The above is a clip of James White’s debate with John Sanders a few years ago at RTS in Orlando.
James White (D.Min., Th.D.) is an elder of Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and John Sanders (Ph.D.) is an open theist. While Sanders affirms God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and infinitude, he critiques the doctrines of immutability, impassibility, and timelessness. These things, he says, are not perfection. An all-powerful and sovereign God can choose to create beings whose choices he neither controls nor can predict. An all-powerful God can change and learn. An all-powerful God can choose to be related and to respond to his creation. To claim that God can do none of these things is to limit God. (Sanders,The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence, 11,225.)
Omniscience for Sanders means that God knows everything that it is possible for him to know. According to the open theist, God know what choices we will make, because we haven’t made them yet. There is nothing to be known. (Ibid., 132,99) Sanders is careful to say that God’s knowledge of the future is limited only because he has chosen to create creatures whose decisions are unpredictable—creatures with “libertarian freedom”.
Basically, this theology teaches that God is a risk-taker, that God wants to have a relationship with humans but has taken the risk of being disappointed if they choose to not want Him. It also teaches, then, that God makes mistakes.
By the way, Sanders is not only an open theist but also an inclusivist. In explaining his soteriology he wrote, “The unevangelized may be saved if they respond in faith to God based on the revelation they have.” (Fackre, Nash, and Sanders, What About Those Who Have Never Heard? Three Views on the Destiny of the Unevangelized, 20.)
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Jason Robertson is a husband and a father and a pastor. He is dedicated to leading and equipping his the Church with God’s word and biblical theology for life ministry, using a combination of pastoral, church planting and evangelism experience. He holds a Master of Divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is experienced in church planting, evangelism, missions, and the training of pastors and Bible teachers.
Jason has been preaching the gospel since 1985, serving the first ten years of ministry as a Southern Baptist itinerant evangelist out of Milldale Baptist Church in Zachary, LA which ordained him in 1993. He has preached in hundreds of churches in over 30 States and 4 countries. He planted churches in Siberia, Russia in the summers of 1993 and 1994. He founded Murrieta Valley Church in California, which he planted in cooperation with the SBC NAMB in 2001. He also teaches ministry students at California Baptist University.
You can hear his sermons and read his manuscripts on sermonaudio.com. Just follow the link to "sermons" at the top of this page.
I love how A.W. Pink responds to such a non-sensical notion that God’s knowledge might be limited in any way, especially that His knowledge is somehow contingent upon the creature advising him.
“Men would strip Deity of His omniscience if they could-what a proof that the carnal mind is enmity against God (Rom 8:7)! The wicked do as naturally hate this Divine perfection as much as they are naturally compelled to acknowledge it. They wish there might be no Witness of their sins, no Searcher of their hearts, no Judge of their deeds. They seek to banish such a God from their thoughts: They consider not in their hearts that I remember all their wickedness (Hosea 7:2). How solemn is Psa 90:8! good reason has every Christ-rejecter for trembling before it: Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.” A.W. Pink; The Attributes of God; pg 18
I actually was a classmate of J.S. many years ago. He was a heretic then, but the school we were attending had leadership that wanted us to “discover doctrine for ourselves”. Praise God, I “found” clear doctrine at another and better school. I argued with him by the hour to no avail. He’s just as arrogant (aka “humble”) as I remember.