Heresy Never Dies (11): Stephen Charnock on open theism

The more familiar that we become with the history of Christian thought, the more we realise that contemporary issues are often replays of older debates.

This has been the case with open theism. Christianity Today may have referred to it, back in 1995, as the "new paradigm" for understanding God, but the reality was that this paradigm had been put forward in the seventeenth century.

I want to show you that Stephen Charnock (1628-1680) understood and sought to refute the open theist paradigm, as espoused by the Socinians, all those centuries ago.

Sacrificing God's exhaustive foreknowledge for the sake of preserving libertarian free-will seems an incredibly high price to pay. This, however, is what the open theists have been prepared to do. Here we reach a major theological fork in the road.

Let's observe how open theist Richard Rice sets this out in his 1989 essay “Divine Foreknowledge and Free-Will Theism” (in Clark Pinnock [ed.], The Grace of God and the Will of Man) explains it as follows:

To avoid the difficulties involved in trying to reconcile creaturely freedom with absolute divine foreknowledge, a number of thinkers propose revisionary interpretations of omniscience. (p. 128)

Furthermore, Clark Pinnock also reached this fork in the road on his pilgrimmage from "Augustine to Arminius":

Finally I had to rethink the divine omniscience and reluctantly ask whether we ought to think of it as an exhaustive foreknowledge of everything that will ever happen, as even most Arminians do.

I found I could not shake off the intuition that such a total omniscience would necessarily mean that everything we will ever choose in the future will have been spelled out in the divine knowledge register, and consequently the belief that we have truly significant choices to make would seem to be mistaken.

I knew the Calvinist argument that exhaustive foreknowledge was tantamount to predestination because it implies the fixity of all things from"eternity past," and I could not shake off its logical force. I feared that, if we view God as timeless and omniscient, we will land back in the camp of theological determinism where these notions naturally belong.

It makes no sense to espouse conditionality and then threaten it by other assumptions that we make. (Clark Pinnock, “From Augustine to Arminius: A Pilgrimage in Theology” in Pinnock [ed.], The Grace of God and the Will of Man, p. 25)

Stephen Charnock's massive and learned seventeenth century work on the existence and attributes of God deals, in passing, with the Socinian denial of foreknowledge.

Incidentally, when dealing with prophecy and foreknowledge Charnock does exactly what later writers (such as Millard Erickson in 2003) do. He asks how Cyrus (Isa. 44:28) and Josiah (1 Kings 13:1-3) can be named so far in advance when their conception and naming are the result of so many (unknown) future free actions. The distance in time between us and the Puritan author does not diminish the fact that, confronted with the same error, the response offered appealed to exactly the same passages of Scripture.

Charnock arrives at the same theological fork in the road faced by Rice and Pinnock and asks:

But what if the foreknowledge of God, and the liberty of the will, cannot be fully reconciled by man? Shall we therefore deny a perfection in God, to support a liberty in ourselves? Shall we rather fasten ignorance upon God, and accuse him of blindness, to maintan our liberty?

How can you avoid the conclusion that by choosing open theism you end up with a diminished God, an inflated and incoherent sense of the human will, and human reason no longer sat at the feet of God's Word listening but standing at the front of the class dictating terms.

As is so often the case, the names may change, and the dates, but the fundamental theological, exegetical and philosophical issues remain the same.

The Story of the Gospel in the Isle of Lewis

Rev. Dr. Iain D. Campbell (Back Free Church) will be speaking at Christ Church Deeside on:

"The Story of the Gospel in the Isle of Lewis"

Ian D. says that "as far as evangelical Calvinism is concerned, the particular lump of peat on which we live has been a theatre in the past for some remarkable works of God."

This is an open meeting and we will be glad to welcome you, it will also be recorded

Tuesday 3rd February at 7.30pm

Directions are here

Our church is 30 minutes from Liverpool, less than an hour from Manchester, and easily accessible from North and Mid Wales and the English borders

Email me if you would like more details (see right hand side bar)

Ministers day conference with Iain D. Campbell on Covenant Theology

If you live within a few hours drive, why not come to this day conference next Tuesday.

Rev. Dr. Iain D. Campbell (Back Free Church, Isle of Lewis) will be speaking in Bala (North Wales) on:

God of the Covenant
The exegetical foundations and practical considerations
of covenant theology

Date: Tuesday 3nd February 2009 Time: 10.30am-3.30pm

Cost: £15 (20% off if this is your first time)

Venue: Bryn-y-groes, Bala

This event is being organised by the Evangelical Movement of Wales

For more details call the EMW office on 01656 655886

You can read Dr. Campbell's lecture "An Introduction to the Doctrine of the Covenant" here.

Heresy Never Dies (10): The War of the Words, open theism and Socinianism

The open theist denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge is the same as the historic Socinian denial of this classical Christian doctrine.

The open theists hold to a particular version of free will (libertarianism), a view that they consider to be incompatible not merely with foreordination but also with foreknowledge. The Socinians held to the same beliefs around four hundred years ago. Open theism found significant historic precedent in the Socinian remodification of God's prescience.

The Socinians, by name, are almost entirely forgotten today. Their views, under different names, have become popular as contemporary evangelical alternatives to classically understood evangelical beliefs. The process philosopher Charles Hartshorne, writing in 1984, put forward the following:

Is God all-knowing? Yes, in the Socinian sense. Never has a great intellectual discovery passed with less notice by the world than the Socinian discovery of the proper meaning of omniscience. To this day works of reference fail to tell us about it. (Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, p. 27, quoted by Erickson, What Does God Know & When Does He Know It? p. 128)

What Hartshorne meant by "all-knowing...in the Socinian sense" can be seen from the following written by him in 1941, and in the words written by Clark Pinnock in 1986:

We could then say that omniscience is all the knowledge that is possible, which by definition is perfect knowledge, but that since some of the truths about the future could not be known at present, omniscience does not know them. (Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism, p. 140)

God is omniscient in the sense that he knows everything which can be known, just as God is omnipotent in the sense that he can do everything that can be done. But free actions are not entities which can be known. God can surmise what you will do next Friday, but cannot know it for certain because you have not done it yet. ("God limits his foreknowledge" in Predestination and Free Will: Four views of divine sovereignty & human freedom, eds. David Basinger & Randall Basinger, 1986)

However, the charge that the open theist view is Socinian has proved to be somewhat controversial. It is not hard to see why. The Socinians were heretics. They denied the Trinity, the deity of Christ, justification by faith alone, and penal substitution. That open theists have reproduced the Socinian view of divine foreknowledge is surely undeniable. The comparison, however, has not been well received.

