John 11:40

Jesus says to her, "Did I not say to you that if you should believe, you will see the glory of God?" - John 11:40 Berean Literal Bible

Open Theism: A Forceful Response to Meticulous Providence, the preordained "script"

The core argument of Open Theism (OT) against Meticulous Providence (MP) is that MP's definition of divine sovereignty eliminates genuine human freedom and responsibility, making God the author of all actions, including sin, and rendering prayer and real relationship meaningless.

Open Theism seeks to maintain God's perfect love, knowledge, and power while preserving a dynamic, risk-taking relationship with genuinely free agents.

The Open Theism Critique of the MP "Script"

Open Theism directly refutes the MP notion that Martha's grief was "scripted" and yet "genuine."

1. The Violation of Free Will (Libertarianism)

• OT's Definition of Freedom: OT holds to libertarian free will ($\text{LFW}$): a choice is truly free only if the agent, given the exact same internal state and external circumstances, genuinely could have chosen otherwise.

• MP's Error: MP's reliance on compatibilism (the idea that freedom means merely doing what one wants, even if the wanting is decreed) is rejected as a sophisticated form of determinism. If God infallibly decrees the outcome, the choice is an illusion.

• The Programming Claim Affirmed: OT asserts that if Martha's grief was necessarily included in the script, she was, functionally, programmed. Her action was an inevitable output of a divine algorithm, robbing her sorrow of its moral and personal significance. A decreed choice is not a free choice.

2. The Denial of Genuine Relationship

• Relationship Requires Risk: OT argues that a genuine love relationship requires the possibility of real risk—the risk of rejection and the chance of genuine, unnecessitated acceptance.

• MP's Fatal Flaw: If Martha's faith in John 11:40 was guaranteed by Effectual Grace (irresistible and limited to the elect), her subsequent belief was not a free response of love but the unavoidable fulfillment of a decree. This turns the relationship into a pre-programmed performance. Jesus was not asking Martha for a true act of faith but simply stating the outcome of a foregone conclusion.

The Open Theist View of God's Foreknowledge

The most forceful element of the OT response is the redefinition of God's knowledge, which directly challenges MP's exhaustive decree.

1. God's Omniscience is Not Exhaustive Foreknowledge of Future Free Acts

• OT maintains that God is perfectly omniscient, but since truly free human choices are not yet determined, they are currently unknowable as settled facts, even to God.

• God knows all that has been and all that will necessarily be (e.g., natural laws, His own promises), but He does not know what will contingently be (free human choices).

• The World is Open: The future is partially "open," containing real possibilities contingent on human decisions.

2. God's Dynamic Sovereignty

• In the Lazarus event, OT would argue that God took a real risk with Martha and Mary.

• God's Plan: God's plan was that this illness would lead to His glory (John 11:4), but the success of the plan depended on the sisters' genuine, unnecessitated faith.

• The Command is Real: When Jesus said, "If you believed," the condition was real. Martha genuinely could have failed to believe and the miracle might have been limited or God would have had to respond differently. God was reacting, adapting, and interacting with Martha's genuine, real-time choice, not reciting a line from a script.

Conclusion: MP Undermines God's Moral Character

OT views MP as ultimately compromising God's moral character:

• Author of Sin: By including all human actions, including the disbelief of the reprobate and the malice of Judas, in the divine decree, MP makes God the ultimate author of sin.

• Meaningless Prayer: If God has already exhaustively fixed all future events, prayer is reduced to a ritual that cannot change God's mind or His established decree.

• Lack of Genuine Compassion: MP's view of Martha's grief as a scripted dramatic tool removes the genuineness of God’s own sorrow (John 11:35, "Jesus wept"), which OT holds is a real, empathetic response to the real pain of His free creation.

Open Theism's final word is that a sovereign God who takes real risks and is truly affected by the free, unscripted choices of His creatures is a greater, more loving, and more biblical God than the deterministic God proposed by Meticulous Providence.