Amos Yong
Assistant Professor of Theology, Bethel College, St. Paul, MN 

Introduction

During the past ten to fifteen years, what began as an effort to revisit the classical Calvinist-Arminian debates regarding divine sovereignty and human freedom has evolved into a heated controversy involving Reformed, Arminian and Wesleyan thinkers along with others who consider themselves within the evangelical tradition.1 The most recent debates have been fueled by developments within the Arminian camp in the direction known as open theism.2 Among other points of difference, open theists argue that the traditional Arminian adherence to the doctrine of divine foreknowledge does not in fact allow for a fully relational engagement between God and free creatures since, to put it simply, a God who foreknows whether or not Amos will pray with Tom about his decision regarding graduate school will also foreknow Tom’s free choice of which school to attend and thus arrive “too late,” as it were, for God to answer Amos’ prayer by influencing Tom’s deliberations. The central issue, open theists insist, involves choosing between a classical view of God which emphasizes God’s agency and sovereignty and an open theism which emphasizes genuine relationality between God and the world.

Various aspects of this debate within evangelicalism seem to have caught the attention of Wesleyan theologians and philosophers.3 Given Wesley’s well-known synergism, it is clear that Wesleyan sympathies would reside with those who resist the monergism of the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition.4 More to the point, their intuitions would also appear to lead many Wesleyans in the direction of a relational metaphysics over and against one that under-emphasizes and neglects creaturely response and responsibility.5 It is therefore not surprising to find in the text written for Wesleyan seminarians that on the question of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents, emphasis is placed on the importance of God’s love making true novelty possible. In fact, the author not only decries the “endless wrangling over whether God knows all the details of future events,” but he also insists that “It is a mistake to think God’s own being is somehow endangered or diminished unless He knows the future absolutely as though it were the past.” The philosophical hermeneutic that is applied theologically on this question is acknowledged to be derived from the work of Charles Hartshorne, without, of course, acknowledging Hartshorne’s process-relational metaphysical commitments.6

In applying Whitehead’s understanding of the God-world relationship to the task of revisioning the traditional concept of God, Hartshorne’s neo-classical theism is fully relational to the point of postulating a dipolarity in the divine reality. Within the framework of Hartshorne’s dipolar theism, God’s omniscience extends exhaustively to all past and present actualities, but does not cover future actualities insofar as the future consists of only possibilities rather than actualities. In a sense, then, God’s omniscience of actualities increases as possibilities become actualities. Arguably, what is gained is a fully relational view of God and the world such that God actually interacts with and responds to creaturely actions and developments. Correlatively, in neo-classical theism, the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is jettisoned because it is not clearly supported by the biblical text and because it would appear to be an exception to the metaphysical scheme in asserting that at least in one particular event—that of the original creation—God acted unilaterally rather than relationally or reciprocally within the dipolarity of ultimate reality. In its place, neo-classical theists often think of divine creativity as a “creation out of chaos,” referring to the everlasting work of God with the preexistent “other pole,” metaphorically understood at times as matter, at times as the world. In this framework, God’s interaction with the world is genuinely everlasting, thus confirming relationality as axiomatic to that which is ultimately real.7

Hartshorne’s influence on contemporary philosophical theology is probably much more widespread than many realize. This influence has taken various forms, the most obvious of which is the emergence of neo-classical or process theism. On the other hand, others doing work in philosophical theology have not been able to proceed without engaging the neo-classical vision regardless of their philosophical, theological or ecclesial commitments. This is the case both with regard to contemporary neo-Thomists, those involved in the science and religion dialogues, and participants in the East-West dialogues.8 Not surprisingly, then, those whose intentions have been to revision classical theism have also engaged Hartshorne’s ideas. And, this is has certainly been the case with regard to the specific question of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents. On this topic, Hartshorne’s neo-classical theism has served both as a point of dialogue for those wishing to do theology constructively, and as a foil for those who believe his vision wrongheaded.

My purpose here is to explore how neo-classical ideas have been brought to bear on the question of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents in ways that can be said to preserve or accentuate authentic relationality between God and the world in general, and with free agents in particular. To do so, I wish to focus on a number of recent philosophical theologians whose metaphysics of possibility have been forged in dialogue with the Whiteheadian-Hartsthornian tradition. One, Gregory Boyd, takes Hartshorne’s relational metaphysic in the direction of open theism. The other two, Richard Creel and Robert Cummings Neville, respectively re-appropriate and reject process philosophical and theological categories in retrieving—again, respectively—kataphatic and apophatic versions of the classical view of God. Now what is striking about Creel’s view of divine omniscience is its similarities to Boyd’s open theist view. However, whereas Creel revises Hartshorne’s doctrine of creation out of chaos in the direction of a creatio ex plenum—the plenum referring to the eternal realm of possibilities that exist as the other “pole” of the divine reality—Boyd’s evangelicalism appears to lead to retention of the classical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo even if (as I will argue) such is reconceptualized in the direction of a creatio ex mente Dei—a creation out of the divine mind. In contrast to both Creel and Boyd, Neville’s retrieval of classical apophaticism restores a robust doctrine of creatio ex nihilo to the conversation.

In what follows, I wish to summarize Creel’s doctrine of possibility and divine omniscience within the broader context of his doctrine of creatio ex plenum (§ I), compare and contrast it to Boyd’s open theist notions of possibility, divine knowledge and creatio ex mente Dei (§ II), and query about the viability of these proposals over and against Neville’s doctrine of creation ex nihilo (§ III). My goal is to compare and contrast the problematic that these various doctrines of possibilities and creation pose for the doctrine of divine knowledge and the metaphysics of relationality (§ IV). I need to be clear, however, about what this paper does not do. This is not, first and foremost, an inquiry into the doctrine of relationality.9 Further, I do not here attempt an in-depth treatment of the problem of divine omniscience in general or divine foreknowledge in particular.10 Finally, my professional training in religious studies and theology means that my treatment of possibility will not engage the extensive work done on that topic by analytic philosophers.11 Rather, what follows asks about the nature of possibility vis-à-vis the doctrine of creation, and what that might mean for the doctrine of divine omniscience of future contingent actions of free creatures. My fundamental question thus focuses on whether or not a relational metaphysic is jeopardized by the metaphysical and theological commitments one makes regarding the doctrines of possibility and of creation. I therefore wish to step back from the details of the contemporary debate on divine omniscience even while using it as a point of entry toward reassessing the larger issues from two different angles—that of creation and possibility—in the hopes that these other perspectives will shed further light on the complexities involved.

I. Creel, Omniscience, and Creatio Ex Plenum

In his Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (1986), Richard Creel argues for the concept of a God who knows all possibilities as future and actualities only after the fact, but nevertheless can never be surprised by what happens since possibilities are understood to lie across a continuum apprehendable by the divine mind. Creel’s defense of this position is set against the backdrop of a neo-process doctrine of creatio ex plenum (over and against the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo) developed in dialogue with the pragmatist metaphysics of C. S. Peirce and the process metaphysics of Hartshorne. Yet Creel’s doctrine of omniscience can only be understood within the context of his wrestling with Charles Hartshorne’s attack on Aquinas’ doctrine of impassibility.12 Hartshorne’s process or neo-classical theism posits a God passible in nature, will, feeling, and knowledge. With regard to the last mentioned item, for Hartshorne, God knows exhaustively past and present actualities, and future possibilities as vague and indefinitely. He appears to have arrived at his position at least in part from an intense study of Charles Sanders Peirce’s doctrine of continuity.13 The latter held that

a continuum is something whose possibilities of determination no multitude of individuals can exhaust. Thus, no collection of points placed upon a continuous line can fill the line so as to leave no room for others, although that collection had a point for every value towards which numbers, endlessly continued into decimal places, could approximate; nor if it contained a point for every possible permutation of all such values.14

