Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Bob Enyart Live. Today, we are going back to 2020, and this is an interview between Bob Enyart and Dr. Richard Rice, the myth, the legend, Dr. Richard Rice. In 1994, Dr. Richard Rice was one of the co-authors of The Openness of God, and then he went on to write The Future of Open Theism.
Many of you know that we teach on Bob Enyart Live that God is open to the future, that he is genuinely affected and genuinely moved by our actions and by our relationship with him. When we sin against him, it hurts him, but when we praise him, he really is touched by that. Richard Rice, Dr. Richard Rice, he’s the man who coined the term open theism.
The idea of open theism is, it goes back very far, but that term open theism, those two words paired together, he is the man who paired these words together. And so this was a big honor for Bob Enyart Live. With that said, let’s jump right into the interview.
Greetings to the broadest audience in the country. Welcome to Bob Enyart Live. I’m the pastor of Denver Bible Church.
Back in 1994, a quarter century ago, a new book, Openness of God, was read widely in my circles. Open theism teaches that God can think new thoughts, and the future is not settled but open, in part because God is inexhaustibly creative. I had become an open theist in 1985, and at that time, I didn’t realize that one of the authors of this new book, Richard Rice, had written a book with the same title way back in 1980, which was the first book ever published, not on the topic, but with that term, openness in the title of the book, for us on the air at Bob Enyart Live.
Well, let’s see, we began defending open theism on the radio in 1991, and then on television with our daily broadcast beginning in 1993, and eventually airing for years daily in 80 cities from Honolulu to Orlando. But this InterVarsity Press Book published in 1994 by five highly qualified authors, Pinnock, Hasker, Basinger, and John Sanders, who became an acquaintance, and eventually though years ago, he and I ended up meeting for breakfast in Chicago. Then the final author, again, Richard Rice.
Well, what an honor to now interview a quarter century after the second book came out, and 40 years after the first. Well, Richard Rice, you’ve been around for a while. Welcome to Bob Enyart Live.
Thank you very much, Bob. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be with you today.
That’s very kind of you. Our interview is occasioned by your latest book, just Out, and as many have said, you are well-positioned to write this, The Future of Open Theism. So before we get to the future, you begin with the origins and development of Open Theism.
And we could talk about pre-1994 and really pre-1980. But first, I’d like to ask, what impact did your 1994 book have among Christian theologians and believers in general?
Well, that’s a very interesting question, and it leads us to some rather dramatic descriptions. The response of many in the evangelical community was very hostile. What we had to say about God seemed to fly in the face of qualities that had been accepted as applying to God for centuries.
And the idea that God was, well, to use the word that has come to refer to this position, the idea that God is open to the future, that God experiences events as they happen, just outraged a lot of people, particularly those who had the idea that God is in complete meticulous control of everything that happens. And the idea that God would be responsive to the decisions that some of the creatures make, that things could go in different directions, depending on how God and the creatures interacted, that seemed to fly in the face of some fundamental qualities that people attributed to God, such as omniscience, absoluteness, and timelessness. So those traditional qualities that theology had attributed to God for centuries seemed to be threatened by this new development.
And it was met with a great deal of resistance. And I don’t think hostility is too strong a word to use.
No, I don’t think so either. Almost a decade later, John Sanders was defending himself down the road from here in Colorado Springs at the Broadmoor, the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. I was down there with Pastor Bob Hill of Derby School of Theology.
It was an extraordinary day. And as I recall, John survived by the skin of his teeth. And Clark Pinnock fared much better.
But John Sanders, he did hang in there.
Yes, John faced serious criticism. And of course, he had to leave the school where he had been teaching and was on a tenure track and wound up down in Arkansas. And he’s maintained, I think, a wonderful commitment to the Lord and has maintained his beliefs.
But he went through a very trying time.
Others have also, YWAM, one of the co-founders of YWAM, Youth with a Mission, Lauren Cunningham. He taught, he basically was teaching open theism in the early years and was aggressively rebuked and threatened that if he didn’t back off, the powers that be within the evangelical community would work to bring down YWAM and he did back off. I don’t know if you know his story.
No, I haven’t gotten acquainted with him yet.
Yes. Clark Pinnock, now, he helped to get your first book back into print. Isn’t that true only with the new title?
That’s correct. I got a letter out of the blue from Clark a couple of years after The Openness of God was published. He said, I had a heck of a time getting your book.
He said, what happened? Was it withdrawn? I told him there were some questions about its publication once it came out.
The original publishers thought they would withdraw it, but then decided not to. And then eventually when it sold out, well, that was it. So Clark actually was Canadian, had to get a copy from the Library of Congress in the United States to get a copy.
