The Bible talk at Emmanuel today referred to a different view of God that is becoming increasingly common. Known as ‘open theism’ or ‘the openness of God theory’, it is suggested that God does not know all that is going to happen in the future.

Prof Greg Boyd of Bethel College in America, writes: In the Christian view God knows all of reality – everything there is to know. But to assume He knows ahead of time how every person is going to freely act assumes that each person’s free activity is already there to know – even before he freely does it! But it’s not. If we have been given freedom, we create the reality of our decisions by making them. And until we make them, they don’t exist. Thus, in my view at least, there simply isn’t anything to know until we make it there to know. So God can’t foreknow the good or bad decisions of the people He creates until He creates these people and they, in turn, create their decisions.

But as C. S. Lewis has written: Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.

There is a lot that you could read on this topic! If you want to read a good summary click here.  If you want just one article that suggests some of the terrifying implications of this view of God’s ‘ignorance’ click here. If you want to browse through a whole lot of articles, click here.

We’ve got used to the Somerfield press release scenario. The hapless individual who (this Easter) said that the supermarket’s range of Easter eggs and other seasonal products was part of the traditional celebration at this time of Christ’s birthday. A second attempt corrected it to ‘… Christ’s rebirth’. The third vaguely suggested that it was all ‘… something to do with death and resurrection’. We don’t expect much more from someone with apparently little knowledge of the Christian faith.

We’re also not terribly surprised any more when a senior church figure denies something central to our faith. In Easter week, the Dean of St Alban’s, Jeffrey John, gave BBC Radio 4’s Lent talk. You can read it here. He rejects the traditional Biblical understanding of the cross as ‘insane’. ‘… Jesus took the rap and we got forgiven as long as we said we believed in him,’ says Mr John. ‘This is repulsive as well as nonsensical. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If a human behaved like this we’d say that they were a monster.’

The Daily Telegraph reported that ‘Church figures have expressed dismay at his comments, which they condemn as a “deliberate perversion of the Bible”. The Rt Rev Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, accused Mr John of attacking the fundamental message of the Gospel.’

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Back in January a number of us went to a conference run by the Midlands Gospel Partnership. Growing Churches looked at the issue of church-planting, which we found particularly relevant at the beginning of a new church.

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We have bought copies of the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible to use as our church Bibles. Some people have been wondering why, particularly because most people probably use the New International Version.

There are many different versions of the Bible now available. At one end of the spectrum are those that aim to translate the original languages of the Bibles (Hebrew for most of the Old Testament, and Greek in the New Testament) with a literal translation. There’s no attempt to unpack what the original Bible author might have meant, but simply to translate the words that are there. For example, if the original talks about ‘bowels of mercy’ then that is what is written down (rather than something like ‘heart filled with mercy’ which is what the author probably meant).

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