In The God Who Risks (rev. 2007), John Sanders admits that the correspondence between the two views holds, "we acknowledge that heretics such as the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Fausto Socinus affirmed this view" (p. 170). He also says that "there is no historical linkage between open theists and Socinus" (p. 170). I quite agree. An argument to the contrary cannot and need not be made. The two views share the same methodology.

Sanders goes further than this when he says that "Erickson seems to agree with some evangelical critics of open theism who attempt to discredit the view by calling it "Socinianism" (p. 170).

Pinnock also wrote that "The hope is to dispose of openness theology by tying it to some known heresy...The fact is, open theists are trinitarian believers, which means the Socinian charge is wide of the mark." (Most Moved Mover, p. 107).

Pinnock notes that Robert Strimple, President Emeritus, Westminster Seminary California, identified the open view as Socinian, rather than Arminian, and chides him for not mentioning that "openness theists are orthodox in their Christology...The tactic is to position free will theists with known heretics if at all possible" (Most Moved Mover, p. 107, n. 122).

Let me write this in clear, plain English. Robert Strimple and Millard Erickson claim that the open theist view of divine foreknowledge is the same as the Socinian view. They do not claim that open theists agree with Socinians on every doctrine. The Socinian view was regarded as unorthodox. It failed to gain a following even among those who carried on the anti-trintarian theology and rationalism of the Socinians (i.e. Unitarians). Open theists have accepted the same premise as the Socinians and have revised the doctrine of divine omniscience in line with it. In doing so they have used the same arguments that the Socinians put forward.

Sanders has accepted that open theists and Socinians are in agreement on omniscience. When Pinnock responded to the charge by saying "The fact is, open theists are trinitarian believers, which means the Socinian charge is wide of the mark" he was tilting at a windmill. No one, not least Robert Strimple, was equating open theists with Socinians at every point, and certainly not accusing them of being anti-trinitarian. One thing was clear. They had bidden farewell to Arminius and adopted the stance of Socinus.

That does not mean that revising omniscience in this way has no effect on other doctrines. Open theists, and their Socinian forebears, are logically consistent in their approach to libertarian freedom, and that to the cost of divine omniscience. Inevitably this does, and will, have an impact on other doctrines if the logic of the whole thing is carried through to its conclusion. At this point inconsistencies are a matter of gratitude and security. A Socinian doctrine of freedom and sin logically entailed a particular kind of Socinian saviour. The Socinians didn't need the kind of Saviour that the Reformed believed in.

Heresy never dies (9): Open theism, Socinianism and Process Philosophy

I will be adding some further posts on the correspondence between the open theist denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge and that espoused by the heretical Socinians in the seventeenth century.

Robert Strimple, in his 1996 essay "What does God know?", demonstrated the striking similarities between the two, and is heavily footnoted by several authors. Gary L. W. Johnson had highlighted the Socinian roots of what would become openness theology a decade before Strimple's essay was published (WTJ, Fall 1986).

Open theists Clark Pinnock and John Sanders reacted strongly against this connection, and both see it as something of a smear campaign, an underhand tactic, and a false attempt at discrediting open theism through "guilt by association."

Pinnock wrote that "The hope is to dispose of openness theology by tying it to some known heresy...The fact is, open theists are trinitarian believers, which means the Socinian charge is wide of the mark." (Most Moved Mover, p. 107). This really misses the point. Socinus denied that God exhaustively knew the future. If God did know the future in this way then human freedom would be unacceptably jeopardised. This same move has been made by the open theists. The charge is on target.

Let me also at this point restate my argument from a previous post (which will form a part of a chapter on the relationship between open theism and Socinianism):

The connection between open theism and Socinianism is not literary but methodological. They share the same convictions and have arrived at the same conclusions concerning the relationship between human freedom and divine foreknowledge.

Rather than quote from Robert Strimple, Millard Erickson, John Frame, Roger Nicole (see his 1995 review of The Openness of God), Michael Horton, Ardel Caneday, Doug Wilson, or Richard Mayhue (to name several writers who have made the connection between open theism and Socinianism) have a read of this extract from the process philosopher Charles Hartshorne:

What follows is an item of Unitarian history that will be unfamiliar to many readers. Nearly four centuries ago, the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus criticized the traditional deification of Jesus of Nazareth; in addition, though scarcely any encyclopedia or history will say so, he rejected the traditional idea of God as an unmoved mover, an immutable and all-determining power.

Believing that human beings have genuine freedom, Socinus denied that God either determines or eternally knows our free acts. Rather, we determine the acts, and God knows them only after the fact or as they occur.

This view implies real novelty in the divine consciousness, it means that we cause changes in God. In this bold break with tradition, Socinus anticipated our current process theology.

What he chiefly lacked was the insight that the idea of creaturely freedom, which creates novelty even in God, should be generalized to apply to all creatures, even the humblest—for instance, atoms. Human creativity is then no sheer exception in an otherwise divinely determined world but is only an extremely special, high-level case of creaturely freedom...

Another important passage of theological history has been neglected. The father of American theology, Jonathan Edwards, was, as is well known, a theological determinist who believed divine power decides all our actions. What is less well known that the Unitarian-bred Ralph Waldo Emerson held the same belief, as his diary makes clear.

I deeply admire Emerson, but in his religious metaphysics he was surprisingly close to Edwards. This is one of many instances of the sad fact that the metaphysical originality and courage of Socinus and his followers were for several centuries allowed to go for nothing.

