God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God Book

After reading an interesting interview with Greg Boyd online, I picked up this book and enjoyed it a lot. I'm not fully convinced of his case, but the book certainly convinced me that Open Theism is no heresy. It is, instead, a means of trying to reconcile God's sovereignty and man's free will in a satisfactory way. Having remained unconvinced by the attempts of Calvinism to deal with free will and the Arminian attempt to explain God's sovereignty, I found this to be an interesting suggestion for a third way that avoids the problems of both.

I've read most of the anti-Open Theist texts available, but I never bothered to read the other side, and this is usually a key problem. Most of these "refutations" never even got to the heart of Open Theism's question.

Open Theism's central question is, "Why do we take the texts talking about God's sovereignty as representing God as He is in Himself, but take passages that speak of God's emotions or of His changing His mind as figurative?" A number of these other books have talked about the doctrine of impassibility, but none of them ever really answered why it is they believe this. Scripturally speaking, using exegesis rather than philosophy, they have not done.

So anyway. You learn all kinds of nifty things here, for example, that Boyd doesn't deny God's providence or that God will ultimately accomplish His purposes. They don't deny God any knowledge, either, they simply argue that classical theism has actually limited God to the actual, rather than the plurality of possibilities. That is, God knows all possible options and ends for every possible choice every single atom in the universe can make, and so like a GPS, no matter what turn is taken, He can reroute everything so that every single aspect of His will and purposes are accomplished in the world. Boyd uses the example of a master chess player, who knows the consequences of every move his opponent can make and is ready to respond to anything they can do.

The book challenged me and forced me to wrestle with Scripture again. I don't begrudge any book that, in fact, that's the best thing any book can really do. As I say, I am not fully convinced their thesis works, but I found aspects of it compelling, for example, the idea of the vulnerable God, and their criticism of a theology of God that begins and ends with authority, power, control, and will, rather than love, which is how Scripture defines God in His being.