This is eleventh and final post in an eleven-part series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019).
In this post I tackle chapter 11 by Keith Wyma, “Jesus Didn’t Die for Your Sins: Open Theism, Atonement, and the Pastoral Problem of Evil” (pp. 178–202). In this essay Wyma responds to well-known open theist pastor and scholar, Greg Boyd. Boyd has argued that open theism—the thesis that God, by design, faces an open-ended future along with us—makes a robust pastoral response to those facing intense suffering much easier than if we supposed God infallibly foreknew with full specificity all the suffering ever to befall humanity and allowed it regardless. Wyma disagrees. He argues from a broadly Reformed position that “open theism’s implications … make the pastoral problem of evil more difficult” (p. 178).
In what follows I summarize Wyma’s arguments and assess their cogency. I shall argue that Wyma’s arguments are weak and overly sentimental. Weak because he rests too much of his case on a penal satisfaction view of the atonement (PSA) and the attendant idea of particular (as opposed to corporate) atonement. Both ideas are controversial and easily contestable. Overly sentimental because his main argument for what he anachronistically calls the “classical view” of the atonement (i.e., PSA and particular atonement) is that if that view is not true then Christ didn’t atone for my (Wyma’s) sins. His idea, in other words, is that if Christ’s atoning work wasn’t targeted at specific individuals from eternity past, then there’s something defective in the manner or extent to which God can be said to love or care for specific individuals. I beg to differ, but let’s see how the argument unfolds.
1. The Pastoral Problem of Evil and Boyd’s Response (pp. 178–184)
Wyma begins by distinguishing what I’ll call the theoretical problem of evil—namely, how best to reconcile the quantity, quality, and distribution of evil in the world with existence of an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God—and what he variously calls the “existential,” “personal”, or “pastoral” problem of evil—namely, how best to encourage a person to “continue to love and trust God” (p. 179) in the face of evil. Wyma sums up the pastoral problem with the question “Should God’s sovereignty be trusted in [our] lives?” He then breaks this question down into two facets: (1) “Is God morally trustworthy in His rule?” and (2) “Is God sufficiently able in His rule, for us to trust our lives wholly to it?” (p. 180). Question (1) addresses doubts about God’s motivation for allowing or bringing suffering into our lives. Question (2) addresses doubts about God’s ability to manage creation in a good, wise, just, and competent manner. After distinguishing these two facets of the pastoral problem of evil, Wyma declares his intention to focus only on the first question (God’s moral trustworthiness), with special attention to God’s love for creation (p. 180).
Wyma next discusses Boyd’s open theist response to the pastoral problem of evil. Among major competing models of divine providence, Boyd believes that open theism offers the “most plausible” general approach to the pastoral problem, even if it does not “entirely solve” the problem (p. 181). Boyd illustrates his approach with an anecdote from his own pastoral counseling experience. A devout Christian woman named Suzanne (not her real name), after much consultation with God in prayer and input from friends and family, believed she had gotten clear direction from God to marry a devout Christian man who I’ll call Sam (not his real name). Suzanne and Sam shared a common passion to be missionaries in Taiwan. To Suzanne it seemed like a match made in heaven. Shortly after their marriage, however, things began to go south. Sam “repeatedly cheated on [Suzanne], abandoned their shared dream of missions, abused her, and finally left her—though she was pregnant—for another woman” (p. 181). Devastated by this turn of events, Suzanne’s faith was shaken to its core. How could a good God have so clearly (to her mind at least) led her into marriage with Sam knowing in advance how things were going to turn out?
