the charge of commending as God one whom the true God declares is false and worthless.
7.
true and living God and the divine Son of the Father, by denying of both, one of their
self-chosen bases for asserting the uniqueness of their deity, viz., that God alone, as God,
knows and declares what the future will be.
declares the future. And what God declares, over and over again, involves countless future
choices and actions of his free creatures (e.g., Isa. 41:21-29; 42:8-9; 43:8-13; 44:6-8; 45:1-7, 18-
25; 46:8-11; 48:3-8). Jesus likewise is here dishonored, for just like God in Isaiah, so too Jesus
asserts his claim to deity as resting in part on his ability to declare the future. In John 13:19,
Jesus says, "From now on I am telling you before it comes to pass, so that when it does occur,
you may believe that I am He." Is it mere coincidence that just a few verses later we hear Jesus
declare unequivocally to Peter, "Truly, truly, I say to you [not: `Probably, probably, I tell you my
well-informed prognostication], a rooster will not crow until you deny Me three times"? How
dare we deny of God what God himself has chosen as a basis for asserting his own unique deity!
8.
could reasonably (i.e., on general openness hermeneutical criteria) be used to advocate
yet greater divine deficiencies than merely God's lack of exhaustive foreknowledge with
its attending drawbacks.
exhaustive past knowledge, God's specific spatial locatedness, God's poor memory and
unavoidable forgetfulness, God's sometimes uncontrolled temper, God's increase in wisdom and
insight through the counsel he receives from others, and more. I can hear the next generation of
open theists now: "If God wanted us to understand that he needed help remembering things,
how could he have made it any more plain than he did in Gen. 9:13-16? For here, God says,
`When the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it, to remember the everlasting covenant'
(9:16). How could it be clearer! When God sees the rainbow, then (and only then) does he
remember!" Given openness hermeneutical theory, what would prevent this extension of their
beliefs? All one needs to do is explain how some biblical statements that teach God's perfect
knowledge (e.g., Ps. 147:5) are actually restrictive (i.e., perfect in restricted senses), to
accommodate God's limited knowledge of the past and present as evident in other texts. And, by
openness standards, wouldn't this make God even more glorious? Because, after all, which is
easier: running the world when it is your nature to remember everything, or doing so when you
have to work hard at remembering (and you just might forget), and yet you succeed in steering
the world to its desired outcome? The openness hermeneutic is driven by its commitment to
deny of God knowledge of future free creaturely choices and actions. If this hermeneutic is
allowed legitimacy, use may be made of it to propose even greater dishonor to God.