The Openness of God

On December 6, at 3pm the Pacific Northwest Adventist Forum presents Richard Rice, Ph.D. Professor of Theology, Philosophy, and Religion Loma Linda University presentation entitled "The Openness of God- Then and Now" The location is:
North Hill Adventist Fellowship 10106 36th Street East Edgewood, WA 98371

I was given a couple of books by a friend on the subject. This blog will be based upon Richard Rice's chapter in the book The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God

Much of his chapter deals with refuting the idea that God is personally involved with humanity, which I think is probably an argument against a minority opinion treated like it is the majority opinion. Rice writes on page 12:

According to this influential view, God dwells in perfect bliss outside the sphere of time and space. From his lofty vantage point, he apprehends the whole of created reality in one timeless perception: past, present and future alike appear before him. But though he fully knows and cares for the created world, he remains essentially unaffected by creaturely events and experiences. He is untouched by the disappointment, sorrow or suffering of his creatures. Just as his sovereign will brooks no opposition, his serene tranquility knows no interruption.

In contrast to this view which as I said probably few Christians maintain Rice gives the open view as:

The Open View of God
The view of God and his relation to the world presented in this book provides a striking alternative to the concept just described. It expresses two basic convictions: love is the most important quality we attribute to God, and love is more than care and commitment; it involves being sensitive and responsive as well. These convictions lead the contributors to this book to think of God's relation to the world in dynamic rather than static terms. This conclusion has important consequences. For one thing, it means that God interacts with his creatures. Not only does he influence them, but they also exert an influence on him. As a result, the course of history is not the product of divine action alone. God's will is not the ultimate explanation for everything that happens; human decisions and actions make an important contribution too. Thus history is the combined result of what God and his creatures decide to do. (page 15-16)

Well we are not going to find a whole lot of argument with that, whether a person is traditional or not. He goes on to show the love of God and that God is involved with humanity. As such there is little there to disagree with. His next paragraph reveals where the difference really lies:

Another consequence of this conviction concerns God's knowledge. As an aspect of his experience, God's knowledge of the world is also dynamic rather than static. Instead of perceiving the entire course of human existence in one timeless moment, God comes to know events as they take place. He learns something from what transpires. We call this position the "open view of God" because it regards God as receptive to new experiences and as flexible in the way he works toward his objectives in the world. Since it sees God as dependent on the world in certain respects, the open view of God differs from much conventional theology. Yet we believe that this dependence does not detract from God's greatness, it only enhances it.

Here we see the idea that God is continually learning and this is where the problems really begin because it puts God the experiential learner as opposed to the almighty God. His new experiences determine his objectives. While he may feel it enhances God it raises more problems then it solves. For instance progressive Christian view's realize that the writers to a large extent place their ideas of what God thinks into their stories. As in the flood story God is sorry that He made man in the first place or in the story of Moses where God repents of the evil of starting a new nation out of Moses because Moses talks God out of it since it would have actually make God look bad. The problem here is that God would have to be behaving in ways that are far from God like. At least far from the God like attributes we think of today, almighty and knowledgeable. He behaves far more like the gods of the nations around Israel at the time. Arbitrary and less then logical...way less. In the open view God learns from the conversation with Moses and changes His mind...He has grown from the experience, in the flood story He gets mad and kills everything except for what gets put in the boat. Not really killed in any god like way but through a tremendous disaster that destroys plants and animals alike rather then addressing the strictly human problem.

To explain this change in God Rice writes:

But a significant feature of this passage does not permit this construction. The fact is that God relents in direct response to Moses' plea, not as a consequence of the people's repentance of their apostasy. The repentance mentioned in this case clearly applies to a change that took place in God, not in his people. Of course, God's essential nature and his ultimate purpose did not change—Moses' appeal presupposes this. But this hardly means that nothing in God really changed. To the contrary, his ultimate objectives required him to change his immediate intentions.

God was about to behave pretty irrationally and Moses talked Him out of His irrational idea by explaining why God should not destroy Israel.