The key to Boyd’s open theistic pastoral response to Suzanne is his denial that God (a) specifically planned and intended things to turn our badly as they did, or even that God (b) specifically foreknew and allowed things to turn our badly as they did. From God’s prior perspective, a bad outcome at the time of the wedding was sufficiently improbable, and a good outcome sufficiently probable, that encouraging Suzanne’s marriage to Sam was worth the risk. Countenancing such risks, moreover, is a necessary cost of creaturely moral freedom. Without significant moral freedom, creatures would be mere extensions of God’s own will. So that God may love us as persons and not merely as His “puppets,” and so that we may freely love God and each other, God gives us moral freedom and with it the power to misuse that freedom in ways that harm others and ourselves. Marriage to Sam was sound advice at the time given how things then stood in both of their lives. When the marriage subsequently went south, God was surprised and saddened. He grieves with Suzanne over the tragic outcome and remains committed to helping her rebuild her life. As for Suzanne, once she was able to look at her situation through an open theistic lens, she was able to heal, reestablish her faith, and continue forward in life.
In contrast to open theism, which says that moral evil or sin is everywhere and always tragic, something that the world would have been overall better off without, theistic determinists and Molinists have to say that God specifically and eternally planned for Sam’s adultery and for Suzanne’s marriage to go south. And even a simple foreknowledge proponent would have to say that God knew for certain from eternity, well in advance of the events that caused the marriage to implode, that it was going to happen and still (from Suzanne’s perspective at least) gave her a clear signal to go ahead with it. It was ideas like these that led to Suzanne’s crisis of faith.
Wyma sums up Boyd’s response to the pastoral problem as follows:
[O]n Boyd’s characterization of the open view, God could not have been certain before creation that … [creaturely] freedom would be misued, that people would do evil, let alone persist in it to their own damnation. After creation, the freedom couldn’t be abrogated without invalidating its original intention to enable love. God’s choice to make us free was, itself, loving and aimed at enabling loving relationship with us. What we’ve done with our freedom is our fault, not God’s. … [Such a God, Boyd] submits, “is a God you can trust.” (p. 184)
Wyma, however, is not impressed. He wants to argue, contrary to Boyd, that “God’s love becomes less trustworthy” on the open theist’s position.
2. The “Classical View” of God’s Love in the Atonement (pp. 184–188)
To argue that open theism makes the pastoral problem “more difficult” Wyma focuses on Christ’s atonement for our sins on the cross. “Christ’s atoning death,” he says, “is not merely the center of Christian theology, it’s also the definitive demonstration of God’s love for us” (p. 184). Boyd, says Wyma, is “wrong” to focus on God’s purposes “in the specific good and bad events of our lives” (like Suzanne’s marriage). Rather, it is the “cross where God’s love is ultimately defined and demonstrated.” It is the cross that demonstrates “the trustworthiness of God’s moral character” and that “definitively answers our doubts about God’s love for us” (p. 185).
So far this is a cheap shot response to Boyd. Boyd is well-known for having a highly Christocentric theology. It’s not that Boyd’s response to Suzanne ignores or downplays the cross, but that he was attempting to meet her at the place of her faith crisis. Yes, he could have started with the work of Christ, but that’s not what was bothering her. Rather, she didn’t know how to make sense of God’s love in her specific circumstances.
In any case, Wyma takes his appeal to Christ’s death in a direction few (if any) open theists can follow:
Now, notice the full impact of Christ’s atoning death, as considered under the classical account of God’s foreknowledge. … When Christ went to the cross, he bore the burden of our sins. … Jesus’ death was for each and every one of us. … Jesus died for you and me, particularly. And not only for us as specific individuals, but for each and every sin we have committed and will commit. (p. 185, emphasis in original as italics, not underline)
The obvious difficulty for the open theist in following Wyma’s view of the atonement is that, from the open theist’s perspective, at the time of the crucifixion there was almost certainly no settled fact of the matter as to whether you or I, living centuries later, would come to exist or what sins we would each commit. So, for the open theist, whatever Christ accomplished on the cross, it could not have been an atonement aimed at the specific sins of specific individuals living far after the fact.
Wyma, for his part, takes the specificity of the atonement to be absolutely central to the “classical view,” as he calls it. Wyma clearly affirms a penal substitutionary model of the atonement (PSA) (pp. 187–188), but he denies limited atonement. On his view, Christ on the cross pays the penalty for every specific sin of every specific person who ever lives throughout all of history. He doesn’t address the question of whether this logically commits him to universalism.