For Peirce, then, possibilities lay across a continuum. Because a continuum consists of an infinite number of individual, determinable points, until a possible point is picked out or determined as an individual, it is only vaguely, but not actually, known.15 We can have fairly definite notions of continuums as a whole—e.g., a yardstick or redness—but only vague and indeterminate ideas of unactualized possibilities within those continuums—e.g., a length longer than two feet but shorter than three, or any possible shade of red. In Hartshorne’s neo-classical framework, then, indeterminate possibilities are continuously achieving determinate actuality in the creative process. This means that the scope of God’s knowledge increases as new individual things come into being. More specifically, until the actual emergence of a possible individual thing, that thing cannot be foreknown in a determinate sense since it lies within a continuum which by definition contains an infinite number of determinable individuals between any two previously determinate points. Certainly, God knows unactualized individuals contained in a continuum, but only as vague and indeterminate possibilities. Creel summarizes the Peircean-inspired vision of Hartshorne as follows:

God, as we, must wait upon creativity to find out what is possible because we can only find out from the actual what is determinately possible. Prior to the actualization of possibility, i.e., the specific determination of possibility that creativity brings about from the infinitude of possibilities, we can only make guesses more or less approximate, depending on the range of our experience, from what is and has been actual to what is possible, e.g., from these shades of blue to the possibility of another shade of blue somehow between them.16

Creel agrees with Peirce and Hartshorne on these matters. Yet his overarching project is to defend a revised version of the classical understanding of impassibility, even with regard to God’s knowledge. How can this be argued, given his agreement with Peirce on the nature of possibilities as lying across a continuum? Creel proceeds in his argument by reflecting on isosceles triangles. In this example, two sticks of equal length secured at one end only can rotate from a fully closed to a fully open position of 180° and in the process circumscribe every possible angle of an isosceles triangle. In principle, there are an infinite number of angles captured in this one continuum. Yet no one stopping point will constitute an angle which does not conform to the measurements imposed by the length of the sticks and their rotation. Therefore, Creel concludes that our knowledge of the continuum is exhaustive even if it does not contain definitely the full (infinite) set of triangles inherent within it:

No isosceles triangle can henceforth come into existence the angularity of which could surprise us. For any isosceles triangle that ever becomes actual, we already know, and not merely in a vague and indeterminate sense, that is angularity is possible….Hence, to understand the triangle as a continuum is to know independently of specific, actual triangles the possibility of all triangles that ever become actual subsequent to that understanding. If an individual’s understanding of this is eternal, then, of course, to that individual no triangle that ever becomes actual will be unfamiliar.17

Creel therefore agrees with Peirce that possibilities lie across infinite continuums, and with Hartshorne that God cannot foreknow possibilities as definite prior to their becoming actual. Yet he denies the latter’s conclusion that because God does not foreknow the future actually, God might be surprised or even disappointed by what happens. Creel puts it this way in a passage that deserves to be reproduced at length:

[T]here is no reason to think that [God] would not know in advance of every actualization of an individual every property and relation that any individual might instantiate. This is possible because God knows possibilities in the mode of continua, and to know a continuum perfectly, as God would, is to know exhaustively and simultaneously an infinite range of possibilities of a certain type—shape, size, color, number, feeling, etc. In knowing a continuum and knowing that it can be decided at any point, one knows all the possibilities that can be instantiated by any individual that will (or could) ever exemplify the universal of which that continuum is the fulfillment. In line with this position I believe that the expression “the realm of essence” is most meaningfully applied to universals and their combinations understood as continua. To know the realm of essence is to know the range of logical possibilities, i.e., of simple qualities and relations and their possible combinations…. We must, then, beware of an ambiguity in, “God cannot know x before x becomes actual.” Taken as meaning, “God cannot know x as actual when x is not actual,” it is analytically true and acknowledges Hartshorne’s point that no one can know an object as actual before it is actual. Taken as meaning, “When x becomes actual God will learn something about possibility that he did not know before,” it is false because of God’s exhaustive knowledge of the continua that any object must exemplify, and it acknowledges the classical point that God learns nothing from the flow of events that he would need to know in order to decide his will in general or in specific.18

From this, Creel concludes that God’s indefinite knowledge of all possibilities is sufficient for God to be able to anticipate all actualities.

The question arises, however, as to what exactly is the ontological status of the continua of logical possibilities that Creel is talking about. In Hartshorne’s neo-classical framework, creativity has to do with actualizing possibilities, and these derive only from actualities: “there is no possibility apart from actuality. Possibilities are possibilities of actualities. From nothing nothing becomes.”19 Neo-classical theism therefore proceeds from the assumption of the eternity of the world and understands divine creation as God’s eternally bringing about new possibilities from actualities. This is the doctrine of creation out of chaos whereby God’s creative work in, with, and through the actual otherness of the world has extended perhaps over an endless number of successive cosmic epochs. Because the world is eternal, possibilities are also eternal, forever producing novel actualities through the creative process.

Creel seems to agree that logical possibilities are eternal. He does not, however, seriously consider either the merits or demerits of Hartshorne’s neo-classical doctrine of creation. At the same time, Creel believes the classical doctrine of creation ex nihilo to be incoherent since, on the one hand, ex nihilo nihil fit, and on the other hand, to say that God creates out of Godself leads to pantheism as what is created cannot then be easily distinguished from the creator. Creel’s argument proceeds as follows:

Theism rejects the idea that…possibilities are resident in God because that would imply pantheism, i.e., that God becomes what is created and that, therefore, the world is God. But if the possibilities of creation are not resident in God, they must be resident in something external to God or be resident in nothing. Nothing, however, cannot have a possibility resident in it; if it could, it would not be nothing; it would be something. Therefore creatio ex nihilo implies either pantheism (God creates out of nothing other than himself) or absurdity (God creates out of nothing, not even himself).20

He concludes that God must create from something other than Godself, hence, creatio ex plenum.

Creel’s plenum is thus the infinite reservoir of logical possibilities. This is not a new idea, having previously been discussed under a variety of other labels in the history of Western thought, viz., the absolute, the void, “the absolutely infinite determinable,” a limiting notion of concept, the logical predeterminate.21 He supports this notion of the plenum through an analysis of the idea of possibility:

The concept of an unactualized possibility is a triadic concept involving three notions: (1) that which can be but is not, (2) that out of which (1) can be actualized, and (3) that by means of which (1) can be actualized from (2). Assumed here are the following principles: (A) potentiality must exist in something; (B) only that which is actual can actualize a potentiality; (C) potentialities are not causally efficacious.22

God thereby creates out of the possibilities of the plenum, which is distinct from God, rather than creating the plenum itself. Yet Creel recognizes that the notion of creatio ex plenum is not easily digestible. He queries

What kind of reality is the plenum? I find it difficult to say. If it exists, it exists necessarily, not contingently, but it does not exist as an individual or as a thing. Rather, it is the passive possibility of there being an individual other than God—God being the only individual that exists necessarily. The plenum must be actual in some sense, but not in the sense that it was once potential or could have been. This means it will be a different type of actuality from the things that are actualized from it. Its reality consists of it being determinable, not determinate, whereas the reality of the things that are actualized from it consists of their being determinate as well as determinable. The plenum is not this or that; it is the passive possibility of this or that.23

