The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God

Voted one of Christianity Today's Books of the Year

The Openness of God presents a careful and full-orbed argument that the God known through Christ desires "responsive relationship" with his creatures. While it rejects process theology, the book asserts that such classical doctrines as God's immutability, impassibility and foreknowledge demand reconsideration.

The authors insist that our understanding of God will be more consistently biblical and more true to the actual devotional lives of Christians if we profess that "God, in grace, grants humans significant freedom" and enters into relationship with a genuine "give-and-take dynamic."

The Openness of God is remarkable in its comprehensiveness, drawing from the disciplines of biblical, historical, systematic and philosophical theology. Evangelical and other orthodox Christian philosophers have promoted the "relational" or "personalist" perspective on God in recent decades. Now here is the first major attempt to bring the discussion into the evangelical theological arena.

Clark Pinnock was Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario. Widely regarded as one of evangelicalism's most stimulating theologians, he produced several widely discussed books, including The Wideness of God's Mercy and (with four other scholars) The Openness of God. He passed away in August, 2010.

Richard Rice is professor of religion at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. He is the author of several books, including God's Foreknowledge and Man's Free Will and Reason and the Contours of Faith.

John Sanders (Th.D., University of South Africa) is professor of religion at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. He has edited and written several books, including No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized. Three of his previous book projects have received a Christianity Today Book Award.