God

Reformed — God chooses, and his choosing is what saves

Augustine in his later anti-Pelagian writings; John Calvin (Institutes III.21-24); the Synod of Dort (1618-19); the Westminster Confession, chapter III; John Owen; Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will); Charles Spurgeon; in our own time R. C. Sproul (Chosen by God) and John Piper (The Justification of God).

Fallen humanity is not merely weakened but spiritually dead and unable to choose God. Therefore God, before the foundation of the world and on the basis of nothing in the creature, chose a people; Christ died to secure their salvation; and the Spirit brings them, infallibly and willingly, to faith. Grace that can finally be refused is grace that does not save anyone; salvation is God's work from first to last, and the elect persevere because God preserves them.

• Romans 9 is written as if to head off exactly the Arminian reading. The twins had done nothing good or bad, so that God's purpose of election might stand — not because of works but because of him who calls. He has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills. Paul then raises the objection any reader would raise — 'why does he still find fault?' — and answers not by softening the doctrine but by rebuking the questioner. That is a hard fact for our side.
• Ephesians 1 says he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, predestined according to the purpose of his will, working all things according to the counsel of his will. The stress falls relentlessly on God's will, not the creature's.
• The chain in Romans 8 has no leakage: those he foreknew he predestined, those he predestined he called, those he called he justified, those he justified he glorified. The same group makes it all the way through.
• Jesus says no one can come to me unless the Father draws him, and all that the Father gives me will come to me. Not may come. Will.
• Dead men do not cooperate. Ephesians 2 says we were dead in trespasses — and being made alive is something done to a corpse, not agreed to by one.
• It has the deepest pastoral logic of all the options: if my salvation finally rests on my grip on God, I am in serious trouble. If it rests on his grip on me, I am safe.

The honest difficulty: The other side of unconditional election is that God passes by the rest, and the tenderest Reformed writers have never made that comfortable. It requires reading 'God desires all to be saved' and 'not willing that any should perish' in restricted senses, and it must explain how the universal offer of the gospel is sincere if the ability to accept it is withheld. Calvin himself called reprobation a dreadful decree.

Molinism — God knows what free creatures would do

Luis de Molina (Concordia, 1588); Francisco Suárez; today William Lane Craig and Kenneth Keathley (Salvation and Sovereignty).

Between God's knowledge of everything possible and his knowledge of everything actual stands 'middle knowledge': God knows what any free creature would freely do in any circumstance. He then chooses which world to actualize. So God ordains all of history in full detail, and every human choice in it is genuinely free.

• It claims both halves without softening either — full meticulous providence and full libertarian freedom — which is what most Christians actually believe when they pray.
• There is biblical footing for the required kind of knowledge: God tells David what the men of Keilah would do if he stayed, and David leaves, so they never do it. Jesus says Tyre and Sidon would have repented if they had seen these works.
• It gives an elegant account of prophecy and of God's providence over free evil acts without making God the author of them.

The honest difficulty: The unsolved question is where these truths come from. If it is true that a particular person would freely accept in a particular circumstance, what makes it true — before God creates anyone? Both Reformed and Arminian critics press this 'grounding objection,' and Molinists concede it is the hard spot.

Open theism — the future is partly open even to God

Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and Gregory Boyd (God of the Possible).

God knows everything that can be known, but future free choices are not yet anything to be known. God is a real partner in an unfolding story: he takes risks, responds, changes his stated plans, and genuinely grieves.

• It reads the narrative texts at face value, and there are more of them than people expect. God says 'now I know that you fear me.' He relents from disaster at Nineveh. He tells Jeremiah that if a nation turns, he will relent. He expresses that Israel did something 'which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.'
• It takes prayer and intercession with total seriousness — Moses argues God out of a stated intention, and the text presents that as real.
• It offers the cleanest answer on evil: God did not plan the atrocity, and did not want it, in any sense.

The honest difficulty: MannaFest declines it, and the reason is decisive for a site that takes prophecy seriously. God stakes his uniqueness on exactly this: I declare the end from the beginning, and things not yet done. He names Cyrus a century and a half before Cyrus is born. Daniel's sequence of empires, the timing in Daniel 9, the details of the crucifixion in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 — all of this requires knowing free human choices in advance. The narrative texts open theism leans on are better read as covenant language, God's stated intentions being genuinely conditional on response, which is a category Jeremiah 18 supplies explicitly. Arminianism does not need open theism, and classical Arminians from Arminius onward have affirmed exhaustive foreknowledge.

The classical answer — God is not acted upon from outside

Augustine; Anselm (Proslogion); Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae Ia); the historic confessions, which describe God as 'without body, parts, or passions.'

