50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I Thought Pinnock was a Heretic, June 9, 2006
This review is from: Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness (Didsbury Lectures) (Paperback)
I was not expecting to like this book.
I read it in the context of a class that was meant to be critical, from a Calvinistic perspective, of Arminianism in its Reformed, Wesleyan, and Open Theist forms. I myself had, until recently, been a typical "angry young man" that you so often find in Reformed schools. But at that time I had begun to re-evaluate my theology. In any case, my preconceived ideas about Clark Pinnock could have been put simply: he was a heretic. Even before he had become an Open Theist, I was under the impression that he was a heretic, not only because he had a weak view of Scripture, but because he had embraced Arminian theology after having been an avowed Calvinist. In all honesty, I read his book rather reluctantly. I had no idea what Open Theism was, and, in all honesty, I had never really examined the arguments for Arminianism from an Arminian perspective. I was only expecting to find "fuel for the fire", you might say, with which to burn an effigy of Pinnock in a critical essay.
But then something unexpected happened. As other reviewers have noted, Most Moved Mover is about God's love and about his relationality. As a Calvinist, I believed in God's love for the elect in the abstract, but was not entirely convinced of his love for any individual I met, even for myself, because I thought it was impossible to know who was truly elect. God loved some people, and hated most, having created them to be tortured for eternity to the praise of his glory. And I understood God's relationality to the world in terms of decrees and legally binding covenants - in other words, my understanding of God was that he was mighty and sovereign, and somewhat distant.
Pinnock's arguments blew that conception out of the water.
Admittedly, having experienced a personal crisis within my family, and having spent some time doing pastoral work and evangelism, my views about God were changing and maturing, but Pinnock really sped up the process by helping me read Scripture in a light I wouldn't or couldn't read as a Calvinist.
And then, a couple days after having read the book, I found myself walking through a mall in Amsterdam and I had something of a religious experience. I've only had a handful of encounters with God throughout my walk as a Christian, so I'm not given to religious experiences on a regular basis (though perhaps I should be). It suddenly occured to me, that God loves me! He loves...me! He... loves. I was at once shocked, humbled, and so full of joy I found myself crying right there in the mall! I had always believed that God was my King, my Saviour, my Judge, my Lord... but I had a hard time accepting or believing that he was my Loving Father. But no longer.
I say all this because I attribute that revelation, that work of grace in my heart to Clark Pinnock's book. I'm not saying I'm an Open Theist, but I cannot bring myself to call Pinnock a heretic. I think his work is worth your attention, especially if you are struggling to understand God's love for you and for the world. In a subsequent correspondence with Prof. Pinnock I found him to be a humble, grace-filled person in love with Christ, totally without the venom you often find in works by other theologians, especially his opponents. I would highly reccomend Most Moved Mover to people whose experiences may have mirorred my own, and who are seeking a deeper revelation of the love of God.
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36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Relevant Theology of Love, September 5, 2004
This review is from: Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness (Didsbury Lectures) (Paperback)
Clark Pinnock offers this monograph as a full-scale explication and defense of the Open view of God. Pinnock and others publicly presented the view in a 1994 book titled, The Openness of God. For those unfamiliar with the basic outlines of this theological alternative, Pinnock provides ample definition and characterization of it in Most Moved Mover.
Openness theology envisions God as a self-sufficient, though relational, Trinitarian being who voluntarily created the world out of nothing. God graciously relates to the world as one self-limited out of respect for the genuine freedom of creatures. This relational, pantemporal God does not exhaustively foreknow future actual events. Above all, the open view of God emphasizes love as God's chief attribute and as the primary priority for theological construction. "The living God is . . . the God of the Bible," writes Pinnock, "the one who is genuinely related to the world, whose nature is the power of love and whose relationship with the world is that of a most moved, not unmoved, Mover" (3).
The book's introductory chapter may be the most interesting part of the book to those already familiar with the general themes of openness theology. In it, Pinnock cites numerous objections to the Open view penned mostly by Evangelical theologians of a Calvinist bent. For instance, "I have to say, with regret," says Don Carson of The Openness of God, "that this book is the most consistently inadequate treatment of scripture and historical theology dealing with the doctrine of God that I've ever seen from the hands of serious Evangelical writers." Robert Morey criticizes the open view by calling the deity it envisions "the finite God of evangelical processianism." "We have here a different God," contends Bruce Ware, "not merely a different version of God. For the sake of the glory that is God's alone, we have no choice but to reject the openness model." R.C. Sproul reacts to Pinnock's theological proposal by stating: "Clark Pinnock is not a believer -- I would not have fellowship with him." Sproul writes elsewhere, "this fascination with the openness of God is an assault, not merely on Calvinism, or even on classical theism, but on Christianity itself."
