This is a book by John Sanders with the subtitle, A Theology of Divine Providence. I noticed this book on an expedition I did on amazon.com looking for books on process theology - something once of interest to Whitehead. This one was in a more Christian context and a lot easier to understand and relate to than the more Whiteheadian texts which I believe I talked about in earlier posts. I found two others similar to the current one which I will describe after I have read them.
The Sanders book describes open theism and concepts important to it like dynamic omniscience and contrasts it and its implications with those of more traditional theological models. This book is written in a Christian context, but it might be applicable more broadly.
For readers unfamiliar with the general idea of open theism, it is basically one where God has chosen NOT to determine everything. God is seen as desiring a truly interactive relationship with his creation (especially us) and is responsive to things that happen in creation not caused by God. For example, open theism allows for God to change his mind based on requests made by people. This seems to be completely counter to Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin, who appeared to view God as immutable to an extreme with the implication being that humans are actually puppets. In my opinion, the God Jesus described was certainly more of the open theists than that of Calvin and the like.
Open theists allow for God to have some broad plan for the creation and individual people, and he can take action to guide things in that direction, but the important thing is that he (at least usually) will not force the issue. The implications of this make for a more hopeful existence than the alternative.
There is actually quite a lot more to this, at least as to implications - those involving the problem of evil being some of the most interesting. (I would argue that even quantum mechanics and its probabilistic picture of the physical universe could be another of these implications, but the author did not seem to mention this one in particular.) The author takes readers carefully through a series of arguments to show basic implications and how open theism makes good sense and is even well based on very old tradition and the Bible itself. I thought that these arguments also made the alternatives look illogical, but the author tried to be respectful and didn't beat on that too much.
Overall, I liked the book. My only complaints are that (1) the author seemed to be a little inconsistent in terminology now and then, (2) the notes should have been footnotes, not endnotes and (3) the text should have been edited a little more to hone the language/argument and to cut the length down 10 to 20%, as it was a little long for what it had to say. Don't take this the wrong way - the book is still well worth reading in my opinion.
The Sanders book describes open theism and concepts important to it like dynamic omniscience and contrasts it and its implications with those of more traditional theological models. This book is written in a Christian context, but it might be applicable more broadly.
For readers unfamiliar with the general idea of open theism, it is basically one where God has chosen NOT to determine everything. God is seen as desiring a truly interactive relationship with his creation (especially us) and is responsive to things that happen in creation not caused by God. For example, open theism allows for God to change his mind based on requests made by people. This seems to be completely counter to Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin, who appeared to view God as immutable to an extreme with the implication being that humans are actually puppets. In my opinion, the God Jesus described was certainly more of the open theists than that of Calvin and the like.
Open theists allow for God to have some broad plan for the creation and individual people, and he can take action to guide things in that direction, but the important thing is that he (at least usually) will not force the issue. The implications of this make for a more hopeful existence than the alternative.
There is actually quite a lot more to this, at least as to implications - those involving the problem of evil being some of the most interesting. (I would argue that even quantum mechanics and its probabilistic picture of the physical universe could be another of these implications, but the author did not seem to mention this one in particular.) The author takes readers carefully through a series of arguments to show basic implications and how open theism makes good sense and is even well based on very old tradition and the Bible itself. I thought that these arguments also made the alternatives look illogical, but the author tried to be respectful and didn't beat on that too much.
Overall, I liked the book. My only complaints are that (1) the author seemed to be a little inconsistent in terminology now and then, (2) the notes should have been footnotes, not endnotes and (3) the text should have been edited a little more to hone the language/argument and to cut the length down 10 to 20%, as it was a little long for what it had to say. Don't take this the wrong way - the book is still well worth reading in my opinion.
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