I will be taking a look at Chris Fisher’s response to some of the things stated by Bruce Ware. This is because I like some of Bruce Ware’s arguments and since they are similar to mine, then I will defend those:
Chris opens by reading Dolezal’s criticisms of Bruce Ware. I have no interest in defending Ware against such criticisms. For a response to Dolezal:
https://frame-poythress.org/two-models-of-divine-transcendence-pure-being-vs-divine-lordship/
http://spirited-tech.com/2020/08/26/aristotle-a-van-tilians-thoughts/
Fisher argues that God knows the future in the way we can know future things. You can know that if you were to offer your child something disgusting to eat or something tasty, they would choose. So, it seems that God can infer from what he knows about us to what we will do in future moments.
This seems to ignore that human predictions about future states of affairs are merely probabilistic. You know what might occur with lesser and greater degrees of reason. In fact, it seems that LFW makes people’s actions too spontaneous to know beforehand. Fisher seems to have stepped into a further issue that there is no reason we can even infer what someone is most likely to do given LFW.
If some agents can know the future in the same way as God, then why think someone is sent from God if he knows the future? It merely trivializes the evidence God uses to validate himself and his prophets.
Deuteronomy 18:20-22
But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’— when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.
Isaiah 41:21-24
21“Present your case,” the Lord says.
“Bring forward your strong arguments,”
The King of Jacob says.
22 Let them bring forth and declare to us what is going to take place;
As for the former events, declare what they were,
That we may consider them and know their outcome.
Or announce to us what is coming;
23 Declare the things that are going to come afterward,
That we may know that you are gods;
Indeed, do good or evil, that we may anxiously look about us and fear together.
24 Behold, you are of no account,
And your work amounts to nothing;
He who chooses you is an abomination.
Lastly, you have an issue that laws of thought govern the minds of God and humans, but where do these laws of thought come from on Fisher’s scheme?
This later turns to 1 Sam. 15 but that is old territory for the issue with Fisher:
http://spirited-tech.com/2019/01/23/god-isnt-open/
Fisher simply tries to limit what God can’t change his mind about. The issue in Fisher’s theology is that God can simply change his mind. It really isn’t the fact that God isn’t a man that he doesn’t lie or change his mind, but rather God doesn’t choose to. This leaves Fisher with needing some reason God doesn’t lie and change his mind like humans.
Fisher’s perspective is that we should agree with the narrator and God that he does change his mind. The problem with this is that the narrator also wrote the story with Samuel saying these things in a passage where he is rebuking Saul for Yahweh. What reason does Fisher doubt Samuel is speaking for Yahweh?
Fisher criticizes Dr. Ware for thinking that Jonah knew what would most likely occur, but he only cites the following portion of the text:
But to Jonah, this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Chris Fisher maintains that Jonah didn’t know (in the human sense) that there was a great likelihood of their repentance. Is Ware alone on this? One comentator states:
Is Jonah angry, then, that Ninevites have repented? Many have suggested that as a good Israelite Jonah would have been delighted if Nineveh were destroyed. At the time of Jonah, however, Nineveh was not yet the capital city of Assyria, and Assyria was not yet the world power that fifty years later would tyrannize Israel. Furthermore, their repentance would have been patently logical, given the message Jonah preached. Once doom had been pronounced and then confirmed by other means, the Ninevites would naturally seek to avert their destruction. Once Jonah has presented his message, the remaining sequence of events was practically inevitable: the people would repent, and the Lord would relent. Jonah could not be distressed or even surprised that they repented, for repenting was their only logical course of action. What instigates Jonah’s anger is the entire chain of events. I have pointed out that it is all totally logical, and Jonah has foreseen it all from the moment of his call. This is the reason why Jonah fled, and he tells us as much. For Jonah, it has been a no-win proposition from the start. He realized that if he went to Nineveh and pronounced its doom, the people would certainly make some attempt to appease the angry deity. But what did they know about the Lord and his demands? Their spiritual perception was extremely naïve, thus making it impossible that they could have any understanding of what they were doing. Yet Jonah knew that God, because of his attributes, would accept their shallow repentance anyway (cf. M. Burrows, “The Literary Category of the Book of Jonah,” in Translating and Understanding the Old Testament, ed. H. Frank and W. Reed [Nashville: Abingdon, 1970], 99, n.19). Jonah is angry that the whole process is taking place. He will not be able to convert the Assyrians to a monotheistic belief in the Lord and has not been instructed to do so. But why should they be spared for such a superficial ritual, and for that matter, why should they even be warned?
John H. Walton; Carl E. Armerding; Larry L. Walker. Jonah, Nahum, Habukkuk, Zephaniah (EBC) (Kindle Locations 2076-2090). HarperCollins Christian Publishing. Kindle Edition.
It seems, once again, that Fisher’s rantings are ‘Sound and fury, signifying nothing’. He thinks this is that Jonah thought it was merely a waste of time. What does God’s kindness, compassion, etc have to do with this being a waste of time?
The next passage that they move to is Gen. 22. Here we have Abraham attempting to sacrifice his son to prove to God that he is faithful. Ware gives a case showing that God knew that Abraham was always faithful. Fisher responds that it becomes a worthless test given that God knew prior to it everything he needed to know. This is true if the tests were for God to learn new things. That can’t be assumed because that is the contention in the discussion. The Bible teaches that God did have such knowledge prior. So, this shows that Fisher puts himself into a corner. How can God know that Abraham is faith and also not know whether he was?
He mocks the idea that the tests are for us rather than God. Contrary to what Fisher believes, scoffing at an idea isn’t a refutation. A character-building interpretation is sufficient to reconcile the contradiction in his view.
Ware moves to make an argument by analogy from Gen 22 to 18 in order to show that they have to accept that God doesn’t know what is currently happening and that he is physical. He states this is to shame a person to agree with Ware’s conclusion and that it commits the tu quoque fallacy.
Ware isn’t “shaming” anyone in order to accept his beliefs. He is arguing that if you use this method of interpretation in one place, then you can use it in another. The issue is that it often results in things most Open Theists reject.
Fisher doesn’t grasp how argumentation works. This is a similar mistake that Leighton Flowers use to make:
I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):
This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man — in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won’t admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent’s present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it’s up to him to modify it somewhere.
As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true.
He mentions that Will Duffy has an explanation of this passage that Gen. 18 is a Christophany. That the pre-incarnate Christ is limited in the way that he was during his earthly ministry. The problem with this is that Oliphint will undermine the OT explanations for passages now. Why couldn’t Gen. 22 just be Christological limitations? This undermines OT:
The most ironic thing about these arguments is that they all be true and Open Theism false. Take Dr. K. Scott Oliphint’s proposal about covenantal properties. They are contingent properties that are taken on in the event that God creates the world but they act analogously to the human nature of Christ. This would allow us to attribute everything the Open Theist applies to God via his covenant properties. So, they would have to show that Open Theists will need more arguments to prove their position than these passages. They have hit the problem of underdetermination.
http://spirited-tech.com/2020/01/29/open-theisms-underdetermination/
The other ideas that he presents are that God is repelled by sin not to be in certain places. How can sin force God to leave an area? What magical force pushes God around? The other one is simply that God doesn’t have to be everywhere. That is the point of the argument that Ware was presenting. It is just called biting the bullet. Is Fisher this inept to understand that? Is there anything wrong with the position that he wasn’t in Sodom and Gemorrah? One problem is how is God going to hold them accountable if he doesn’t know their sin because he didn’t want to be there? Fisher’s eschatological judge isn’t reliable to give good verdicts because he may not be paying attention.
Further Recommendation:
The Council 