Another instance of their lying fallow is that when, some years ago, the Unitarian church of England drew up a statement of faith, God was defined as immutable in the document.

Why labor the point? Three centuries were wasted by the failure of scholars to do their job in dealing the [sic.] Socinianism. I had to read a little-known German work by Otto Fock entitled, Der Socinianismus, to find out what the Socinians believed about God.

Extracts taken from Chapter 6, "A New World and a New World View," in Charles Hartshorne, A New World View, (edited by Herbert F. Vetter)

Hartshorne thought that Socinus did not go far enough, and that he had anticipated "our current process philosophy." Moreover, his views on God's foreknowledge lay dormant, even among those who embraced his denial of the deity of Jesus Christ and became Unitarians.

Open theists do not merely repeat the same views as process philosophers, there are significant differences. They are in fact much closer to Socinus than Hartshorne. They have been, however, thinking Socinus' thoughts after him, even if, unlike Hartshorne (at least by way of confirmation), they did so without reading his works.

The correspondence of their views is undeniable, and the denials of it really lack plausibility when carefully examined.

Lloyd-Jones on truth and error

We meet it most [a general ecumenical outlook] in the form of an all-pervasive climate of opinion which dislikes anything that is really distinctive in doctrine or in life, which demands, indeed, ever less emphasis on doctrine, on definition, or on ethical principle.

Never was a time when polemics in any form was at such a discount. There have been periods in history when the preservation of the very life of the church depended upon the capacity and readiness of certain great leaders to differentiate truth from error and boldly to hold fast to the good and to reject the false; but our generation does not like anything of the kind. It is against any clear and precise demarcation of truth and error.

Those words have such a contemporary feel to them it is hard to believe that they were first spoken in 1952. If anything the accommodation of this way of thinking has been even greater in the twenty eight years since Dr. Lloyd-Jones' death. His words do at least capture something of the mindset that is acceptable among many evangelicals.

Risking The Truth: Table of Contents

Here's the table of contents for Risking the Truth: Handling Error in the Church (Christian Focus Publications):

1. Heresy 101

2. Sin in High Places, an interview with Carl R. Trueman

3. In My Place Condemned He Stood, an interview on penal substitution with Tom Schreiner

4. The Agony of Deceit, an interview with Michael Horton

5. The Faithful Pastor and the Faithful Church, an interview with Mark Dever

6. Truth, Error and the Minister's Task, an interview with Derek Thomas

7. The Defense Against the Dark Arts, an interview with R. Scott Clark

8. Heroes and Heretics, an interview with Iain D. Campbell

9. The Good Shepherd, an interview with Tom Ascol

10. A Debtor to Mercy Alone, an interview with Guy Waters

11. Truth, Error and the End Times, an interview with Kim Riddlebarger

12. Fulfill Your Ministry, an interview with Ron Gleason

13. The Fight of Faith, an interview with Sean Michael Lucas

14. Raising the Foundations, an interview with Gary L. W. Johnson

15. Teaching the Whole Counsel of God, an interview with Conrad Mbewe

16. Present Issues from a Long Term Perspective, an interview with Geoffrey Thomas

17. Ministry Among Sheep and Wolves, an interview with Joel Beeke

18. Error and the Church, an interview with Michael Ovey

19. Will the Church Stand or Fall, an interview on justification and the new perspective with Ligon Duncan

20. The Annihilation of Hell, an interview on evangelicals and eternal punishment with Robert A. Peterson

21. The Word of Truth, an interview on inerrancy with Greg Beale

22. Being against heresies is not enough

23. What really matters in ministry: directives for church leaders in Acts 20

Book endorsement: Risking the Truth

Here's an endorsement for the forthcoming interviews book from Stuart Olyott:

This is a book that promotes reflection. By introducing you to a number of leading Christian thinkers, it gives you a read that is interesting, informative and stimulating. It provides you with a treasure-chest of historical, theological and practical insights as it airs issues that are confronting the worldwide church and its leaders at the present time. Christian pastors, leaders and academics who neglect this book will be very much the poorer intellectually, spiritually and practically.

Stuart Olyott, Pastoral Director, Evangelical Movement of Wales

The are some more endorsements and information about the book here

Here are some details about the book:

Risking The Truth
Handling Error in the Church

Foreword by Sinclair Ferguson

Interviews with Mark Dever, Carl Trueman, Mike Horton, Tom Schreiner, Scott Clark, Ligon Duncan, Derek Thomas, Kim Riddlebarger...

...and there are interviews with several other senior ministers and seminary
professors.

Here's the blurb:

A collection of interviews on handling truth and error in the church. Contributors reflect on this issue in relation to the minister's own life, pulpit ministry, local church leadership, seminary training, denominations, the impact of the academy, Evangelicalism, contemporary trends, history, creeds and confessions, and doctrines that are currently under attack.

There is also personal reflection on these matters, lessons drawn from experience, and practical advice. The interviews are introduced by a primer on heresy and false teaching, and concluded with a chapters on "Why being against heresies is not enough" and "What really matters in ministry: directives for church leaders in Acts 20."

Sanity and Clarity

Scott Clark on justification sola fide, ECT, and Chuck Colson's recent interview at Christianity Today. Read it here.

Soon to be back in print: "Repentance" by John Colquhoun

Whilst rummaging through our church library, looking for a book by Machen, I stumbled across John Colquhoun's Repentance.

Colquhoun was a Church of Scotland minister who also wrote Law and Gospel, The Covenant of Grace and The Covenant of Works. Colquhoun was considered an able preacher of the "Marrow" theology, having been moulded in his Christian life and ministry by Thomas Boston's Fourfold State.

The "Marrow men" were defenders and preachers of the offer of God's free grace in Christ to all sinners.

The book was first published in 1826, and published by the Banner of Truth in 1965. As I started reading through it I could not fathom why they let this little gem go out of print. Well the good news from Jonathan Watson at the Banner is that they will be republishing the book later this year.