Yet at the same time, Creel is also careful to specify that the plenum

is not and could not be created by God because it is the passive ground of his omnipotence. Apart from it God would not be omnipotent because he would have nothing upon which to exercise his power; therefore apart from it he could not be God; therefore apart from it there would be no God. Hence, as well as not being able to create the plenum, God could not destroy it because in destroying it he would destroy himself—but he exists necessarily and therefore cannot perish or be destroyed, not even by himself….” As important, however, is to note that the absolute “is not something in addition to God. It is not above God or superior to God. It is not a GOD above God. It should not be deified by capitalization. The absolute is imply God and the plenum in their mutual dependence, a dependence which puts not limitation on God but is a necessary condition of the reality of God.24

What then is the cash value of Creel’s theory so far with regard to divine knowledge? Two points need to be made in this regard. First, with respect to the abstract or vague continua of possibilities of the plenum, God’s knowledge is impassible. With respect to concrete possibilities, however, God’s knowledge is passible since such possibilities follow from actual existents that emerge from the creative process. The second and more important point is that while God knows the future only as abstract possibilities, yet whatever actualizes in the future cannot catch God by surprise since their possibilities were included within the infinite continua “contained” in the plenum of which God does have exhaustive knowledge. This enables him to secure the immutability of the divine will since “God’s will has always been resolved with regard to every possibility, and because it is impossible that God could improve upon his decisions by the discovery of some hitherto unknown fact, it is unreasonable to believe that he might want to change his mind or would change his mind.”25 This is because “God knows by means of continua and not by means of disjuncts what each individual can do, God has always provided for whatever a free agent might do. There are no disjuncts between which we can choose an alternative that will catch God unprepared.”26

Critical questions can certainly be raised regarding various aspects of Creel’s proposal, both on its own terms, as well as his interpretation and use of either Peirce or Hartshorne.27 I want to briefly examine two aspects of Creel’s thinking, one philosophical and the other theological. First, I wonder about Creel’s notion that possibilities are infinite. What kind of infinites are they? Perhaps it might be helpful to ask if possibilities consist of sets of closed infinites or open infinites. It appears that a boundless or open infinite is something quite different from a closed infinite in that the latter can be traversed (as the solutions to Zeno’s paradoxes demonstrate), while the former cannot. Briefly put, if in fact all possibilities can be conceived of as sets of closed infinites, then yes, God can have exhaustive knowledge of all possibilities within that continuum (all of Creel’s examples are drawn from what could be characterized as closed continua). Following this line of thought, possibilities are not open-endedly indeterminate, but are determinable precisely within the limits set by the continuum. This also renders intelligible the idea of human freedom, even in a libertarian sense that requires both ability and opportunity. Human freedom is not arbitrary in the sense of not being limited at all by an open infinite. Rather, human freedom is boundaried, set within determined limits, yet not in that sense being fully determined itself. In short, humans are self-determinable, perhaps with even infinite possibilities of self-actualization, but all within certain prescribed limits within a closed infinite.

But, perhaps the question is whether this distinction between open and closed infinites is valid. First, in what sense can an infinite legitimately said to be limited or boundaried? Perhaps Creel would response that the various closed continua are simply abstract demarcations conforming the categories of thought to the reality of experience, but that these subsets can be more precisely understood as subsisting within the plenum. In this case, the plenum itself taken as a whole would be the true open infinite. As a rejoinder, however, does this move not break down Creel’s argument for the divine knowledge of all possibilities from analogies drawn from closed continua? Further, the fact that the plenum is an open infinite means that there are an infinite number of closed infinite continua. But, if in fact the plenum is truly an open infinite, it is to that extent indeterminate and indistinguishable not only from nothing, but also perhaps from God.

This leads to the theological question: in Creel’s proposal, is or is not the plenum a limiting reality for God. On the one hand, it is not limiting (of God or otherwise) in that it is infinite. On the other hand, the plenum is limiting in that it is a necessary condition of and for God’s reality. Creel does qualify the limitation in this way: “God does not stand out from the plenum; he stands over against the plenum. The plenum does not stand out from God; it stands over against God; but it does not stand over against God in a limiting way; it stands over against God in a complementary way, as the convex side of a curve stands over against the concave side.”28 Regardless, if the plenum is limiting, then it is determinate in that respect, and hence not infinite. If it is infinite (and hence not limiting), it is completely indeterminate and, hence, indistinguishable neither from God nor from nothing. Now, the two horns of the dilemma for Creel appear to be this: either admit that the mutually dependent God-and-the-plenum are infinite and thus the indeterminateness from which all determinateness springs;29 or, succumb to the central axiom of process theism with regard to God as dipolar.

I am not interested, at this point, in deciding on either Creel’s orthodoxy or the viability of his proposal regarding omniscience as such.30 What caught my attention initially about Divine Impassibility was its potential usefulness by open theists in their efforts to articulate a fully relational theology in the current debate regarding divine foreknowledge. The time spent understanding Creel’s position should now pay dividends in our examination of the continuities and discontinuities between Creel and Greg Boyd’s version of open theism regarding God’s omniscience.

II. Boyd, Omniscience, and Creatio Ex Mente Dei

Greg Boyd’s recently published version of open theism reveals a view of God’s omniscience that is similar to and yet different from Creel’s.31 To begin with, both Boyd and Creel believe God knows the future only as possible, but not as actual. This is because the future is not yet real, and given that, there is nothing actually to be known about the future. Yet Boyd goes farther than Creel in submitting that God knows not only possibilities regarding the future, but also the probabilities associated with those possibilities. God’s knowledge of these probabilities means that God can anticipate the future in great detail. Therefore, because “God knows all possibilities and all probabilities (as well as all settled realities) perfectly..., he can be trusted to inspire us to avoid certain future possibilities he sees coming.”32 Of course, sometimes, it is the improbabilities rather than the probabilities that actually materialize. In that case, God is surprised. But to be surprised does not mean to be shocked, nor does it mean that God comes to find out something unanticipated. With Creel, Boyd holds that God certainly “knows all future possibilities throughout all eternity. He is certain about everything that could be and thus is never caught off guard.”33

A question arises, however, about the apparent difference between Creel’s doctrine that God knows possibilities only vaguely and indefinitely, and Boyd’s assertion that God can know the probabilities of possibilities. I’m not sure that this necessarily means that Boyd disagrees with Creel that possibilities lie across a continuum and can therefore be known only in a vague and indeterminate sense. To my knowledge, Boyd nowhere uses the category of continua in his formulating a theory of possibility. At the same time, assuming Peirce, Hartshorne, and Creel to be right just for the sake of argument, on Boyd’s account, God’s knowledge of probabilities could simply mean that God is better able to approximate the range of infinite possibilities that may actualize. Even though an infinite number of possibilities lie between any two points on a continuum, yet a compressed continuum reveals a much lesser range of difference between the two points than a wider continuum would hold. In short, God’s knowledge of probabilities means God is able to “zero in” on the series of individuals that have a better chance of actualizing from the continuum in question. If we agree that possibilities lie across a continuum, this seems to me to be an advantage over Creel’s formulation with regard to divine omniscience.

