It is being suggested in other places that God is immutable in himself (in se) but he is not immutable with respect to us. This “two-track” approach to the doctrine of God seems to want to affirm orthodoxy and modify it simultaneously. The second impulse seems to be driven by biblicism and perhaps, in some cases, rationalism (in the sense of the intersection of the divine and human intellects). Biblicism, because there is absolutely nothing in historic Reformed theology or in the confessions of the Reformed churches that would move one in such a direction. As a matter of theological method it is quite like that of the Federal Visionists, who assert that there are two kinds of election: the real, unconditional type and a second, parallel, conditional type of election.

One of the most disturbing developments in the latter phases of the decline of the neo-evangelical empire, as Carl Henry, Harold Ockenga et al came to be replaced by their baby-boomer successors was the influx at the same time of a Socinian approach to Scripture and a Socinian doctrine of God. BySocinian I mean a rationalist, biblicistic doctrine of God and Scripture that asserted that it was merely following the Scriptures without the encumbrance of churchly reflection and confession, as if no one had ever read Scripture before. By rationalist, I mean that view that asserts the primacy of the human intellect over all other authorities or that the human intellect has intersected with the divine. For the purposes of this discussion it does not matter which version he held. What matters is that he regarded his intellect, in one way or the other, as superior to God’s Word as confessed by the church universal. These two boys, rationalism and biblicism, are brothers. Not all rationalists are biblicists but all biblicists are rationalists, even if they protest to the contrary. For more on this see the chapter in Recovering the Reformed Confession.

Back then the controversy was known as the “Open Theism” debate. I came to it late (as always). I was ill-prepared by my seminary course on the doctrine of God and distracted by pastoral ministry and then by my research into sixteenth-century Reformed theology. As part of that research, however, I had done some work on the Reformed doctrine of God. I saw repeated affirmations of divine immutability.In the Reformation and early Reformed orthodoxy, the lines between the orthodox and the heterodox, on the doctrine of God, seemed quite clear. To that point I thought that whatever differences there were between the Reformed and the evangelicals, we were together on the doctrine of God. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, that line was blurred as Clark Pinnock (1937–2010) had morphed from being a rationalist who defended of divine sovereignty and biblical inerrancy to a rationalist who denied both. He denied the former explicitly and the latter implicitly. According to Open Theism, for humans to be truly human, the future must be genuinely open to God. It is not that God has middle knowledge about what free humans might do or even that God had voluntarily restrained himself from controlling the future. No, according to the Open Theists, the future is truly open to God. He does not know and cannot know or control the future. From the perspective of the ecumenical (universal) faith, God was out of a job. After all, the first article of the Apostles’ Creed is “Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem” (I believe in God the Father almighty or omnipotent). One cannot coherently assert that God is both omnipotent and that the future is genuinely open to God. To assert that God created the heavens and the earth and then lost control of it all is nothing less than paganism. Indeed, by the end of his career, Pinnock was not only a Socinian, but, in what was perhaps his most notorious book, Most Moved Mover, he took a quasi-Mormon view of God, resurrecting one of the most ancient Christian heresies, the Anthropomorphite  heresy that God is bodily. Remarkably, the evangelical world remained virtually silent about it.

As a matter of theology, if the future is genuinely open to God—a heresy against the catholic faith if ever there was one—then, as Roger Nicole (1915–2010) argued before the Evangelical Theological Society, the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture is incoherent. By the early 1980s, as Richard Muller showed in 1983, Pinnock and company were advocating a doctrine of God that reduced God to an “incompetent” and “Marcionite” deity. To the best of my knowledge, the Open Theists never responded to Muller’s article. One of the rhetorical pillars on which Open Theism rested, as a corollary to their claim to be merely following the Bible, was their repeated but ill-argued assertion that “classical theism”—notice how the ecumenical faith is implicitly marginalized by the adjective “classical”—rested unknowingly upon the influence of Greek philosophy. Mike Horton demolished that last pillar of the Open Theist temple in 2002.

In the years since, however, traces of the same sort of hermeneutic that infused the Open Theist movement have made their way into the confessional tent. Ronald S. Baines and Richard Barcellos have edited a collection of essays, Confessing the Impassible God, re-asserting the historic Christian view. Sam Renihan has edited a collection of sources, God Without Passions: A Reader. The necessity of these books testifies that something is amiss even among confessionalists.

Read More