Colquhoun wrote the following words about "evangelical" as opposed to natural or legal repentance:

It is a gracious principle and habit implanted in the soul by the Spirit of Christ, in the exercise of which a regenerate and believing sinner, deeply sensible of the exceeding sinfulness and just demerit of his innumerable sins is truly humbled and grieved before the Lord, on account of the sinfulness and hurtfulness of them.

He feels bitter remorse, unfeigned sorrow, and deep self-abhorrence for the aggravated transgressions of his life, and the deep depravity of his nature; chiefly, because by all his innumerable provocations he had dishonoured an infinitely holy and gracious God, transgressed a law which is "holy, just and good," and defiled, deformed and even destroyed his own precious soul.

This godly sorrow for sin and this holy abhorrence of it arise from a spiritual discovery of pardoning mercy with God in Christ, and from the exercise of trusting in his mercy.

And these feelings and exercises are always accompanied by an unfeigned love of universal holiness, and by fixed resolutions and endeavours to turn from all inquity to God and to walk before him in newness of life.

Such, in general is the nature of that evangelical repentance, to the habit and exercise of which the Lord Jesus calls sinners who hear the Gospel.

Repentance, p. 10

Here is the inscription from Colquhoun's gravestone:

Having studied deeply the Doctrines of
Grace, and experienced their saving
and sanctifying power in his own soul.
He laboured earnestly and affectionately
to communicate the knowledge of them
to his Fellow Sinners.
As an Author his chief aim was to advance
the Glory of the Saviour.
In private he exhibited the effects of the
holy Doctrines he inculcated in public by
a close walk with God;
And by a kind affable and humble deportment
towards all men.
And in these several ways his labours
were acknowledged of God,
by whom they were blessed to many.
He was faithful unto death
and
has now received the Crown of Life.

Heresy never dies (8): What does God know? Pinnock & Machen on omniscience

"What does God know?"is the title of Robert Strimple's essay on open theism in The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current challenges to the authority of Scripture and the Gospel (edited by John Armstrong). It is a fine essay and repays careful reading. It is also a heavily footnoted essay because of the comparison Strimple made between open theists and a certain seventeenth century theological movement: the Socinians.

They like the open theists denied the exhaustive foreknowledge of God, and redefined omniscience to accommodate their commitment to libertarian free will.

Socinians. Now there's an unfamiliar word in today's evangelical world. It is so obscure you instinctively think it must be irrelevant, so old that you want to blow the dust off it, and that some weirdo doing a Phd is about the only person interested in it (in case you were wondering, that's not me).

Even in the late nineteenth century Thomas Carlyle referred to the "dusthole of extinct Socinianism." But not all of their ideas were extinct. It would be better to say that they lay dormant.

It was somewhat curious, in the mid 1990s, that the openness proposal should have been feted as a new insight free from the shackles of philosophy and more in tune with Scripture. The truth is that it was old, had been tried and found wanting, and was well understood to be beholden to a particular, philosophical, view of the will, a view rejected as incoherent and unscriptural. Read Luther and Edwards on the freedom of the will and see for yourself.

The denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge was well past its "sell by" date long before evangelicals gave it air time, column inches, the imprimatur of their big publishing houses, and public platforms.

Our best theologians and historians, from previous generations, had described, engaged with, and discarded the denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge. See the references in earlier posts from Martin Luther (1483-1546), John Owen (1616-1683), Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), William Cunningham (1805-1861), Charles Hodge (1797-1878), A. A. Hodge (1823-1886), and Herman Bavinck (1854-1921).

Compare the following words from Pinnock with those from Gresham Machen (first published in 1937):

However, omniscience need not mean exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events. If that were its meaning, the future would be fixed and determined, much as is the past.

Total knowledge of the future would imply a fixity of events. Nothing in the future would need to be decided. It also would imply that human freedom is an illusion, that we make no difference and are not responsible. (The Openness of God, p. 121)

Machen wrote:

Is not man's freedom of choice a delusion if all is fixed in God's eternal plan?

There are those who have been impressed by this objection and have actually regarded the personal choices of persons, especially man, as lying outside the range of the things fixed in God's eternal purpose.

When God created persons, they have said, He left the persons free; otherwise they would not have been persons at all.

This view may be held in two forms. In the first place, those who hold it may say that God does not even know beforehand what choices the persons whom He has created will make...

The former of these two forms of the theory seems to do away with the omniscience of God.

If God does not know what His creatures, including man, will do, then a wild, unaccountable factor is introduced into the universe. Can that unaccountable factor be isolated? Can we hold that although God does not know what the persons whom he has created will do, yet He can go on governing the rest of the universe in an orderly fashion?

If God does not know what the personal beings in the universe will do, then the whole course of the world is thrown into confusion. God, moreover, on that view, ceases to be God.

He becomes a being who has to wait to see what His creatures will do; He becomes a God who has to change His plans to meet changing circumstances. (The Christian View of Man, p. 38-9)

Heresy never dies (7): Luther on denying God's exhaustive foreknowledge

"For He must be a ridiculous God, or idol rather, who did not, to a certainty, foreknow the future, or was liable to be deceived in events..."

Martin Luther

"To confess that God exists, and at the same time to deny that he has foreknowledge of future things is the most manifest folly"

Augustine

Sacrificing God's exhaustive foreknowledge for the sake of preserving libertarian free-will seems an incredibly high price to pay. Luther certainly thought so. This, however, is what the open theists have been prepared to do.

