Oh man, do I have some catching up to do on the blog front.

1) I dropped my Handspring Visor Deluxe about 1 foot and the screen cracked. I just picked up a “returned” Visor Neo off eBay for the price of a replacement screen. Hope that was a good move. The Neo has a faster CPU.

2) I found a job at Whole Foods Market but it doesn’t pay enough but it is a job for now. I’m looking else where and was offered a job by security company for better pay but it requires a bigger initial outlay. Still praying over that. There is a secular radio station up the road from me. I think I’ll pop in some time and see if they need anyone to babysit the board at night. I have radio experience (I did a radio program for my church for a while) and worked sound for two bands and at church. It would be nice to read and listen to music at night and get paid for it. We’ll see.

3) This is registration week! It has been great. There have been some wonderful devotions by some of the profs every morning. What a great way to start the day, wish we did it every day. :) As far as actual registration, they assigned people certian times and I got 8:30 AM which is the first time slot. I stand a good chance of getting the classes I want. I’m stacking them all up on Tuesday and Thursday so that it will be easier to do a work schedule around them.

4) I deleted OpenOffice off the iBook when it expired. Aside from it running slow, I didn’t like the way the word processor handeled tables, a function I use a lot. OpenOffice isn’t a bad start but it needs some maturing so I’ll continue to use Word in Classic until something better comes along.

5) I started getting nervous that I hadn’t backed up my Quicken data in a while so I picked up 50 blank CDs for $10 at OfficeMax. Burned a whole bunch of stuff on one and I can stop worrying.

Head’s up. Since .Mac will be subscription and I’m on the “starving student” budget, my website won’t be at http://homepage.mac.com/byfarthersteps for much longer. You should update you links and bookmarks to http://byfarthersteps.blogspot.com and thank you Apple.

The opening music of the heavenly spheres
Has not yet sounded, nor has come to light
The texture, intricacy, color-flight
Of cosmos, introducing history’s years,
And yet, already God transcendent sears
The Void with holy splendor, glory bright,
No shadows known, no meaning yet to night,
Sans shade, sans death, sans sin, sans hate, sans tears.
    God’s Self-Expression, his own Son, his Word
    Joins with his Father, clothed with light of bliss,
    In solemn covenant, resolve assured,
    To save the lost who do not yet exist.
Transcendent Deity now deigns to mesh
With finite clay: the Word takes on our flesh. – D. A. Carson from Holy Sonnets of the Twentieth Century

I am not kidding, at Home Depot I saw a sign that said “Your back to school headquarters.” What kind of school? VoTech?

Okay, I know that we all have those kinds of days at work. But how about the carjacker who tried to steal a van filled with a judo team on their way to teach a course in self defense? That is a bad day at work.

I know us Reformed folks are not supposed to be very comfortable with miracles and such, but I heard about this one when I was in Myanmar before I ever heard about it on the web. What are we supposed to tell this guy, “Get back in the casket, God doesn’t do this kind of thing anymore”?

Gosh I come up with some good passwords! Here let me give you an example of one I’m currently using…uh, nevermind.

Greek is over. I’ve no idea how I did on the final and I don’t think I care to find out. I’ll be starting Greek Exegesis this fall and putting Hebrew off till next summer. In order to sharpen my skills I plan on translating 2 Peter. I know a first year Greek student isn’t going to get far but at least I can parse each word or something. I have to get those forms down or I will forever be running to a book.

To celebrate the end of Greek, I bought a four pack of Tetley English Ale and an eight pack of cigars imported from Honduras. The ale is good but I really wanted a pale or brown ale. This stuff is not nutty enough and is too creamy for my taste. The cigars are nice. :)

I’m continuing to read the Openness debate in the recent Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Up to Greg Boyd’s response. One thing I’ve noticed in both Boyd’s and Sander’s responses is that they draw arbitrary lines and then can’t understand why other folks don’t follow them. There have been many examples but here is, I think, a clear one:

Ware worries that if we take biblical depictions of God changing his mind, regretting decisions, experiencing surprise, etc. as straightforward depictions, then some might eventually go further and conclude that God has a poor memory, has an uncontrolled tempter, has to travel to different locations, etc. We simply do not see anything in narratives that describes God as thinking about the future in terms of what may or may not happen (e.g. Exod 4:1-9; 13:17; Jer 26:3; Ezek 12:2) or changing his mind (e.g. Exod 32:10-14; Jer 18:7-10; Jonah 3:10) or expecting something to happen that does not come to pass (Jer 3:6-7; 19-20; Isa 5:1-10) that suggests they are anthropomorphisms. Nor do we see what true meaning such texts could convey if they are taken as anthropomorphisms.

