A former president of the Southern Baptist
Convention is concerned that the doctrine of open theism is
gaining appeal among churchgoers. He says the growth of that
doctrine in evangelical circles could one day be threatening to
Southern Baptist churches.
“Open theism” essentially rejects
God’s foreknowledge; it holds that His knowledge is limited
to the past and the present. Dr. Paige Patterson is president of
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North
Carolina. He says the teaching of open theism is currently not
very common in Southern Baptist churches, but it has had a
somewhat meteoric growth in the evangelical community in general.
Patterson says advocates of open theism have
generated this following because they are good with rhetoric.
“The progenitors of this particular
idea are very winsome, charismatic individuals,” Patterson
explains. “Clark Pinnock, my old professor, is up in Toronto–and
anything he does, he does with a flair. It’s going to be
interesting, and it’s going to be pretty well argued.”
Patterson says Pinnock and others who share
his views have basically joined hands with Karl Rahner and his
position of “the anonymous Christian,” which makes just
about everybody in the world a Christian. Unfortunately,
Patterson says, there is a certain political correctness about
that which some people find appealing.
But Patterson says any denial of God’s
foreknowledge undermines the deity of God and Jesus, and must be
confronted.
“We must counter it with a good
presentation of the doctrine of God and of the Trinity, which we
probably haven’t done very well with,” he says. “We
have always assumed that everybody understood those and knew what
we were talking about, so most of our discussion has been about
Christ, salvation, the Church, and things of that nature.
“The good side of this is that it
probably drives us back to some good, solid biblical teaching on
the nature of God Himself and of the Trinity.”
Patterson says it is highly unlikely that
all the great theologians of the past 2,000 years missed a
doctrine of such great import that was supposedly discovered to
be “true” in the last ten years.
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