Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Bob Enyart Live. Today, we’re going back to 2020. This is Bob’s second interview with Dr. Richard Rice.
Dr. Richard Rice, he is the man who coined the term open theism. Open theism is a very popular idea. It’s been, it goes far back, but only recently in the 90s was that term open theism actually coined, those two words open and theism put together.
And they were put together by Dr. Richard Rice. And so he’s been influential in formalizing this movement, in articulating this idea of open theism, that God has free will, that God is open to the future. Not that he is stuck in fate, like the God Zeus was stuck in fate, right?
But he is alive and interactive, and he is open to the future, and he experiences the future alongside us, and us being made in his image. We also have free will. And so Dr. Richard Rice was foundational to the open theism movement.
And this is my dad, Bob Enyart, his second interview with him from 2020. Really exciting interview. You don’t want to miss it.
Let’s jump right into the broadcast.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Bob Enyart Live. I’m the pastor of Denver Bible Church.
Back in June, we interviewed theology professor Dr. Richard Rice. That was just before he was to retire from Loma Linda University. We titled that program, The Guy Who Put Two Words Together, Open and Theism.
Dr. Rice is not only a leading author in the community, with his latest book being The Future of Open Theism, but he’s also beloved or notorious, depending on your perspective, for coming up with the term Open Theism. Even though the doctrine itself goes back through the centuries, and many would argue to the very pages of the Old and New Testaments. So it’s an honor to welcome back to Bob Enyart Live, Dr. Richard Rice.
I hope your retirement has begun well, Dr. Rice, during a pandemic, no less.
Well, thank you for touching on that personal note. It’s been a very interesting transition when you spent two-thirds of your life, 50 years studying or teaching theology. I ran across an article from a review of a book that I got from the journal I had gone to graduate school in.
And it had the title, When What You Do Is No Longer Who You Are.
Oh.
And it was dealing with three types of people from three different professions and how retirement affects them. And one of them was university professors. So I’m discovering that not to have the sort of the situation where you were and the set of responsibilities you had and to move into a totally new sort of situation is an interesting challenge.
Well, if you feel at a loss, you have this nostalgia for your old classroom. Remember, you have a standing invitation here where not to exaggerate, we’re on the nation’s most powerful Christian radio station, 50,000 Watt AM 670 KLTT plus the podcast. So you have a class of about 5,000 people, not exaggerating.
So you’re always welcome, Dr. Rice.
Thank you so much. I’ll keep that in mind because 5,000 that would surpass all the students I’ve taught over the years.
All right. You have written two books by the same title. That’s a bit different.
You’re first in The Openness of God of 1980. And then you co-authored in 1994, the extremely popular book by the same name with Pinnock, Hasker, Basinger and John Sanders. And back in June, we began talking through your latest, The Future of Open Theism from Antecedents to Opportunities.
And we got to your point on, and let me quote you, the pervasive influence of Greek philosophy on Christian theology that obscured the personal qualities of God that appear in the biblical portrait of him, leaving a view of God that lacks the ability for genuine personal relationship. That is a key issue, know that God is personal and that that tends to be obscured by classical theology.
Yes, unfortunately, that’s the case. Greek philosophy, in many ways, was a resource for early Christian thinkers. And I think we could say in retrospect, it had an important contribution to make by emphasizing the fact that God was radically different from everything else.
And there were things about God that were unchanging, including, if you go to the biblical view, God’s reliability, God’s trustworthiness. But as opposed to the sort of the fickle notions of Greek deities in general, they were not personally interested in human beings. So the Greek philosophers, with their quest for something that didn’t change, something that kept reality sort of in the scope, that was the quest for Greek philosophy.
They wanted something that was the same, that was very reliable. And I think to attribute that to God, as opposed to the fickle nature, the unreliable nature of other deities was valuable. But the problem was they, early Christians, shall we say, putting it casually, they bought into the Greek idea that the God who was completely reliable was absolutely changeless in every respect.
And that was the ultimate reality of, say, Aristotle, the unmoved mover.
Yes. And to show that that concept is widespread and enduring, Dr. Rice, the Pope Benedict gave a speech at the University of Regensburg, and I’ve read it recently, and he brags about the synthesis between Greek philosophy and Christian theology. And he actually says it’s that synthesis that can save the world.
And so I don’t think in any way it is an overestimation to say that pagan Greek philosophy has had an enormous influence on theology, classical theology, certainly from the time of Augustine and even his bishop Ambrose through to today.
You’re absolutely right. One of the interesting things that I discovered reading about people who talked about that was that some of the theologians reflecting on the nature of God before Augustine made a deliberate effort not to buy into Greek thought but to resist it. And they resisted it by maintaining what we would call the emergence of the doctrine of the Trinity.
