Paradox Lost
S. M. Hutchens on Open Theism & the Easy Road to Heresy

TOM POSTS IT BELOW.

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 7/18/2009 9:21:42 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 7/17/2009 6:28:30 PM (GMT-5)

 

CHRISTOLOGICAL MISTAKES

Denying or diminishing, however, any aspect of the many paradoxes that form the warp and woof of Christian teaching, the foundation of which is God's mysterious communion with his creation in the incarnation of the divine Son, involves us in heresy. Ultimately, the mistakes heretical teachers of this variety make are mistakes in Christology.

The God of the Old Testament is perfectly revealed in Christ, but his involvement in the world has always been based upon the union of persons in which creation and incarnation was, is, and shall be contained by an¬ticipation, execution, and consummation. The relation of God to the world in the eternal Son has always been one in which time, space, matter, and every multiplicity of creation have been perfectly "taken into account" in the classical divine perfections with no diminution of either.

Paradox Lost

S. M. HUTCHENS on Open Theism & the Easy Road to Heresy

I HAVE ONLY RECENTLY, after years of letting it adhere lightly to the exterior surface of consciousness, come to a clear conclusion on what is known as the Openness of God theology. The denouement was the sudden realization that it exists in the classical form of a heresy, that is, as the affirmation of a truth in such a way as to efface or deny an equally true counterpart.

Arianism is a heresy because, while it rightly affirms the humanity of Christ, this humanity is used to deny his deity. Likewise, religious egalitarianism, while affirming the orthodox teaching that men and women, being of one substance, are equal, uses this truth as an appliance to defeat the equally true doctrine of the primacy of the man over the woman. In each case the truths seem contradictory, a sovereign logic demanding that one be chosen over the other, but in each case the Church has held to both with equal vigor and insistence.

RESISTING PARADOXES

Proponents of the Openness of God theology have been adept at displaying biblical passages where God is involved in chance, contingency, or ignorance, that is, in what active intelligence must experience in the vicissitudes of time and space: He changed his mind about Nineveh, tested Abraham and Job to see whether they would remain faithful—as if he did not know beforehand—and, incarnate (!) as a human child, learned and grew.

To be sure, the classical perfections of God drawn from the biblical narrative are all put at risk, if not contradicted, in that same narrative by—shall we say?—the perplexing “humanness of God,” and the tables customarily drawn up to summarize those transcendent attributes are as apt to cause consternation as assurance among those who know their Bibles. “Open Theism” is, I think, an attempt to deal with the humanness of God as an abstract theological problem outside a Christological framework in which the divine and human are perfectly related in the ineffable and paradoxical mystery of our faith.

What seems to be the great discovery of these theologians? Do they need to inform an ignorant or unheedful Church that God is “open?” I think not. The Church has always known that he is, in the ways constantly and insistently indicated by Scripture, and needs no convincing. Rather, their discovery seems to be in their use of this truth to deny or efface (by way of resolution) the divine attributes that form the other part of the paradox.

The paradoxes in which the church fathers so often reveled in the life of God, revealed to us perfectly in Christ, are all glorious impossibilities: God became man, omnipresence became circumscribed, the sinless became sin, omniscience became ignorant, omnipotence became impotent, and the immortal died. Tertullian said, Credibile est, quia ineptum est, “It is believable because it is, from the human point of view, absurd.”

But rationalist theologians, liberal or conservative, don't like paradoxes. Instead of looking for them as signs marking the places where inquiry stops and doxology begins, they resist them on instinct and principle, and take out their hammers.

Chesterton protested thus:

“The ordinary man ... has always cared more about truth than consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.... The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.... He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health.... The cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its center, it can grow without changing.” (Orthodoxy, Chapter II)

CHRISTOLOGICAL MISTAKES

Denying or diminishing, however, any aspect of the many paradoxes that form the warp and woof of Christian teaching, the foundation of which is God's mysterious communion with his creation in the incarnation of the divine Son, involves us in heresy. Ultimately, the mistakes heretical teachers of this variety make are mistakes in Christology.

The God of the Old Testament is perfectly revealed in Christ, but his involvement in the world has always been based upon the union of persons in which creation and incarnation was, is, and shall be contained by anticipation, execution, and consummation. The relation of God to the world in the eternal Son has always been one in which time, space, matter, and every multiplicity of creation have been perfectly “taken into account” in the classical divine perfections with no diminution of either.

When someone (and I am thinking here primarily of an intelligent young Christian) is exposed to a form of religion in which one truth suffers at the hands of another, there is often a reactive tendency not to settle them by resolving them into paradox and letting them stand together, but to go over to the “other side,” committing the equal and opposite error.

If, for example, someone is taught to think of the perfections of God as theological abstractions so that no apparent disruption of those perfections evident in Scripture may be attributed to the mystery of God himself, but must be resolved in some unsatisfying rationalization (“God didn't really ‘change his mind’ about Nineveh because ...”), then coming into a conviction that there is an “openness” in God may seem a startling revelation about which it is necessary to write books, choose up sides—and deny what one had learned before about the absolute and ineffable characteristics of God.

But the Openness of God school, instead of acknowledging what Chesterton’s ordinary Christian has always known and going on its way corrected, has taken one tendency to err—that of propounding the perfections as abstract absolutes independent of the Christology that comprehends the entire biblical narrative (Luke 24:27)— and attempted to correct it by way of mitigation.

