Interacting with “Most Moved Mover”
1: Introduction
2: Hyper-Relationality
3: Sovereignty
4: Changeability
5: Temporality
6: Conclusion

SOVEREIGNTY

Because God is hyper-relational and purposefully crafted beings after His image exist eternally with them in relationship, Pinnock explains the Bible does not teach that God exercises all controlling sovereignty, but instead alludes to a general sovereignty. An open view reveals a God who shares power with His co-creators and limits His owns power through human freedom. This of Open Theistic notion stands over against a Greek concept of a domineering, all-controlling despot typically articulated by a more deterministic, Classic Theistic understanding of God. While the open view has a place for sovereignty, it recognizes the universe is filled with dynamic forces and events outside God. The “march of history” moves accordingly, because God chooses to share His power with beings outside Himself (both human and non-human being). In fact, the open view of God and new re-negotiations of the doctrine of sovereignty helps with the problem of evil, a contribution to systematic theology that is long over due.

Like the European philosopher LeRon Shults, Clark Pinnock believes “absolute evil” exists in the world. This genuine evil, as he puts it, resulted not by the willing hand of an all-controlling God, but rather out of the possibility entailed by genuine freedom. “If love requires freedom and if freedom entails risk, God could not create such a world and be absolutely certain what the creatures would do with it.” Furthermore, the general sovereignty God enacts upon the world out of His hyper-relationality and human partnership allows for the “bad things that happen to good people” precisely because He is not hyper-sovereign nor holds a monopoly on power and the affairs of the world. As Pinnock says, “If God had such a monopoly, one would have to deny the existence of genuine evil because evil is something God wanted to happen.” I welcome Pinnock’s re-imagining the doctrine of sovereignty and nature of God for this point alone, let alone several others. I agree with Pinnock that if nothing happens outside the sovereign will of God there is no genuine evil. If everything truly does happen for a reason, then God’s hands are rightly stained with the blood of the Jewish Holocaust victims and countless Africans who have died because of starvation and malnutrition.

On the other hand though, while I agree with his idea of genuine evil and understand how human freedom can affect God and History, I do wonder how we are to reconcile this notion with the picture of an in-control-God found in the Scriptures. For example, in the Psalms and Job God is portrayed above and outside Creation, He is both YHWH (immanent) and Elohim (transcendent). Although, as Pinnock writes, maybe Scripture’s picture of Divine Sovereignty is not of a single, all-determining divine will that calls all the shots, but of an all wise, resourceful, and creative God who can cope with all of the contingencies that result from the choices of other powers. My fear is that such a view of God sacrifices transcendence at the expense of hyper-immanence. There is danger of going to too far in making God “one of us,” though I appreciate Pinnock’s effort at wrestling God “out from the clouds” and presenting a more entirely relational God that fails to appear with Classic Theism.

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