In other words, if we think of the Cappadocian fathers who wrote primarily in Greek, what they were doing was resisting the encroachment of Greek philosophy to the extent that what happened was they located God on the highest level of reality and attributed to him changelessness, familiar Greek idea. But obviously, somehow God is related or there’s something about God that gets involved in the world of ongoing experience, human beings. And you read the Bible, the different ways in which God over time dealt with different people.
Then Christ is what is sent by God into the world. But the place that Jesus occupies, given that radical distinction between a God who doesn’t change, a God who is absolutely timeless, and the changing dynamic world, that has to be an intermediate figure. Well, if Jesus is located in a position between God and world, well, then he can’t be fully divine.
And that was sort of the great alternative view of Christ that was, shall we say, threatening the early Christian view, or the early view that many Christians had of how to relate the father and the son in the relationship there. And the doctrine of the Trinity was developed largely, I think a good example is the Cappadocian fathers, who maintained that that view of the relation was wrong, and that Arianism was the word that’s used to describe the idea that Jesus is a subordinate figure. He may be God for us, but he’s not certainly not God in himself, because he’s involved in time, and God, the ultimate reality, is not involved in time.
So we could see…
Jesus stands somewhere in between.
Yeah, what a tragedy. So we could see how, if you have an idea that is false, it easily influences other ideas. And the more foundational an error is, the greater its impact will be toward harm.
Now Cappadocia, as the locals put it, we’ve had our Bible tour of Turkey. We spent three weeks there. What a wonderful time.
And it was heavily Hellenized. And so the ideas of the Greeks were extremely persuasive. And this idea of utter unchangeability, that seemed to be perhaps at the very heart of the philosophical attempt to defend Greek fatalism.
The fatalism, the belief that everything that will ever happen is inexorable, unavoidable. That goes all the way back actually to the ancient Babylonians and the Sumerians, their creation epic, Enuma Elish. And so the Greeks, that grew into the Greek belief that the future was settled.
Latin philosopher would even call it Providence thousands of years ago. And so in order to defend that, Plato made the argument that, well, obviously God cannot change in any way. He’s utterly immutable.
And that would mean then that his knowledge cannot change either because of his knowledge changed. Then that would be a change in his perfection. He would no longer be perfect.
So because God is utterly immutable, we know that the future must be settled, hence fatalism. And this has done enormous damage, I think, to biblical theology and the understanding of the church about God and the nature of reality.
Well, I think you put it very, very nicely there. The attempt of some people, understandably, to somehow affirm human freedom and to certain extent say, no, what happens is something you decide. And that view of complete settled future, those attempts just don’t work.
As one of the authors, I quote, Linda Zagzebski said, all of the attempts to sort of reconcile the affirmation of human freedom with a settled future. And I’m paraphrasing very roughly. Sure.
They just don’t work. And so I think it’s very difficult, as one of the people I’ve read, a quotation, actually, you can’t read the Bible and come up with the idea that God is absolutely changeless. It just isn’t there.
Or that God is exactly what he would be, regardless of what happened in the world. I’ve been reading as part of my devotional experience in the morning, excerpts from the book of Hosea. And you’ve got Hosea expressing God’s terrible disappointment with the fact that the people he loves are abandoning their commitment to him in pursuit of other gods.
And he’s sort of on the verge of giving them up, but he just can’t do it. He cares for them like a mother cares for her children, you know, who bends down to feed them. And you get this picture of a God who’s really in turmoil because what he wants so deeply for his human children is something they just don’t seem to be accepting.
And what does he do? He really realistically should give them up, but God just can’t do them.
All that you mentioned, Hosea, it’s all metaphor, everything. In fact, when I had a debate, a 10-round written moderated debate with Professor Dr. Samuel Lamerson in Knox Theological Seminary in Florida, he worked for D. James Kennedy, and it was on open theism.
Is the future settled or open? He actually quoted one of his favorite theologians saying from their classical reform perspective, almost everything the Bible says about God is metaphor. Almost everything.
And so I put an enormous list of all the features and attributes that the Bible says about God, including that he is righteous and he’s the creator and he’s the savior. And if your theology, if you could actually get yourself to utter the words that almost everything the Bible says about God is metaphor, that means you have no constraint. You could turn God into anything you want to turn him into because the scriptures are practically irrelevant as to what God is really like.
If you want to know that you got to go to Martin Luther and John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas and in Augustine because they’re not speaking in metaphor. They’re speaking in truth. And to me, that’s all absurd.
Dr. Rice.
Well, you put it very strongly. What I’ve done in the opening pages, since you referred to my book, thank you, The Future of Open Theism, in the chapter called Antithetans to Open Theism, is review the study of the Bible and its understanding of God on the part of people who largely were not theologically trained. And what they’ve done is study the Bible and they’ve looked at its views of divine foreknowledge and the issues that we’ve been talking about here.
