Understanding Thomas Jay Oord's Model of God's Providence

NOTE: From July 8–12, 2019, I had the opportunity to attend a seminar taught by Thomas Jay Oord. For many believers, theology seems like something only academic discuss. Yet, whether we discuss it or not, we all (believers, agnostics and atheists) have a theology that we embrace and that impacts how we live day-to-day. My encouragement is don't let yours be a default, unexamined theology. Who you think God is and how you think God works in the universe–and in your life–absolutely determines how you live. So...think about it. I hope these notes inspire you to dig deeper.

Day One Summary

Here are some things I learned from Thomas Jay Oord on DAY ONE of week-long class he taught at Vancouver School of Theology (July 8-12).

Open and Relational Theology is an umbrella label for the variety of theologies that affirm at least the following:

1.     The future is open and undetermined to both us and God.

2.     God is relational. God affects us and we affect God.

There are basically three general views of God's Omniscience:

1.     Calvinist believe that God foreknows and foreordains everything.

2.     Arminians believe that God foreknows but does not foreordain.

3.     Open and Relational (O&R) theologians believe that God neither foreknows (for certain) nor foreordains.

The reason O&R theologians believe that God neither foreknows nor foreordains is because God has endowed humanity with free-will and that because the preeminent quality of God's nature is uncontrolling love. God takes each individual's free-will seriously and though he works to influence, inform, and even persuade, each person is free to make her/his own choices.

What I learned about O&R Theology on Day Two, will follow in later posts. If you want to learn on your own about Open and Relational Theology with each post I'll share a book or two you might want to check out.

"Uncontrolling Love: Essays Exploring the Love of God" - Edited by Thomas Jay Oord.

Day Two Summary (Part 1)

Here are some things I learned from Thomas Jay Oord on DAY TWO of week-long class he taught at Vancouver School of Theology (July 8-12).

Thomas Jay Oord outlined seven basic theological approaches to understanding God’s providence, that is, how God works in and with his creation.

1.     God is the Omnicause—that is God has, does and will cause everything that happens in the universe. Theologians who teach this model include John Calvin (1600s) and John Piper (present day).

2.     God Empowers and Overpowers—While God is the source of our freedom and God usually empowers, there are times when God overpowers. In other words, we have free will, but God intervenes whenever and however he determines to accomplish his will. All Plantinga and Roger Olson are modern theologians who espouse this view. This is perhaps the most popular model of God’s providence among conservative Christians.

3.     God is Voluntarily Self-Limited—God rarely intervenes to overpower our free will. God usually persuades but can be coercive when deemed necessary. This is similar to the above view but differs in degree. John Polkinghorne, Philip Clayton, Greg Boyd are modern theologians who espouse this view.

4.     God is Essentially Kenotic (terms to be explain on another day)—God’s nature is love and that love is self-emptying, others-empowering and God never violates creaturely free will. Thomas Jay Oord is the originator of this model (thus more explanation to come later).

5.     God is Present but essentially Uninvolved—God is not interactive, personal nor responsive to human experience. God is the glue of the universe. Paul Tillich and Gordon Kauffman are two modern theologians who espouse this model.

6.     God is the Initial Creator and a Current Observer—This is “Bette Midler’s God” who watches from a distance. God is a perfect creator and thus does not need to intervene in his creation. Michael Corey espouses this view.

7.     God’s Ways are Not Our Ways—This is not a model of God’s providence but rather an explanation of why we can’t come up with a model. God is utterly mysterious. We cannot really know who/what God is. We can only know who/what God isn’t. Apophatic theologians hold to this view (or lack of view).

Book Recommendation: "The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence" by Thomas Jay Oord.

Day Two Summary (Part 2)

Here are some MORE things I learned from Thomas Jay Oord on DAY TWO of week-long class he taught at Vancouver School of Theology (July 8-12).

