Introduction
I have been re-reading the book Most Moved Mover by Clark Pinnock. While remaining accessible to the educated reader, this book covers many technical details regarding the Open View of God. The title is an allusion to the idea from Aristotle that there must be an “unmoved mover” which motivates all motion (in the most general sense). This is because things do not move unless something makes them move, but in order to avoid an infinite regress there must be something that is not made to move by anything else, yet causes everything else to move.
Pinnock, along with most of those holding the Open View, believes that God is neither unmoving nor unmoved. Rather, he is both supremely influential (a mover) and supremely influenced (moved). He influences everything and he is influenced by everything.
Supremely Influential, Supremely Influenced
In the following I want to focus on this idea of the most-moved mover as supremely influential and supremely influenced. This way of putting it is my own, not Pinnock’s, though I believe it is a compatible way to express the theme of the book.
Influence
Influence is a general way of expressing God’s power or sovereignty. God affects everything that happens in a mode of his own choosing. The idea that total meticulous control is the only way that God can affect the universe detracts from God’s freedom and glory. God can persuade; he can redeem; he can act as one among many other actors. He can also act with absolute power. In every mode of influence he always moves with perfect wisdom, always taking the course that best furthers his creative and loving agenda.
Influenced
That God is influenced is another way of speaking about his perfect knowledge. Everything that happens in the universe affects him in that it forms the content of what he knows. To say that God is supreme in being influenced by everything is simply to say that he is supreme in his knowledge. But notice that this implies a passivity or receptivity in God. In order for him to know things he must allow them to move him by affecting his state of knowledge.
Biblical vs. Philosophical View of God
Pinnock claims that this view of God is faithful to the Bible, which describes God as influencing but not determining humans. For example, Jeremiah 18, the infamous potter-clay passage, supposedly exalts God’s sovereignty but actually reflects God the potter’s responsiveness to the clay. In this passage, the way nations and kingdoms act can actually change God’s purpose and plan (see vv. 7-10 especially).
Pinnock and others think that the view of God as unmoved mover is the result of over-identification of the Christian idea of God with that of the Greek philosophers, especially that of Aristotle. To all intents and purposes, Aristotle’s view of God as unmoved, unchanging and non-relational became the standard view of God even to this day. For example, the idea that God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge about the future is due to the Aristotelian view (as modified to fit Christianity) that God’s knowledge cannot change. God is already perfect, and any change would detract from that perfection. So the future must be foreknown in exact definiteness.
Unfortunately this view of God’s knowledge destroys freedom. If something is known in its exact definiteness, it cannot contain possibilities. In other words the fact that God knows it means that nothing could happen that would invalidate God’s knowledge.
It does no good to say that we are free and God simply sees, in his eternal Present, what we do as we do it. This might save the notion that God’s knowledge is unchanging, but true freedom must mean that the outcome of an action could have been different. Since God foreknew the action in definite terms, its outcome could not have been different.
The Problem of Time
One way to look at the problem is that time becomes “spacialized.” The metaphor of “time line” assumes that all of time already exists. Actually time is not another dimension of space—even in relativity time is multiplied by i (the square-root of -1) with respect to spacial dimensions. But in relativity theory time does gain a space-like quality because it is based on the invariance of the speed of light.
Space Measured by Time
It’s kind of a “Los Angeles” idea. In LA space is measured by time. Places are a certain time away—perhaps 40 minutes on the freeway. In relativity theory space is also measured by time—the time it takes for light to travel a particular distance: one light second or one light year. But even that notion eventually bottoms out in an event-based metric. A second is defined as “9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.” The frequency of the particular radiation emitted by cesium under certain conditions serves as a ticking clock that ticks 9-billion-plus times a second.
Event-Based View
This event-based view is compatible with another way to think about time: a process whereby possibilities become definite or actual. We experience time as change. Something happens. Unless something happened we would not experience time at all.
Past and Future
The difference between the past and the future is simple: the past is totally definite and known perfectly and unchangeably by God, while the future is indefinite and known perfectly by God as indefinite. The transition between these is an event: something happened. Possibilities are “pruned” and we are left with the unique and fully definite event that is now in the past. God knows these past events perfectly; we know them imperfectly and our memories of them fade. Nevertheless they can no longer be changed or revisited, except as memories, even for God.
Knowledge: Exhaustive vs. Complete
There is an area of possible confusion here. In Pinnock’s book it is mentioned that “God does not have exhaustive knowledge of the future.” See for example pg. 175 where Pinnock quotes another author, David Basinger.
The problem here is that God does in fact have complete knowledge of past, present and future. I believe the qualification that God does not have “exhaustive” knowledge would be better stated as saying that God does not have “definite” knowledge about the future. God’s knowledge of past, present and future is complete in that he knows the past as completely fixed and definite, the present as the point of transition between the future and the past—the point where potential things become definite—and the future as containing possibilities that are not completely actual and definite until they become present events.
God’s Knowledge Reflects Reality
In other words, God knows all of reality, but he knows it in the mode of its reality. He knows the past as the past (fully definite) and the future as the future (containing open possibilities). He cannot know the future in the same way he knows the past, because the thing that makes the future the future is that it does not have the “ontological status” of definiteness like the past does. For God to know the future as fully definite would be to know it falsely.
God In Time
The radical idea in the Open View of God is that God shares in the process whereby the future becomes the past. He experiences events as they happen, and as they happen they pass from potential to actual or definite. One possibility becomes definite; the rest are pruned away.
Before the event, God knew all the counterfactual possibilities and had plans to deal with them if they had been chosen and actualized by free agents. He himself also selects from possibilities as he acts with wisdom to respond, influence, and shape the things that happen so that reality can be shaped to his will.
A Glorious View of God
The view of God as supremely influential and supremely influenced, combined with the notion of his infinite wisdom, gives a glorious view of God’s interactions with creation. God is not like some chess player who has been granted the power to dictate the moves of his opponents. If that were the case he would win every game, but there would be nothing praiseworthy about him.
Instead, God is like a chess master who responds in perfect wisdom to every move his opponent freely chooses. He wins the game not because he limits the game, but because he plays it supremely. This is glorious mastery.
The Certain Fulfillment of God’s Promises
This is why the promises of the Bible are sure. The Bible says that “All things work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” How can this be? Because God can influence all things effectively so they achieve his desire. The Bible repeatedly speaks of the power of God at work in us being the same as that with which he raised Jesus from the dead (Ephesians 1:20, Romans 6:4, Colossians 2:12 etc). The effectiveness of this power, which was God’s response to the supreme attempt by forces in creation to escape him, shows again that the promises of God are sure: “What can separate us from the love of Christ?… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us…” (Romans 8:35-39).