The Errors of Open Theism

12 min readOct 12, 2019

The ontology of God has recently come into great dispute, especially among modern evangelicals. Open theism — a school of thought that largely began in the 20th Century — rose to challenge the traditional understanding of God’s omniscience. While supporters of open theism suggest that their interpretation best represents Biblical Christianity, they are radically incorrect, reinterpreting several key scriptural passages, ignoring the history of the Church, and advocating embarrassing philosophy.

What’s Open Theism?

According to Greg Boyd, arguably the most prominent supporter of open theism today, “open theism holds that, because agents are free, the future includes possibilities…open theists hold that God knows the future partly as a realm of possibilities” (Boyd 2019). In this view, God’s omniscience is contingent on human action. God’s view of the future is essentially a series of possible worlds, with God intervening in history to produce an outcome that He prefers. God is a risk-taker, seeing that He can’t entirely distinguish between the real future and counterfactuals, or at least chooses not to. The best way to describe the God of open theism is one who is “within time.”

Open theism stands in contrast to classical theism, which states that God’s essence is his existence, meaning He is transcendent above all reality. There are several different terms that can be used to describe God in this view, including:

Actus Purus
Necessary Being
Subsistent Existence
Necessary Intellect
Pure Being
First Being

Classical theists hold that God is wholly immutable, impassible (in the Divine Nature, not the human nature of Christ), omnipotent, omnipresent, etc. Most notably, however, classical theists hold that the Divine Attributes are identical, with the distinctions being virtual — or formal in the Scotist view (Feser 2014). God is thus not composed of parts, meaning He’s “Divinely Simple” as Plotinus would say (though he’s no Christian). This view is grounded in Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc.

With these descriptions above I will henceforth describe the God of open theism as the demiurge. This will largely be to avoid confusion, and, as we’ll see, to best represent the historical understanding of the deity of open theism.

Roots

Admittedly, there were several proponents of a demiurge in the first few centuries of the Church. The most recognizable groups would likely be the Valentinians, Manicheans, Marcosians, and Gnostics in general. These groups were heretical offshoots of Christianity that considered the demiurge to be the creator of the world, stumbling and bumbling to make terrain for inferior material beings. To be fair, the primary motivation of the Gnostics and open theists are not the same. The Gnostics believed that the material world was bad, so they twisted Holy Scripture to say that the Old Testament followed a clumsy being that accidentally created a terrain for mere mortals. Of course, there are variations of this story in Gnostic mythology, but that’s the general overview of it.

Meanwhile, the open theists suggest that Christians worship a demiurge because they desire to preserve human free will and to have a human element to prayer. Open theists essentially want the future to be developed synergistically. Also, they aren’t like the various sects of Gnostics which create their own canon of the Bible, but they have some unconventional interpretations of the Bible itself. The most prominent open theists are arguably Greg Boyd, William Hasker, and Clark H. Pinnock.

Scriptural Analysis

Open theists like to say that the demiurge is the best representation of the deity in Christian Canon and that the God of classical theism is simply a corruption of Biblical Christianity brought by Greek philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. According to classical theists, God has knowledge of past, present, and future all at once. God does not change His mind, and anything that God has decreed for the future will truly happen. Open theists explicitly reject this, stating that the demiurge exists within time and changes his mind. Open theists like to point to Exodus 32:14, emphasizing that the demiurge “repented” of what he was going to do.

This interpretation has a key problem, however, and that’s the view of Scripture. Scripture isn’t dropped from Heaven into the hands of the Church, but rather, the Holy Spirit guides various authors to write certain texts. Thus, there is a human element — which is wholly infallible when inspired by the Holy Spirit — that’s present. So, we have to take into account the perspective of the authors when we read the text. Oftentimes, when writers are describing God, they use language and metaphors that help us understand what God does that might not be perfect representations of how the Godhead works. For example, Isaiah 59:1 suggests that God has long arms and wide ears, but these are simply analogies for God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Thus, when the text says that God “repented,” from His ways, it’s simply a way of stating what occurred from a human analogy.

In his grand City of God, St. Augustine writes, “though we often hear the expression ‘God changed his mind’ or even read in the figurative language of Scripture that ‘God repented,’ we interpret these says not in reference to the decisions determined on the almighty God but in reference to the expectations of man or to the order of natural causes ” (Augustine 426)

I’m not entirely sure how a perfect being can make a mistake, given how Scripture works. How exactly does infallible Scripture come from the fallible demiurge? Similarly, prophecy makes no sense, thus eliminating the Books of Daniel and Revelation, which are, ironically, two favorites of the modern evangelical crowd. How Christ determined that Peter would deny him three times prior to the crow of the rooster (Matthew 26:33–35) is quite the puzzle for the open theist. Open theists — at least from what I can tell — suggest that the demiurge makes predictions about what will happen and then actively works to make those events happen.