My greatest problem with the open view is that it establishes God in behavior particularly in the Old Testament which is likely based more upon the writers concept of God then God's ultimate character. They were beginners just learning about God and dealing with the relation of God to man which we clearly see progressing through the Old Testament. As the writers progressed from blind obedience to a reasoned faith not based upon the rituals and sacrifices but upon living lives of justice, mercy and caring for other people. In which case it is not because God is changing but because people are changing, they are growing in understanding and knowledge, God is the one leading in a step by step process slow as it may be it is the only way people can learn. No doubt and even slower process when you consider that the other people of the world were just as primitive and the violence of the time made justice and mercy difficult. Thus the wars with other nations and the rules to kill Sabbath breakers and adulterers and rebellious children.

To me it seems the open view of God is based upon some faulty assumptions. But then that is another problem that has plagued mankind since the beginning and why we still see through the glass darkly.

Adventist Forum Announcement and Hebrew Language

I was originally going to write on another topic but I read the following announcement about the next Adventist Forum meeting and the subject got me thinking.

The Pacific Northwest Adventist Forum will hold its next meeting at the Green Lake Seventh-day Adventist on June 7 at 3:00 PM. The speaker will be Brian Bull MD who currently chairs the Department of Pathology at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine. His presentation is entitled "What in Heaven (and Earth) Was the Writer of Genesis Talking About?" Dr. Bull has been active in the affairs of the church including the difficult and controversial topic of integrating faith and science. He is a member of a group in Loma Linda that is carefully studying the Hebrew words of Genesis in an attempt to figure out the intended meaning of the writer of the first chapters of Genesis. At times some translations of the Bible may reflect the beliefs of the translator more than the actual meaning of the manuscripts on which the translation is based. How Dr. Bull reads and examines the Genesis story will of interest to those who care about how God created the heavens and earth. He also is one of the authors of the recently published book, Understanding Genesis. Dr. Bull is a graduate of Walla Walla College and for many years served as Dean of the Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Following the meeting light refreshments will be served.

I thought I would check and see how many words made up the ancient Hebrew language. I did not figure it was nearly as robust as English and thus not nearly as descriptive. You hear people say that Eskimo’s have 7 different words for snow. Well English has hundreds of words for snow because we have adjectives which describe the snow. “light snow, heavy snow, wet snow, sandy snow, coarse snow etc. On top of that we have over 1 million English words. Fortunately we don’t have to use them all but still we use a lot. Now what about using the words of the ancient Hebrew in understanding what the writer of that book intended. First the writer was limited to what his language was, his words and his rather scientifically speaking limited knowledge of the world as well as his limited knowledge of God. So even if we ascertain the most likely meaning the writer had in mind we are left with only that, the meaning he had in his or their mind, depending on if what we have is original or redacted from some other original document. Even with the assumption of God given inspiration we have only the limited vocabulary of the language and the times for which God could work. Limitations which could cause limitations in understanding if one assumes that those limited words must be of ultimate importance.

Which leads us to an interesting new Hebrew translation in the works now. It is called the Mechanical Translation. Here is what the Ancient-Hebrew.org website introduction says:

About the Translation

I will be publishing this project one book at a time beginning with the book of Genesis. Once the first five books of the Bible are completed I will combine them into the Mechanical Translation of the Torah and will then continue with the book of Joshua.

Standard Text Translations

Most all English translations of Genesis 1:24 are translated as "And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind...' ". Now compare that with Genesis 2:7 which is usually translated as "...and the man became a living soul (some translations have 'living being')". I have often heard it debated that only man has a soul but not animals. This theological assumption can be supported by the two verses quoted above but not in the original Hebrew text. The phrase "living creature" from the first verse and "living soul" in the second verse are identical in Hebrew - nephesh hhayah. If this phrase was translated the same way in both verses the theological idea that only man has a soul (nephesh) would never [sic]

Standard Word Translations

This change in the way Hebrew words are translated does not end with only one or two different translations but the list goes on. The Hebrew word nephesh is translated as soul, life, person, mind, heart, creature, body, dead, desire, man, appetite, lust, thing, self, beast, pleasure, ghost, breath and will in the King James Version. The King James Version also translates the Hebrew word hhayah as live, life, beast, alive, creature, running, living, raw, springing, old, quick, lifetime, troop, appetite, lively, congregation, company and maintenance. The King James Version is not alone in this style of translation as all translations are similar. If one wishes to do a serious study of the Bible and does not know Hebrew how is one to sort through this conglomeration of word translations?

