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Last month, I traveled to San Diego, CA for the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. More specifically, I attended the SBL/AAR annual conference to present a response paper in the second session of the Open and Relational Theologies group, which was commemorating 20 years since the publishing of The Openness of God by Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, Richard Rice, William Hasker, and David Basinger. Three of the original authors of the book (John Sanders, Richard Rice, and David Basinger) were there in attendance and presented reflections on the last 20 years.
Why commemorate The Openness of God (OOG) 1? Because that book signaled a theological shift in U.S. American, evangelicalical theology that has very few parallels. It was a bold vision that made claims about God that were shocking to the evangelical theological establishment then and still shock many evangelicals today.
Part 1 of "Fighting the Virus of Classical Theism," will focus on the claims made by Richard Rice in the first chapter of OOG about God's emotional sensitivity and capacity for emotional change. These claims continue to be controversial even now.