For my part, I see his reliance on PSA as a major weakness of his argument. PSA is not remotely the “classical” view of Christ’s work. (For an extensive analysis and rebuttal of PSA, see this YouTube playlist.) Atonement in the Bible is corporate, a function of Jesus having taken on human nature, not the specific sins of specific individuals. Nor could Jesus, the righteous one, rightly “pay the penalty” for our sins because, while monetary debt is fungible and so can be transferred from individual to individual, moral guilt doesn’t work that way. I can’t pursue the topic here, but I’m convinced that Wyma, along with the Reformed tradition generally, is way off base when it comes to the work of Christ for our salvation.
3. Open Theism and God’s Love in the Atonement (pp. 188–198)
We now come to the heart of Wyma’s critique of open theism: Open theism is bad because it doesn’t support PSA and so doesn’t guarantee that, on the cross, Jesus specifically had you and I in mind.
The main problem is that Christ can no longer be understood as dying out of love for you and me, as specific, concretely real persons, let alone for our specific sins. … [Given open theism,] when Christ went to the cross, even the Father could not have known what specific, actual persons in the future for whom He was dying, and hence that act could not have been performed for love of those recipients as real persons, nor for their specific, actual sins. (p. 188, emphasis Wyma’s)
[T]he idea that Jesus died for you and me as concrete, real persons—that he died from a loving intention to atone for your actual sins and mine—becomes nonsensical in the open view of God’s foreknowledge. … In short, Boyd’s open position must abandon the [penal] substitutionary model of Christ’s atonement. (p. 190, emphasis Wyma’s)
Again, I don’t see this as much of a “problem” because I don’t share Wyma’s attachment to PSA. Indeed, Wyma’s attachment to PSA seems to me to be emotional and sentimental at least as much as it is intellectual. When I hear him complain that on open theism Jesus on the cross didn’t have you or me specifically in mind as concrete individuals, my attitude is “So? Given the dynamic nature of time, how could things be otherwise?” Indeed, how is it even coherent to love as “specific, concretely real persons” individuals who don’t exist yet? For this reason, I have a hard time hearing Wyma’s complaint as anything other than narcissism wrapped in sentimentalism—Christ on the cross loved me, me, ME!—to which I want to say “Get over yourself.” Christ defeated sin, death, and the devil with His incarnation, death, and resurrection and thereby made it possible much later for each of us to enter into a personal, saving relationship with Him. Atonement models aside, nothing in open theism prevents us from saying that God loves you immeasurably and concretely as the individual you are right now. That the open theist can’t project that same individual love back into eternity past before any of us ever existed as concrete individuals doesn’t strike me as a serious problem.
Wyma notes that Boyd rejects PSA in favor of a Christus Victor (CV) model of Christ’s atonement. According to CV, Jesus’s death and resurrection broke the chains of sin and death and the power of Satan that were keeping humanity bound. According to Boyd, as cited by Wyma, Jesus effectively wrote a “blank check” for humanity’s redemption “sufficient to cover all possible sinners and all possible sins” (p. 191). While Wyma appreciates Christus Victor and believes that it can work “alongside” PSA, he doesn’t believe that any non-PSA model like CV is adequate by itself for it “does not as strongly reassure believers of God’s love for them” (p. 191). Without PSA, says Wyma, “[t]he love that leads Jesus to the cross is love for Humanity, in the abstract with a capital H,” but “this notion of God’s love doesn’t as fully address the question of how much he loves you and me as real individuals” (p. 191):
Given the ontological nature of a freely-enacted future as simply a cloud of possibilities, Boyd’s open position must say that it was logically impossible for the subject matter of God’s foreknowledge of us to have any more definiteness than that cloud. But possibility-clouds are not persons. The open view cannot include that God could knew [sic] you or me as persons in the work of atonement when Jesus went to the cross. (p. 192, underline in original)
This picture of atonement leaves existing, individual believers and doubters wondering how much love for them was expressed in the cross. (p. 196, emphasis in original as italics, not underline)
Again, I find myself quite unmoved by this. Any view that doesn’t espouse a static block ontology of time entails that, at the time of the crucifixion, all far-future individuals existed as nothing more than concepts in God’s mind. These concepts could be highly detailed and fine-grained, unlike the vague “cloud of possibilities” of which Wyma speaks. That is, God could have anticipated in full “living color” the future existence of every possible individual in every possible set of circumstances. But on any dynamic ontology of time, future individuals simply don’t exist yet for God to be acquainted with them and know them as concrete individuals. From my perspective, the only thing that matters is that God loves us concretely as the individuals we are right now and will continue to love us eternally into the future.
