Description
John Sanders, Clark H. Pinnock, Richard Rice, William Hasker and David Basinger. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1994, 6.5×9″ softbound, 202 pages.
The Openness of God presents a careful and full-orbed argument that the God known through Christ desires “responsive relationship” with his creatures. While it rejects process theology, the book asserts that such classical doctrines as God’s immutability, impassibility and foreknowledge demand reconsideration.
The authors insist that our understanding of God will be more consistently biblical and more true to the actual devotional lives of Christians if we profess that “God, in grace, grants humans significant freedom” and enters into relationship with a genuine “give-and-take dynamic.”
The Openness of God is remarkable in its comprehensiveness, drawing from the disciplines of biblical, historical, systematic and philosophical theology. Evangelical and other orthodox Christian philosophers have promoted the “relational” or “personalist” perspective on God in recent decades. Now here is the first major attempt to bring the discussion into the evangelical theological arena.
The book proposes that God’s relationship with us has a true “give-and-take” dynamic, it rethinks clasical doctrines of immutability, impassibility and foreknowledge, makes recent developments in evangelical scholarship accessible to general readers, and is written by a team of respected scholars. This book was awarded the 1995 “Christianity Today Book of the Year.”
Contents:
1. Biblical Support for a New Perspective – Richard Rice
2. Historical Considerations – John Sanders
3. Systematic Theology – Clark H. Pinnock
4. A Philosophical Perspective – William Hasker
5. Practical Implications – David Basinger