For example, take Richard Rice's 1989 essay “Divine Foreknowledge and Free-Will Theism” (in Clark Pinnock [ed.], The Grace of God and the Will of Man):

To avoid the difficulties involved in trying to reconcile creaturely freedom with absolute divine foreknowledge, a number of thinkers propose revisionary interpretations of omniscience. (p. 128)

Moreover, Bruce Ware has shown that open theism has pressed this issue upon Arminians:

The challenge from open theism to other Arminians is simple: Comprehensive divine foreknowledge and libertarian freedom are mutually exclusive notions. You cannot have both together. So if you value libertarian freedom (as classical Arminianism clearly does), then you must be willing to give up your commitment to comprehensive divine foreknowledge. (God's Lesser Glory, p. 33)

Tampering with God's foreknowledge is something that Luther addressed in his thunderous response to Erasmus. His words are relevant to the present day modifications that open theists have made to omniscience and foreknowledge. As is so often the case, the names may change, and the dates, but the fundamental theological, exegetical and philosophical issues remain the same.

Here are some extracts from The Bondage of the Will:

If God be not deceived in that which he foreknows, that which he foreknows must, of necessity, take place.

If it were not so, who could believe His promises, who would fear His threatenings, if what He promised or threatened did not of necessity take place!

Or, how could he promise or threaten, if His prescience could be deceived or hindered by our mutability.

We are dispuitng about the prescience of God! And if you do not subscribe to this, the necessity of the consequent foreknown, you take away faith and the fear of God, you destroy the force of all the divine promises and threatenings, and thus deny divinity itself! (Baker edition, p. 237)

For is it not searching with temerity, when we attempt to make the all-free prescience of God to harmonize with our freedom, prepared to derogate prescience from God, rather than lose our own liberty? (Baker edition, p. 241)

Wherefore, the prescience and omnipotence of God, are diametrically opposite to our "free-will." And it must be, that either God is deceived in His prescience and errs in his action, (which is impossible) or we act, and are acted upon, according to His prescience and action. (Baker edition, p. 242)

How religious, devout, and necessary a thing is it to know [of God's foreknowledge]. For if these things are not known, there can be neither faith nor any worship of God. For that would be ignorance of God, and where there is such ignorance, there cannot be salvation, as we know.

For if you doubt or disdain to know that God foreknows all things, not contingently, but necessarily and immutably, how can you believe in his promises and place a sure trust and reliance on them?

For when he promises anything, you ought to be certain that he knows and is able and willing to perform what he promises; otherwise, you will regard him as neither truthful nor faithful, and that is impiety and a denial of the Most High God.

But how will you be certain and sure unless you know that he knows and wills and will do what he promises, certainly, infallibly, immutably, and necessarily?

Therefore, Christian faith is entirely extinguished, the promises of God are completely destroyed, if we teach and believe that it is not for us to know the necessary foreknowledge of God. (Quoted in Steven C. Roy How Much Does God Know? From the Westminster edition of The Bondage of the Will, p. 122)

Tom Schriener has a short introduction to open theism that sets out the contrast between it and the historic Christian view entitled "My God and Their God."

Monergism have a page of links to articles on open theism that you can find here.

The painting by the way is of King Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake (1757-1827)

Heresy never dies (6): Jonathan Edwards on the denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge

Back in the summer of 2001, when we lived in sunny Swansea, I read Jonathan Edwards' treatise on The Freedom of the Will (or as the full title has it, A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the modern prevailing notions of that Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be essential to moral agency, virtue and vice, reward and punishment, praise and blame).

As you can imagine it was a hard but rewarding read, plus I read it in the Banner of Truth edition and nearly lost my eyesight in the process.

Edwards has a brilliant section (XI) on "The Evidence of God's Certain Foreknowledge of the Volitions of Moral Agents." He has an interesting caveat before he builds his case from Scripture:

One would think it wholly needless to enter on such an argument with any that profess themselves Christians: but so it is; God's certain foreknowledge of the free acts of moral agents, is denied by some that pretend to believe the Scriptures to be the Word of God; and especially of late. I therefore shall consider the evidence of such a prescience in the Most High...

My first argument shall be taken from God's prediction of such events. Here I would, in the first place, lay down these two things as axioms.

1. If God does not foreknow, He cannot foretell such events; that is, He cannot peremptorily and certainly foretell them. If God has no more than an uncertain guess concerning events of this kind, then he can declare no more than an uncertain guess. Positively to foretell, is to profess to foreknow, or declare positive foreknowledge.

2. If God does not certainly foreknow the future volitions of moral agents, then neither can he certainly foreknow those events which are dependent on these volitions. The existence of the one depending on the existence of the other, the knowledge of the existence of the one depends on the knowledge of the existence of the other; and the one cannot be more certain than the other.

Heresy never dies (5): The Flight from Calvinism

The 19th Century Scottish theologian William Cunningham looked upon Socinianism as a unified system of theology and the only consistent rival to Calvinism.

He also reasoned that "when men abandon the great features of the Scriptural system of Calvinism, they have no firm and steady resting place on which they can take their stand, until they sink down to Socinianism." (Historical Theology Volume 2, p. 183)

Cunningham's words, with reference to divine omniscience, can be illustrated from the experience and reasoning of open theists Clark Pinnock and Richard Rice.

The following quotations from Pinnock are taken from his chapter “From Augustine to Arminius: A Pilgrimage in Theology.” He frames his journey, throughout that chapter, in the language of being freed from Calvinist logic. In his new found emancipation he was now able to listen to what the Bible was saying.

A careful reading of the whole chapter, and from the extracts below, reveal, however, that there is a commitment on his part to following the logic of a non-negotiable premise, namely libertarian free will:

Finally I had to rethink the divine omniscience and reluctantly ask whether we ought to think of it as an exhaustive foreknowledge of everything that will ever happen, as even most Arminians do.

I found I could not shake off the intuition that such a total omniscience would necessarily mean that everything we will ever choose in the future will have been spelled out in the divine knowledge register, and consequently the belief that we have truly significant choices to make would seem to be mistaken.

I knew the Calvinist argument that exhaustive foreknowledge was tantamount to predestination because it implies the fixity of all things from"eternity past," and I could not shake off its logical force. I feared that, if we view God as timeless and omniscient, we will land back in the camp of theological determinism where these notions naturally belong.