Wyma admits that open theism supports God’s individual love for us here and now and God’s generic love for humanity, but he doesn’t think open theists can coherently maintain that Christ would have died for each of us.
It’s not that God doesn’t love us, now that we’re here, on the open view; of course He does. But would God go to those lengths of the cross for us, in spite of our sins? Open theism’s answer is, “Very probably.” That’s not a joke; that’s the best reassurance open theism can offer.” (p. 196)
The reason Wyma thinks this is the best open theism can offer is because open theism denies that God could possibly have middle knowledge. When it comes to free choices, the most that can be known in advance are might counterfactuals. And since God is free, the most God can know of His own salvific decisions is that He might save us (p. 196). Moreover, if, as open theists often maintain, God sometimes regrets past decisions like making Saul king (1 Sam. 15:11), then why couldn’t God regret saving us?
God, having covered you under the blank check in Christ but not seeing how you’ve actually turned out, might regret His decision on your behalf. God might now see you and regret having bothered in your case. He might literally wish He could take back His offer. (p. 197)
And, if an open theist like Boyd replies to this by suggesting that “unlike us, God does not have to choose to love; He just loves as part of His necessary and perfect character,” Wyma objects that this reply is “incoherent with Boyd’s larger claim that love must, by logical necessity, be chosen” (p. 197).
What are we to make of this? Is it merely probable that God loves us on open theism? Is it possible that God should regret loving us? Wyma’s argument here, I submit, is incredibly weak. First, while God loves as part of His necessary and perfect character (1 John 4:8), God’s love for creation is still freely chosen because God didn’t have to create. In choosing to create, God thereby chooses to love creation come what may. Second, there is no danger that God might regret loving us because “there is no fear in love” (1 John 4:18). In choosing to bring about an open-ended creation of morally free creatures made in His own image, God freely committed Himself to loving them for eternity. Thus, there has never been any doubt that God would seek to rescue and restore His fallen creation. There’s no mere “probably” about it. Because God by nature is perfect love, He cannot not love what He chooses to create. Third, there is every reason to believe that Christ would have become incarnate and dwelt among us even if there had never been a Fall. After all, Adam and Eve were not created in a final, gloried state. They started out in a provisional paradise in which they were tasked and tested by God to move them toward a more mature and deeper relationship with God. They failed the test, but the goal of creation has never been simply to restore the Edenic paradise but for God and creation to dwell together in perfect love: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God.” (Revelation 21:4) Seen in this light, the coming of Emmanuel (God with us; cf. Matthew 1:23) was not merely an ad hoc rescue plan, but was intended from the get-go.
At this point Wyma makes a final complaint against open theism: By implicitly rejecting PSA, open theism undermines “God’s concern for justice … because its model of the atonement does not include satisfying God’s justice over specific wrongs done” (p. 198). In other words, retributive justice is fundamental to God’s justice proper. PSA recognizes this, but open theism doesn’t mesh well with PSA, and so open theism undermines God’s justice proper.