AN OBSTACLE TO PATRISTIC THINKING

My own slowness to understand what was going on here I attribute to the influence of a certain variety of theological rationalism (not Reason!) on my mind. Something had to be knocked away before I could think patristically about the nature of a God whose attributes of omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, simplicity, aseity, and other absolute perfections could be thought of Christologically instead of as abstract qualities of divine Being to be projected upon an essentially impersonal infinity. When this latter mistake is made, God, to have life in communion with his creation, must be understood as just as abstractly and impersonally “open,” rather than known to us in the impenetrable Mystery whom, in seeing, we have beheld the invisible God.

Senior editor S.M. Hutchens works as a reference librarian in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He holds a doctorate in theology.

Hutchens: …after years of letting it adhere lightly to the exterior surface of consciousness…

Tom: Exterior surface of consciousness? I take that to means, “after years of knowing about it but giving it little or no concentrated attention.”

Hutchens: The denouement was the sudden realization that it exists in the classical form of a heresy, that is, as the affirmation of a truth in such a way as to efface or deny an equally true counterpart.

Tom: Tell me, what is the truth that open theists affirm and what equally true counterpart does it deny? Hutchens never says.

Wait. Tom, stop. Don’t do this.

I was gonna go through his comments point for point, but I got better things to do. I’ll just say this much.

1) Nobody believes reality is ULTIMATELY paradoxical, i.e., that there are truths which IN FACT contradict other claims which are equally true. When we run into situations in which we fact two claims we want to say are ‘true’ but which are contradictory, we conclude that the greater truth of the matter is something we don’t see but which resolves the tension. We don’t think ‘being’ is itself contradictory. That’s silly and not worth talking about.

2) The problem POW is that people use the apparent contradictoriness of some biblical claims (like the difficulty we face in explaining how Jesus is both fully divine and fully human) and build a methodology out of it. That’s what Hutchens is doing. He’s saying, “Look, open theists refuse to embrace a contradiction, therefore open theism must be false.” Look at what he actually says. His whole article boils down to that: “Open theism is false because it refuses to affirm a contradiction.” What apparent contradiction is that? Well, that God eternally knows out future choices, on the one hand, and that those choices are free, on the other. Hutchens is saying, just because these two claims are contradictory that means they must both be true and it must therefore be heresy to deny either. Trust me, this IS at the heart of his argument, and it’s insanely ridiculous.

3) If it’s not true that we should affirm contradictory claims about God and the world just because they’re contradictory, then when should we do so? Well, we should NEVER do so, because it’s meaningless to do so. If we’re ever in a situation where all our best reasoning tells us that both A and B are independently true and that both are contradictory, then we just bite the bullet, live in the tension, and wait until we know more. We’ll understand in the bye and bye which one, A or B, was really false and which was really true.

4) But you have to argue the case for each instance of biting the bullet like this. It can’t be a policy or methodology. You can’t say, “Unless every belief you have contradicts some other belief, that belief can’t be true.” That’s just ridiculous. But it lies at the heart of Hutchens’ argument against open theism. Throw Arianism up on the table. Throw unqualified egalitarianism up on the table. Point out that what’s at the heart of these errors is a refusal to embrace paradox (which itself is false—Arianism isn’t false because it refuses to affirm ostensibly contradictory truths; it’s false because it denies the Son is divine). Then say open theists ALSO refuse to embrace a paradox (viz., contradictory claims about God’s knowledge of the future and our freedom) and—poof—open theism joins Arianism as theological heresy.

Hutchens isn’t doing theology. He’s performing magic sleight of hand.

Chesterton: The ordinary man ... has always cared more about truth than consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.

Tom: I hate to disagree with a legend like Chesterton, but (1) what is truth if it’s not consistent? and (2) ordinary people are NOT more likely to embrace an apparent contradiction than they are to try to resolve the conflict by establishing the whole truth of the matter. On the contrary my good fellow. We DO assume there is a whole truth to the matter, that reality and truth are not ultimately contradictory, and that there are consistent explanations for things. That's WHY we push ourselves to find out more, and in the meantime we demand of ourselves plausible explanations. WHY? Because ONLY plausible explanations of truth can inform our living and our worshipping in a meaningful way.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 7/18/2009 1:14:15 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 7/18/2009 2:15:17 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 7/18/2009 2:37:57 PM (GMT-5)

Tom: Tell me in your own words what you understand the core, defining claim of open theism to be. The heart of it all. I really need to know that you understand open theism.

POW: 1. I picture openness as being a biblical and devotional topic. 2. Onto this is sometimes added accretions. 3. These later have as their impetus political battles rather than devotion/worship or discipleship -- hense the great variety of o-th-ers. 4. And the “ways” claims are defended may or may not be tied to the initial politics.) 5. Openness grows out of christology, and not christology out of openness.

Tom: Like I said to you privately, B, your response did help me. I am grateful. It helped me understand where you’re coming from, and I needed to see where that was. I now see that you just don’t know what open theism is. I don’t mean this as a criticism, really. I don’t know--and won't guess--how or why you don’t understand--after all these years--what the open view is, but you just don’t understand it. There’s not a single word in your 5 points that tells me ‘what’ open theism is, what open theists believe.  Nothing. I have not a clue from anything you said as to what open theism is.

I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.

No biggie. Other things will come along that we can talk about, just NOT open theism.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 7/19/2009 8:13:06 AM (GMT-5)