It makes no sense to espouse conditionality and then threaten it by other assumptions that we make. (Clark Pinnock, “From Augustine to Arminius: A Pilgrimage in Theology” in Pinnock [ed.], The Grace of God and the Will of Man, p. 25)

The same pursuit of consistency, even at the cost of revising divine omniscience can be found in author Richard Rice:

In the earlier part of this discussion we noticed the considerable difficulties encountered by those who seek to reconcile the concept of absolute divine foreknowledge with an affirmation of creaturely freedom. Now we can identify the basic cause of these problems. They arise from the attempt to combine contradictory elements from different views of God, specifically from the attempt to incorporate elements of the Calvinist view of God with the Arminian model.

The concept of absolute foreknowledge retained from Calvinism is incompatible with the dynamic portrait of God that is basic to Arminianism. Absolute foreknowledge--the idea that God sees the entire future in advance--is incompatible with the concept that God interacts with his creatures on a momentary basis.

But we cannot make such changes in our concept of God coherently while clinging to the traditional concept of divine foreknowledge. To be consistent, we must reformulate our understanding of omniscience. (Richard Rice "Divine Knowledge and Free-Will Theism" in Pinnock [ed.], The Grace of God and the Will of Man,p. 133-4)

The above bears out what Cunningham argued around 150 years ago. It is also substantiated in his telling of the following anecdote:

It may be worthwhile to mention...that, in what is probably the earliest summary ever given of the whole Socinian system of doctrine, after it was fully developed, in a little work, understood to have been written with the view of explaining and defending it, by Ostorodus and Voidovius, when, in 1598, they were sent from Poland on a mission into the Low Countries, in order to propogate their doctrine there, it is expressly assigned as a reason why they denied God's foreknowledge of the future actions of men, that there was no other way of escaping from the Calvinistic doctrine of presdestination. (Historical Theology Volume 2, p. 174)

Heresy never dies (4): God cannot know future free decisions

Here is another post comparing the views of contemporary open theists with their theological ancestors on this point, the Socinians.

Although separated by centuries, and although they worked out their theological views under different cultural and philosophical conditions, they have entertained the same ideas, adopted the same premises, and arrived at the same doctrinal conclusions concerning God's omniscience. And that, as I have previously shown (and I am unaware that anyone else has demonstrated), without any literary connection between the two views.

Indeed John Sanders and Greg Boyd have strongly denied that the comparison is even fair, let alone that there is any dependence or borrowing of ideas. The connection between the two views, at a conceptual level, is remarkable.

Why then are we seeing living representatives of the old Socinian view even though they did not arrive at this view by being influenced by the Socinian literature, or by the descent of Socinian ideas in other theological works?

Weighing up the variables and the constants in the respective environments, methodologies and presuppositions of the open theist and Socinian camps I consider the following comment by the late Harold O. J. Brown to be a key insight:

Over and over again, in widely separated cultures, in different centuries, the same basic misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the person and work of Christ and his message reappear. The persistence of the same stimulus, so to speak, repeatedly produces the same or similar reactions.

In their flight from Calvinism the open theists have not found the Arminian understanding of free will and foreknowledge to provide sufficient cognitive rest. Roger Olson has said that open theists look upon their view as consistent Arminianism. It is more true to say that, as Robert Strimple did back in 1996, it is Socinian.

Open theists are careful to note that the revised version of divine omniscience that they are putting forward is logically coherent and does not diminish the perfection of God's knowledge.

God, says Clark Pinnock, “knows all that it is possible to know,” (The Openness of God, p. 124) indeed he has come to position where he thinks it is biblically possible “to hold that God knows everything that can be known, but that free choices would not be something that can be known even by God because they are not yet settled in reality.” (Clark Pinnock, “From Augustine to Arminius: A Pilgrimage in Theology” in Pinnock [ed.], The Grace of God and the Will of Man, p. 25).

Richard Rice, one of the contributors to The Openness of God, defends this revision of omniscience:

It implies no deficiency in divine knowledge to say that God does not know them [creaturely decisions] until they occur. Indeed, to say that God is ignorant of future creaturely decisions is like saying that God is deaf to silence. It makes no sense, because before they exist such decisions are nothing for God to be ignorant of. (The Grace of God and the Will of Man, p. 129)

Compare the position adopted by Pinnock and Sanders with the description of the Socinian denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge found in William Cunningham's Historical Theology Volume 2 (1862).

Summarizing the Socinian argument Cunningham wrote:

That they may seem, indeed, not to derogate from God's omniscience, they admit indeed that God knows all things that are knowable; but then they contend that future contingent events, such as the future actions of responsible agents, are not knowable,--do not come within the scope of what may be known, even by an infinite Being; and, upon this ground, they allege that it is no derogation from the omniscience of God, that He does not, and cannot, know what is not knowable. (Historical Theology Volume 2, p. 173)

Heresy Never Dies (3): The amazing prescience of Charles Hodge

How did Charles Hodge know about open theism over a hundred years before it arose? Because it was knocking around centuries before he was born:

The Socinians, however, and some of the Remonstrants, unable to reconcile this foreknowledge with human liberty, deny that free acts can be foreknown. As the omnipotence of God is his ability to do whatever is possible, so his omniscience is his knowledge of everything knowable. But as free acts are in their nature uncertain, as they may or may not be, they cannot be known before they occur. Such is the argument of Socinus. This whole difficulty arises out of the assumption that contingency is essential to free agency. (Systematic Theology Volume 1, p. 400-1)

This was the same point that John Owen made in his treatise Vindicae Evangelicae (1655):

Socinus in his Prelections, where the main of his design is to vindicate man's free-will into that latitude and absoluteness as none before him had once aimed at, in his eighth chapter objects to himself this foreknowledge of God as that which seems to abridge and cut short the liberty contended for. (Vindicae Evangelicae, p. 116)

This is the same move that the open theists have made in our own day. For example, take Richard Rice's 1989 essay “Divine Foreknowledge and Free-Will Theism” (in Clark Pinnock [ed.], The Grace of God and the Will of Man). Five years prior to the publication of The Openness of God Rice noted that:

To avoid the difficulties involved in trying to reconcile creaturely freedom with absolute divine foreknowledge, a number of thinkers propose revisionary interpretations of omniscience. (p. 128)

Rice goes on to suggest that this is achieved by developing a definition of omniscience in line with the generally accepted definition of omnipotence. If omnipotence is understood as God having power to do anything logically possible, as opposed to having power to do anything, so omniscience should not be understood as knowing everything but rather as knowing everything that is logically knowable. (p. 128).

