And if it is not logically impossible, there must be another reason why God does not do this: either he does not really want to do so or he does not know how to do it. What other options are possible based on open theist premises? Hence, in Boyd’s framework either God sometimes intentionally allows evil to win or his wisdom is limited.
God Relies on Love
According to this “christocentric” principle, God relies on love to defeat evil and accomplish his purposes. (This love, I assume, works by persuasion.) To give his creatures some “say-so,” the loving God restrains his power and opens himself to be affected and changed by those he loves. He chooses to depend on creatures for help in accomplishing his will, and he suffers when things go wrong. Despite the sentimental appeal of this picture of divine love, it finds little support in the New Testament and is by no means christocentrically derived. Even though Boyd quotes scriptural texts to support his relational theism, it is clear that this interpretation is driven by the assumption that divine love falls under a general concept of love extrapolated from human experience. Boyd signals this when he says, “It is in the nature of loving relationships that they are mutually influential.” A genuine christocentric doctrine of God’s love would begin, not with human love, but with the eternal love among the Trinity, in which there is no suffering, no change, and no possibility of refusal to love in return. God loves the world in his eternal love for his Son and through the Son loves even his enemies (Rom. 5:6 — 10). He shows his love for us sinners, not by allowing us to say yes or no, but by refusing to take our idiotic no seriously. His love manifests itself in breaking open our self-enclosed existence and freeing us from our senseless no for the yes of love in return. God does not need to change to be our highest good; he is that good eternally. We need to change so that we can receive him as our supreme good. And only he can bring about that change.
God Wins by Bringing Good Out of Evil
According to Boyd’s fourth “christological” principle, Christ’s work of atonement and his resurrection show that God can bring good out of evil. Indeed, they show that God has “in principle already won and already accomplished all of his purposes in creation.“ This is a bold claim, which I accept. But can the open theist view of providence do justice to it? At first, it seems plausible that the self-limited God of open theism can accomplish the purpose for which he created the world. Of course, that plausibility rests on God’s plan being defined in such general terms that it can encompass an almost infinite spectrum of specific outcomes. That is to say, God has lots of “might be” worlds (a narrower class than “possible” worlds) that fit the general criteria for creation’s goal, and as one world becomes unrealizable, God can work for another. But several problems plague this view. First, even with a very generally defined view of God’s plan, such as “The purpose of creation is for us to receive and reflect God’s love by being incorporated into Christ,” the God of open theism cannot know that this goal will be realized. Even explaining that the word “us” in this sentence refers not to specific individuals but generally to “a people” does not ameliorate the problem. Given the unknowability of future free choices, there must be some “might be” worlds that do not fit the general criteria. It might be that all the angels fall and no human beings choose to receive God’s love. Boyd anticipates this objection: “If there were possible story lines that could not result in God’s bringing good out of evil, let alone story lines that threatened God’s objectives for creation as a whole, the Author of the adventure of creation would simply exclude them from the adventure.“ This is a stunning statement and should result in a massive revision of open theism. I can see only two ways for the God of open theism to do this. God could make sure some angels and some human beings freely say yes to God by a mysterious type of causality that does not coerce freedom or by infallibly effective persuasion, both of which are defined by Boyd as impossible. Or God could simply never allow the circumstances to arise that would realize the rejected world. But the only way for God to do this while maintaining libertarian freedom is through middle knowledge of what a specific free being would do under certain conditions. But to make this exception is to inflict a mortal wound on open theism. If God can rule out worst-case scenarios, why can he not in the same way rule out every world but the one that corresponds to his perfect will? Or at least pick the “might be” world that best approximates his perfect will? I suspect, however, that Boyd will want to avoid these implications and maintain his basic open theist framework. Hence, in Boyd’s doctrine of providence, God cannot know for certain in advance that even his general purpose for creation will be accomplished.
Consider a second challenge to open theism’s God achieving his goal for creation. Even if an infinite number of “might be” worlds fit the general criteria of divine success and God manages to have one of them realized, surely some of them are better than others, measured by the best-case scenario. In Boyd’s providential framework, there can be no assurance, much less certainty, that God will be able to realize anything close to the best “might be” world. God may “succeed” in achieving a minimum goal, but the open theist view cannot inspire confidence that God is able to bring about his most perfect will and his greatest glory.
A third problem concerns the impersonal nature of the open theist view of providence. Even if I can take comfort that God will accomplish his general will and in a general way bring good out of evil, I can possess no confidence that God can make my salvation certain or bring good out of every evil that befalls me. In the open theist world, at the point of God’s decision to create the world, he could not know the certain realization of any possibility that depends on a free decision at any point in its causal history. Hence, in contemplating whether or not to create, God knew nothing for certain about anyone alive today. My Creator did not know from the beginning that I would be born, would survive until I wrote these lines, or would come to faith in Christ. He cannot know even a day in advance that a decision by some free agent driving down a freeway or robbing a convenience store or shooting an arrow randomly would not end my life. He cannot know an hour in advance that I will remain faithful for a day, much less faithful unto death. Hence, the open theist view of providence can give me no assurance that God knows how to make my salvation sure or that the evil that befalls me tomorrow cannot thwart God’s plan for me.