While Reformed criticisms have been harsh, not all Evangelicals object to the Open view of God. Pinnock lists those found mostly in Wesleyan, Arminian, and Pentecostal circles as appreciative hearers and sympathizers. In addition, "there's a whole new large group called `Christians in Renewal' who enjoy a very relational and intimate spirituality and who, when they hear of it," notes Pinnock, "often resonate with the open view of God. Their presence on the scene may make this a truly new debate and more than a rehash of the old one" (18).
Following the lengthy introduction, the remaining chapters follow the four-fold approach of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Because Pinnock looks to Scripture as the primary source for theology, he addresses how it corresponds with his proposed view. Pinnock admits that he gives particular weight to narrative and to the language of personal relationships in scripture. He also accepts diversity among the biblical witnesses and recognizes the dialogical character of the Bible. But "conventional theists have difficulty with open view of God because it challenges certain well-established traditions," suggests Pinnock, "not because it is unscriptural." He finds Open themes throughout the biblical witness: "for example, the idea of God taking risks, of God's will being thwarted, of God being flexible, of grace being resistible, of God having a temporal dimension, of God being impacted by the creature, and of God not knowing the entire future as certain" (64).
Pinnock turns in chapter two to assess the authority of the Christian tradition. Just as Christians need to render the Word of God intelligible today, the tradition must continually be scrutinized for its soundness and relevance. Unfortunately, formal Christian theology has been less positive in terms of understanding God's dynamic activity than has the life of Christian piety. The tradition's theology has sometimes lost a biblical focus, such that the package of divine attributes presented by theologians leans in the direction of divine immobility and hyper-transcendence. This is due particularly because of the influence of Hellenistic categories of unchangeableness. After briefly considering figures in Christian history, including Aquinas, Augustine, and Philo, and after addressing evangelical responses to the concept of God, Pinnock concludes that the basic tenets in the open view, "grows out of ideological, if not the ecclesiastical, soil of Wesleyan-Arminianism" (106).
This reviewer found chapter three, "The Metaphysics of Love," the most exciting of the book. In it Pinnock explains his preference for dynamic, relational philosophy as opposed to substantive philosophy of classical thought. He believes that addressing philosophical suppositions is important, because "theological integrity and the credibility of the concept of God in our time are both at stake" (118). Pinnock argues that the open view adopts a "biblical philosophy" -- rather than currently available philosophical propositions -- as the basis for itself. He contrasts his biblical philosophy with process philosophy because, as he understands it, process thought places priority on identifying a contemporary conceptuality and looks secondly to biblical teaching. With regard to arguments for the existence of God, Pinnock opts for the cumulative case for God's existence. He supposes that all people have an intuition that deity exists; the philosopher must provide a coherent and consistent conceptuality of the One whom so many intuit.
The Metaphysics of Love chapter provides Pinnock with the opportunity to address how the open view relates with process philosophy. "Process thought is an impressive modern conceptuality with a lot to offer," Pinnock acknowledges (141). The open view shares with process thought the desire to overcome an emphasis upon the metaphysic of being and to emphasize, instead, a metaphysics of becoming. Pinnock believes process theologians are correct to conceive of God as affecting everything and being affected by everything. He agrees with the process notion that God is temporally everlasting rather than timelessly eternal. He also agrees that God should be understood as passable, not impassable, and omniscient in the sense of exhaustively knowing all that can be known. In fact, says Pinnock, "I appreciate Whitehead and Hartshorne much the way the conventional theists appreciate Plato and Aristotle" (143). Pinnock provides a helpful list of convictions that process and open theists hold in common. "We:
* make the love of God a priority;
* hold to libertarian human freedom;
* are both critical of conventional theism;
* seek a more dynamic model of God;
* contend that God has real, not merely rational, relationships with the world;
* believe that God is affected by what happens in the world;
* say that God knows what can be known, which does not amount to exhaustive foreknowledge;
* appreciate the value of philosophy in helping to shape theological convictions;
* connect positively to Wesleyan/Arminian traditions. (142-143)"
Open theism is not process theism, however. "Process philosophy can be helpful," admits Pinnock, "but [it] must be refashioned and cannot be adopted wholesale" (148). Process thought is based upon the metaphysics of Whitehead, whereas openness is a biblical theology not obligated to any philosophical scheme.