What is important is that Boyd agrees with Creel that “possibilities are a crucial aspect of reality, even for God.”34 What, however, is the ontological status of possibilities in Boyd’s mind? At one point, Boyd writes, “Possibilities, unlike actualities, are eternal. Whatever has or ever shall come to pass was always possible, as is whatever could have or might still come to pass. Possibilities are thus eternally in God’s omniscient mind.”35 At another point, however, he says, “God is absolutely certain about the range of possibilities contained in this openness, for he is the one who created it.”36 The context of the latter statement, however, refers to God’s having pre-established the general structure or plot of a story, with free creatures determining the details. This seems to indicate that Boyd understands possibilities in at least two senses: logical possibilities, which are eternal, and ontological possibilities, which are created by God.37 His affirming the latter could be seen as a means of acknowledging the force of the idea that possibilities derive or emerge from existing actualities. Now while Hartshorne understands this to require the eternity of the world, and while Creel posits the eternally “actual” plenum, Boyd insists that all ontological possibilities derive ultimately from God’s decision to initially create the world. Apart from the world, only logical possibilities exist eternally, in the mind of God. With the creative act, ontological possibilities now “spring” into existence, following from the actuality of creation.38

It should be clear, however, that Boyd’s doctrine of creation differs from Creel’s. Though both affirm that logical possibilities “exist” eternally, this “existence” should be qualified insofar as Boyd understands such to be internal to God, in the divine mind, while Creel believes such to be external to God, in the plenum.39 This leads Boyd to affirm a more the traditional doctrine of creation. Now Boyd would certainly affirm the classical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, especially if the only alternative available is process theism’s notion of creation out of chaos.40 However, it might be better to call Boyd’s view creatio ex mente Dei—God’s creating the world out of possibilities resident in the divine mind.41 He argues this position at length in an earlier book wherein he forges a sophisticated philosophical theology in dialogue also with Charles Hartshorne.42 On the latter’s neo-classical framework, God and the world are considered to be two interdependent poles: God as primordially in Godself, considered in the abstract, and the world as the actuality of God, considered in concrete terms. To repeat, Hartshorne’s metaphysics posits the world as the eternally actual source of all possibilities with which God works. In this framework, God decides which possibilities would be best actualized, and lures the world in that direction. Given the freedom inherent in the creative processes of the world, however, God’s desires are not always accomplished.

There is much about Hartshorne’s neo-classical or process vision that Boyd appreciates. At the same time, Boyd thinks that unless two key revisions demanded by the internal logic of Hartshorne’s philosophical theology are made, process theism will ultimately prove incoherent. First, on the more philosophical issue, Hartshorne’s metaphysics fails to provide an adequate account of how abstract, vague, indeterminate possibilities become concrete, definite, determinate actualities. This is the problem of causation. Boyd’s revision of process metaphysics includes what he calls the “ontological category of dispositions.”43 Dispositions are the necessary and sufficient ground, or power, of causation; they are an incorporeal yet abiding reality; they are the aesthetic subjective aims of any thing; in short, dispositions mediate between possibility and actuality, ground both of them, but are neither of the two. In fact, dispositions function cosmologically to guide the possibilities of becoming. Boyd puts it this way: “This ontologically grounded dispositional understanding of aesthetic subjective aims sets the parameters of intelligibility for a future act or event without necessitating the totality of this act or event. It preserves the openness of the future while articulating the aesthetic dimension of reality just as the Process concept of an aesthetic subject aim does.”44 With this move, Boyd accomplishes one of two revisions of Hartshorne’s dipolar construct toward a trinitarian metaphysics.

The second, more theological, issue revolves around Boyd’s rejection of Hartshorne’s doctrine of creation out of chaos since this implies the eternal interdependence of God and the world, and since it compromises the classical doctrine of God’s aseity.45 He thinks that both conclusions entail the denial of divine graciousness in creating, sustaining and redeeming the world—a cost too high even in exchange for much that is attractive about Hartshorne’s neo-classical theism. In order to preserve the truths of the latter’s metaphysics without the liabilities, what is needed is a philosophical theology that conceives “of a being who a) is necessarily actual; b) is self-sufficient in this actuality; c) is open to express Godself in contingent modes; d) is internally relational; and e) enjoys within Godself an unsurpassable intensity of aesthetic satisfaction.”46 This leads, Boyd concludes, to a God who is “necessarily relational to Godself,” thus alleviating the need for the necessity of a non-divine world.47

More important, the ontological category of dispositions previously developed supports such a relational and dynamic view of God in two ways. First, it enables understanding of the eternal relationships that comprise God’s reality as internally disposed; here, Boyd appeals not only to the biblical and Christian tradition, but also connects with contemporary models of God that emphasize the intra-trinitarian relations of the divine life. Second, it enables understanding of how an eternally self-related being can be externally disposed—e.g., so as to create a world—albeit not necessarily so. Only such a self-sufficient and internally related God—a triune God, as understood by orthodox Christianity—can be the creative source of the contingent world.48 The upshot of all this is that Hartshorne’s dipolar theism is reconceived along robustly trinitarian lines in order to account both for the logical possibility of the world in the mind of God and for the various ontological possibilities in the world as emergent from the world’s actuality. Rather than creating the world out of chaos, God creates the world out of Godself—more specifically, out of or from the logical possibilities eternally existing in the mind of the divine relationality. The difference between Boyd’s inherently relational theism and the medieval notion of divine simplicity, however, needs to be emphasized. The former’s robust relational trinitarianism seems capable of supporting eternal logical possibilities in ways that the ancient and medieval theologians who affirmed divine simplicity could not. For the latter, it would seem that creation is either necessary in some sense (e.g., as in the medieval Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world), or completely arbitrary (e.g., as in Scotus’ voluntarism).

Is there a problem with Boyd’s notion of creatio ex mente Dei? Not if Boyd’s creatio ex mente Dei is understood as equivalent, for all intents and purposes, to the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo long asserted by orthodox Christianity.49 Two other complexes of questions, however, arise on Boyd’s account. The first revolves around the notion of logical possibilities eternally existing in the mind of God. The second is the problem that plagues all social models of the Trinity: how to avoid tri-theism and affirm the monotheistic faith of historical Christianity; more specifically, how does one account for the unity of the three, or how does one prevent the intra-trinitarian relations from fracture?50 In wishing to affirm that relationality not only spans the “gap” between God and the world but also is intrinsic to divinity itself, the problem of the one-and-the-many appears to have been transposed from the realm of cosmology to that of theology proper. The force of this question can be better appreciated when contrasted with Neville’s doctrine of creation.

III. Neville, Possibility, and Creatio Ex Nihilo

In accordance with the argument developed so far in this paper, I propose to discuss Neville’s notion of creatio ex nihilo in the context of his theory of possibility. Neville agrees with Hartshorne and Creel that possibilities derive from actualities. He would also agree with Boyd in distinguishing between logical and ontological possibilities—or, in Neville’s terms, formal and real possibilities. More specifically, however, Neville has consistently argued that possibilities are the structures of the future. This conclusion emerges in his thinking over the course of extensive and prolonged engagement both with Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy and Whitehead’s process cosmology.51

I began this paper by noting Creel’s and Hartshorne’s dependence on Peirce’s doctrine of continuity. To be fair, it should be mentioned that the idea of continuity is Peirce is not only an epistemic one connected with the structure of possibility, but also a metaphysical one regarding the structure of reality itself. For Peirce, reality is itself continuous. Neville might agree with Peirce if “reality” is limited to spatiality. He faults Peirce, however, for being unable to account for temporal reality since the doctrine of continuity requires that an infinite number of moments exist between past and present, and between present and future. The question this raises then is not only how becoming occurs, but also how past, present and future can be distinguished from each other.

