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Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness
Clark H. Pinnock
Baker Academic, 224 pages, $19.99

Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy
Gregory A. Boyd
InterVarsity, 456 pages, $25

As the Evangelical Theological Society debates the orthodoxy of openness theology (CT, January, p. 24), Most Moved Mover and Satan and the Problem of Evil are working out the finer theological points of "theodicy" (the problem of evil), the nature and extent of God's foreknowledge, and issues regarding the doctrine of God itself.

Openness theologians are convinced that if human beings are to exercise meaningful freedom—a basic requirement for love to be expressed and received—there must be aspects of the future, those entailing the free choices of rational beings, that God does not know exhaustively.

In 1994 Clark H. Pinnock and four other scholars published The Openness of God, one of the foundational books of the openness movement. In Most Moved Mover, Pinnock (retired professor of systematic theology at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario) reviews the controversy that has surrounded the movement, responds to some critics of openness, and describes what he considers weaknesses in classical Christian theology's understanding of God's nature and knowledge.

Augustine, for instance, "was wrong to have said that God does not grieve over the suffering of the world; Anselm was wrong to have said that God does not experience compassion; Calvin was wrong to have said that biblical figures that convey such things are mere accommodations to finite understanding." The classical view, Pinnock believes, has been too deeply influenced by "pagan assumptions about God's nature," such as God's immutability, timelessness, and impassibility.

In response to the classical model, Pinnock offers a model of God as "most moved mover," a God whom he describes as "compassionate, suffering, and victorious love." Instead of "attributing to God qualities that undermine God's own self-disclosure," Pinnock encourages his readers to understand biblical metaphors as "reality-depicting descriptions of the living God, whose very being is self-giving love."

Pinnock's "most moved mover" is deeply relational, a trinity of divine love in communion, and hence desires to enter into personal relationships with his creation, "not because he needs to … but because he wants to since relationality is an essential aspect of God." God is not coercive or manipulative. To force human beings into a relationship, however much God desires to be in relationship with us, would violate his own nature.

It is here that Pinnock's proposal becomes more controversial. Because of God's deeply relational nature, God has chosen to relate to the world not only as its sovereign Lord, but also in a relation of dependence. "God affects the world, but is also affected by the world. God is sovereign, but he has also given power to creatures."

God's dependence extends even to his knowledge of the future. "Though God knows all there is to know about the world, there are aspects about the future that even God does not know. Though unchangeable with respect to his character and the steadfastness of his purposes, God changes in the light of what happens by interacting with the world." If so, God's relationship to creation is "temporal and not totally different from ours." God relates to creation "within the structures of time."

Indeed, Pinnock contends that "there is temporal succession in God's thinking; he remembers the past, interacts with the present and anticipates the future." If God's intensely personal relationship to creation is to be preserved, there are aspects of the future—particularly regarding the free choices of personal creatures—that God cannot know in advance. To maintain freedom, both divine and human, God has purposely chosen to limit his knowledge. God is deeply moved by his creation, but can do so only by relating to creation within time. "At least since creation, the divine life has been temporally ordered. God is inside, not outside, time. He is involved in the thick of, and is not above, the flow of history."

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2