And he said he liked the book, he believed it. He wanted to get the message out. When I told him what had happened, he suggested going with Bethany house publishers in Minneapolis.
And so I sent a copy to them and they spent several months looking at it. And then I’ll never forget the phone call I got from the managing editor. Her name was Carol Johnson.
And on the phone she said, Richard Rice, we’ve read your book, we believe its message, we want to get it out to the people.
Wow.
And I was, you can understand why I never forgot that.
Yes.
And so they published it. But evidently, Bethany house is interested in selling books as a way of raising money for their mission endeavors. And they said, nobody knows what the expression openness of God means.
And we want to put a title on it that may attract attention when it’s on a bookstore rack or something like that. And so they suggested what I believe was the subtitle of the original book, God’s Foreknowledge and Man’s Free Will, an issue that lots and lots of Christians have dealt with. And so that was the title under which Bethany house published it.
Wow, that’s just super. And that title goes right smack to the core of the issue. Historically, going back to arminius, who you talk about, I’d like to get to in just a moment.
But after hearing that story, Richard, it just reminded me of a letter we got from the president of Thomas Nelson Publishing, one of the largest Christian publishers. And we’ve been on the air for 30 years, and we’ve been selling almost all that time, My Life’s Work, The Plot, an overview of the Bible. And this letter was incredibly kind.
And he said, I’ve never received more encouragement to publish a book than for this book, The Plot, could you send a copy? And so, of course, what a thrill. Well, we sent a copy and an acquisition editor read it and he wrote a critique.
And he said, we recommend against publishing this book because it teaches that Israel and the body of Christ are two different covenant peoples. And I thought, boy, that would discount like half of all evangelical literature. But anyway, that was our big shot, Richard, and it didn’t come through, but it was exciting.
So, congratulations on your publishing history and the impact you guys have made. So, beyond the theological world, how about filtering down through pulpits and Bible studies and small groups? What is your assessment of the current state of open theism?
Is it more well known than it was in 1980?
Oh, yes, of course. I mean, it was it was a title I came up with. I think I had read a book by a Catholic scholar as part of my graduate education, The Openness of Being.
And so that expression openness came to me and I thought, well, that would be a nice way to to talk about God. You mentioned the five of us who contributed to the Symposium volume that came out in 1994. And it was Clark who decided we hadn’t come up with a title.
The general position was known as three-will theism. But Clark Pinnock suggested, you know, I’ve always liked the title of Rice’s original book, the original title, The Openness of God. It doesn’t have any theological baggage.
It wasn’t associated with any particular position.
Right.
And he said it has a kind of a positive ring to it. So let’s go with that. And that’s how the 94 volume that has acquired so much attention got the title.
All right. We had, before our group came upon your 1994 book, we had read Elseth’s, Did God Know? That came out in 1977, Chapter 8, has it?
The title, God Lives in Time. Very interesting book. And the fact that the term open theism, Dr. Rice, Dr. Richard Rice has come from your book.
What an honor. You know, I’ve lived so much of my life now, 35 years promoting open theism. And to get to talk to the guy who came up, who coined the term, thank you for that.
This is really exciting.
Thank you. I sometimes feel my, my contribution to religious thought and theological scholarship is putting together two words. That pretty well sums it up.
You asked an interesting question a moment ago about the way in which it’s sort of played out in different circles. The theological community, at least among conservative Christians, has been quite resistant, at least in places. However, the idea that God is interacting with us and sensitive to what we’re going through and responsive and caring and so forth on an ongoing basis has a great deal of appeal to, I think, the general public, to, we might say, Christians in the pew who are wondering how their lives are related to God and how God is related to them.
And this notion that God is immediately responsive to what we say and do and what we’re going through in our lives. And of course, you can imagine in the current situation we’re in, how much that would mean to people. So a lot of not necessarily theologically trained individuals, but we might say, I don’t want to say average or run in the mill, but I mean, Christians who are day to day worshiping and wanting God to be a part of their lives.
A lot of them has said, this makes sense to me.
Well, yeah. And one of the main questions asked when believers start to study theology is that even in Sunday school, they will say, well, then why pray? Why pray if everything is inexorably going to happen, even to an Arminian who let’s say he has, as we now have, we have seven sons, we now have seven grandchildren.
But an Arminian would say that whether one or seven of those kids go to heaven or hell or a mixture, even though they believe in man’s free will, they would say that inexorably from eternity past, it has been known which of my children, great grandchildren will go to heaven or hell. So open theism has to me, it’s restored a robust relationship from God to his creatures and from his creatures back to God. Dr. Rice, do you have a favorite term, a neutral descriptive term for the non-open theist Christian theologies, like one term that would include Calvinism, Arminianism, Molanism, the beliefs that claim the future is not open.