Neville’s deep philosophical indebtedness to Peirce does not keep him from resolving this particular conundrum by recourse to Whitehead’s atomic theory of time. He notes that while “the pragmatic theory…of continuity does not allow for a significant distinction of the present (in which change takes place) from either the past (which is finished) or the future (which is mere possibility)…, pragmatism’s weakness [is] Whiteheadian philosophy’s strength.”52 Time’s flow requires that the past, present and future be distinguishable. The past is actual; the future is possible; the present is the dividing line between the other two. More specifically, Neville’s metaphysics understands all realities as being necessarily composed of what he calls essential and contingent features—the former constitutive of a thing’s integrity and values, the latter of that same thing’s relations to other things. The essential features of the past are its finishedness, objectivity, everlasting fixity; that of the present are its creative energy and its decision-making character; that of the future is its normativeness regarding the formal and real structures of possibility. Yet, past, present and future also have contingent features relative to each other. The past conditions present actualities and future possibilities; the present mediates the past and the future; the possibilities of the future emerge out of the fixed multiplicities of the past and the harmonizing activities of the present. These combine as Neville’s doctrine of temporality: “the harmony of the respective timely essential features and the conditions the modes of time give one another.”53

It will be noticed from this brief overview that emergence of the future possibilities out of past actualities as synthesized by the present in Neville’s scheme of temporality is close to Boyd’s notion of future possibilities emerging out of past actualities being disposed in certain directions. Now recall that for Boyd, logical possibilities are eternal, by which he means, I take it, everlastingly existing (in the divine mind), even “before” or “prior to” the creative act. Neville also affirms the eternality of logical possibilities. However, Neville’s eternity is simply the togetherness of the modes of time, rather than the combination of created temporality with the “antecedent” sequentiality of the divine life. For Neville, eternity is the ontological context that allows past, present and future to cohere, thus accounting for the personal continuity and moral responsibility otherwise absent in Whitehead’s atomistic theory of time.54 Whereas Creel locates logical possibilities in the plenum, and Boyd places them in the eternal mind of the divine relationality, Neville locates logical possibilities nowhere in particular. Rather, they are the eternal structures of the temporal future. In order to follow Neville’s reasoning here, it is necessary to understand how he sees his theory of creatio ex nihilo as superior to alternative doctrines of creation.

Why would Neville take issue with Creel’s creatio ex plenum? He would point first of all to the vacuity of Creel’s notion of the plenum. Being infinite, Neville would then query whether or not the plenum is a coherent notion given its indeterminateness. If Creel responds that the plenum consists of an infinite continua of determinables, Neville would push the question about what it is that makes these determinations. At this point, it will be recalled that for Creel, God is the active aspect of the absolute on the other side of the passive plenum. Now, given Boyd’s criticism of dipolar theism, one might be inclined to adopt his dispositional and relational theism in conjunction with Creel’s plenum as the answer to Neville’s question. But, this is not possible since Boyd rejects the notion of the plenum as “external” to God. Further, even if Boyd were convinced that a plenum “external” to God is acceptable, he has accomplished a fundamental revision of Hartshorne’s dipolar theism in the direction of a trinitarian metaphysics. Boyd’s system includes not only the actuality of God and the plenum of possibilities (Creel’s position), but also the dispositional nature of ultimately reality that enables the former to emerge from that latter. So, the more fundamental question is whether Boyd’s trinitarian vision provides a satisfactory response to Neville’s query?

Neville’s counter-question to Boyd’s creatio ex mente Dei is whether or not God is determinate prior to creating the world. Clearly, Boyd’s response is affirmative.55 Neville would then raise a series of questions for Boyd’s theism. First, if deity is determinate, then is not deity’s infinitude denied? Is not deity then limited insofar as it is determinate in just this way and not that? Second, would Boyd say that logical possibilities derive from actualities? If not, then how does his position differ from Creel’s notion of possibilities as contained in the plenum? If so, then what actuality does logical possibilities derive from? Boyd’s answer would probably be the mind of the intra-relational divine reality. But if logical possibilities are eternal, as is the mind of the intra-relational divine reality, then how does one distinguish between the two? In other words, if logical possibilities have always “existed,” how can they be said to “derive” from anything, even the mind of God? How, for example, would new thoughts “arise”—specifically as in the age-old question of God having the thought of creating just this world at just this “time” and not “before”? Boyd might respond that the trinitarian God has eternally been disposed to create the world. If that is the case, as shall be seen, his position is not far from Neville’s.

Third, however, the question about the nature of logical possibilities can be pressed. Besides being eternal in the mind of God, are logical possibilities also infinite, as Creel claims the plenum to be? If so, then how can a determinate deity comprehend in the divine mind the infinitude of logical possibilities? If not, then logical possibilities are not only eternal, but they are determinate in some sense. Then what is it that makes eternal possibilities determinate? Boyd might answer, dispositions. But, dispositions flow from actualities and mediate possibilities and actualities. One cannot account for logical possibilities by pointing to “antecedent” or “other” dispositions since these latter would both be problematic for something which by definition is eternal and infinite.

Neville’s responses to these questions leads to his theory of creatio ex nihilo.56 On his terms, logical and real possibilities are essentially determinate insofar as they are the formal and axiological structures of the future derived from the creative act of God and emergent from present moments of becoming, but contingently vague or indeterminate with regard to future actualities. It is thus divine creation that determines possibilities rather than the other way around.57 Being created, logical possibilities as structures of the future are thereby eternal not in the sense of being “prior to” or “before” creation, but in the sense that they always exist (note, without scare quotes) vis-à-vis created temporality—shifting constantly as the present synthesizes the past. This also means, however, that the creation can be understood only as an act of an infinite—better, indeterminate—deity. This leads, Neville believes, a robust doctrine of creatio ex nihilo wherein the nihil is taken seriously. For Neville, a determinate creator cannot be just another determinate “thing” besides all other determinations of being. If that were the case, God and the world would require a larger ontological context to unite them together. It is better to see the creative act as the ultimate ontological reality—the one grounding the many—rather than an attempt to find “something” determinate behind or before that act. The manyness of the world finds thus its unity in the ontological act of creatio ex nihilo, and relationality pervades the created order through and through precisely because everything—each determination of being—is grounded in the singularity of the creative act of God. On Neville’s account, then, God gives himself the features of divinity precisely through creation. Creation is an eternal act from which emerge both the world’s actualities, dynamic becoming, and possibilities, and God’s character as creator. Apart from creation, God is not, nor is there anything determinate—hence, creatio ex nihilo.

My heretofore silence regarding Neville’s doctrine of omniscience should now be evident. Neville would not deny that God is omniscient; rather, he would relocate the concept of divine omniscience within the framework of his philosophical theology. Unlike Boyd, Neville denies that we can say anything about God prior to, before, or apart from creation. Insofar as the doctrine of omniscience has generally been understood to include God’s foreknowledge, including knowledge of the world prior to its creation, Neville would insist that such a notion is incoherent. However, insofar as the created product—the world—reveals personal creatures, Neville would affirm that God is personal, knowledgeable, and, in that sense, omniscient. At the same time, and this is central to the problem that Neville confronts, insofar as the world includes tragic and painful features, God is also, in those senses, responsible for just those aspects of the created order. Not only is the problem of evil perhaps intractable on Neville’s account, but the very moral character of God as creator of just this kind of world with its ills and evils may be open to question. It would appear that the deity that is portrayed in this robust version of creatio ex nihilo is somewhat different from what classical Christian theology has long held.

But, how far is Neville’s theism from that of orthodoxy? In affirming God as actus purus—the creative act being eternal in the sense of holding together past, present, and future— and in prioritizing the divine will rather than the divine being, Neville is as close to a postmodern Thomist and Scotist as one could get. Further, insofar as he sees the entire creation as displaying the glory of God’s creative act, he counts himself within the Augustinian and Calvinist traditions. Finally, in the pursuit of inquiry through a “quadrilateral” approach to authority—Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience—Neville claims his Wesleyan roots.58 Certainly one way to negotiate the question of Neville’s “orthodoxy” is to distinguish between apophatic and kataphatic ways of expressing the divine mystery. While he agrees that his view of divinity can be understood as referring to an infinite God, he prefers the language of indeterminateness. Classical theists, of course, have consistently maintained that God is infinite. Specifying the way in which infinitude differs from indeterminateness, however, has been a perennial source of contention. Ongoing discussions on just this topic with my colleague here at Bethel, Le Ron Shults, has convinced me that his attempt to articulate an “infinite trinitarian God” and my effort to appropriate certain Nevillean insights toward an “apophatic trintarianism” are parallel quests with a multitude of converging moments. On both accounts, it is a mistake to think of God as a subject in Cartesian and modern Western individualistic categories.59 At the same time, on Neville’s terms, if God knows anything at all, God certainly knows the actualities of the past, the present’s processes of becoming, and the possible structures, norms, and values of the future in such a way that God cannot be surprised by anything that does happen. In that case, on a practical level, do Neville, Boyd, and even Creel ultimately disagree on this question?