Think of the reliability of US Government debt: US T-bills, T-notes, and T-bonds are practically risk-free since the US has managed to pay them back so well in the past and has significant power, so we can expect those securities to have very low risk now and in the near future. Much in the same way, the demiurge has succeeded in bringing about previous events alongside humans because of his enormous power, but there is a very small chance — but a chance nonetheless — that his next predictions will fail. So the Book of Revelation is what the demiurge wants to happen and will do his best to bring about, but we can’t be 100% sure it will happen.

Open Theism in Church Thought

As I stated earlier, the best place to find the idea of a risk-taking super-human is in the early Gnostic texts, but no Early Church Father truly believed in open theism, nor any theologians in the medieval ages.

It’s practically impossible to find an Early Church figure who didn’t believe that God knew the future, and some believed that God clearly predestined it. For example, St. Justin Martyr — in his Dialogue with Trypho — clearly suggested that God has Divine Foreknowledge, remarking, “for none of you, I suppose, will venture to say that God neither did nor does foresee the events, which are future, nor foreordained his deserts for each one” (Martyr). Later, Martyr states, “But if the word of God foretells that some angels and men shall be certainly punished, it did so because it foreknew that they would be unchangeably [wicked], but not because God had created them so” (Martyr). So, at least in St. Justin Martyr’s view, God’s foreknowledge of reality suggests that God doesn’t just make predictions, but knows what will occur infallibly.

Most of the debates about God’s omniscience from the first few Centuries all the way through the mid-20th Century surrounded how God’s foreknowledge works. Augustinians, Thomists, and Calvinists emphasize Divine Sovereignty while Molinists, Classical Arminians, and Wesleyan Arminians tend to stress the free will of man. However, most groups desired to balance these aspects in some way, though they would bend towards one side more than another. The demiurge, on the other hand, just knows more facts about reality than normal humans, so there’s practically no true sovereignty.

I wonder if open theists have ever read St. Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, but I can’t be so optimistic. St. Irenaeus vigorously fought the Gnostic mythology and how it seeped into certain interpretations of the Bible. St. Irenaeus writes the following:

“But if they had known the Scriptures, and been taught by the truth, they would have known, beyond doubt, that God is not as men are; and that His thoughts are not like the thoughts of men. He is a simple, uncompounded Being, without diverse members, and altogether like, and equal to himself, since He is wholly understanding, and wholly spirit, and wholly thought, and wholly intelligence, and wholly reason, and wholly hearing, and wholly seeing, and wholly light, and the whole source of all that is good — even as the religious and pious are wont to speak concerning God” (Irenaeus).

Clearly, St. Irenaeus is a classical theist. We can also find this sentiment very clearly in St. Augustine, St. Athanasius, St. Anselm, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. Thomas Aquinas, and several others. The Roman Catholic Church vehemently defends classical theism and divine simplicity. We can also find divine simplicity in the Augsburg Confession, the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, the Westminster Confession, the Belgic Confession, etc.

Open Theism and the Classical Arguments for God

The demiurge cannot be God. First, since open theists suggest that the demiurge is “within time,” they readily reject that the demiurge is the first efficient cause, meaning he is subject to both accidentally-ordered and essentially-ordered causal series. This means that the demiurge is a mere secondary cause, not holding any true power of his own. Defining the demiurge like this rules out true omnipotence in favor of a very great being. The demiurge can be classified within a genus, so there is nothing unique about it; in fact, the demiurge is basically just deity of polytheism that happens to have the powers of all other potential deities and has none other around him.

Greek philosophy — especially Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought — stresses that there must be a termination of any essentially-ordered causal chain.

According to Aristotle and St. Thomas, that termination must be immutable, since mutability implies imperfection in some way. If there is some perfection that lies outside of this entity, then there is something greater, meaning the former entity is not the greatest being. Thus, the entity must be wholly immutable if it is understood to be perfect. To be the cause of all things — to bring about Creation Ex Nihilo — this being must be Pure Act, meaning it is the source of all causality. As the cause of all things, only the Pure Act can be considered omnipotent, so anything with potential — like the demiurge — cannot be the creator of the Universe, for example. John Duns Scotus develops a similar line of thought, showing that there must be the First Being for anything to be, but that thing cannot be the demiurge.