Thomas Jay Oord explained the difference between “voluntarism” and “essentialism” when it comes to God’s nature. “Voluntarism” states that God’s sovereign will is pre-eminent when it comes to God’s nature. So while God, for example, created free will creatures, God can override that free will and impose his own will on any or all of his creation. “Essentialism” states that there are certain qualities that are who God is and these qualities cannot change. For example, God cannot choose to NOT love; God cannot choose to NOT create; God cannot choose to NOT care.

He then explained what Open and Relational Theology means in terms of the following:

1.     God’s omniscience—God knows everything that can be known, but the future is not yet knowable because we have free will. God doesn’t see all of time as one viewing a parade from thousands of feet above, but rather God is in the parade, every part of the parade as it happens.

2.     God’s emotions—God experiences human emotions with but few exceptions (e.g., guilt). However, even those emotions God does not have, God perceives and is affected by.

3.     Our free will—We have genuine but limited free will. We, too, are limited in the choices we make because of the limitations of human nature and our individual natures.

4.     Petitionary prayer—If God knows and determines the future, why pray for God to act. If, however, the future is open, then we can pray that we will be aware of and responsive to God’s influence and persuasion. However, because God’s love is “uncontrolling” it would be fruitless to pray for God to intervene in a way that violates another’s free will.

5.     Our lives matter! God wants to, and does, work together with us to accomplish God’s loving will moment-by-moment. Also, everyone counts whether or not we choose to cooperate with God’s desire.

Book Recommendation: “Divine Echoes: Reconciling Prayer with the Uncontrolling Love of God” by Mark Gregory Karris.

Day Three Summary

Here are some things I learned from Thomas Jay Oord on DAY THREE of week-long class he taught at Vancouver School of Theology (July 8-12).

Thomas presented, in greater detail, his model especially as it relates to the problem of evil and suffering. In fact, he proposed “a solution for the problem of evil.” First, he stated the problem.

·      If God is able to do absolutely anything, God would be able to prevent any occurrence of genuine evil.

·      If God is perfectly loving, God would want to prevent every occurrence of genuine evil.

·      However, events of genuine evil occur.

·      Conclusion: Either God does not exist, or one of the first two statements is wrong—that is, either God is not able to do absolutely anything OR he is not perfectly loving.

Next, he defined “genuine evil” as any event that, all things considered, makes the universe worse that it might have been. That evil can be the result of human free will, other creaturely interactions and/or natural evil. He next explained the realities of random events, law-like regularities, human and other creaturely free will and agency, the existence of values and the fact that we can know something true about the universe we observe (i.e., not everything is subjective). However, we cannot know the full truth about the universe nor can we know truth with absolute certainty. The same holds true when it comes to what we know about God. Thus, there is plausible faith—reasonable trust. I, personally, love this because it so fits with some sage advice I once heard—we need to hold to our beliefs with humility.

Oord’s solution to the problem of evil and the core of his model of providence begins with God’s nature as love: a self-giving, others-empowering and uncontrolling love. Therefore, God can’t do certain things because this is God’s nature. God cannot withdraw freedom from a perpetrator of evil. God cannot interrupt law-like regularities to prevent evil or stop random events that result in evil.

Book recommendation: “God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse and Other Evils” by Thomas Jay Oord.

Days Four & Five Summary

Here are some things I learned from Thomas Jay Oord on DAYS FOUR & FIVE of week-long class he taught at Vancouver School of Theology (July 8-12).

I learned two new words:

1.     Panentheism. Note, this is not “pantheism” but “panENtheism”. Literally, “pan” means all/every, “en” means in and “theism” means God. So “Panentheism” means “all in God.” Many reference Paul’s statement to the Athenians in Acts 17—“for in him we live and move and have our being as some of your own poets have said.” The main point is this: God is not “out there” but rather God is present with us, or as Paul wrote, “God is not far from each one of us,” or as one person paraphrased this, “God is at your elbow.” Since God is present with us, God is relational. God is influenced by creation as he also influences creation. God experiences creation.