IV. Conclusion

That Creel, Boyd, and Neville have all forged their philosophical theologies partially in dialogue with the neo-classical vision of Whitehead and Hartshorne makes for an informative conversation among this trio. Their theological visions, however, differ drastically. For Creel, God has eternally indexed the divine will to the vaguely and indefinitely known infinite continua of possibilities in the plenum. For Boyd, possibilities are eternally in the mind of the divine relationality, and the dispositional aspect of reality enables God to know not only the possibilities of the future but also its probabilities. For Neville, possibilities are simply the structures of the future created by God ex nihilo; God’s “knowledge” and God’s “will” come together in this transcendent and eternal—meaning, again, the togetherness of all times—act of creation. Creel’s success in developing a more relational understanding of God’s interaction with free creatures may be offset—at least so far as evangelicals and perhaps even Wesleyans are concerned—by his closeness to the dipolar theism of process theology. Further, it is difficult for Creel to account for the relationship between God and possibilities. Boyd and other open theists have certainly brought back to center stage the relational motif of Scripture in stark contrast to what might, comparatively speaking, be called the “quasi-relationality” of Arminian theological conceptions. The problem for Boyd might be the unity of the divine being, especially theologically in terms of its robust trinitarianism. Even if Boyd could resolve these questions, he may not as easily account for possibilities. In the meanwhile, Neville’s project that proceeds with commitments to empiricism characteristic of contemporary inquiry goes a long way toward re-establishing the viability of central insights of classical theism even as he retrieves neglected strands of that tradition. The problem for Neville is the nature of divinity itself, especially the moral character of God; while he can account for possibilities, he cannot account for God, at least not as traditionally conceived.

Perhaps one question that this paper raises with all seriousness is this: does God have options or does God create options? Cynthia Rigby has suggested that “God’s sovereignty should not be described as God’s freedom to choose among options but as God’s freedom to be exactly who God is.”60 Another way of stating the same point is to reflect on whether or not God’s freedom is the freedom to choose, establish, and create relationships, or whether or not God is intrinsically relational. Personally, I find the both notions appealing in different contexts of theological inquiry. I take this in some ways as an invitation toward a relationship with a mysterious and thoroughly unpredictable God.61 For those committed to historically Christian faith, however, what might be appealing for any number of reasons will never be sufficient to determine the dogmas of the Church if it does not have strong biblical support. So whereas the exegetes often say to the theologians after they’ve done their homework, “Here, figure out how all these details hold together coherently and systematically,” in this case, at this point in the argument, this theologian who has dared to dabble in philosophy turns to exegetes for help. The results of that inquiry and ongoing debate, however, do not appear to be forthcoming in the near future.62

References

1 Arguably, the initial shots were fired by Richard Rice, God's Foreknowledge and Man's Free Will (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1985), William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), and Clark Pinnock, et al., in Pinnock, ed., The Grace of God, The Will of Man: A Case for Arminianism (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1989). Another early engagement included Wesleyan participants: David Basinger and Randall Basinger, eds., Predestination and Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986). These initial salvos have been answered by those defending more classical views such as Molinism (William Lane Craig position in The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987]), and a revised Augustinian-Calvinism (e.g., Paul Helm, The Providence of God [Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1994]; and Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware, eds., The Grace of God, The Bondage of the Will, 2 vols. [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995]).

2 Led by Clark Pinnock, et al., The Openness of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994), and followed since by David Basinger, The Case for Freewill Theism: A Philosophical Assessment (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998), and Gregory Boyd (whose work I engage below). On the other side in this second round, see R. K. McGregor Wright, No Place for Sovereignty: What’s Wrong with Freewill Theism? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), Norman Geisler, Creating God in the Image of Man?: The New “Open” View of God—Neotheism’s Dangerous Drift (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1997), and Bruce A. Ware, God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000).

3 Two books that appeared early on in the debate were David Ingersoll Naglee, From Everlasting to Everlasting: John Wesley on Eternity and Time, 2 vols. (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), and Alan G. Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). More recent issues of the Wesleyan Theological Journal have featured Pinnock himself addressing Wesleyans: “Evangelical Theologians Facing the Future: Ancient and Future Paradigms,” WTJ 33:2 (1998): 7-28; Philip Meadows elaborating on a Wesleyan view of providence: “Providence, Chance, and the Problem of Suffering,” WTJ 34:2 (1999): 52-77; and Thomas Oord defending a process-relational metaphysic: “A Postmodern Wesleyan Philosophy and David Ray Griffin’s Postmodern Vision,” WTJ 35:1 (2000): 216-44.

4 In this regard, it is instructive to follow the journey of David Basinger, whose path toward Open Theism—what he calls free will theism—led through process theism and Molinism; see Basinger, Divine Power in Process Theism: A Philosophical Critique (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), and various articles published on middle knowledge from 1984-1993, some of which have been reprinted in David Basinger, William Hasker, and Eef Dekker, eds., Middle Knowledge: Theory and Applications (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000). The running motif through Basinger’s inquiry appears to be the concern to preserve a genuine sense of creaturely freedom within the constraints of divine intention and action.

5 See, e.g., Michael Lodahl, The Story of God: Wesleyan Theology and Biblical Narrative (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1994), esp. 86-89. Arguably, the classical Wesleyan statement of this conviction remains Lorenzo Dow McCabe’s nineteenth-century argument, The Foreknowledge of God and Cognate Themes in Theology and Philosophy (Cincinnati: Walden and Stowe, 1882).

6 Albert Truesdale, “THEISM: The Eternal, Personal, Creative God,” in Charles W. Carter, gen. ed., A Contemporary Wesleyan Theology: Biblical, Systematic, and Practical, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury Press of Zondervan Publishing House, 1983), 2: 107-48; quotations and discussion of divine omniscience from p. 126. For recent, constructive developments in the dialogue between evangelical thinkers and process theists, see John B. Cobb, Jr., and Clark H. Pinnock, eds., Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue Between Process and Free Will Theists (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000).

7 Hartshorne’s clearest and most succinct statements of these ideas are found in his Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984).

8 The names are legion. A sampling would include the work of neo-Thomists like Norris Clarke, Lewis Ford, and Joseph Bracken; science-and-religion scholars like Ted Peters, Philip Clayton, and Wolfhart Pannenberg; and interfaith ecumenists like John B. Cobb, Jr., David Ray Griffin, and John Berthrong.

9 It should come as no surprise that process theists have been at the forefront of developing relational theologies; see, e.g., Paul R. Sponheim, Faith and the Other: A Relational Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), and Joseph A. Bracken and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, eds., Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God (New York: Continuum, 1997). Other voices include Henry Jansen, Relationality and the Concept of God, Currents of Encounter 10 (Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 1995), and the work of feminist theologians like Sallie McFague.

