Pete's Blog

My Twenty Two word attempt to make an application question on Matthew 6:21:

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Why do churches pay janitors but not their Sunday School teachers?

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The Shack, written by William P. Young, is popular pretty much everywhere in evangelicalism. Power To Change's bookstore is selling it. Michael W. Smith is endorsing it.

But, you know who else likes it? Greg Boyd. In case you don't know, Greg Boyd does not believe that God knows the future. Realistically, it comes down to the question of God and suffering that Dr. Boyd gave up the view that God had foreknowledge. He tries to reconcile a loving God with the existence of evil by (at least as far as I can tell from reading him) saying that man has perfect free will and that God doesn't know how His creatures will choose and act, nor will He intervene.

This is not an issue of Calvinism versus Arminianism. This is a Gospel issue. For example, consider Abraham of Ur, son of Terah. In Romans 4 Paul says that Abraham was justified by his faith (v. 3). This was an example of how all saved people are saved by faith in God through the grace bought on the cross in Jesus' death, the argument that Paul had just made, prior in Romans 3:21-26. Consider 3:25, 26: "This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." This essentially says that God waited before punishing the sins. God had a plan to punish sins (His justice) while at the same time forgiving men (His mercy) the whole time. If God didn't know for sure that Jesus was going to be killed by man, then how could God be just and let Abraham's sin go unpunished? He couldn't. God unquestionably knew the future results of sending His Son to earth. I read this argument being made in Bruce Ware's chapter of Beyond the Bounds (beginning page 309 in-text, or 295 in the PDF), a book critiquing Open Theism, edited by Piper and Justin Taylor (writes my favourite blog, dealing with what I like to call "Popular Theology", used to work for Piper at Desiring God, now works for Crossway, working on the masterpiece, The ESV Study Bible).

Anyway, Boyd wrote of The Shack, "those who told me Young expressed my understanding of God and evil in narrative form were largely right." This scares me about the book. Boyd falls terribly far from orthodoxy, so if he's right, and the book is representative of his theology (by and large) then this is not a good book if you're looking for a modern Christian allegory.

If you want to hear more about it, refer to Dr. Mohler's critique and review of the book on his radio program. (His critique begins at 10:35 in the audio.)

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Update: I was listening to Mark Dever today and heard him say that he doesn't let open theists take the advantage by calling themselves by that label. Instead, he addresses their heresy, not as open theism but as limited God.

Labels: Bible, Characters, Resources