2.     Theocosmocentrism. That’s a mouthful, right? Again, “theo” means God, “cosmo” is cosmos, i.e., the universe and “centrism” means central. Some points based on this are: (1) We cannot understand God well without reference to creation and we cannot understand creation well without reference to God; (2) God necessarily exists and God necessarily creates. It is God’s very nature of love that necessitates that God creates. Just as God cannot NOT love, God cannot NOT create. God essentially loves all creation. It is God’s nature to love creation—every minute aspect of the universe is loved by God.

I was exposed to some different ways to conceive of the afterlife, based on this premise of the uncontrolling love of God. The main point I need to further ponder and that has serious implications for the conservative evangelical teaching is this: If God’s nature is uncontrolling love, does God stop loving when our lives on this planet end or does God continue to love and thus continue to influence and persuade?

On the final day, Thomas reviewed Pope Francis’ 2015 Encyclical Letter “Laudato Si’” (Praise Be to You). It is a letter written to discuss the critical environmental issues our world is facing and is an impassioned and intelligently written plea for people of all stripes to work together to prevent further damage and to undo the damage we’ve already caused. As he writes, “This sister [the earth] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the. Water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail’ (Rom 8:22).” What I was deeply convicted of by this session was how conservative evangelical theology has little if anything to say about our responsibility to the rest of God’s creation. We teach and we act as if the only really important part of God’s creation is humanity, the rest is expendable. This universe is God’s creation. We are not its masters and lords; we are its stewards!

Book Recommendation: “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World” edited by Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke.

What is the Bible? Part 6

What is the Bible?

Part 6

The Process of Canonization: Complex, Convoluted and Contentious

Overview

Trying to summarize the process of canonization of the biblical texts is much like trying to successfully put together a jigsaw puzzle, without a picture of the finished product to go by and while some key pieces have been lost. This is echoed by respected biblical scholars who, without exception, state something equivalent to the following:

Canonization, broadly construed as the process through which the Bible became the Bible, is only vaguely understood. We do not know exactly how various books were chosen to be part of the Bible to the exclusion of others, how these books were put into a particular order, and how their text was established. Since there are no contemporaneous documents that describe this process, it needs to be reconstructed from indirect evidence, namely, from the variety of biblical texts from different periods and places that have survived, and from later traditions in rabbinic and other sources that discuss canonization.[1]

The reality is that neither the canon of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, nor the canon of the New Testament, developed in a single moment in time but each “was the result of a series of decisions made over the course of centuries by leaders of different religious groups, decisions concerning a variety of works written by many authors also over the course of centuries”[2] (emphasis is mine).

Canonization of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament

·      In broad terms, the canon of the Hebrew Bible was “settled” by the end of the 2^nd century CE and includes the 24 books of the Tanak.

·      The canon of the Old Testament (i.e., in Christian Bibles) was not nearly as quickly “resolved.”

o   The books that were included in the Roman Catholic/Orthodox Old Testament canon were the authoritative scriptures for the majority of Christians from at least 400 CE to the mid-1600s.

o   These included the 39 books that are basically equivalent to the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible but also included the books of Tobit, Judith, The Additions to the Book of Esther, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, The Letter to Jeremiah, The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and 1 & 2 Maccabees.

o   It wasn’t until the Reformation that the status of these “extra” books were challenged and excluded with the result that Protestant Bibles contain only the 39 Old Testament books.

·      Both the development of the canons of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament were directly the result of Christian use of the Septuagint—the 3^rd–1^st centuries BCE translation of the books of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

o   Initially, “…the Septuagint was revered by many Jews as the divinely inspired text, perhaps on par with the Hebrew Scriptures…Within the first decades of the church…the Septuagint became the church’s Old Testament while it continued to function as the Bible used by the Jews.”[3]

o   However, in the 2^nd century CE, because of the Christian use of, and influence on, the Septuagint translation, the Jews became distrustful of it and by the end of the 2^nd century CE, “the Septuagint had passed into the care and keeping of the Christian church.”[4]

o   The earliest Christian copies we have of the “Bible” (i.e., codicies Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandricus—from the 4^th & 5^th centuies CE) contain all the books of the Hebrew Bible plus the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal books in Greek translation, plus the collection of 27 writings that became the New Testament.[5] Also, toward the end of the 4^th century CE, Jerome produced the standard Latin Translation—known as the Vulgate—which include the Deuterocanonical books.

