Kafkaesque Theism

There are many reasons to believe in open theism, but perhaps the most important is that without it I am screwed. 

For one thing, if everything is predetermined, and the elect are elected before the game even begins, then there is literally nothing we can do to become one of them. We are ontological NPCs that serve no purpose but to be furniture in God's dream. 

Which is a nightmare, since there's no way to find out if we're a hellbound NPC, nor any way to remedy the situation anyway, since God's will is God's will, and that's final. God does not change because he cannot change. Which strikes me as a rather absurd limitation on what God can and cannot do.

This makes life even more kafkaesque than Kafka imagined it to be: absurd, surreal, illogical, nightmarish, oppressive, bizarre, pointless, dehumanized, devoid of sense, and trapped with no exit.  

That's quite a list.

Yes, I compiled it from a google search. But even then it's a partial list. The point is that there are two kinds of existentialism: atheistic and theistic. But the theistic version isn't even really theistic if it is totally wrong about God. Rather, it's just existentialism with a side order of idolatry. 

Which is why I believe in open theism regardless of whether or not it is orthodox, because for me the alternative is absurd. Now, life could be absurd. But if it is, I don't want to know about it. Life is hard enough with a point, let alone without one.

These preliminary observations were provoked by a recent immersion in the literature of open theism, of which I was only dimly aware, partly because it seems to mainly be a Protestant phenomenon. I was of course aware of process philosophy, which shares some features of open theism. 

However, I rejected process philosophy for a number of reasons, especially its pantheism and the idea that God evolves. It it also impossible to square this vastly diminished, immanent God with the transcendent creator of being itself. Rather, it makes God completely subject to becoming, so that's a nonstarter. 

However, there are two ideas from process philosophy that appeal to me. 

Now, I don't blame anyone for responding that what appeals to Bob is totally irrelevant to the nature of God. Frankly, Bob's preferences don't enter into the question.

Except to say that I prefer to live in a world that isn't absurd, surreal, illogical, nightmarish, et al., nor do I think God would go to all of the bother of creating such an absurd world. Indeed, one could argue that the very principle of intelligence would be incapable of such a cosmic absurdity, any more than God is capable of evil. 

One thing I like about process philosophy is that it gets God off the hook for the existence of evil. By limiting God's omnipotence, he is absolutely not guilty, because his power doesn't extend to a totalitarian micromanagement of man's affairs. However, it goes too far in that direction, effectively making God a passive victim of a cosmos over which he exerts little control.

Conversely, in open theism God retains his omnipotence but voluntarily relinquishes some of it in creating truly free creatures, more on which as we proceed, because I think this needs a little tweaking.

The second thing I like about process philosophy (at least Hartshorne's version) is that it envisions God as both first cause and first effect, and why not? 

However, Hartshorne appears to be some kind of liberal lunitarian, and nowhere to my knowledge does he relate this to the Trinity, in which we see a kind of "first cause" (in a manner of speaking) in the Father, and a "first effect" in the Son, only occurring in eternity rather than time. 

But because God is also First Effect, this makes him the paradigm of all open systems: it makes him irreducibly relational -- which is to say affected by the Other -- always giving and receiving. 

This is in contrast to the totally static, immutable, and impassive God of classical theism, to whom it is difficult to relate. That is to say, we can relate to him but he cannot relate to us, and what kind of relationship is that? Aquinas analogizes it to how we can be in relation to a pillar, but the pillar -- which is to say God -- is not in relation to us.

Again, we've spoken before about how the absolutely immutable God is a Greek import developed in the early centuries of Christianity, by thinkers who wanted to reconcile the gospel with the best available philosophy. 

For Aristotle and Plato, change was regarded as an imperfection and privation, for if God is perfect, then change can only be toward the less perfect. Or, if God can become "more perfect," then there's something more perfect than God, which is a contradiction.

But what if change itself isn't a privation but a perfection? And what if God is an eternal movement from perfection to perfection? Here again, this is how I envision the Trinity, an eternal "movement in perfection," so to speak.

You may think that only Lutherans and Calvinists believe in predestination, but so too does the Catholic church, only in a more nuanced way. 

But the nuance doesn't work for me, because you just can't square man's freedom with God's complete foreknowledge of what we're going to do with our freedom. It essentially tries to say we are both free and determined, but no amount of nuance can square that absurcularity. The Church calls it a mystery, but I say it's incoherence. I agree with Hasker, that

once we admit that both of two mutually inconsistent propositions can be true, I simply do not know how to go about doing philosophy.

In other words, if the principle of noncontradiction doesn't hold, then all bets are off. The world becomes unintelligible, because anything and its contrary can simultaneously be true. 

Does this mean that we are trying to confine God to a philosophical principle? In a way, yes, in the sense that God is who he is, and cannot be who he isn't. God even says I am who I am, so he's certainly not who he's not. But who is he? Does he have a nature? If so, he is "limited" by that nature, which is ill-sounding at first blush, because God is the Unlimited, full stop.

Here we enter that annoying apophatic world of Eckhartian paradox whereby God is limited by his own unlimitedness, or distinguished by his own lack of distinction, but that's not my point. Rather, God is radically undetermined, so, in my book, to enclose God -- or his image -- in any kind of absolute determinism is actually to place illegitimate limits on God and man. 

For example, who says the future is written and even God can't change it, because this implies change in God? 

I won't bore you with all of the many examples from scripture that prove otherwise, but to cite just one, how can God test Abraham if he already knows the outcome of the test? What's the point? In response to the test, God says, "now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son from Me."

Now, I'm a simple man, but a straight reading of the text implies that God himself found out something that he didn't know before the test: "now I know that you fear God." 

We could cite many similar examples, but I think I'll give it a rest. We're already well over 1,000 words, but we've barely scratched the surface of the surface. More scratching to follow.