God has no passions in the sense of being passively moved, altered, or diminished by anything outside himself. His love and mercy are perfect acts of his will, not moods that come over him. The Bible's emotional language describes God truly, in terms we can understand, without implying that God is changeable.

• It protects God's freedom and constancy. A God whose inner life rises and falls with the news is a God who can be manipulated, and whose promises are only as stable as his current state.
• Anselm's formulation is more pastoral than its reputation: 'Thou art compassionate in terms of our experience, and not compassionate in terms of thy being.' We really do experience mercy; God really does act mercifully; what is denied is that God is unsettled.
• Scripture warns explicitly against imagining that God is like us: 'you thought that I was one like yourself.'
• It has near-unanimous support across the first fifteen centuries of the church, East and West.

The honest difficulty: Pressed hard, it can make the prophetic literature sound like an elaborate accommodation, and readers rightly ask why God would describe himself in such extravagant emotional terms if none of it corresponds to anything real. The technical vocabulary of the tradition also does a poor job of distinguishing 'not destabilized' from 'not affected at all,' and much of the modern reaction is a reaction to the latter.

The suffering God — the modern revision

Jürgen Moltmann (The Crucified God, 1972); Kazoh Kitamori (Theology of the Pain of God, 1946); Eberhard Jüngel; the wartime line of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from prison, that only a suffering God can help.

God is not insulated from his creation's suffering. At the cross, God himself — Father in bereavement, Son in death — entered human agony, and that is where his love is most fully revealed. Impassibility was borrowed from Greek philosophy, not learned from Scripture.

• It reads the passion narratives as revealing God rather than merely revealing a man. If the cross shows us what God is like, and the cross is agony, then something about God is disclosed there that impassibility struggles to name.
• It came out of the twentieth century's atrocities, and it answers the question that century forced: where was God? The reply — in it — has genuine pastoral power, and Kitamori wrote it from a bombed Japan, Moltmann from a prisoner-of-war camp.
• The prophetic texts are on its side at face value, and Abraham Heschel's work on the pathos of God in the Hebrew prophets showed how central that theme is to the Old Testament rather than peripheral.

The honest difficulty: It risks making suffering something intrinsic to God rather than something God defeats — and a God who is essentially in pain has trouble being the one who wipes away every tear. It also comes close to saying the divine nature itself died, which the church rejected in the sixth-century debates over the 'one of the Trinity suffered' formula, admitting it only in the careful sense that the Son who suffered in his humanity is one of the Trinity.

The elohim are human judges

The traditional reading in much of Jewish interpretation and in the Reformers — John Calvin's commentary on Psalm 82 takes it this way, as do Matthew Henry and much of the Puritan tradition.

Psalm 82 is God rebuking Israel's magistrates, who bore his authority in judgment and abused it. 'You are gods' is an honorific for those who hold judicial office in God's name, and 'you shall die like men' is the point: for all their office, they are only men.

• The charges fit human courts exactly — defend the weak and fatherless, rescue the poor from the hand of the wicked. That is a magistrate's job description.
• Jesus quotes the verse in John 10 in an argument about people to whom the word of God came, which reads most naturally as human recipients of revelation.
• Exodus uses elohim for human judges in the law of the household servant and the case of the borrowed ox, so the usage is attested.
• It keeps the psalm firmly monotheistic without requiring any account of a spirit world, which is a real virtue if you think that world is where interpretation tends to go wrong.

The honest difficulty: It has to explain why corrupt human judges are told they will 'die like men' — which is not a threat to men — and why the psalm ends by asking God to arise and inherit all the nations, which is the Deuteronomy 32 allotment showing up again. The Exodus passages usually cited for 'judges' are themselves disputed and may point to the sanctuary and God's own presence.

The council is real but strictly angelic and non-authoritative

Mainstream conservative commentators who accept a heavenly host but resist the 'divine council' framing — much of standard evangelical commentary on Job 1 and 1 Kings 22.

God has angels, some of whom fell; the throne-room scenes are court imagery in which angels serve and report. But the language of 'gods' is polemical or poetic, and no created being was ever given genuine authority over nations.

• It grants everything the texts require about a heavenly host without importing a structure the Bible never labels.
• It is properly cautious. The divine council reading has been made to carry a lot of speculative weight in popular teaching, and caution about an unseen realm we cannot check is a virtue, not cowardice.

The honest difficulty: It has trouble with Daniel 10, where a 'prince of Persia' and a 'prince of Greece' resist a heavenly messenger for three weeks and Michael is called Israel's prince — territorial authority is exactly what is being described. It also leaves the Deuteronomy 32 allotment doing nothing.