o   “At the time of the Reformation, the unique authority of the Latin Vulgate was challenged by Protestants. The books of the Protestant Old Testament were translated afresh from the Hebrew canon, which does not include the additional Greek books...”[6]

The Canonization of the New Testament

·      The New Testament “came into being over a prolonged period that extended from the second through the fourth centuries in the West of the Roman Empire and through the sixth century in the East”[7] (emphasis is mine).

·      However, “by the beginning of the third century, the contours of the “New Testament” as we know it begin to emerge.”[8]

·      It seems that the key criteria upon which decisions to include only the 27 books in accepted versions of the New Testament include:

o   Usage and acceptance in the early church

o   Apostolic authorship or authority

o   Conformity to the proper understanding of Christian doctrine (as determined by those in power in the church—and formalized by the councils of bishops)

o   The text’s ability to be applied universally to the church as a whole.

o   But surprisingly to many, “Divine inspiration was not a criterion for acknowledging a document as scripture. The concept itself [of divine inspiration] was developing only during the second century and worked, rather, the other way around”[9] (emphasis is mine).

Significant Implications of Canonization

·      First, no version of “the Bible”—Hebrew, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant—was pre-packaged by God and delivered into human hands inerrantly by the Holy Spirit, and thus requiring only their acceptance.

·      Second, because these writings are considered authoritative by many, “these ancient compositions retain their significance for every Christian in every age and circumstance…Indeed, [they] define Scripture as prophetic, as speaking for God to humans in every age.”[10]

·      Finally, the goal of canonization was to establish unity by clearly delineating which writings were authoritative [later, inspired], yet these writings are diverse in genre, perspective and opinion. As Johnson correctly notes,

Because of this irreducible diversity, Christians through the ages have managed to produce a bewildering variety of institutional structures, theologies, rituals, and even moralities, all while sincerely claiming to take the New Testament with utmost seriousness.[11]

What is the Bible? For Me…

The best thing I did, fifteen years or so ago, was to take off my “conservative evangelical apologetics” glasses in order to try to read the biblical texts (as well as other related ancient texts) for what they are rather than for what I wanted them to be. I no longer see the diversity and ambiguity of these texts as something to be either explained away or forcefully “reconciled.” The result is that I now see the biblical texts, not the inerrant Word of God, but as a participation and cooperation between God’s revelation and various and diverse human responses to it. Thus, “…scripture itself bears witness to the early Israelite and Christian movements as living, breathing, growing, changing traditions, grappling with the nature of God and what it means to live as God’s people.”[12] I was, indeed, spiritually dying on the modernist hill of defending inerrancy. Now my faith is alive and my excitement for the scriptures revived as I indeed strive to grapple with the biblical texts in all their diversity, ambiguity and humanness.

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[1] Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Canonization of the Bible,” in The Jewish Study Bible, ed. Michael Fishbane (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2004), 2072.

[2] Michael Coogan, The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.

[3] Karen H. Jobes and Moises Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), 82.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 83.

[7] Michael R. Greenwald, “The Canon of the New Testament,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, eds. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 557.

[8] Ibid, 558.

[9] Ibid, 559. Cf. Johnson, The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction, 119.

[10] Johnson, The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction, 120.

[11] Ibid.

[12] https://peteenns.com/why-its-spiritually-valuable-to-embrace-the-bibles-diversity-and-contradictions-or-this-is-a-hill-to-die-on/?fbclid=IwAR1Hjey9pZqi4NusQyArJe0jcEEhPl3zedF1ebho0bUIq3ZXpPk5Qnjt9wg