10 I have addressed the pertinent issues on this larger problem elsewhere: “Time and Eternity, Divine (Fore-)Knowledge and Creaturely Freedom: Historical and Contemporary Issues,” in Thomas J. Oord, ed., Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to Issues (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press/Nazarene Publishing House, forthcoming); for a preview of a longer version of this paper, see http://www.bethel.edu/wcb/schools/BC/bib/ayong/3/index.html.

11 While I do not believe that this hurts my argument, I am open to be shown that I am wrong. At the very least, I hope that those conversant with the discussions about possibility and actuality done by analytical philosophers will submit the argument presented here to scrutiny from that perspective.

12 Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ix; see also John C. Moskop, Divine Omniscience and Human Freedom: Thomas Aquinas and Charles Hartshorne (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984).

13 Cf. Creel’s discussion of both Peirce’s and Hartshorne’s understandings of continuity in Divine Impassibility, 36-43. It was Hartshorne who, along with Paul Weiss, edited Peirce’s papers housed at Harvard and published them the Collected Papers in the 1930s. I touch on this view of Peirce’s at various places in my overview of his pragmatist epistemology in “The Demise of Foundationalism and the Retention of Truth: What Evangelicals Can Learn from C. S. Peirce,” Christian Scholar’s Review 29:3 (Spring 2000): 563-88, esp. 569-79. For the chronological development of this idea in Peirce’s thinking, see Vincent G. Potter and Paul B. Shields, “Peirce’s Definitions of Continuity,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 13:1 (1977): 20-34.

14 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 6 vols., eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 6, ¶ 170, quoted in Creel, Divine Impassibility, 36.

15 “Vague” throughout this paper is used in the Peircean sense of not being subject to the law of the excluded middle.

16 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 41-42.

17 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 44. Other similar illustrations briefly noted by Creel include the screwing of a crescent wrench, the turning of a rheostat, and a spectrum of a shade of color (Hartshorne’s case in point).

18 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 47-48.

19 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 65; Creel and Hartshorne both adhere to the ancient saying, ex nihilo nihil fit. For an explication of this point in Hartshorne, see James A. Keller, “Continuity, Possibility, and Omniscience: A Contrasting View,” Process Studies 15:1 (1986): 1-18, esp. 6-8. That possibility presupposes actuality is a fairly widely held notion; see J. R. Lucas, The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality and Truth (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 197.

20 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 65.

21 At various places in his book, Creel uses this alternative set of nomenclature; see Divine Impassibility, 69, 71, 73, 213, and 214.

22 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 67. Note the trinitarian schema of possibility, actuality, and power of actualization in this triadic assessment of possibility. It will be made clear below how an analysis something like this one leads Boyd toward a trinitarian metaphysics.

23 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 70-71.

24 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 69.

25 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 21.

26 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 98. Some might inquire as to the relationship between Creel’s doctrine of omniscience and that of Molinism. Creel himself discusses the Molinist option briefly (Divine Impassibility, 89-91) and concludes with a variant of the “grounding objection’ by insisting that the flaw in middle knowledge is its “assumption that God can know which possible world is the actual world…that, because God must have knowledge of all possible worlds, he must therefore know what free agents will do in an actual world, which is, of course, an actualization of one of the possible worlds, all of which he knows” (Divine Impassibility, 90).

27 Creel’s book has drawn forth responses from those in the process camp as well as those more firmly within traditional orthodoxy. Reviews from the former include Lewis Ford (in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 25:1 [1989]: 1964-98), and Santiago Sia (in Modern Theology 5:2 [1989]: 182-84; while those of the latter include Michael Root (in Currents in Theology and Mission 15:3 [1988]: 290-91), Paul D. Feinberg (in Trinity Journal 7:2 [1986]: 97-100), and Helen Oppenheimer (in Journal of Theological Studies 37:2 [1986]: 682-85). James Keller, a process theist, raises the obvious question against Creel’s theory: how can the infinite density of possibilities across any continuum be prehended or brought to full consciousness as discreet individuals even by the divine mind? Insofar as this is impossible, then God cannot—contra Creel—pre-decide any response to the many possibilities that derive from the world’s actualities (“Continuity, Possibility, and Omniscience,” 7; cf. also, Keller’s critical review of Creel’s book in Process Studies 15:4 [1986]: 290-96). Joseph Bracken, SJ, also a Whitehead specialist, poses the same question (in his review in Theological studies 47:4 [1986]: 707-08).

28 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 215.

29 As will be seen, this would bring Creel close to Neville’s position to be discussed below. But note also that within the context of the medieval doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum, and of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, the pleroma and nothingness is equated; see Thomas J. J. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 93-106, passim, and esp. 104.

30 Instead, like Kelly James Clark, I tend to see the entire issue of foreknowledge to be a subsidiary “problem” that emerges out of a complex configuration of philosophical, theological, and (especially for Christians) hermeneutical presuppositions; see my “Divine Knowledge and Future Contingents: Weighing the Presuppositional Issues in the Contemporary Debate,” paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Nashville, Tennessee, 15-18 November 2000 (currently under review with Philosophia Cristi), and Clark’s “Hold Not Thy Peace At My Tears: Methodological Reflections on Divine Impassibility,” in Kelly James Clark, ed., Our Knowledge of God: Essays on Natural and Philosophical Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 167-93. My retrieval of Creel is intended solely to approach the contemporary debate on divine omniscience from two specific angles: the philosophic one regarding the nature of possibilities, and the theological one regarding the nature of divine creation.

31 Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2000). While Boyd addresses this book primarily toward a lay audience, one should not think then that it does not accurately depict his theological position. In the introduction to this work, Boyd clearly states that the book’s contents are simply a rehearsal of conclusions he had reached through a serious study of Scripture conducted during the mid-1980s (11). Because what is said in God of the Possible is consistent with Boyd’s more technical and scholarly publications in the intervening years (one of which I will appeal to below), I will use it liberally even though it does not purport to be a philosophical-theological argument.

32 Boyd, God of the Possible, 152.

33 Boyd, God of the Possible, 150. Given that probabilities imply time for both maturation or disappearance (on this, see Lucas, The Future, 193ff.), it is arguable that Boyd believes that God’s knowledge of probabilities is always in flux, emergent as they are from the actualities of the world’s becoming.

34 Boyd, God of the Possible, 94.

35 Boyd, God of the Possible, 124; later, he says, “a God who faces a partly open future would know every one of these possibilities from all eternity (…possibilities, unlike actualities, are eternal)” (127).

36 Boyd, God of the Possible, 151.

37 Boyd has emphasized this distinction in private e-mail correspondence (25 January 2000). Creel also distinguishes two modes of knowledge of possible worlds: logically possible and creatable worlds. He suggests that when free creatures are involved, God can only know logical possibilities in a vague and indeterminate sense: “He sets the limits to the possibilities for free creatures in the actual world, but he does not foreknow which of those possibilities they will actualize….To be sure, God does know eternally the parameters within which our choices will take place, and the consequences that will flow from our various possible actions, but the full actuality of the world is a joint product of the decisions and actions of God and free creatures. Which possible world the actual world is is still being decided—but the only decisions left to be made are those by us. Because they are free they cannot be foreknown by God knowing his will or possible worlds” (Divine Impassibility, 92). Creel’s position is consistent with what open theism affirms.

38 Boyd’s view is plausible considering that possibility-theorists generally agree that possibilities both derive from actualities and are dependent on some mind or other; for a comprehensive statement of this understanding of possibilities, see Nicholas Rescher, A Theory of Possibility (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, and London: Basil Blackwell, 1975), and idem., “The Ontology of the Possible,” in Michael J. Loux, ed., The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), 166-81.

39 My guess is that Boyd would reject Creel’s notion of creatio ex plenum for the reasons similar to those he gives for rejecting Hartshorne’s creation out of chaos; see below.