The Heart of the Open Theist Model of Providence
As this section of Boyd’s chapter makes clear, the open theist view of providence stands or falls with the ideas of libertarian freedom and the free agent who exercises this power. 392 According to open theism, a free agent acts with libertarian freedom when he determines his own will for A or ~A apart from a determining or codetermining cause of any kind— divine, physical, or psychological—other than himself. And the agent could have chosen differently under the exact same conditions. Boyd argues that logic, intuition, and Scripture show that libertarian freedom is the necessary condition of genuine love. And since God wanted to create beings who could return his love, he had to give them freedom to love or not to love him. Hence, by creating such beings, God limited his ability to control completely what happens in his creation. Boyd illustrates this predicament with his story of the “demented scientist” who “makes” the object of her affection love her by implanting an emotion-controlling microchip in his brain. However much such “love” looks like the real thing, it is not. Genuine love must arise freely in the heart of the beloved. The same rule holds true in God’s relationship with us. He cannot “make” us love him. When Boyd asserts that God “cannot” make us love him, he means that it is logically impossible, as impossible as “a round triangle or a married bachelor.“ As long as God does not revoke his decision to create beings capable of love, he “cannot” revoke the creature’s freedom. This would place him in self-contradiction.
In response to this line of thinking, I first want to point out that libertarian freedom and free agency are highly abstract and logically polished concepts. They are defined so that they will work efficiently in open theist arguments. And they work beautifully at the logical level of the relations among propositions. But propositions should not be mistaken for the things to which they ostensibly refer. Real, existing human beings and the living God are not clear concepts susceptible to logical manipulation. It seems to me implausible that the abstract concept of libertarian freedom could adequately conceptualize the depth of the human self. But it seems highly dubious and, indeed, presumptuous to think we are able to conceptualize adequately God’s being and his way of relating to creation in an abstract proposition. The image of a philosopher-logician declaring triumphantly that it is impossible for God to relate to his creation in a certain way, because two abstract propositions contradict each other, possesses what Kierkegaard called a “comic” quality.
In a second observation about libertarian freedom, it is good to remember that we do not experience libertarian freedom psychologically. The concept has to be abstracted from experience and refined. And in this form, it is highly contested. Indeed, compatibilistic freedom is much closer to lived experience. We seem to be pretty clear in most cases about what we want to do, and it is usually pretty obvious when conditions are favorable for doing what we want. No great abstraction is needed.
My third and more serious concern with libertarian freedom is the obvious fact that Scripture does not teach the libertarian theory. Scripture does not talk (as does Boyd) about created free agents. Nor does it speak of a natural power to love or not love God. It speaks, rather, of our “powerlessness” and of our settled enmity toward God (Rom. 5:6 — 10). Sadly, the fall lies between creation and the sinful, ungodly, blind, enslaved, corrupt, lost, and suffering human beings who are the objects of God’s love and of his saving will. Boyd speaks as if the fall had no effects on our wills or our reason, as if we had not been born already turned away from God. Scripture is unambiguous: All have sinned! And sin is not a superficial condition touching only the body and its evanescent emotions but leaving the sovereign self untouched; apart from divine grace, the heart is corrupt and the will is turned toward evil.
Boyd’s illustration of the “demented scientist” completely reverses the biblical order. To reflect the narrative of salvation, the story should go this way: a good scientist falls in love with a woman who cannot love him back because an evil genius planted a microchip in her brain at birth, programming her for selfishness, envy, and suspicion. The good scientist believes that were it not for the alien influence, he could win his beloved’s affection. Driven by his love, he discovers a way, without his beloved’s knowledge or permission (which she could not give in any case), to disable the chip so that she can return his love. In a similar way, the God who comes to us in Christ finds us, not in pristine innocence possessing sovereign power over ourselves, but already corrupted, enslaved by evil, and unable to love God or our neighbors. In his infinite love and powerful grace, he frees us from slavery, opens our eyes, unbinds our wills, and melts our hearts. In the New Testament, freedom is defined not as the power to choose between good and evil but as the power of a new life, in which sin no longer controls us and we love God with all our heart, mind, and strength. 393 We were indeed created for freedom and love as Boyd contends, but only in Christ and by the grace of the Holy Spirit are we gifted with the power freely to love him with our whole being. In my view, the Christian doctrine of providence should be inspired by the confidence that everything God does in his interaction with his creation aims at this goal, the most certain achievement of which reveals both the infinite glory of God and the glorious liberty of his beloved creation. Now the reader must decide whether the open theist doctrine of providence can do justice to the God of Scripture, who revealed himself in our sovereign Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.