The Nicene creed affirms that “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” The orthodox understanding of the doctrines of providence and omniscience are implied in terms like “God”, “almighty” and “maker of heaven and earth”.
No, not necessarily, although some (like the occasionalists) might agree with that. Within orthodoxy, theologians may reasonably disagree on what God’s governance entails. But open theism seems to imply that God is not much different than a human being, reacting to creation and changing his mind according to what is happening in creation. There is a non-zero probability that God might fail to achieve his purposes and decrees. This is what pushes open theism over the edge of the boundary of orthodoxy.
That may have been the orthodox view in centuries past. The lightning rod was once very controversial because it was thought to counter God’s will.
Of course, that would also challenge God’s omnipotence, so I’m not sure if there was a consistent theological argument against lightning rods. However, our modern view of a mechanistic and clockwork-like natural world is not what people believed for most of Christian history. Even Newton was criticized for explaining the motion of the planets in a mechanistic manner.
Is it universally agreed that OT rejects omniscience? Some of my reading on the subject gives the impression that its advocates view their position as ‘God knows all that is knowable, but has purposely left the future unknowable’. This would seem to be a redefinition of omniscience, more than an ‘explicit rejection’ of it. Whether this ‘redefinition’ can be considered allowable within orthodoxy is of course another matter.
As a related question, which denominations have officially and explicitly defined OT as heretical (i.e. outside of orthodoxy and allowable heterodoxy)?
The view that God directly causes every event (occasionalism) is actually a view which only significantly developed in the modern era (i.e. Descartes onwards).
That’s tenuous at best. I’ll grant that “almighty” and “omnipotent” are synonyms, but that doesn’t imply omniscience. And really, implied in “God”? Now that’s begging the question for sure.
This doesn’t seem to comport with what little I’ve read about open theism. Perhaps “open theism” is as amorphous as “orthodoxy”. Are you allowing its opponents to define it? According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
It seems merely a way to allow us to have free will. You’re not in favor of free will? Orthodoxy demands predestination?
They are indeed implied in “God”, which is clear for anyone who’s had a basic class in the doctrine of God, whether it’s a class in a Roman Catholic, Anglican, Reformed, or other type of church. We’re discussing how orthodox theology has understood the doctrine of God, not whether the orthodox understanding is the “correct” one.
Furthermore, I think we’re starting to forget again that the Nicene creed isn’t an exhaustive statement of orthodoxy. I thought we had progressed past that.
There’s room for some disagreement regarding what “free will” means in orthodoxy. The options are much wider than just Calvinistic predestination vs. open theism. But it’s not infinite room. An understanding where human free will can cause God’s will to be “thwarted” violates those boundaries.
The omniscience of God is orthodox.
The omnipotence of God is orthodox.
The goodness of God is orthodox.
These are core beliefs of the church throughout history. The persistent logical problem is that, given the fallen state of the world and fickleness of nature, you only get to pick two. It is the approach to theodicy taken which accounts for much of the division and tension of doctrine to be found, involving God’s transcendence and immanence, natural and propositional and incarnational revelation, man’s bondage and freedom, predestination and grace, and whether salvation is election or sacramental or volitional or some blend. It is largely on this question that the creeds expand to volumes of systematic theology, and tomes written ranging from Augustine’s City of God, Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
Theology proper is relatively straightforward, although it strikes me as a bit audacious to think that the creature can define the creator by attributes which cannot be fathomed. It is the theology of God’s dealing with man that proves tangled. The first lie told in the world was that “you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”. Instead, an angel with a flaming sword blocked the path, leaving the experience but not the understanding, and so it has remained ever since. Yes, there is some lack of consistency as to the boundary of orthodoxy, and it will be possible to find passionate advocates which self designate their preferred theologies as essential orthodoxy. There is, of course, no empirical means to resolve such disputes. As such, a demand for a universally recognized, clearly bounded set of beliefs will likely prove frustrated. Still, orthodox is a useful and even vital term, and for the most part Christians are concerned with the target and not the edges.
Again, that’s begging the question, because omniscience is only implied in “God” because orthodox theology says that’s one of God’s attributes, not because it’s present in the Nicene creed. The creed is not the source of that assumption.
No, you’re just raising a strawman, which seems to be pulling back from your prior claim that all those attributes were contained implicitly in the creed.
