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Clark Pinnock

Clark Pinnock (1937–2010), Canadian Baptist theologian who taught for many years at McMaster Divinity College and became a leading voice of Open Theism.

History

Roots

Pinnock was born in Toronto on 3 February 1937 to liberal Baptist parents and was converted to evangelical faith at twelve (Christianity Today obituary, secondary). He studied Ancient Near Eastern languages at the University of Toronto, spent time at Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri, and took a PhD at Manchester under F. F. Bruce with a thesis on the Holy Spirit in Paul. The two influences pulled in the same direction at first: Schaeffer’s apologetics and Bruce’s confident historical scholarship both supported a robust, rational defense of Scripture.

He began his career as that kind of defender. A Defense of Biblical Infallibility (1967) and Biblical Revelation (1971) argued for strict Biblical Inerrancy. He was also, by his own later account, a convinced Calvinist who thought Calvinism “just scriptural evangelicalism in its purest expression” (quoted in the CT obituary). He taught at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary from 1965, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (1969–1974) and Regent College, Vancouver (1974–1977), then settled at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton in 1977, where he stayed until he retired in 2002.

Causes of his changes

Pinnock’s career is a series of public changes of mind, each argued in print. The first was on grace and predestination. By his own account, around 1970 his study of the warnings in Hebrews made him doubt that the elect could never fall away, and from there the rest of the Calvinist system loosened (Evangelical Arminians). He told the story in “From Augustine to Arminius: A Pilgrimage in Theology,” the opening essay of the volume he edited, The Grace of God, the Will of Man: A Case for Arminianism (1989, Archive.org), which followed his earlier edited collection Grace Unlimited (1975). By the late 1970s he described himself as Arminian.

The second change was on Scripture. In The Scripture Principle (1984, Archive.org) he still called the Bible fully trustworthy, but he located its inerrancy in what the text intends to teach and gave more room to the human, historical side of the writing. Many readers saw that as a move toward Limited Inerrancy, six years after the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy had tried to fix the stricter definition.

The third change concerned God. If human choices are truly free, Pinnock reasoned, the future cannot already be settled, even in God’s knowledge. That argument produced his most famous work.

Influence

In 1994 Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger published The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Archive.org). It came eighth in Christianity Today’s book awards and drew four reviews in the magazine, three of them hostile (John Sanders, “An Overview of the Debate on Open Theism in Evangelicalism”, secondary, by a co-author). The book turned open theism from a minority position held by a few philosophers into a fight that ran through evangelical seminaries, denominations and publishing houses for a decade. Pinnock set out his mature version in Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (2001, Archive.org).

His other books had their own reach. A Wideness in God’s Mercy (1992, Archive.org) became a standard evangelical statement of inclusivism. Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (1996, Archive.org) argued that the Spirit had been treated as “a kind of junior assistant to Christ” (CT obituary) and reflected his move from Cessationism toward Charismatic openness. A Festschrift, Semper Reformandum (2003), honored him. In March 2010 he announced that he had Alzheimer’s disease and was withdrawing from public life; he died of a heart attack on 15 August 2010.

Key ideas and contributors

God’s love is the controlling attribute. Pinnock’s theology starts from the claim that God is love and wants a real, two-way relationship with free creatures. Anything in Classical Theism that seemed to block that relationship (impassibility, immutability, timelessness, meticulous control) he treated as Greek philosophy imported into the Bible rather than drawn from it. The title Most Moved Mover inverts Aristotle’s “unmoved mover.”

The future is partly open. Open theism holds that God knows everything that can be known, but that the free decisions of creatures do not yet exist to be known. God knows the future as a range of possibilities and his own settled intentions. Pinnock and his co-authors read texts in which God tests, regrets or changes course as meaning what they say (Genesis 22:12, Exodus 32:14, Jeremiah 3:7). See Divine Foreknowledge.

Grace is universal in scope. Following Jacobus Arminius and John Wesley more than Augustine, Pinnock held that God wills the salvation of all and gives everyone grace enough to respond. A Wideness in God’s Mercy pushed that further: people who never hear of Christ can still be saved by him if they respond in faith to the light they have, as Pinnock read the cases of Cornelius and the “holy pagans” of the Old Testament (Acts 10:34–35). He was an inclusivist, not a universalist: Christ remains the only Savior, but explicit knowledge of him is not required.

The wicked are destroyed, not tormented forever. Pinnock was one of the best-known evangelical defenders of Annihilationism, alongside John Stott. He argued it in “The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent” (Criswell Theological Review, 1990) and as “the conditional view” in William Crockett, ed., Four Views on Hell (1992, Archive.org). His case rested on texts about destruction (Matthew 10:28) and on the moral claim that endless conscious punishment for finite sin is incompatible with a loving God.

Theology should keep reforming. Pinnock saw his changes as faithfulness, not drift. He wanted to be remembered for “the courage to question them and to change old opinions which need changing” (CT obituary).

Key controversies

Open theism and God’s knowledge. Critics argued that denying exhaustive foreknowledge shrinks God and undercuts prophecy, providence and the believer’s confidence that God will finish what he started (Isaiah 46:9–10, Psalm 139:16). The main book-length replies were Norman Geisler’s Creating God in the Image of Man? (1997), Bruce Ware’s God’s Lesser Glory (2000) and John Frame’s No Other God (2001). Thomas Oden wrote in Christianity Today (February 1998) that “the fantasy that God is ignorant of the future is a heresy that must be rejected” (quoted in Sanders). Open theists replied that their critics were defending a Greek idea of God and reading the “regret” texts away. Arminian critics added that simple foreknowledge is compatible with free will, so Pinnock’s premise did not require his conclusion.

The ETS hearing. In 2001 the Evangelical Theological Society passed a resolution affirming that God has “complete, accurate and infallible knowledge of all events past, present and future.” At the 2002 meeting Roger Nicole, a founding member, charged Pinnock and Sanders with violating the society’s inerrancy clause, on the grounds that biblical predictions God might not fulfill would make Scripture err. The Executive Committee held hearings in October 2003 and cleared Pinnock while finding against Sanders; by Sanders’s account the difference turned on whether biblical statements about free future acts can be mere probabilities, a philosophical question Pinnock said he knew little about. At the November 2003 meeting 67% voted to retain Pinnock; the motion to expel Sanders got 63%, short of the two-thirds required (Sanders, “Overview”, secondary). Pinnock stayed a member. The episode showed how far open theism had divided the society.

Scripture. Pinnock’s former allies on inerrancy treated The Scripture Principle as a retreat. Defenders of the Chicago Statement saw his focus on the “intended teaching” of a text as a way to let errors in through the back door. Pinnock answered that he was describing the Bible as it actually is, and that strict inerrancy demanded a precision the biblical writers never claimed.

Inclusivism and hell. Exclusivists argued that A Wideness in God’s Mercy weakened the motive for missions and misread Acts 4:12 and Romans 10:14. Defenders of Eternal Conscious Torment answered his annihilationism by pointing to “eternal punishment” set beside “eternal life” in Matthew 25:46, and charged that his argument from God’s love put moral intuition above the text. Some critics also saw a pattern: each of his moves made God gentler and less sovereign, and they asked where the trajectory ended.

What remains unresolved

Pinnock himself said he felt “too much of a free thinker to be accepted by the evangelical establishment” (CT obituary). Even opponents granted that he argued from the Bible first. The open question his career leaves is whether evangelical theology has room for that kind of continual revision, or whether a fixed doctrine of God and Scripture is what holds it together. The ETS vote answered it for his membership; it did not answer it for the movement.