Theological Scribbles

I had a conversation with one of my internet friends over on Bluesky the other day. It began with him publishing a “skeet” that went like this:

“To those who still hold that nothing happens apart from God willing or permitting it: REALLY!? STILL!? REALLY!? What would that say about God? (I ask as the guy who once, in another life, presented and defended the AAR paper “The Only Possible World of the Only Possible God.”

Before I comment on this, let me say the following. I like and admire the person who shared that post. I have “known” him for a while. I know him to be a serious student of the Christian tradition, an avid reader and student of Christian theology, and a very nice person to dialogue with online.

I am not a fan at all of both open theism and process theology. David Bentley Hart aptly summarizes my sentiments in this short video below:

I have always believed that open theism and process theology are poor ways of handling the theodicy question. How can we hold that God is both good and all powerful in light of the world we live in? This is a very difficult question to answer. Ultimately, this is not a question that can be answered in any satisfactory way. I am a universalist. I believe that God will save the whole of creation. Anything less than that is untenable: it would ultimately make God evil if we still hold that God is sovereign, in control, or able somehow to fix this world but He ends up choosing not to for whatever reason. So the move open theism and process theology make is to say that God is not able to do very much. He too is like us, limited, wanting goodness to prevail but unable to see to it that goodness prevails. At this point, to me, both process theology and open theism both veer into mythology.

I am aware that (apparently) one can be both a universalist and a process theologian. I have read a whole book about this, but it left me unconvinced.

It seems to me that a lot of people who abandon traditional theology proper—which I define here as the idea that God is good and God is absolutely able to save and heal the whole of creation—have a misguided understanding of what classical theism actually is. They understand, for instance, the idea that God is impassible to mean that God is really, ultimately indifferent to what happens to us. The Church Fathers were able to affirm both that God is impassible and that God is moved to compassion by our suffering in this vale of tears we call planet Earth. People who opt for open theism—the idea that God doesn’t know the future or that the future as such does not even exist—make a temporal being. People who embrace process theology undermine the basis of our confidence in God’s future for us. They assure us that God is love, that God is doing His best, but that He can do no more or no better. It is truly beyond me how people who believe this could also have any confidence that universal salvation could even be a possibility for us.

I have talked to scholars about this issue before (start at 49:27):

My thoughts and feelings have only intensified. Open theism and process theology are naive, biblicist attempts at theodicy that should be left to more sophisticated theologians.