novus•lumen

Interacting with “Most Moved Mover”
1: Introduction
2: Hyper-Relationality
3: Sovereignty
4: Changeability
5: Temporality
6: Conclusion

HYPER-RELATIONALITY

One of the foundational principles of Open Theism is the notion that God is hyper-personal and hyper-relational; the personal God, as evident in the self-ascribed personal name “YHWH”, desires to enter into a covenanted partnership with his creatures. Since this principle undergirds God’s Sovereignty, Changeability, and Temporality, the author spends a great deal of time throughout the book explaining God’s relationality and loving posture towards those whom He would woo. According to Pinnock, God’s Textual self-disclosure through the Holy Scriptures is writ large with evidence of this personal and relational posture toward His Creatures, especially through the narrative of the children of Israel and the person of Jesus Christ. In fact, he says the gospel compels us to re-understand God anew in light of the Jesus we encounter in the New Testament who changes and suffers on our behalf. Over against this very personal, relational God is set the God of Hellenistic philosophy and Classic Theism that is immutable, timeless, and apathetic—the God of Augustine, Anselm, and Calvin.

In this view, God does not grieve over the suffering of the world nor experience compassion, He is distant from His Creation, has determined its course like a Master Programmer, and it claims the language the Bible uses to describe this personal, relational God merely accommodates to finite understanding, rather than viewing the biblical metaphors as reality-depicting descriptions. The general aim of Pinnock’s argument is clear: we need to be more affirming of God as a living person involved in history and less as a remote absolute principle. While the Scriptures do seem to point toward a hyper-personal, hyper-relationally “open” God, “a package of divine attributes has been constructed which leans in the direction of immobility and hyper-transcendence, particularly because of the influence of the Hellenistic category of unchangeableness.” Through this Hellenistic, pagan tradition our perception of God as the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle replaced the Biblical God who responds to changing circumstances and is passionately involved in History. Pinnock argues against this depiction by pointing to the general thrust of the biblical narrative as evidence of God’s hyper-relationality.

Three of the strongest hyper-relational “thrusts” Pinnock describes in Scripture relating to Open Theism is human freedom, the story of Israel, and Jesus Christ. In painting a God who is open, partnering, dependent, interactive and hyper-relational, Pinnock begins with Creation. God’s creative act of breathing the cosmos into existence was not only a self-expresive act, it was also communitarian and self-limiting. According to Pinnock, “creating human beings who have true freedom is a self-restraining, self-humbling and self-sacrificing act on God’s part.” As Creator, God assumes residency in the world, operates within our space and time, relates to us within our structure of time, partners with humans in History, engages in conflict with opposing creative powers (both human and non-human), and is not in complete control as the result of those competing creative powers. He says that Scripture and experience show God created humans with “libertarian freedom,” the freedom to perform or refrain from an action. By creating humans as free agents, God left open the possibility of humans choosing relationship with Himself, obeying His ordered Way, and acting in such a way that was not predicted nor planned by God. Creating beings crafted after His image necessitated beings who had the freedom to choose and left open the risky possibility of rejection and an unsettled future. These notions of risk, undefined future, and hyper-freedom, are especially evident in God’s covenant with Israel. In it, God partnered with a people in a mutually binding “contract” and required them to honor their end of the bargain. God required them to consciously choose Him and His Way, allowing them to fail at their contractual obligations, which they did. Through His covenantal partnership with this chosen people, we see a God who risks by voluntarily binding himself to His creatures, changes his mind based on an interactive relationship, and alters His plans in light of His people’s covenantal failing by invading earth in the person of Jesus Christ, ultimately leading to the Cross where “instead of using his powers to enforce compliance, God travels the path of vulnerable love.”

What are we to make of this God who risks for relationship that Clark Pinnock describes? While he is weak on specific Scriptural support (i.e. chapter and verse prooftexts), I believe Pinnock does make some valid arguments for a general thrust within Scripture that reveals a God who is risky for the sake of love, partners with humanity, is marked by hyper-relationaliy, and chooses to be impacted by human freedom. Conventional theism suffers from a monarchic view of God who is the “sole performer” of the story and dictates the script from above, rather than a Being who is inanimately involved and affected by a story in which other characters exist. As Pinnock alludes, the narrative of the Garden in the Scriptures pictures a realm of unlimited possibility, because God created other characters with the freedom to choose. And because true freedom demands real, actual choice, both in relation to God and Creation, how could God not be affected at some level by those real choices? Furthermore, because God freely and deliberately loves humans and is conditioned by human acceptance or refusal of that love, love necessitates vulnerability, thus God is affected by the objects of His love and made vulnerable by them. In the Sodom and Gomorah narrative, for instance, we see a God who changes His mind in light of his relationship with Abram; God and his choices are affected by a human. This affecting is wrought not because the human is stronger than God, but because God chose to be affected by this relationship, because the essential posture of the nature of God is Love, not control.

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