Boiling this down, what Boyd is saying is that they are just reading those passages and taking them at face value. If it says that God changed His mind, then He changed His mind. Openness Theologians simply don’t see any reason to take them in any other way.

This is nice and makes Openness sound like it is exegetically driven but it isn’t. For example, what clues in context would tell you that God does not have a poor memory or that He has to travel from location to location, or any other anthropomorphism? Why does Boyd read those texts differently than the ones that talk about God changing His mind? This was Ware’s point and it seems to have been lost on Boyd. Boyd will decide when a text is anthropomorphic and when it isn’t. If we chide him for his inconsistency we have good reason. Furthermore, since Openness Theologians are going to employ a consistent hermeneutic (e.g. not one that changes based on a philosophical presupposition) then what are they going to do with things like God’s prediction of Cyrus in Isaiah 44? This took place (if I remember correctly) something like 100 year after Isaiah predicated it. If we follow the Openness notion of what God knows, then there was a real chance that Cyrus would never have been born or could have died before this prophecy could be fulfilled or his parents might have given him a different name or any other number of possibilities. There is no way that God could have known this would come to pass as it did if He does not posses exhaustive foreknowledge.

Openness Theologians want to decide which verses to take literally and which to take antrhopomorphically and they don’t want any guff for making that decision. To my mind, they just can’t have it both ways. If God does not possess exhaustive foreknowledge then He could not have named Cyrus so accurately so many years before his birth.

The problem here has been and remains the philosophical tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Instead of dealing with these two as the exist in the bible, Openness Theologians want to err on the side of human freedom. Hypercalvinists do the exact same thing but err on the side of divine sovereignty. This is not a horse you want to fall off of. Calvinists and Arminians (and other orthodox systems) may lean to one side or the other but somehow they are able to remain the saddle.

The most recent Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS, June 2002) is pretty much devoted to the Openness Theology debate. Bruce Ware starts the discussion by stating the problems with Openness Theology and then the three big Openness leaders, Pinnock, Sanders and Boyd respond. Sanders’ response is most interesting. In order to maintain his position that Openness Theology is orthodox, he tries to hitch his horse to the Arminian wagon. His tact is that Arminianism is part of Evangelicalism and Ware is just trying to push Calvinism on everyone. It certinaly doesn’t answer the criticisms of the positions but seeks to run for cover.

Still, Sanders tries to answer Ware’s major objections and I just have to comment upon one of his answers. The issue gets a bit complicated but it boils down to this: does God know what every free agent will do throughout all of the future? Openness Theologians say no and classical theists (Calvinist or Armianian) assert that He does. While Openness proponents are trying to put themselves in the Arminian camp, claiming (repeatedly) that an attack on Openness is an attack on Arminianism, Arminians are busy pointing to the difference between them. Sanders cites David Hunt as an example of this and claims that Hunt’s efforts fail. Hunt, in explaining simple foreknowledge, tells this story. Suppose a billionaire decided to give a ton of money to a missions organization if that organization can guess the correct number between 1 and 100 which the billionaire will write down on a certain day. God “previsions” that the billionaire will write down 47 and He informs someone from that agency to select that number. Thus God is in control.

Sanders claims that this won’t work because at the same time God foresees that the billionaire will select 47 he also sees that the missions agency person will select 83 and God cannot then change that or else His foreknowledge would be wrong. What kills me is that Sanders belabors the point that God knows all possible future actions that can come to pass, He just doesn’t know for sure which ones will, and at the same time he misses the fact that amongst the counteractuals God is aware of is the possibility that God could inform the missions agency or change the number on the paper or whatever. In other words, according to Sanders, God’s foreknowledge omits His own actions in time. God can know what every person who will (or might) ever be born might do but unfortunately He cannot know what He Himself will do.

As uncomfortable as I am with simple foreknowledge, I think it is a distinct concept from Sanders view of foreknowledge. To a degree Sanders is correct, some of the difficulties that exist in Openness Theology exist in Arminianism to a much lesser degree. Modern Arminians can work around their problems and the need to make sure that Openness Theology doesn’t hijack them in order to gain legitimacy. Ware is a Calvinist, I wish JETS would have an Arminian publish a critique next.