Paradox Lost
S. M. Hutchens on Open Theism & the Easy Road to Heresy
I have only recently, after years of letting it adhere lightly to the exterior surface of consciousness, come to a clear conclusion on what is known as the Openness of God theology. The denouement was the sudden realization that it exists in the classical form of a heresy, that is, as the affirmation of a truth in such a way as to efface or deny an equally true counterpart.
Arianism is a heresy because, while it rightly affirms the humanity of Christ, this humanity is used to deny his deity. Likewise, religious egalitarianism, while affirming the orthodox teaching that men and women, being of one substance, are equal, uses this truth as an appliance to defeat the equally true doctrine of the primacy of the man over the woman. In each case the truths seem contradictory, a sovereign logic demanding that one be chosen over the other, but in each case the Church has held to both with equal vigor and insistence.
Resisting Paradoxes
Proponents of the Openness of God theology have been adept at displaying biblical passages where God is involved in chance, contingency, or ignorance, that is, in what active intelligence must experience in the vicissitudes of time and space: He changed his mind about Nineveh, tested Abraham and Job to see whether they would remain faithful—as if he did not know beforehand—and, incarnate (!) as a human child, learned and grew.
To be sure, the classical perfections of God drawn from the biblical narrative are all put at risk, if not contradicted, in that same narrative by—shall we say?—the perplexing “humanness of God,” and the tables customarily drawn up to summarize those transcendent attributes are as apt to cause consternation as assurance among those who know their Bibles. “Open Theism” is, I think, an attempt to deal with the humanness of God as an abstract theological problem outside a Christological framework in which the divine and human are perfectly related in the ineffable and paradoxical mystery of our faith.
What seems to be the great discovery of these theologians? Do they need to inform an ignorant or unheedful Church that God is “open?” I think not. The Church has always known that he is, in the ways constantly and insistently indicated by Scripture, and needs no convincing. Rather, their discovery seems to be in their use of this truth to deny or efface (by way of resolution) the divine attributes that form the other part of the paradox.
The paradoxes in which the church fathers so often reveled in the life of God, revealed to us perfectly in Christ, are all glorious impossibilities: God became man, omnipresence became circumscribed, the sinless became sin, omniscience became ignorant, omnipotence became impotent, and the immortal died. Tertullian said, Credibile est, quia ineptum est: “It is believable because it is, from the human point of view, absurd.”
But rationalist theologians, liberal or conservative, don’t like paradoxes. Instead of looking for them as signs marking the places where inquiry stops and doxology begins, they resist them on instinct and principle, and take out their hammers.
Chesterton protested thus:
The ordinary man . . . has always cared more about truth than consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. . . . The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. . . . He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. . . . The cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its center, it can grow without changing. ( Orthodoxy, chapter II)
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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