40 Most open theists distance themselves from process theology’s creation out of chaos precisely at this point; see John Sanders, The God Who Risks, 161, and Clark Pinnock, et al., The Openness of God, 109-10. I should point out that in his book, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 103-10, Boyd actually argues that the creation narratives in the book of Genesis are better read not as advocating creatio ex nihilo, but through the lens of creation out of chaos. I take this not to mean that Boyd affirms the process doctrine of creation, but that he understands the theological doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, or creatio ex mente Dei as I prefer to call Boyd’s view, to be true as an ontological claim with regard to the world’s contingency, and the exegesis of Genesis as creation out of chaos to be true as a cosmological claim about the acts of God in a fallen world.

41 This would be over and against creatio ex Deo—creation out of Godself—since, as Creel noted, to affirm creatio ex Deo would be to open oneself up to the pantheistic objection (Divine Impassibility, 71). Thus William Hasker, an open theist himself, concludes that creatio ex Deo implies creation as “fulfilling a need on God’s part” thus nullifying the Christian doctrine of gratuitous creation (Metaphysics: Constructing a World View [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1983], 116).

42 Gregory A. Boyd, Trinity and Process: A Critical Evaluation and Reconstruction of Hartshorne’s Di-Polar Theism towards a Trinitarian Metaphysics (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).

43 See Boyd, Trinity and Process, 105-27 in general, or 108-10 more specifically. My own trinitarian metaphysics is close to Boyd’s at this point, except that I understand the category of dispositions within the larger “mediational” category which includes dispositions, habits, laws, generals, vectors, etc.; for details, see chapter four of my Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), and chapter two of my forthcoming Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, Ltd., 2002).

44 Boyd, Trinity and Process, 121. “Aesthetic subjective aims” are the lures that guide becoming in Hartshorne’s process cosmology.

45 See Boyd, Trinity and Process, 209-11.

46 Boyd, Trinity and Process, 227; these, of course, are categories drawn from Boyd’s interaction with the Hartshornean version of the process tradition.

47 Boyd, Trinity and Process, 329.

48 Boyd’s develops this trinitarian vision in Trinity and Process, 374-400, drawing in part on Jonathan Edwards’ doctrine of intra-trinitarian dispositions; on Edwards, see Sang-hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), esp. 48-51 and 175-210, for an exposition.

49 The traditional ex nihilo doctrine affirms a self-existent and necessary God who creates the world from nothing else outside of Godself. This is, as has been depicted, essentially Boyd’s position; but it is not, as will become clear, what Neville means by creatio ex nihilo.

50 For a defense of social trinitarianism, see Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” in Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 21-47. Questions for social trinitarianism can be found in John L. Gresham, Jr., “The Social Model of the Trinity and Its Critics,” Scottish Journal of Theology 46 (1993): 325-43, and Brian Leftow, “Anti Social Trinitarianism,” in Steven T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins, SJ, eds., The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 203-50. It may be unfair to label Boyd as a social trinitarian even if he does talk of “God’s internal triune sociality” (Trinity and Process, 382). Perhaps it is preferable to consider him a relational theist. This category of would certainly be much more inclusive than that of either social trinitarianism or open theism, as Ted Peters’ wide-ranging discussion—including individuals like Barth, Claude Welch, Jüngel, Rahner, Moltmann, Boff, Bracken, LaCugna, Jensen and Pannenberg—shows. Peters’ distinguishes relational trinitarianism from social trinitarianism by insisting on the temporalistic and eschatological features of the former over and against the pluralistic and communitarian emphases of the latter (see his God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993], 184-86). Boyd, as all open theists, would agree on relationality as central to the divine life.

51 The following summarizes Neville’s notion of possibilities as the structures of the future within the broader context of his doctrine of time. These are developed in Neville, The Cosmology of Freedom, new ed. (orig. 1974; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 140-47; Recovery of the Measure: Nature and Interpretation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), 170-85; Eternity and Time’s Flow (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), passim. Appropriations of Peirce and Whitehead can also be found throughout the Nevillean corpus. Specifically, however, Neville discusses Peirce in The Highroad around Modernism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 25-52. His break with process theology, even while retaining much of the Whitehead’s cosmological vision, is documented in Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (orig. 1980; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995).

52 Neville, The Highroad Around Modernism, 215; cf. also Neville’s comment in this regard in Recovery of the Measure, 50-52. For a lucid sketch of Neville’s relationship to both the process and pragmatist traditions which centers around the doctrine of time and temporality, see Sandra Rosenthal, “Neville and Pragmatism: Toward Ongoing Dialogue,” in J. Harley Chapman and Nancy Frankenberry, eds., Interpreting Neville (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 59-76 (Neville’s response to Frankenberry can be found on pp. 296-97 of this same volume). In part because of Rosenthal’s assessment, I now see the difficulties in the doctrine of continuity overlooked in my initial study of Peirce (see my “Demise of Foundationalism and Retention of Truth,” 569-79).

53 Neville, Recovery of the Measure, 179.

54 I struggled with the notion of personal identity in Whitehead’s philosophy in a paper originally written in 1994: “Personal Selfhood(?) and Human Experience in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism,” Paideia Project: Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy (1998), available online at [http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainPPer.htm]. Neville has helped me to see that while the process categories for time are viable, they are held together only through the divine creative act which is eternal; more on this immediately following.

55 In fact, Boyd has previously taken issue with Neville precisely on this point; see Boyd, Trinity and Process, 93-98, 273-74 and 337-39.

56 Neville’s larger, and ongoing, project, was initially sketched in God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God (orig. 1968; reprint, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).

57 As William Hasker notes, “When God newly creates a being ex nihilo, then God alone must determine all that being’s characteristics; there is nothing else that might perform this task” (“Creation and Conservation, Religious Doctrine of,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig [New York and London: Routledge, 1998], 2.698). In the context of his discussion, Hasker means to distinguish between the classical notion of creatio ex nihilo (or, creatio ex mente Dei a la Boyd) from the doctrine of continuous creation whereby God sustains the world in conjunction with secondary causes. My point is simply to indicate that Neville would apply just this same reasoning to eternal logical possibilities as well: they are naught—completely indeterminate—apart from the creative act of God ex nihilo.

58 For Neville on Wesley, see Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 163-64; on Calvin, see The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 158-58, n.11; on Aquinas and Scotus, see God the Creator, passim. I have previously argued for the viability of Neville’s doctrine of God as creator in the limited context of modern Pentecostalism: “Oneness and the Trinity: The Theological and Ecumenical Implications of ‘Creation Ex Nihilo’ for an Intra-Pentecostal Dispute,” PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 19:1 (Spring 1997): 81-107. For a German Lutheran theologian’s reading of Neville’s orthodoxy, see Hermann Deuser, “Neville’s Theology of Creation, Covenant, and Trinity,” in J. Harley Chapman and Nancy Frankenberry, eds., Interpreting Neville (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 223-43.

59 See F. Le Ron Shults’ “The Infinite Trinitarian God and Human Freedom,” unpublished paper presented to the Evangelical Philosophical Society, Boston, MA, November 1999; idem., Theological Anthropology: Infinity, Trinity, Futurity and Humanity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming). For more on how moderns like Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Spinoza have wrestled with the question of God as infinite, cf. Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).

60 Cynthia L. Rigby, “Free to Be Human: Limits, Possibilities, and the Sovereignty of God,” Theology Today 53:1 (1996): 50.

61 I am reminded in this context of a comment by Linda Zagzebski, who, after a lengthy and sustained discussion of the difficult topic of God as either temporal or timeless, concludes that the latter appeals to her in part because it “is simply more metaphysically exciting than the view that God is temporal” (The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 65).