The need for a Mechanical Translation

The Mechanical Translation will provide a consistent translation where each Hebrew word, prefix and suffix are translated exactly the same way every time. This will provide the student of the Bible with a very Hebraic look at the Bible without knowing Hebrew. When the same word is found in two different verses it will be known that they are the same word in the Hebrew text as well and problems such as identified above will disappear. This translation will also translate the Hebrew words into English in the same order as they are in Hebrew. The only problem with this is that if one does not know Hebrew sentence structure the translation will not make sense but instead appear as gibberish. For this reason a second translation (called the 'Revised Mechanical Translation' or RMT) is provided which uses the same English words to translate the Hebrew but will re-arrange the words so that they can be understood by English readers.

The Dictionary

Even though each Hebrew word is translated exactly the same way every time with an English word or phrase the English words will not be sufficient for understanding the meaning of the Hebrew words. For this reason the Mechanical Translation will be accompanied by a dictionary that will allow the student to look up each English word or phrase to learn the meaning of the word from an Hebraic perspective. The dictionary will also provide the identification number for that word in the "Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible".

Genesis 1:1-5

in the summit “Elohiym [Powers]” fattened the sky and the land, and the land had existed in confusion and was unfilled and darkness was upon the face of the deep sea and the wind of “Elohiym [Powers]” was much fluttering upon the face of the water, and “Elohiym [Powers]” said, light exist and light existed, and “Elohiym [Powers]” saw the light given that it was functional and “Elohiym [Powers]” made a separation between the light and the darkness, and “Elohiym [Powers]” called out to the light day and to the darkness he called out night and evening existed and morning existed one day.

Mech. Trans. of Genesis - Sample
The following from Einhorn Press states some additional problems.

Modern English is often thought to be a difficult language to translate, with its irregular spellings, numerous shades of meanings, variations in pronunciations, incorporation of countless foreign words, difficult idioms, and other peculiarities and inconsistencies. However, none of these could begin to compare with one major translating difficulty found in the biblical language of Israel, especially since Hebrew ceased to be a commonly spoken language hun­dreds of years before Jesus Christ arrived. “In regard to the Old Testament, the Hebrew language, as anciently written, was the most difficult of all languages to translate,” wrote Bible-scholar John E. Remsburg in his work entitled The Bible. In one of thirty weekly installments from his book which began to appear in The Truth Seeker at the beginning of January in 1901 he went on to explain that

Here is the best known passage in the Bible printed in English as the Jews would have written it in Hebrew:"It was written from right to left; the words contained no [written] vowels; there were no intervening spaces between words, and no punctuation marks. Even with the introduction of vowel points [dots or marks below the words that indicate vowel sounds] many words in Hebrew, as in English, have more than one meaning. Without these points, as originally written, the number is increased a hundred fold. The five English words, bag, beg, big, bog, and buy, are quite unlike and easily distinguished. Omit the vowels, as the ancient Jews did, and we have five words exactly alike, or rather, one word with five different meanings. The Hebrew language was thus largely composed of words with several mean­ings. As there were no spaces between words, it was sometimes hard to tell where a word began or where it ended; and as there were no punctuation marks, and no spaces between sentences, paragraphs, or even sections, it was often difficult to determine the meaning of a writer after the words had been deciphered."

bllwhtmcmdgnkhtmnhtbdllhnvhntrhchwrhtfR
vgrfwsstbdrsvgrfdndrbldrdshtsvgnvhnstshtrnnd nkhtsnhtrflvmrfsrvldtbnttpmttntnsdldnsrtbdrn
nmrvrfrlghtdnrphtdnmdg

If you can't figure it out it is the Lord's prayer King James version

From the Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible

In our Modern Western language verbs express action (dynamic) while nouns express inanimate (static) objects. In Hebrew all things are in motion (dynamic) including verbs and nouns. In Hebrew sentences the verbs identify the action of an object while nouns identify an object of action. The verb Malak is “the reign of the king” while the noun melek is the “the king who reigns”. A mountain top is not a static object but the “head lifting up out of the hill”. A good example of action in what appears to be a static passage is the command to “have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). In Hebrew thought this passage is saying “not to bring another one of power in front of my face”.

So what have we learned? Literal isn't really all that literal, so we had better apply all the information we can to the Bible and that means using our God given ability to reason from all the data available.