And they’ve come up with, let’s say, here’s one. I’m just going to quote from page 22 here, Howard Roy Elseth, a Bible student, but not theologically trained in a conventional way. One of the appendices of his book, he lists over 11,000 verses that reveal God changes his mind.
So, I don’t think anybody reading the Bible, let’s say, without some sort of theological, classical theological commitment to a changeless deity, would read the Bible and come to the conclusion, well, this God never changes. And to dismiss the references to God changing as metaphor, as if they didn’t give us a more reliable, vivid portrayal of God’s actual experience, is to dismiss a mainstream of biblical description of God.
Yes, he wrote that book titled, Did God Know? And it’s a book that my friends and I, we all read back in the mid 1980s.
Okay.
And what we’ve done, so a lot of people will take issue with his verses, but we have boiled down a list to 570 verses that we present in 33 categories online at opentheism.org. And we say, now these verses are really hard to deny what they’re saying. So these are like the strongest of the verses that make this point that the future is open.
So in your book, when you focus on God engaging in genuine personal relationship, that’s what seems to be at risk. And what classical theology easily seems to lose. Here’s how we put it, Dr. Rice, that all those philosophical omnis and ems turn him from a personal God into something more like a force or even a mathematical equation of infinities and infinitesimals.
So much so that nothing could affect him. Not our prayers, not our sin, nor even our worship. But when you read the Bible, the entire Bible shows God presenting himself as being deeply moved by these things.
No, I think you’re right. Now, I’ve had two sorts of contributors to this discussion of God that are worth paying attention to. I studied the writings in graduate school of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartsorn.
They’re generally characterized as process theologians. And what they do is see temporal succession as intrinsic to reality. So when you get to ultimate reality, you find a sequence of experiences, a sequence of events.
And they both have a place for God, a very important place for God in their scheme of things as the one who provides for, shall we say, continuity and support for this ongoing process. And it’s interesting to me that they see temporality as an attribute of God, and they are not conventional theologians. They’re sort of, you know, trying to look at things and make sense of reality.
Then we go to the people like the one you just mentioned, Elseth and others, who are reading the Bible without some sort of classical theological sort of presuppositions that they’re totally committed to. And they come up from their reading of the Bible with, in a sense, the same conclusion that God is involved in the course of creaturely events. So it seems to me if you…
it’s kind of coincidental to me that here you have philosophers trying to make sense of reality and needing God and attributing to God temporal experience. And then you’ve got just students of the Bible without the classical philosophical commitments. And they come up with very much a similar idea.
And I think it’s important to notice that while those of us who are open theists would emphasize that God’s experience is successive and ongoing and God is open to new experience and so forth, that the classical emphasis on timelessness does have an application to God because there are things about God that never change. And so you have a complex view of God. Instead of insisting that God is timeless, unchanging, immutable in every respect, you’ve got the view that God is completely changeless in certain respects, but in others, immensely dynamic.
The most moved mover to quote the title of one of Clark Pinnock’s books. So the example I use is what it takes, since you have seven sons, you can appreciate this. The example I would take is that of a good parent, an ideal parent.
Now there are things about an ideal parent that will never change. That is, commitment to the welfare of her children. A willingness to be committed to, dedicated to, a resource that’s always there, that the child can always return to.
And yet, on the other hand, immensely sensitive and responsive to a child’s experience. So you can think of bad ways of changing and bad ways of not changing when it comes to parenting. But I think when it comes to the ideal parent, there are ways in which they never change.
And then there are ways in which they change maybe immensely from one child’s experience.
What a great point. But those qualities of God that the way you put it, suggests timelessness. I’d say there’s another way to view that, in that some of those very qualities are really things that could only be had if God actually exists in time, like God’s faithfulness, God’s patience.
The Bible says over and over and over. God’s enduring patience. In fact, God being able to sustain emotion.
And there are so many, even God being a God of hope, so much of what the Bible attributes to God. And we see these things as, well, his faithfulness endures from everlasting to everlasting. So that would be something that we might say, be tempted to say, well, that’s like a timeless attribute.
But really it’s an attribute he could only possess if he exists in time. You can’t be patient if you are a temporal.
And thank you for that. I think a way of putting it would be the qualities about God that never change are those that describe God’s essential being, God’s essential character. And those are qualities that are embodied in the larger reality, which was God’s concrete personal experience.
And so they are qualities that apply to the experience that God has of an ongoing nature, of a temporal nature. So they’re there, but I think you can say they are, you know, God is eternally temporal. Or God is unchangingly sensitive to the world.