The "new paradigm" for understanding God (as the January 1995 subtitle of the Christianity Today forum called it) was in fact a repetition of the old Socinian paradigm. I think that John Frame's conclusion in No Other God is warranted:

In my judgment, the concept of human freedom in the libertarian sense is the engine that drives open theism, often called freewill theism. For the open theist, libertarian free will serves as a kind of grid, through which all other theological assertions must pass—a general criterion for testing the truth of all other doctrines. (No Other God, p. 119)

Waking the dead: Socinus redivivus

Have a read of this description of the open theist understanding of God's foreknowledge from the pen of Clark Pinnock (it is a bit long but worth reading):

Obviously God must know all things that can be known and know them truly. To be able to know all that can be known is a dimension of God's power. Ignorance, or not to know something God needs to know in order to govern the universe and pursue his will, would be a serious limitation.

However, omniscience need not mean exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events. If that were its meaning, the future would be fixed and determined, much as is the past. Total knowledge of the future would imply a fixity of events. Nothing in the future would need to be decided. It also would imply that human freedom is an illusion, that we make no difference and are not responsible. (The Openness of God, p. 121)

We should not think of God's omniscience as a vast encyclopedia of past, present and future facts. The Bible does not see it this way, nor is it a helpful way to think of it.

When God gave creatures freedom, he gave them an open future, a future in a degree to be shaped by their decisions, not a future already determined in its every detail...Philosophically speaking, if choices are real and freedom significant, future decisions cannot be exhaustively foreknown.

This is because the future is not determinate but shaped in part by human choices. The future is not fixed like the past, which can be known completely. The future does not yet exist and therefore cannot be infallibly anticipated, even by God. Future decisions cannot in every way be foreknown, because they have not yet been made. God knows everything that can be known—but God's foreknowledge does not include the undecided.(Ibid., p. 123)

The Openness of God was published in 1994.

Please bear in mind that when Christianity Today published an article on open theism (9th January 1995, "Has God been held hostage by philosophy?" with contributions from Roger Olson, Douglas Kelly, Timothy George and Alister McGrath) the subtitle for the article read "A forum on free-will theism, a new paradigm for understanding God."

Just how new was this new paradigm? Well compare Pinnock's words above with the following from Charles Hodge written in 1871:

The Socinians, however, and some of the Remonstrants, unable to reconcile this foreknowledge with human liberty, deny that free acts can be foreknown. As the omnipotence of God is his ability to do whatever is possible, so his omniscience is his knowledge of everything knowable. But as free acts are in their nature uncertain, as they may or may not be, they cannot be known before they occur. Such is the argument of Socinus. This whole difficulty arises out of the assumption that contingency is essential to free agency. (Systematic Theology Vol. 1, p. 400-1)

And also these words from Herman Bavinck (1854-1921):

In a later period the Socinians taught the same thing. God knows all things, they said, but all things according to their nature. Hence, he knows future contingent (accidental) events, not with absolute certainty (for then they would cease to be accidental), but as contingent and accidental; that is, he knows what the future holds insofar as it depends on humans, but not with infallible foreknowledge. If that were the case, the freedom of the will would be lost, God would become the author of sin, and he himself would be subject to necessity. (Reformed Dogmatics Volume 2: God and Creation, p. 197. Emphasis added)

The point? The new view of God known as open theism was at least as old as the Socinian denial of God's foreknowledge, and it rested on the non-negotiable commitment to the same premise: libertarian free will.

The connection between open theism and Socinianism is not literary but methodological. They share the same convictions and have arrived at the same conclusions concerning the relationship between human freedom and divine foreknowledge.

Heresy never dies (2)

Whilst working on a chapter comparing the Open theist denials of God's exhaustive foreknowledge with their theological ancestors, the Socinians, I came across the following striking remark by Archibald Alexander.

In an article in The Biblical Repertory and Theological Review (Vol. 5 No. 2, 1833) Alexander had translated a large section of N. Arnold's refutation of the Racovian Catechism, at the end of which he concludes:

One thing must have struck the reader as remarkable, namely, that the modern arguments, by which error attempts to defend her cause, are precisely the same as those employed for centuries past. We know, indeed, that those who now adopt and advocate these opinions, greatly dislike this comparison of modern theories with ancient heresies, and denounce it as invidious.

But why should it be so considered? Or why should they be unwilling to acknowledge the conformity of their opinions with those of ancient times, when the agreement is so manifest, not only in the doctrines themselves, but in the arguments and interpretations of Scripture, by which they attempt to support them?

Some of the conditions under which heresies arise are variable (philosophical, political, cultural etc.) and some are constant (the nature of the orthodox doctrines being opposed, the non-negotiable aspects of their system such as the place of reason, or free will).

It is the presence of the latter that I think best accounts for the recurrence and resurgence of old errors in new forms. Heresy never dies. And that is why John Owen in the seventeenth century and the likes of Bruce Ware in the twenty-first, adopt the same arguments and the same exegesis in denying the same errors put forward by Socinians and Open theists.

Calvin 365: (14) Exposing a fictitious righteousness

Calvin describes the effects of being confronted by the moral law:

So long as he is permitted to stand upon his own judgment, he passes off hypocrisy as righteousness; pleased with this, he is aroused against God's grace by I know not what counterfeit acts of righteousness.

But after he is compelled to weigh his life in the scales of the law, laying aside all that presumption of fictitious righteousness, he discovers that he is a long way from holiness, and is in fact teeming with a multitude of vices, with which he previously thought himself undefiled.