Yes, any combination of free will and God’s absolute control leads quickly to contradiction, resolvable only by obfuscation. Orthodoxy apparently lives by obfuscation.
Open Theism is fairly new, mainly in the 1990s. They described themselves as revisionists, that thought traditional doctrine on omniscience and Providence was wrong and needed to change. Most of them ended up losing their jobs at seminaries. Outside a very narrow group, the idea seems to have been quickly rejected. So it never gained enough traction to elicit much in the way of official condemnation, as far as I know.
The group includes Peter Enns and Thomas Oord, who are both BioLogos favorites. Their embrace by BioLogos, along with the way they tightly yoked OT to evolution, raised a lot of eyebrows (@jongarvey and @Eddie are certainly not the only ones).
[NOTE: @deuteroKJ corrected me here. Peter Enns is not an Open Theist. Rather, he rejects Biblical inerrancy, a different unorthodox position.]
Whether or not OT is legitimate, it is widely rejected by evangelicals. Yoking evolutionary science to it, as BioLogos did at first, was a really bad strategy for science advancement.
I know of no such official list, even within a single Church such as the Roman Catholic. Nonetheless, it is quite clear that the Creeds, and all Ecumenical Council decisions of a theological kind, are required, as well as a large number of propositions about God, including his omnipotence, foresight, and sovereignty.
How do I know those other propositions are required, you ask? By the behavior of churches and theologians when they are challenged. In the past, not only in the Catholic Church but in most others, anyone who has denied that God is omnipotent, knows the future perfectly, is sovereign over all of nature, etc. has been sharply rebuked by authorities and/or respected theologians. It’s only in post-Enlightenment Christianity that such powers and characteristics of God have been questioned by people who claim to be fully faithful, fully Biblical, fully orthodox Christians, and that such questioning has been tolerated within some churches and seminaries. And guess which side of the Enlightenment modern TE/EC sits on?
For more on your question, see the excellent reply of Daniel Ang, who clearly has been reading a good deal in the history of Christian thought over the past few years, based on the knowledge he displays in his postings.
I would agree with Daniel here. Yes, I was partly referring to Oord, who in one guest column was pretty flagrant in his unorthodoxy regarding God’s knowledge and control of the future, but hints of Oord’s position were found earlier on BioLogos; Falk at points flirted with Open Theist premises, though not by name. And Ken Miller, who has also been a guest columnist on BioLogos, has said some things akin to Open Theism.
To be fair to the current BioLogos, I will say that Oord does not appear in columns there any more, and if I’m not mistaken, he was at one point on its advisory board, but no longer is. So his explicit defense of Open Theism was a bridge too far even for BioLogos. I expect that the departures of Kenton Sparks, Peter Enns, and Karl Giberson were due to similar concerns. (Though we should not expect that such things would be frankly admitted, and would expect other explanations for their departures, e.g., X has left BioLogos to make more time for his writing and his family, or the like.) My sense is that the governing board of BioLogos contains many traditional Protestant evangelicals and is sensitive to the traditional beliefs of the evangelical community and will only allow theological experimentalism to go so far. The board realizes, I think, that if BioLogos theological speculation becomes identified with liberal and radical theology, BioLogos will lose its appeal for the moderate middle of evangelicals who have not yet made up their minds about evolution. If belief in evolution is tied to a liberal or radical theology, that would be enough for many to reject evolution. It is only if BioLogos can represent evolution as compatible with a traditional Bible-based and classical Protestant theology that it has any hope of winning any more converts.
To understand the theology that is contained in the Nicene creed, I can’t just interpret the words of the creed only in a way which I as a person living in the 21st century think is reasonable, based on what I believe “God” means. Instead, I need to look at the writings of theologians who formulated the creed and see what their assumptions and concerns were when they wrote words like “God”, “almighty”, “maker”, and so on. And while I’m far, far from being an expert on this topic, I’m fairly sure that no one seriously entertained a doctrine of God resembling what open theists believe until the 20th century. As @swamidass said, even open theists themselves knew that they were bucking orthodoxy, they just thought their position was correct and orthodoxy was wrong.