The way in which open theists characterize God's relationship with the world receives much of Pinnock's attention as he distinguishes between process and open theisms. "Like process [theism], we want to preserve the transcendence of God while denying the separation of God in the world," explains Pinnock. "But unlike process, we want to conceive the relationship as a voluntary, not a necessary, one" (144). Pinnock argues elsewhere that "the self-sufficiency of the triune God underlines the fact that the world exists by grace, not by necessity" (125). Pinnock continues his criticism of process thought by saying that "we [Open theists] hold that God is ontologically other than the world and in a certain sense `requires' no world. God does not have to relate to some other reality because he is internally social, loving and self-sufficient" (145). The Open vision of the Trinity-world relation provides a way to conceive that God is essentially loving, while also conceiving of creation as a free gift, not a necessity.
The last chapter of the book, "The Existential Fit," addresses theology's adequacy to the demands of life. Pinnock believes that the openness model is more relevant than conventional theologies to real life situations, and open theism confirms deep human intuitions about choice and the future. "It is no small point in favor of the openness model," contends Pinnock, "that it is difficult to live life in any other way than the way it describes" (23). Among the assets Pinnock believes the open view provides are the following: open theism (1) emphasizes that life and our life-decisions really do matter, (2) points to a friendship with the Lord that is possible in cooperative relationship, (3) emphasizes the reality of freedom that we all presuppose, (4) corresponds with our intuition that love ought to be persuasive rather than coercive, (5) emphasizes sanctification in the sense of growth in grace, (6) focuses upon genuine responsibility in discipleship, (7) meshes well with what we commonly believe that prayer is about, i.e., influencing God, (8) corresponds with how we understand God guiding...
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76 of 104 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
God, the senstive man, December 17, 2001
This review is from: Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness (Didsbury Lectures) (Paperback)
There is a trend on the fringes of Evangelicalism known as "open theism." Perhaps its best-known expositor is Prof. Clark Pinnock of McMaster Divinity College in Ontario. Open theism is, roughly speaking, somewhere in-between classical theism and process theism. While open theists affirm the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, they reject that claims that God has exhasutive foreknowledge of the future (omniscience), that God is impassible (incapable of suffering), immutable, without emotions, and outside of time. According to open theists, these ideas are the result of the influence of Greek philosophy on Christian theology. While classical theists take Scriptural language concerning God's repenting or changing his mind as anthropomorphisms, open theists take them as literal descriptions of how God's being and his interaction with the world. Not surprisingly, open theists are almost exclusively Arminians (although traditional Arminians oppose open theists as much as Calvinists).
There are some good things about this book. It is reasonably well-written (although it could be more compact and better organized). Also, it contains a good overview of the issue, presenting the opinions of both supporters of open theism and its opponents.
My main objection to this book is that, like some of other of Prof. Pinnock's writings, it seems to be based on what Prof. Pinnock would prefer to believe, rather than what is Scriptural. [See x-xi.] We now have a "sensitive God." Indeed God is just the type of sensitive man a modern woman is looking for - he "risks," wants a relationship based on "love" and not "control" [p. 45]. He "restore[s] the relationship and rebuild[s] the trust." [p. 46.] He "invites us to participate with him in a loving dialogue. . . " [p. 4.] He is "sensitive to experiences." [p. 59.] He is "vulnerable." [p. 92.] (In this respect, see the interesting comments of Leon Podles, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, p. 126.)
In addition, Prof. Pinnock fails to discuss in any detail the passages in Scripture that contradict his position. One searches in vain for an exegesis of passages such as 1 John 3:20 and Heb. 4:13 concerning God's knowledge of all events, much less passages such as Ephesians 1:11 that teach predestination. The relationship between God's foreknowledge and predestination is a complex issue. Unless one wants to take the position of certain Calvinists (such as Gordon Clark) that God creates sin and evil, then it is hard to deny that God has given men at least a small amount of freedom, but I think Prof. Pinnock errs to far in the opposite direction.
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