Trinity Sunday, 2004

The Trinity is a puzzle. We accept it because the Bible teaches it and the Holy Spirit led the Church to formulate it in our Creeds. Scripture presents both the oneness and the three-ness of the deity. God is every bit as much One as He is Three, and every bit as much Three as He is One. The Athanasian Creed states:

“We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.”

The doctrine of the Trinity is not the only theological puzzle in Christianity. How about the presence of evil? If God is the Creator of all things wouldn’t that make Him the author of sin and evil too? Likewise, if God is All-powerful why doesn’t He do something to stop the cruelty on the earth? Think of prayer. Why does God command us pray? If the Lord already knows what will happen in the future, and if He has already ordained what will take place, what good does prayer do? Let’s not forget human freedom. How can we be truly free in our decisions when God predestines all things? The same question can be posed for responsibility. How can people be responsible for their sinful actions and deserving of punishment when God planned them in the first place?

Christians have long wrestled with these problems having to do with God’s relationship to humanity. Some of the brighter theologians have come up with admirable explanations. But an element of mystery still remains. Perfect understanding of theological puzzles eludes us. Why? Because we are creatures and God is the Creator. We are human beings and our understanding is limited to the category of creature. Isaiah 55:8 spells it out this way: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.” Consequently, traditional Christianity allows mystery to fill in where man’s understanding falls short. The Triune God possesses exhaustive knowledge of the future. He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, unchanging, and He governs all things according to His eternal purpose. (Romans 8:29; Eph. 1:4, 5, 11; Moreover, these attributes are compatible with human freedom, human responsibility, and the necessity for believers to pray and worship (Acts 2:23; 4:28).

Our hymns and liturgy presuppose these truths. In the memorial service on Friday we prayed, “O Lord, our God, who art the disposer of human events…” A disposer of human events speaks to God’s sovereign omnipotence. It is the Person who decides what happens, arranges those details, and makes them occur. That is what God does. The first prayer in the Holy Communion assumes God’s omniscience, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” Have you ever given that prayer some thought? During our present worship your heart is open to God’s view. He sees it. Your desires are known to Him, and He sees your secret thoughts. In the Morning Prayer we say, “O LORD, our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God, who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day…” This prayer assumes God’s providence, his sustaining care and control over the minutia of our lives.

Our hymnal promotes the same high view of God’s majesty. A hymn we love at St. Luke’s is, “God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year; God is working his purpose out, and the time is drawing near; Nearer and nearer draws the time, The time that shall surely be, When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.” (p. 538) What is assumed in this hymn is nothing less than God’s total control of creation’s destiny. The prophets have foretold the coming of the New Heavens and New Earth and God will bring it about. Flip through the hymnal. How many hymns sing out the royal majesty of Christ? “Lead on, O King eternal” “A Mighty fortress is our God, a Bulwark never failing.” “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed, Great David’s greater Son!” (p. 545) “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun Doth his successive journeys run; His kingdom stretch from shore to shore, Till moons shall wax and wane no more.” (p. 542) The list is long. Christians have always sung with joy about God’s providential action. Nothing happens to us – nothing good or bad – that does not ultimately come from God’s hand. In one way or another the Church has always believed this.

However, things may be changing if some heretical evangelical thinkers get their way. A group professing to be Christian is challenging the Church’s traditional notions about God. A new movement called “open theism” is becoming popular in academic circles. As you know, my sermons are posted on the web site. People can read them and then write an email to me in response. Most of the feedback I get is positive. A few negative. The bulk of the negative responses come from advocates of open theism. They take me to task for what I have preached about God’s immutability. Some of them get pretty feisty.

What does open theism espouse? It claims that God doesn’t know what will happen in the future. Nor does God in any way predestine what will take place. Everything is undetermined. They redefine God’s knowledge and power. Open theism dismisses in one stroke the entire classical tradition from the church fathers to current orthodoxy. It is a radical break from the understanding of God held by the Early Church, the Medieval Church, and the Protestant Reformers, both Calvinist and Arminian. Why are people embracing open theism? What is the advantage of taking such a posture? Is it heretical? This is the topic we want to explore on this Trinity Sunday. One of the duties of a minister is to “banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word.” (p. 547 BCP). That is part of my purpose today. [For more on this subject please see, Beyond the Bounds by John Piper Justin Taylor, and Paul Kjoss Helseth. Also R.C. Sproul’s The Character of God.]

What is the attraction of open theism? It offers mystery-free answers to the tougher doctrines of Christianity. By shrinking God’s sovereignty, erasing His foreknowledge, wiping away His immutability and bringing Him closer to earth the open theists suppose they can create a better theological system.

Does the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom create a frustrating tension? OK. Get rid of the doctrine of God’s all-controlling sovereignty. God foreordains nothing, leaving humans autonomous of any divine plan. The tension vanishes. Why is there so much evil in the world? God wasn’t able to prevent it. Why does God tell us to pray if he already knows what we’ll ask? He doesn’t know. He can only guess what we are going to ask. The future for God remains undetermined until we make our choices. Until we pray, God is ignorant of our specific requests; so He can’t decide until then how to respond.

Besides removing the tensions in the hard teachings of Christianity open theists claim their new god is more loving and compassionate. You can think of him struggling and weeping with you, taking risks, and worrying about the future. They accuse traditional Christians of worshipping a figment of Greek philosophy, a static, cold and distant God who is more of a metaphysical idea than a person.