I’m not pulling back anything. I grant that if one just looks at the creed in isolation, there seems to be room for all kinds of beliefs, including open theism. However, this is not the case if you look at the Nicene creed in conjunction with other historical creeds, works, and writings which are commonly held to express what orthodoxy is.
Scientists say that random mutations are important to evolution. Christian objects that nothing is random, so evolution rejects Gods providence. There is a fundamental theological conflict here!
Nope. Just an equivocation.
By “random,” scientists don’t mean “unknown to God,” but only that it is “unpredictable from a human constructed model.” We aren’t making claims about ontological randomness, so discussion random mutations in biology is no more a threat to God providence than is rolling dice in a board game or shuffling a deck of cards.
Open Theists, rather than exposing the equivocation, double down on it. They claim things like, evolution shows us that (ontological) randomness is a part of nature, so we know that God is omniscient and that God doesn’t control everything.
(That just reinforces the anti-evolutionists objection!)
One can object to OT because of its conclusions about doctrine. But well before that, reasoning like this needs to be rejected. It’s just blatant equivocation that traffics in some large misunderstandinga of science.
Peter Enns is still a regular, and some key power brokers at BL are intent on using their platform to legitimize unorthodox theology. The fact that this agenda is more covert than it was in the past isnt much of a virtue.
@tim are you questioning the conclusion? Asking for a specific type of evidence? Or looking to understand how reasonign works in this space?
I already answered your question above…so I’m lost on what you are getting at.
Perhaps this might help you?
While open theism was embraced by a small number of scholars within ETS, the controversy was large and heated: many scholars believe openness theology, with its rejection of classical theism’s doctrine of God’s exhaustive foreknowledge, represents a re-envisioning of the God of Scripture. Many conservative evangelical scholars contended that open theism necessarily denies the inerrancy of Scripture, since a God who does not know the future cannot guarantee that Old Testament prophecies will come true.
In the wake of the controversy, members adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 2006, a move aimed at safeguarding membership from those who hold aberrant theological positions such as open theism. Adoption of the Chicago Statement ended the ETS debate.
I’d say this also is an important statement of orthodoxy. We hold from the outset that our conception of God is not going to take hold of the infinite.
This is one point that both of us agree on. I have often wondered if “stochastic” might be a better word to use. Stochastic leans more heavily towards statistical models and away from the philosophical baggage associated with the term randomness.
My question was an attempt to get a handle on the aggregate level of rejection or toleration of OT within Christianity as a whole.
I was not asking about OT’s impact on the careers of individual theologians. I would note however, that the two you explicitly mentioned by name (Peter Enns and Thomas Oord), their Wikipedia articles do not suggest that their seminaries spoke with one voice in expelling them.
Also, I was not asking only about evangelicalism, and was most certainly not asking about BL.
From your cited article:
That year, a controversy over open theism that had been brewing since the mid-1990s came to a head when members of ETS voted on a recommendation to remove from membership open theist scholars Clark Pinnock and John Sanders. A two-thirds majority is required for removal from ETS, and members voted by a narrow margin to allow both Pinnock and Sanders to remain in the society.
That means that at least a third of the ETS considered OT to be insufficiently heterodox to require expulsion.
But I think the question bears repeating, do any of the three largest Christian communions, Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican explicitly reject OT as heretical?
The information about the lightning rod is sociologically and culturally quite interesting, and I’m glad to be informed of it. However, the question to be asked here is whether any formal theological statement about lightning rods was made by the Church, either at the highest level or a some lower level (a local bishopric or some regional council). If there was no formal condemnation of lightning rods by certified authorities, it would seem that this was a popular movement, representing a certain segment of religious opinion, but not representative of the theology of the Church.
This would not be the only time such a thing would happen. The justifications of black slavery offered by some American writers prior to the Civil War were purely popular arguments, and had no basis in any doctrine ever established by the Church. In fact, slavery had already been abolished in most of the Western world, with the impetus for the abolition frequently coming from Christian quarters.
Not every argument that claims to be based on the Bible or traditional religious belief is in fact based on orthodox theology. Popular religious ideas have a life of their own, and religious zeal quite frequently produces people who claim to speak for orthodox theology, but don’t.
Most of them, I suspect, would not have ever heard of OT. It appears to be largely a controversy that broke out in places like the ETS, which do not include a large membership of Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican.
