I have a bone to pick with the theology of the open theists, for I have spent time in prayer and thought and have found something troubling in their thought.
What I find to be troubling, especially in the open theism of the dispensationalist variety, is that they have rooted the Creation in the wrong foundation. They truthfully say that freedom and love go hand in hand, but they wrongly order the two so as to create a false contingency for love found in freedom.
For the open theists freedom must come before love, for the God who loves must grant freedom, and therefore must allow the Creation to be free before he can truly love. Love is not love without the freedom of the other, according to them. This is where we go wrong, however, for freedom does not dictate love, but the converse is much more true; love is the grounding for freedom. In other words, one does not find freedom before one encounters love, but one must encounter love before one finds true freedom. As the apostle Paul clarifies in I Corinthians 13, whatever we might have without having love, that which we have is nothing. It is also interesting that nowhere in Paul's musings on love does he ever state that love must allow another to be "free". Instead Paul images a love which rejects coersion as the true power for the power of the one who can Create, the one who can give life and grace. Coersion and violence only have a power to destroy. True power comes in the Creation and the building-up of that Creation (faith, hope, and love).
Open Theism has committed a falacy of logic, for though it sees the necesity of love, it assumes that love is weak. The reason that love cannot respond through coersion is that it no longer is love when it uses coersion, this much is very true. But to assume that because love is not coersive it must therefore be weak is the fallacy. Love does not yield to the "freedom" of the other to coerse. Love does not yield to the slavery of coersion simply because "freedom" has given the coersion power. Love yields because true power is not in the ability of another to destroy what has been created, but the very essense of the Creation is grounded in the love of God, which does not destroy but brings out of the destruction (the chaos) life and space for life (which is truly powerful). Love is not grounded in freedom (thus allowing for an opposite of love in coersion and violence); love is the ground of the Creation so that anything that has been created is created in love. Freedom cannot exist without love (not the other way around). Love does not depend on freedom (just as the Creation is not destroyed through the introduction of the coersion of sin). Sin is not freedom, but is slavery and destruction. And the only power that sin has is drawn from the true power that has substance, that truly is because God has brought it into existance. Sin is the power that is weak, while love in its apparent weakness is true strength.
Thus, what we witness in the garden with the presence of the trees is not freedom (as if man could become sovereign by eating from them). The trees in the garden represent choice, a choice between the God of love and the God who is coersive and violent (and choice cannot be equated to "freedom," for freedom indicates sovereignty, while choice is volitional; one can have volition even as that one remains contingent; even a slave has volition). Now in my statement of our choice between gods it is not to say that God is dependant upon our choices, but that we either receive the God who reveals Godself as the caretaker of the Creation, or we reject this God in order to fashion a god of our own making, a god who rules in coersion and violence, the god who is our very self enslaved to sin, humanity and empire. The humans in the garden do not exercise freedom, but enter into slavery, as they fashion god in their own image and draw all the rest of humanity (and the Creation, for that matter) into this idolatry.
We have to ask what is freedom? From what I can gather, the Open Theists define freedom in the ability to make choices that are independant from forces external to the person. We are free in as much as our choices are not contingent on something else. If we define freedom in this way there is but one who is free, for God is the only one who can produce something from chaos. Our choices are not in freedom. We are not free beings who consist in ourselves. Our existence is contingent upon God, and in that respect we are never free. This contingency encompasses both the good and the evil in our world. Whether one is righteous or unrighteous their life depends on the grace of God "for he causes it to rain upon the righteous and the unrighteous alike." We can never make a choice out of freedom because we are never free. The only one who is truly free is God, for God can Create (that is to say produce something out of nothing).
Now this is not my support of the doctrine of Creation ex nihilo (though you might be able to see some semblance within). The ex nihilo doctrine assumes that there was nothing in the beginning by a definition of lacking that is grounded in a very abstract language, i.e. a vacuum or emptiness. However, the scriptures do not make use of such language as this, but rather draw from the ancient near-eastern cultures to talk about the tohu vavohu (Genesis 1:2) (or the embodiment of chaos and disorder). The world without God is not nothing per se, but is nothing in the sense that it has no telos no ultimacy in being. Its substance is forever degenerate; it is death and destruction, which truthfully means it lacks life.
Thus, the image of the Creation without God is the image of chaos, in which nothing can be sustained over time, but is doomed to destruction and death. It is only with the movement of the Word of God (Christ) and the "breath" of God (the Spirit) that the chaos is broken. God from the very beginning enters into the Creation to give ultimacy and purpose to that which was without. The "substance" which was no substance at all is displaced by what truly is. So darkness is cast-out and divided by what truly is (light). The watery chaos "substance" is displaced to make room for true substance (air which sustains life, while water drowns it out). And the oceans are divided to bring fourth land, a place for creatures to live. The first half of the Creation is the Creation of space in the midst of chaos and the second half fills that space with life. This is the image of Creation, and it does not end with verse 3 of chapter 2 of Genesis. Gensis 1 is a telling of the Creation of God from beginning to end (from chaos to worship), in which God the Creator (the trinity) brings life through God's very self, and sustains that life in love. Even before there is freedom for humanity (in that humanity did not even exist) there was love.
So to say that God can only be loving of the Creation if humanity is free is a fallacy, for God's love sustains the Creation from beginning to end, and freedom for humanity (that is the freedom granted to us by God, a volition or a will) comes subsequent to that love. Our will depends on God's love, not love on the will.
Now this has been an extended commentary on what I have been pondering and praying about over the past few weeks, and I hope that someone will be able to respond. I know my posts are long, but to develop these ideas it is necessary for the post to be lengthy (because I can't defend my ideas without support). Much of what I have written actually stems from the recently published encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI (which I read and by which I was inspired to write). Though I am not Roman Catholic I find his writing to be simple and profound enough for even a protestant like me to be able to read it and be moved by it, for it is grounded in the life of the true Christian (and even embraces the message of Luther to the church, to be grounded in the scriptures and in Christ). What more could we ask of our Catholic brothers and sisters?
Peace,
Michael
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