Plotinus states that the creator of all things must be absolutely simple as well, upholding all complexity within existence. Following this train of thought, St. Thomas Aquinas showed that for anything to exist as a composite of essence and existence, that being must be dependent on some prior efficient cause, the termination of which is found in something which has an essence of existence. Subsistent Existence — as St. Thomas described it — cannot be the demiurge, since the fountain of existence itself cannot be contingent on time.

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both understood that God is the Divine Intellect. For St. Augustine, God holds all universals within Himself, so he perfectly knows all things regardless of time. For St. Thomas, God wills all non-rational and inanimate objects towards their ends, since He designed and knows them so perfectly. However, open theists clearly deny this form of omniscience, so the demiurge is not the Divine Intellect.

With the above in mind, Subsistent Existence must be absolutely omnipotent and omniscient. Anything that exists is either directly or indirectly caused by Subsistent Existence, so all things exist out of the outflowing of His Essence, implying He loves all things. And since existence is everywhere at once, He is also omnipresent. I could go on further discussing the Divine Attributes, and, later, why they align best with Christianity, but I think you get the point.

So, as we’ve shown above, open theists are incapable of using any of these arguments to defend the existence of their demiurge. In fact, regardless of the demiurge’s existence, Subsistent Existence must be real as well. Even if the demiurge is the true deity that Christianity describes, there must still be a base of reality that exists beyond it. The demiurge would just be another part of reality designed by Pure Act, so there’s little reason to worship this being in the first place.

How Can Open Theism Defend Itself?

I hesitate to say that open theism can have any serious philosophical apologetics. Open theists cannot use Aristotle, Plotinus, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, John Duns Scotus, Leibniz, nor any of the lesser-known apologetics of orthodox (small ‘o’) Christianity. They could potentially use St. Anselm’s famous Ontological Argument, but I hesitate to say that since the demiurge doesn’t seem perfect to me. Unless open theists want to commit to Cartesian metaphysics, which I doubt will occur anytime soon, they can’t use Descartes’ Trademark Argument either (nor can they use his vastly inferior version of the Ontological Argument, of course). I’m not sure they can even use the Kalam Cosmological argument since that argument sets up a cause beyond time as well.

The only argument I can see open theists using is the “argument from desire,” which Greg Boyd particularly likes (Boyd 2015). However, that argument doesn’t work for them in the first place since it stresses a transcendent reality, and the demiurge is anything but that. That argument is weak anyway, and any arguments similar to it — like the Moral Argument and Transcendental Argument — won’t work for them either.

Supposing the open theist can prove the existence of their demiurge, I also see no way how they’d set up any of the Divine Attributes. They especially can’t jump from the demiurge’s existence to Christianity. There’s an old atheist joke that God is just a “bearded sky fairy,” and while that’s clearly a strawman to classical theists, open theists have to bite the bullet and accept it. Consequently, most neckbeard-tier atheist questions thrown at theists should stump the open theist, including but not limited to the following:

Who created the demiurge?
How do you know your demiurge is the true demiurge?
Why a demiurge and not some aliens?
Can the demiurge lie?
Does the demiurge determine morality arbitrarily or does morality exist beyond the demiurge?

On Experience

Now, onto the final portion of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. This section needs little discussion, but it matters nonetheless.

How does it feel to think of a protector who can’t distinguish real worlds and possible worlds? I can’t imagine praying at night to a deity who can’t even promise to fulfill prophecies that were given in the infallible testimony of this deity’s apparent perfection. Isn’t it awfully ironic that the folks who encourage this kind of ontology are often those who suggest that the gift of prophecy continues to this very day? Seriously, though, it just seems silly to believe in such an incompetent deity. I don’t remember having a prayer answered with something like “I’ll try.”

Conclusion

Open theism parades a philosophy that embarrasses theists all around. I cannot imagine any classical philosopher — or theologian for that matter — taking any of these ideas seriously. I pray to God that He purges this erroneous belief from the Church for all eternity. If this belief became the norm, Christianity would fall apart.

References

Augustine. The City of God.

Boyd, Greg. “How People Misunderstand Open Theism — Greg Boyd.” ReKnew, 18 June 2019, https://reknew.org/2019/06/how-people-misunderstand-open-theism/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2019.

Feser, Edward. Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction. Editiones Scholasticae, 2014.

Irenaeus. Against Heresies.

Martyr, St. Justin. Dialogue with Trypho.

Boyd, Greg. “Why Believe That There Is a God?” ReKnew, 6 Nov. 2015, https://reknew.org/2014/05/why-believe-that-there-is-a-god/.