We’ve got a favorite term. Do you have a term for all those groups that are not open theist?
Let me put it this way. I think the idea that God is in complete control, that nothing that happens is in any way a departure from the way God wants things to be has a lot of appeal. I wouldn’t deny that.
The question then is not is that impossible or is that somehow diminishing God? It’s just to say that God had a choice between choosing that kind of world or one where there would be creatures responding to God and interacting with them on an on-going basis. So it was it was God’s choice to create a world that included creatures who would participate with God in achieving God’s purposes rather than planning it all.
Could God have done it the other way? I think the answer is yes. The question is did God do it that way?
And the evidence seems to point as open theists take the position. God made the choice to create a world containing beings who had the capacity to respond to God on the basis of their own decisions to participate willingly with God in pursuing God’s objectives. And that meant that if they chose tragically to go against God’s will, well, then God would respect the choices they made.
Now, I haven’t given a short answer to your question.
No, well, that’s awesome. God wanted beings who could love him. And it seems that requires the ability to not love him.
He wanted creatures who could obey him. And that seems to require the ability to disobey him. A term that we use, Dr. Rice, is we call it, we think it’s neutral.
We call it the settled view.
The settled view. Oh, I think that’s a nice term. I think it’s important to notice, there are certain things in life that we want to go exactly the way they have because we’re relying on them.
I want an automobile that does exactly what the salesperson said it would do. The brakes work reliably, the accelerator works reliably. You get the picture here.
I want some parts of my life to be completely reliable. I want to turn on lights and have them come on or hit light switches and all of that. But that’s not the way in which we relate.
Say you have seven sons. My hunch is that you have not in every single respect, had every single son done exactly what you wanted that person to do.
Of course, absolutely not.
Now, why if the ideal is to have everything under your responsibility or everything within your responsibility, operate with mechanical obedience, exactly what you wanted to happen, you would not have a family. Well, there must be other values and other objectives that people have because we thrive on interpersonal relationships. Yes, it would be-
Having people do what you tell them to do.
It would be like an author of a book who has a relationship with the characters in his book, but no actual real family and friend relationships. That would be terrible. When I first read the Bible cover to cover, I became a Christian September 1973, and I bought an easy to read version of the Bible, so I could try to read it real quick.
I’m a teenager and I had this impression of what the Bible would say. I was shocked. When I went through, I thought God’s people throughout the Bible would do everything God wanted them to do.
It’d be this perfect pristine story, and it was really a catastrophe. I mean, God is having the victory through it all, but the story itself, the main characters, the discouragement, the sin, and yet God is able to take our ashes and turn them into joy. So that idea, I could relate to because when I first read the Bible, I thought, okay, everything is going to fit in beautifully, concisely, perfectly, and it turns out reality was real messy.
Exactly. I think messy is a good word for it. God achieves God’s objectives through a complex process of interacting, and this means that God is alternately delighted with the response of the creatures to his hopes and plans for them, and deeply disappointed when they go another direction.
And as you pointed out, you can’t read, you can’t get the biblical narrative in its dynamic quality without seeing that kind of interaction, where God is not in complete rigid control. So, you know, I mean, when the Israelites wanted a king, God’s reaction, you know, Samuel said, that’s going to be a big mistake. God said, you know, we’re right on, you’re right about that.
But if they’re going to insist on it, we’re going to go ahead with it. So, I think what we see is that, that God, I don’t want to, I want to be very careful about saying, lets things happen. I don’t think God just lets things run, but God gives creatures freedom to make decisions.
And this is a very important part of that. It’s not just selecting A rather than B or vice versa. It’s also letting the consequences of their choices play out.
If people really have freedom, they not only make a decision, but the results of those decisions are experienced over time. So that’s what happens when it comes to the course of human history. But what’s interesting is, God responds to these events, even the ones that are disappointing to God, in ways that can move toward the fulfillment of God’s purposes.
because He’s omni-competent. He’s able to bring about a victory, regardless of what kind of opposition He is facing. So many of our opponents in debates, and even high-profile theologians over the many years, they have come to us as though we are saying that God is completely incompetent, He’s completely powerless, He’s completely ignorant, and it is such a persistent effect, Dr. Rice, that our opponents have a very hard time debating what we are asserting the Bible teaches, and they create a straw man.
