My question to you who are Open Theists: Am I mistaken? Or is he? I often represent the Openness view as I have below, and do not wish to continue doing so if I am misrepresenting it. Here is the response I sent him:
Hi G—,
The way I represented Openness Theology is accurate to the way it has been held by every Open Theist I have read and been in dialogue with in the past thirty-eight years. It is the view that has been advocated by the earliest and most prominent Open Theists. I personally knew Clark Pinnock, who was one of the most famous and controversial advocates of the view in the evangelical movement..
One of the most important problems that Openness is proposed to solve is the fact that, if God knows the future, then future actions of individuals cannot go otherwise than He knows, and are, therefore, determined. This destroys the possibility of free will. It was in the interest of preserving the truth of free will that Openness arose challenging the absolute foreknowledge of God (I first read such authors in 1980).
Because future freely-chosen actions are not, in fact, predetermined, but are subject to free-will choices that have not yet been made, they currently exist in no realm, and cannot be known even by God. Nothing is there to know. If God could foreknow them, it would be only because, in some realm accessible only to God, they are choices that have already been made, and cannot freely be made by agents in "real time."
Openness says that these choices not only are not, but cannot be, known—because they are non-realities, at the present time. If your brother's view is true, then future choices could be known by God, but simply are not. This still assumes that they exist in some realm to (possibly) be known, and are therefore determined—and does nothing to solve the conundrum that Openness was formulated to resolve. Openness theologians would not have "freely chosen" this explanation.
I have heard people express your brother's views (namely, that God could know the future if He chose, but often chooses to remain ignorant), but such people have not called themselves Open Theists. If the whole movement has shifted so as to affirm your brother's view, in recent years, it has occurred without my noticing, and apart from the notice of the Open Theists I know.
I have a number of friends who are mainstream Open Theists, and I have read many others. They all say the same thing that I have represented to be their views. Your brother's views are familiar to me, though I have never heard them labeled Open Theism. In fact, I am not currently aware of any name that has been given to them. The people I have heard expressing this position are usually people who have been convinced by Open Theists that God does not know our future choices, but are not ready to overthrow God's ability to know the future. It is a compromise—sort of a "halfway house"—between Historical Theology and Openness Theology.
Blessings!
Steve
