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to the doctrine of inerrancy in relation to the specific issues of a concursive theory of inspiration
and the phenomena of predictive prophecy. I will then finish with three concluding reflections.


The Openness Proposal

What exactly is the openness proposal in regard to the relationship between divine
sovereignty, omniscience and human freedom? Probably the best place to begin is to define
clearly what open theists mean by human freedom before we turn to how they view the divine
sovereignty, omniscience and human freedom relationship.

Human Freedom

In the current philosophical and theological literature there are two basic views of human
freedom which are primarily discussed and adopted ­ an indeterministic notion referred to in
various ways such as libertarian free will or incompatibilism, and a deterministic notion referred
to as compatibilism or soft determinism.
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Open theism strongly endorses the former rather than
the latter. It is important to be clear as to what this view of freedom is since, as we shall see, it
has dramatic implications for how the open theist construes the divine sovereignty-omniscience
and human freedom relationship.

What, then, do philosophers and theologians mean by the concept of a libertarian view of
freedom? Simply stated, the most basic sense of this view is that a person's act is free if it is not
causally determined. For libertarians this does not mean that our actions are random or arbitrary.
Reasons and causes play upon the will as one chooses, but none of them is sufficient to incline
the will decisively in one direction or another. Thus, a person could always have chosen
otherwise than he did. David Basinger states it this way: for a person to be free with respect to
performing an action he must have it within his power "to choose to perform action A or choose
not to perform action A. Both A and not A could actually occur; which will actually occur has
not yet been determined."
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Scripture does not precisely define the nature of human freedom, but philosophers and theologians discuss it. As
stated, there are two main notions of freedom ­ libertarianism and compatibilism. These two conceptions of human
freedom clearly contradict one another, but both are possible views of freedom in the sense that there is no logical
contradiction in affirming either view. Supporting the notion that both views of freedom are coherent and defensible
is Thomas Flint, "Two Accounts of Providence," in Divine and Human Action, ed. Thomas V. Morris (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), 177-79. Ultimately the view of freedom that one ought to embrace should be the
view that best fits the biblical data, not our pre-conceived notions of what human freedom is or ought to be.
6
David Basinger, "Middle Knowledge and Classical Christian Thought," Religious Studies 22 (1986), 416. Also see
William Hasker, Metaphysics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1983), 32-44; Ledger Wood, "Indeterminism,"
Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Dagobert Runes (Savage: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1983), 159; Michael
Peterson, et al. Reason and Religious Belief (New York: Oxford Press, 1991), 59-61; Thomas Talbott,
"Indeterminism and Chance Occurrences," The Personalist 60 (1979), 254.