How do the open theists support their new god? They rely on the Bible passages that describe God as changing his mind. Genesis 6:5 says, “then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.” From this passage it seems that that the sins of earth spun out of the Lord’s control. 1 Samuel 15:10 states, “Now the word of the Lord came to Samuel, saying, I greatly regret that I have set up Saul as king, for he has turned back from following Me.” Doesn’t this suggest that God didn’t know the future? That the rebellion of king Saul surprised the Lord? One more illustration: God told Abraham to take his son Isaac up to Mount Moriah and offer him up as a human sacrifice. Abraham built the altar, tied his son on top of it, raised his knife-held hand to strike and God stayed his hand saying, “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me” (Genesis 22:12). In other words, it appears that before that moment God was ignorant of Abraham’s fear. God is hence limited in his knowledge of the future.

The Church has understood these passages as examples of anthropomorphisms. Anthropomorphism is a fancy word. It means ascribing to God human attributes to make a point or teach a lesson. Anthropomorphisms are to be taken figuratively. The Bible does this all the time. Genesis 2:2 says that God rested on the seventh day. Did the Almighty Creator really lie down and take a nap? Probably not. Psalm 110 says that Jesus sits at God’s right hand. Does God possess a physical right hand? No, God is a spirit. The right hand is a symbol of the rank of utmost honor. Psalm 110 also says that King Jesus sits in Heaven resting his feet on a footstool (v.1). That may be true since Jesus has a resurrected, glorified and physical body in Heaven, but more than likely the footstool is a symbol of Christ’s conquering of His enemies. The open theists would agree with us that any physical depiction of God is anthropomorphism. God’s right hand, His finger, and His footstool should be understood to be figurative, not literal. So far so good! But next they break their rules of interpretation. They become inconsistent when they assert that any mental or emotional depiction of God in human terms must be interpreted literally. God literally didn’t know that Saul would be a bad king. God literally didn’t know if Abraham would fear him. The sins of men before Noah’s flood literally caught the Lord off guard. Thus, inconsistencies mark open theism’s use of anthropomorphisms. The ones that prove their case must be interpreted literally, all the rest can be interpreted figuratively.

Furthermore, how does the open theism theory deal with predictive prophecy? If God is ignorant of vast stretches of forthcoming history, then how can any of the predictive prophecies in Scripture be anything more than mere probabilities? How can God know that these prophecies will truly come to pass? The open theists fail to provide a satisfying answer to those questions.

Also, what happens when you take power away from God? It creates a vacuum. In the writings of some open theists, Satan fills that vacuum. The devil takes on more power and control than the Bible gives him and a sort of dualism results. We’re back to the ancient heresy of Manicheanism.

Furthermore, their allegation that orthodox Christians stole the concept of an unchanging transcendent God from Greek paganism is a weak argument. The early Christians who wrote the books of the Bible and advanced the doctrine of the Trinity had a Hebrew worldview. The same charge of pagan Greek influence can be leveled at the open theists. Heraclitus was a Greek thinker who taught that all was in flux. Everything was changing, including God. Other Greek thinkers promoted the notion of libertarian freedom. These are precisely the ideas that open theists promulgate. Are they too swayed by Greek pagan philosophy?

What about the open theist notion that God is a risk taker? Isn’t that a legitimate way of regarding the Lord? If you want to understand that term anthropomorphically, fine. But it would be incorrect to say that God is a Risk Taker in a literal sense. The risk-taker idea limits God. It implies that God lacks exact and infallible knowledge of the future. Instead of God working out His preordained plan for the Kingdom of God, He is constantly being disappointed by shortcomings. C.S. Lewis never spoke of God as a risk taker. He had this to say, “Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.”

In terms of God’s relationship to humanity, we must be careful to strike a balance. The open theists strip God of His transcendence, immutability, and majesty. They are outside the bounds of Christianity. Open theism may not be a heresy in the sense that it directly violates the creeds but it certainly violates the way that orthodox Christians have always thought of the nature of God. The denial of God’s foreknowledge is an insult to the God we worship. The denial of God’s foreordination of the future undermines the prophecies of the Bible. We would have to rewrite our hymnals and Prayer Books to accommodate them to open theism. The implications are staggering.

Let’s not overreact in our rejection of open theism. It is possible for the pendulum to swing too far the other way and become hyper-transcendent in our understanding of God. How is that possible? We can stress God’s transcendence so much that it is hard to imagine having a close relationship with Him, or difficult to think of Him involved in the world at all. Let’s dismiss the notion that the immutability of God is the same thing as His immobility. God is a consuming fire, not a stagnant ocean. He is our Heavenly Father and He loves His children with compassion. You see Him in the parable of the prodigal son. Day after day the Father looks out on the road with a yearning heart. From afar he spots his son. With joy He sprints out to hug him. He kills the fatted calf in celebration. He dances. Any proper theology must combine the majesty of God with His gracious love for you and me. The Triune God is intensely personal. God repents, but not as humans do; God suffers, but not exactly as we do.

On this Trinity Sunday let us be committed to God as He truly is. He is seated in Heaven transcendent and majestic, yet at the same time lovingly and graciously present with us through the Spirit. He comes to us in the Eucharist. Hebrews tells us, “We do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

B.B Warfield had a relevant comment on this subject: “Men tell us that God is, by the very necessity of His nature, incapable of passion, incapable of being moved by inducements from without; that He dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness, untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows for ever... Let us bless our God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love. We have Scriptural warrant for believing that… We may feel awe in the presence of a storm or of an earthquake, but we cannot love a storm; we cannot trust an earthquake. Let us rejoice that God has plainly revealed Himself to us in His Word as a God who loves us, and who, because He loves us, has sacrificed Himself for us.”

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