Your book has two parts, the origins and development of open theism and the themes of open theism. I’d love to ask you about arminius, because you quote him and it really encourages me that he was pretty honest about the difficulty he saw in the scriptures with his theology. You’ve written this whole book, you might not recall, you might recall arminius talking about the difficulty with God’s exhaustive foreknowledge, if in fact there are free will agents whose lives involve contingencies.
That’s right. arminius maintained the traditional view of absolute foreknowledge. God knows everything that’s going to happen.
He didn’t know how to relate that to his view that we were genuinely free. But I’ve pulled out some reference here to the articles of remonstrance that those who followed arminius developed after he had passed away. And one was, well, they were conditional election, unlimited atonement, deprivation, resistible grace, assurance, and security.
The Senate of Dort, which is the classic Calvinist expression, came about with the canons of Dort, and they came up with the five points of Calvinism, which are better known than the articles of the Arminian group that met before. And they affirm total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. Wow.
Now, it’s interesting. You and I have both looked at the biblical material, and we’ve said it’s very hard to apply, as arminius did, very hard to apply the classical notion of God as timeless, the future is completely definite to God’s standpoint with what we read in the Bible. And it’s interesting, Clark Pinnock said he became a Christian, I believe, after he was, I think a teenager, as I recall, and it was in a Calvinist theological setting, and so he accepted Calvinism.
But he said, I was reading, particularly the latter part of the New Testament, where there’s a strong concern about Christians who might fall away and lose their faith. And he said, that seemed to conflict with the idea that there’s the perseverance of the saints. You know, once you’re in, you’re in.
And it’s unconditional. There’s no possibility you would lose that. He couldn’t put that together with the urgent appeals that you find in the New Testament letters and in the Book of Hebrews, for example, and where they’re talking about…
Hebrews and Peter especially, right?
No, exactly. The importance of remaining steadfast. And he said, well, that that element of Calvinism slipped away.
And then it was sort of a domino effect. One by one, they, they all had to change. Now, I would like to suggest an analogy here that brings together, in my view, the strong points of both positions.
And the analogy is that of what it takes to be a very good parent. Now, you, if I raised one son, he’s, we have a wonderful relationship. He’s professionally successful, a very loving father to his children.
But we had our times during his teenage years. But I, I’ve come to the conclusion, it takes two different kinds of qualities to be a really good parent. On the one hand, a good parent needs to be consistent.
Consistent that is constant in his or her commitment to the welfare of the children. Dedicated to the objectives of having them become successful and responsible adults and so forth. And that never changes.
And a concern, a sensitivity to what they’re going through at any time, that never changes. But I think a good parent has to be flexible. It has to be, a good parent has to be able to decide, should I, would this be more helpful or would that be more helpful?
If something goes wrong in my child’s life, how do I respond to that and so on? So a good parent needs to be both consistent. Some things never change, but also flexible.
So some things may change. So maybe a promise that was made can’t be fulfilled.
Oh, yeah. If we say to our kids, tomorrow we’re going to the beach, and then one of the kids does something that’s so terrible, that we realize we cannot go through with that promise without hurting our child, because we can’t let him experience this great blessing after he’s done such a terrible thing. So sometimes, in order to stay consistent with the principles of being a good parent, you have to say, we’re not going to do that because of what you’ve done.
And then if they say, oh, so you lied, then they get another spanking. That’s our perspective. Could I quote to you from your own book, Dr. Rice, you mentioned arminius and wow, what a quote he admits that he doesn’t have a good explanation for this.
He writes, the knowledge of God is eternal, immutable and infinite and extends to all things, both necessary and contingent. But I do not understand the mode in which God knows future contingencies, and especially those which belong to the free will of creatures. He that he is being honest there in a way that many of those we debate, we so wish they would be just honest with the implications of their theology.
Well, I think you may be right. I think there’s a commitment to the two, a commitment to one side of the qualities that make for a good parod, if we can sort of, I don’t want to run analogies into the ground. God is consistent.
God is reliable. God never changes in certain aspects. There’s always been a God.
There always will be. God’s love is unconditional and so forth. But this doesn’t mean that God can’t create a world where creatures are capable of interacting with God.
And there’s a sense, I believe, in which if we think about power, there’s a power to determine things that will happen exactly the way they do, but there’s also a kind of power that means responding to things in a creative, resourceful way. And I believe that that kind of power is in many ways superior to just sort of the rigid, my plan will inevitably be fulfilled because I’m the only one who decides it.
Oh, absolutely. And not only the flexibility, but then the humility in the Book of Revelation, the banner under which the victory is won is that of the lamb that was slain. How could you have a more perfect picture of meekness and gentleness than a lamb that was slain?
