Bound Only Once: The Failure of Open Theism

Open theists like to picture the God of classical Christian theism as a distant, despotic, micro-managing sovereign. The god of Open theism, on the other hand, is ready to enter into new experiences and to become deeply involved in helping us cope as we, with him, face things we simply did not know would happen. They insist that God has knowledge, but not all knowledge, certainly not knowledge of the future acts of free beings. Such Open theistic inferences reveal a deep-seated devotion to Enlightenment categgories and narrow unpoetic imaginations. Ideas have destinations, and one of the consequences of our trying to read the Scriptures without any poetry in our souls will be the eventual destruction of any possibility of ministering to souls. Just imagine the hymn writer trying to life up the downcast--"I know not what the future holds, but I know who also doesn't know much about it either."