Be wary of Ware: A reply to Bruce Ware

No theological position is immune to question or free from problems. I admit that open theism has questions that we have yet to answer and areas that need further development. Ware's paper brings out a few of these, and I appreciate his thinking on these points. On the other hand, several of Ware's criticisms are simply mistaken, while others apply just as much to traditional Arminianism. All criticisms come from a particular point of view, so it is important to state Ware's perspective right off the bat: he is a strong Calvinist neo-evangelical in the Calvinist scholastic tradition.1 Ware's God is one who controls every single detail of what we do, including the very words I am now writing, such that nothing ever happens which God did not specifically ordain to occur prior to creation. God's meticulous providence encompasses even our sin and evil. God wants us to sin for some, unknown to us, good reason-it is all part of God's great plan to redeem some and damn the majority of humans. Ware rejects as absolutely unbiblical the Arminian views of human freedom, enabling grace, conditional election, and unlimited atonement. It is important to get these points on the table, because many readers will fail to see that these beliefs are behind his criticisms of open theism.

Ware does not claim that he disagrees with open theism on every point. He says that openness and "classical theism" agree on divine aseity, selfsufficiency, and creatio ex nihilo. Futhermore, he correctly acknowledges that openness and traditional Arminianism agree on these points as well as the centrality of the love of God and libertarian freedom as essential for moral responsibility, love, and genuine personal relationships. Of course, open theism agrees with both classical and freewill (Arminian) theism on many more points than these, but it is good of Ware to bring this up, since it is often ignored.

It is common for Calvinist critics to claim that open theism rejects the "classical theism" upon which Christianity is built.2 Does openness reject classical theism? Was Christianity built upon it? Classical theism is a view of God begun by Philo of Alexandria, developed further by Augustine, reaching its apex in the Medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers Maimonides, Al-Ghazzali, and Thomas Aquinas. Hence, it is clear that Christianity was founded upon Jesus, not classical theism. According to classical theism God is simple, impassible, immutable, absolutely unconditioned by any external reality, controls all that happens, never takes any risks, has no emotions, and never responds to creatures. Clearly, open theism conflicts with classical theism on many points, but then so do all versions of freewill theism, including traditional Arminianism. Today, there are exceedingly few evangelicals who are actual classical theists, even though they continue to use the title of themselves. Though Ware classifies himself as a classical theist, he rejects the traditional notion of immutability. Wayne Grudem rejects impassibility as being clearly unbiblical. Millard Erickson says that "the traditional doctrine of impassibility is not the current one" among contemporary evangelicals.3 These thinkers have modified classical theism in ways that Aquinas and Calvin would find logically inconsistent. The great classical theists understood that it was a package deal, you cannot change one of the attributes without affecting the others. When you begin to pull on the thread of a knit sweater, it will eventually unravel on you. So, beware of Ware, for his minor revisions to classical theism will, mutatis mutandis, lead to many more alterations.

Before responding to specific criticisms that Ware raises, I would like to mention a general point about the way he carries on his argument. On many occasions he conflates our view with his own speculation about what we believe. It may be likened to someone informing a Lutheran that "since you Lutherans believe that all baptized infants who die are saved, you believe that all unbaptized infants who die are damned." Or, someone might assert that Calvinists have no motivation to evangelize, since God has elected certain people no matter what we do. Or again, someone may claim that Arminians believe that they daily are saved and lost and so live in a constant state of anxiety. The accuser in these cases simply does not understand from the inside the position he is criticizing. This is the case with Ware on many of his points. Even though he explicitly claims to know how we might respond to his criticisms, in his writings to date he has shown a singularly unimaginative and unsympathetic attitude as to how we might answer. He never gives us the benefit of the doubt as to what we might mean and typically reads our statements in the worst possible light.

Now on to some specific points.

First, in his introduction Ware claims that open theism denies what God knows or can know. It is correct that most open theists hold that the future actions of creatures with libertarian freedom are intrinsically unknowable. It is simply impossible, even for God, to have such knowledge. But not all open theists make this claim. Some are content simply to say that the biblical revelation teaches that God does not have such knowledge. These folks have no explanation as to why God does not know our future free actions. They simply go with the biblical description. Other open theists believe that God could know our future free actions, but God chooses not to know them. This may be called "dispositional omniscience" corresponding to dispositional omnipotence. This is the view of Dallas Willard.4 He argues that, just as God has all power but chooses whether to utilize it or not, so God could know our future actions but chooses not to know them. Willard believes that, for God to have truly personal relationships with us, God cannot know what we will do. My reason for raising this clarification is simply to note that not all open theists agree as to why God does not know our future free actions.