As the reader probably expects as this point, I’m not impressed by this complaint. God’s justice must be understood in light of God’s love (Hebrews 12:6). Perfect love always works for the true good of the beloved. The true good of every creature is to be in a right relationship with God. Thus, it is restorative justice, not retributive justice, that is fundamental to justice proper. Retributive justice, to the extent it is warranted, is warranted as a means of restoration. For example, retribution can help teach us the seriousness of what we’ve done by imposing on us a commensurate penalty. The penalty is not for the penalty’s sake, as though some cosmic scale needs to be balanced, but for the sake of teaching, deterring, and ultimately restoring what sin has harmed.
4. Conclusion: Does PSA + Unlimited Atonement Solve the Pastoral Problem?
As I see matters, Wyma’s complaints against open theism fall flat. His sentimental attachment to PSA (God loved me on the cross by dying for my sins!) prevents him from seriously countenancing alternative models of the atonement, like CV. Moreover, I think Wyma loses sight of the pastoral problem of evil. He seems to think that if PSA + unlimited atonement is true, then each of us should be consoled by God’s salvific love regardless of what happens in our lives. Thus, he seems to think that Suzanne’s pain over a broken marriage, her husband’s betrayal, and the way in which (she supposed) God set it all up should be swamped by “But Jesus died specifically for me.” Wyma seems, therefore, to downplay if not dismiss aspects of the pastoral problem that his own model generates.
Wyma is a Molinist, or at least he’s highly sympathetic to Molinism. He speaks of it positively in this essay and has published in defense of Molinism in the past. Suppose, then, in line with Wyma’s thinking, that a woman believes PSA + unlimited atonement and thus that Christ died specifically for her and her sins. Suppose, further, that she is a Molinist and therefore believes God sovereignly ordains and specifically intends “whatsoever comes to pass” for the sake of some nebulous greater good. Finally, suppose that she has experienced a life full of seemingly gratuitous suffering and abuse with no clear end in sight and witnessed numerous horrors inflicted on young children. On Wyma’s account it seems that she should console herself with the thought that Jesus died specifically for me and each of these suffering children and not face any special pastoral problem of evil related to the seemingly gratuitous suffering that she and the children undergo. This seems psychologically bizarre to me. Yes, the thought of Christ’s atoning work is consoling, but that doesn’t by itself eliminate the cognitive dissonance that comes from believing (1) God loves every person specifically, (2) everything that happens is specifically intended by God (for a greater good), and (3) a whole lot of gratuitously bad stuff seems to be happening to me and others. On the face of it, (1) and (2) should lead us to expect the opposite of (3). Now, maybe that’s not a strict entailment. Maybe we shouldn’t necessarily expect to understand why all this bad stuff is happening. But if we understand (or think we understand) how much God loves us in the atonement, then why shouldn’t we expect to see that same love displayed throughout our lives with a clear measure of consistency? And if we don’t see it displayed with clear consistency, then shouldn’t that naturally put psychological pressure on us to reconsider whether (1) and (2) are both actually true? I think that’s where Suzanne was at. For all we know, she may have already accepted PSA + unlimited atonement before talking with Boyd, but it wasn’t enough. God, she thought, had implicitly broken a promise to her. How could she trust such a God? At this point I don’t see that Wyma has anything concrete to offer Suzanne except high-level theological platitudes. Boyd offered her, instead, a new way of looking at her situation, one that affirmed (1) and (3) and rejected (2) and thereby made it possible for her to see God as trustworthy in the midst of her tragically broken circumstances. Boyd’s counsel helped her precisely because he didn’t downplay or dismiss the genuinely tragic nature of those circumstances by telling her “Well, God must’ve had a good reason for seemingly misleading you into thinking He wanted you to marry this guy and a good reason for ordaining this guy’s betrayal, etc.” On Wyma’s approach, there are no genuinely gratuitous evils, no genuine tragedies. Whatever happens, we have to gaslight ourselves into believing that God ordained it all for a “greater good” that He alone can grasp. Is that really the best way of dealing with the pastoral problem of evil?