Critical Consideration on God's Essence and His Features in Open Theism

Abstract

Open Theism, as a new perspective in theology, has attracted attention of many scholars and mainly claims that some teachings of classical theism are not in accordance with Scripture and depict God in the way of Greek metaphysic and Hermeneutical pattern. Therefore, Open Theists proposed a new model of theology based on the notion of Openness in reaction to deterministic model of classical theism. Their point of view had some implications like mutability, temporality and direct involvement of God. But these lead to some problems in their view like inconsistency and ambiguity in addition to denying absolute perfection from Him. In this paper, we will clarify these defects and give solutions based on Islamic thought and Lastly introduce Doctrine of Badāʾ by which we will answer many of unsolved problems that led some theologians toward Open Theism. It will be shown that by Badāʾ there will be no room for inconsistency in Devine properties.

Keywords

• open theism
• islamic thought
• divine timelessness
• badāʾ
• immutability