So deep and tortuous are the recesses in which the evils of covetousness lurk that they easily deceive man's sight. The apostle has good reason to say: "I should not have known covetousness, if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet'" [Rom. 7:7].

For if by the law covetousness is not dragged from its lair, it destroys wretched man so secretly that he does not even feel its fatal stab.

Institutes, 2. 7. 7.

Calvin 365: (13) The first use of the law

Let us survey briefly the function and use of what is called the "moral law." Now, as far as I understand it, it consists of three parts.

The first part us this: while it shows God's righteousness, that is, the righteousness alone acceptable to God, it warns, informs, convicts, and lastly condemns, every man of his own unrighteousness.

Institutes, 2. 7. 6.

Calvin 365: (12) The righteousness of the law

Having been sick and bad of late (long "a" in "bad," and "bad" is Wenglish for unwell) I have fallen behind with the daily quote from Calvin:

If it is true that in the law we are taught the perfection of righteousness, this also follows: the complete observance of the law is perfect righteousness before God. By it man would evidently be deemed and reckoned righteous before the heavenly judgment seat...We cannot gainsay that the reward of eternal salvation awaits complete obedience to the law, as the Lord has promised.

Because observance of the law is found in none of us, we are excluded from the promises of life, and fall back into the mere curse.

Institutes, 2. 7. 3

Resurrection and union with Christ

Last Friday I had the privilege of conducting the funeral service of Lynda Carr. Lynda was a believer, a long term member of Christ Church Deeside, mother of eleven and a wonderful, wonderful character. We will all miss her terribly. She was resting and relying on Christ and looked forward to being with him wich is far better. At the funeral service I spoke from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 about an intelligent faith, a certain hope, and a real comfort.

My practice at the burial of a believer is to read and explain question thirty-seven from the Shorter Catechism:

What benefits do believers receive from Christ at death?

A. The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united in Christ, do rest in their graves, till the resurrection.

Christ is Saviour of body and soul (see HC Q. 1, 57, 58). He assumed our humanity, real and sinless, that he might redeem all that was fallen.

There seems such a terrible finality to the grave. As the coffin is lowered down it all appears to be so final. What a difference it makes to stand there with the Word of God proclaiming a different perspective, a greater reality than death. Christ is risen, death is conquered.

Those who fall asleep in him were not appointed for wrath but for salvation through the Lord Christ. Their union with him extends to the resurrection of the body. How could the grave be the end if Jesus is at the right hand of the Father, reigning over heaven and earth, having all power and authority? How could this be the end since he loves us so much that he will make our lowly bodies like his glorious body?

As the Puritan Samuel Bolton put it "our dust and bones are still united to the Son of God."

"Risking the Truth: Handling Error in the Church" due out in Spring 2009

The release date for the interviews book is Spring 2009. Check it out here. I've had a sneak preview of the cover design (The picture above is not it. This is Augustine refuting heretics!).

Risking The Truth: Handling Error in the Church
Interviews with Mark Dever, Carl Trueman, Mike Horton, Tom Schreiner, Scott Clark, Ligon Duncan, Derek Thomas, Kim Riddlebarger...

Foreword by Sinclair Ferguson

...and there are interviews with several other senior ministers and seminary professors.

Here's the blurb:

A collection of interviews on handling truth and error in the church. Contributors reflect on this issue in relation to the minister's own life, pulpit ministry, local church leadership, seminary training, denominations, the impact of the academy, Evangelicalism, contemporary trends, history, creeds and confessions, and doctrines that are currently under attack.

There is also personal reflection on these matters, lessons drawn from experience, and practical advice. The interviews are introduced by a primer on heresy and false teaching, and concluded with a chapters on "Why being against heresies is not enough" and "What really matters in ministry: directives for church leaders in Acts 20."

And here are some endorsements:

"This collection is fascinating, sobering and encouraging. It presents an impressive range of experience and wisdom on the challenges facing the church and its ministry in dealing with false teaching while being sensitive to those affected by it."

Robert Letham
Tutor in Systematic Theology
WEST (Wales Evangelical School of Theology)

"Serious. Thoughtful. Humble. Godly. Loving. Bracing. Encouraging. These interviews will be a blessing to anyone seeking to be faithful in Christian ministry."

James M. Hamilton Jr.
Associate Professor of Biblical Theology
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

"What a novel way to approach this most vital of subjects! Given that theological reflection is human thought about the Scriptural revelation of a tri-personal God, I have always believed that the personal element has a place in all of our theologizing. The subjective should not—indeed cannot—be removed from theology. And here we see the way that some of the most important theological minds of our day personally grapple with how truth is to be defended. This mesh of subjectivity and Christian apologetics—in which objectivity is so vital—makes for both compelling and profoundly instructive reading."

Michael Haykin
Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

"Affirmations and Denials Regarding Recent Issues" WTS Board of Trustees document

Mike Bird points us to a recent document (3rd December 2008) adopted by the Board of Trustees of Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, on "Affirmations and Denials regarding recent issues " (related to the recent controversy over the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture).

The document contains the required pledges for voting faculty members and members of the Board of Trustees.

The "Affirmations and Denials" are set out as follows:

I. Confessional Subscription

A. Basic character of subscription

B. Progress in understanding Scripture

C. Specific obligations implied by the pledge

D. Judgments about subscription

II. Confession and Mission

A. Universality of truth

B. The legitimacy of pedagogical adaptation

III. Scripture

A. The inspiration of Scripture

B. The interpretation of Scripture

C. The pertinence of ancient contexts: Ancient Near-Eastern and First Century Mediterranean World

D. The truthfulness of Scripture

E. The role of the Holy Spirit

IV. Special Areas of Interest

A. Special Area: Harmony of Scripture

B. Special Area: Implications of Details in Scripture, Including NT Use of the OT

C. Special Area: Old Testament Teaching

D. Special Area: Old Testament History

Westminster Seminary Distinctives

The document is ten pages long and is available here.