And so what you’ve done is include those classical qualities within, shall we say, the larger dynamic concrete personal reality that God is.
When, and you’re exactly right, Dr. Rice, when you say, here, you know, on this program, I’m a talk show host, I’m not a theologian, you know, and I’m not a diplomat. So we do tend to say things rather abruptly or harshly. Have you heard of George B.
caird, if that’s how you pronounce his last name, C-A-I-R-D? He wrote the language and imagery of the Bible. Are you familiar with that theologian?
It doesn’t ring a bell loudly.
Okay. Well, that’s fine because he’s the one that when I was debating Dr. Samuel Lamerson, Dr. Lamerson quoted caird in this book, The Language and Imagery of the Bible. And I’d love to read it.
It’s a short little quote here. All or almost all of the language used by the Bible to refer to God is metaphor. Unquote.
And when he argued that Dr. Lamerson and Dr. caird there, you know, we were somewhat stunned. We were preparing. We had a team at Denver Bible Church, and we took every round of this 10 round debate very seriously.
And so we responded with a list of what the Bible says about God, that he’s living eternal, the creator, mighty. He’s good. He’s exalted.
He’s great. He’s loving. He’s gracious.
He’s spirit. He’s righteous. He’s true.
He’s powerful, wise, blameless. Lord, he is known. He’s just.
He’s awesome, merciful, judge, holy, savior. I mean, all these things. And yet Dr. Lamerson came back and said, well, you had the word king.
God is not really a king in there. And we think, well, God’s kingdom, maybe God’s kingdom is just a metaphor. Maybe he’s not really the head of his kingdom.
But our kings, if anything, earthly kings are the metaphor. They are the shadow of God as king, king of all the earth. So at any rate, it seems that if you want to defend classical theology and you claim that most of what the Bible says about God is a figure of speech, that really gives you leeway.
Well, I think we have to be careful with that. The language applied to God takes us to a really complex topic. Not confused necessarily, but one of the people I’ve read says that we can make distinctions, literal language, symbolic language, and analogical language.
Sure.
To say something literal about God would be say, God exists.
Right.
I mean that literally or symbolically. No, I think those who believe in God say, no, literally, God exists. There is a God.
Right.
Symbolic language would be, the Lord is my shepherd. Do we think of God holding a staff and in a field with sheep? Well, no, we don’t.
Shepherd is a symbol for which reminds us of God’s loving care and attention and so on. So we’ve got that. Then we’ve got what some people would call analogical language.
And the interesting thing there is, literal language, you can say, yes, it’s true, but no, it’s false. You know, there’s a sense in which it’s true, there’s a sense in which it’s false. We’ve got another that would say, analogical, and that is, the ordinary experience in which we would apply this term, it may be the limited language, and we can say it literally of God in an unlimited way.
And the best example would be God is love. I am a person who loves, I love my wife, I love my kids, I love, you know, we could go on, I love classical music, things like that. Yeah, right.
But if we talk about, I have to admit that my love of others has certain qualifications to it. I don’t love everybody the same way. My love is not always perfectly manifested, even to those closest to me.
But they would say, God is love. You can take that literally. God is the one whose very nature exemplifies and embodies love in its purest sense.
So, it does get complicated.
Yeah, without God’s love.
An open theist, if I could just mention, an open theist, John Sanders, has given specific attention to the nature of theological language. And I would recommend his book on the topic.
Yes, and whenever there’s an analogy, the Bible uses many analogies. There are analogies. They’re not direct.
They’re, as analogs, therefore, not literally. But to then argue that most of what the Bible says about God is metaphor, I think stretches beyond the breaking point, the Bible’s claim itself, because the Bible presents God. Stop the tape, stop the tape.
Hey, this is Bob Enyart. We recorded this on Dr. Richard Rice’s schedule. And, thankfully, he was able to go beyond our expected time.
So, tomorrow, Lord willing, tune in for the second half of our interview with the man who put two words together, open and theism, Dr. Richard Rice.
All right, it’s Dominic Enyart in studio again. I hope you enjoyed that broadcast. We’ll probably be airing part three tomorrow.
A lot of fun. They did a whole series together, Bob and Dr. Rice. Yeah, great series, a lot of fun.
So make sure to join us tomorrow for that. In addition, if you want to support the channel, support the store, go to kgov.com, kgov.com. Click on the store by any of Bob’s vast library of Bible study products.
We have everything from Free Will versus Calvinism, to just verse by verse studies, to what does God say about the death penalty. We have such a vast library of content. So any topic, any Bible topic that you want to know about, Catholicism, Mormonism, whatever it is, we got stuff.
We got you covered. So kgov.com, go to the store. You don’t want to miss it.
Hey, may God bless you guys.