And here is God the Son. jesus says at one point in the Gospels, he says, now listen to what I’m about to tell you. The Son of Man is going to be taken by wicked men and offered up.
He said, listen to this. He became the Son of Man and he humbled himself. And that is the antithesis of something that can never change and is only power, is only power and is only immutability.
That’s humility and wow, is that a change to become a man and then to offer up your life for those who would be saved.
Oh, it’s, it’s remarkable. And of course, that’s the central object of Christian faith. God was manifested in that life of service and self-sacrifice more vividly than anywhere else in human history.
And so we get the picture of jesus who came not to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many, as Mark says. And so I think it’s consistent. I think we need to look at the history of Christian thought and realize that there was an influence in Greek philosophy on early Christian thought.
They wanted to identify the significance of God as opposed to any sort of creaturely reality and so forth. And so they were influenced by, I don’t want to say they bought into the idea, but the idea that there is a supreme reality above the created world or above the phenomenal world, which is absolute and unchanging, was very attractive. And so that was the view of God that had an immense influence and it’s kind of exerted its influence all through history.
Well, this was the chapter that was written by John Sanders in your 1994 book.
Exactly.
On the history, the pervasive influence of Greek philosophy on Christian theology. And that’s what we call the omnis and the ems and immutability and immovability and impassability and omniscience and omnipresence.
And I would say, yeah, they’re all true if they apply to one aspect of God. This is why I want to make a distinction between God’s essence and God’s experience. And to refer to the analogy I just made, there are things about a good parent that will be unchanging throughout a child’s life.
But there are other aspects that will be changing.
So, sure, with our father in heaven, it’s his righteousness is unchanging, right? But humility, what he did for us. So arminius in his struggle, and I know we’re about out of time, but it seems like the part of theology that he was struggling with was what John Sanders wrote in your 1994 book, The Openness of God.
It basically came from the Neoplatonist Aristotelian ideas that the Greek philosophers had boiled down to some very simple basics. What we have long said is that the Reformation broke with Rome, but not with Greece.
Interesting way to put it. But I think there’s an expansive way of looking at these different qualities so that, yes, God is as changeless as the Greeks insisted, but in a part of God’s reality. But there is another part.
So I like, there is another part that is infinitely changing, constantly changing. I like the way that Clark Pinnock in one of his titles, it’s a send up of Aristotle’s definition of God or the definition associated with Aristotle. God is the unmoved mover.
It is God who accounts for everything else being in motion and the world that we see and so forth. It’s God that gives that world some stability and that generates it, but God is unmoved. Clark Pinnock’s title was the most moved.
I love that.
I thought it was great because it says God in God’s infinite sensitivity to absolutely everything is generically different from anything else. All of our experience is partial. God’s experience is all encompassing and it includes everything.
So that’s, shall we say, as distinguishing a characteristic of God’s reality, it applies to the divine transcendence just as well as God being unmoved. And I think God is unmoved in certain important respects.
In some ways, but when the scriptures begin, as the Bible reveals to us who God is, and we have, you just quoted from the Greek philosophers through all the classical theologians who have written about the immovability of God, that God cannot be moved. They’re quoting not Moses, not the scriptures, but Aristotle, because Genesis begins saying that God moved over the face of the waters. And at least that should give you some pause to think, am I really going to support a doctrine that says that God cannot move, or even that he cannot be moved, because the Bible shows us that our worship can touch his heart, and our prayers can move his hand, and am I going to follow Aristotle, the way I think Thomas Aquinas wrote 13 commentaries, not on Paul’s epistles, but on Aristotle.
Am I going to follow Aristotle or Moses? And so this influence from Greek philosophy seems enormous to us, Dr. Rice. We are out of time.
Is it possible, I hate to put you on the spot and ask you on the air, is it possible we could continue and hit more highlights from your book on another interview?
I think we could. Let’s talk about it and see what we can work out.
Okay, that’s wonderful. And you will be retiring from your teaching career at Loma Linda University there in Southern California. So congratulations for that part of your life’s work also, Dr. Rice.
Well, thank you. And thank you for the enjoyable conversation we’ve had.
Well, here too, what a joy. And again, this is Pastor Bob Enyart of Denver Bible Church, our website, kgov.com, and also opentheism.org. One of our elders, Will Duffy and I, have created that site years ago, and it hosts many exciting debates, and a list of verses, 750 verses from the Bible in 33 categories, establishing that the future is open because God is free.
God is able to think new thoughts, and he is inexhaustibly creative. May the Lord bless you. This is Bob Enyart.
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