We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The Open View and Radical Suffering
Jessica Kelley spoke at Open2013 this morning, sharing her journey with tenderness and authority. Jessica began wrestling with her view of God a couple of years ago and embraced Open Theism prior to the diagnosis and eventual death of her four-year-old son, Henry. Everyone here at the conference was profoundly affected by her story and by the beauty of the God who walked with her and her husband through the darkest days of their lives. We’re so grateful that she has been open to sharing with us in this way.
Someone commented afterwards, “Theologians can work their whole lives to refine their views, but there are places where our words fall short. We have to allow the voices of those who have suffered to rise up and teach us.” This was a moment where a room full of theologians listened in silence and with tears to the voice of a grieving mother, and learned what this theology really means when radical suffering comes. Jessica reminded us, “The blueprint worldview turns broken people away from the One who was broken for them.”
Although her portion of the conference was not taped (big mistake) we’ll be working at getting her presentation to all of you as soon as possible. God is doing something amazing here.
Category: General
Tags: Blueprint Worldview, Calvinism, Jess in Process, Jessica Kelley, Open Theism
Related Reading
The Future is Not Like the Past For God (or Us)
Image by seier+seier via Flickr Everyone agrees that we are not free to change the past. No sane person would claim, for example, that I can now make any free choices about whether John F. Kennedy will be assassinated or not on November 22, 1963. This deed, like all past deeds, has already been accomplished. Now consider,…
What is the significance of 2 Chronicles 32:31?
“God left [Hezekiah] to himself, in order to test him and to know all that was in his heart.” God tests his covenant partners to discover whether they will choose to remain faithful to him, an exercise that is absurd if God exhaustively foreknows exactly how faithful every person will choose to be. If the…
What is the significance of Jeremiah 36:1-6
The Lord has Jeremiah write his prophecy on a scroll, telling him, “Perhaps when the people of Judah hear about every disaster I plan to inflict on them, they will each turn from their wicked ways; then I will forgive their wickedness and their sin” (Jer. 36:3). Jeremiah then tells his scribe to take the…
What is the significance of Exodus 13:17?
The Lord didn’t lead Israel along the shortest route to Canaan because Israel would have had to fight the Philistines. The Lord wanted to avoid this, “Lest the people change their minds when they see war, and they return to Egypt.” [NIV: “If they face war they might change their minds and return to Egypt”].…
Revelation 17:8 refers to people whose names haven’t been written in “the book of life from the creation of the world.” Doesn’t this conflict with open theism?
As in Revelation 13:8, the clause “from the foundation” (apo kataboleis) need not mean “from before the foundation” but simply “from the foundation” (= since the foundation). It’s not that names either were or were not written in the “book of life” before they were ever born. Rather, throughout history, in response to the choices…
What is the significance of Exodus 33:1–3, 14?
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go, leave this place, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, and go to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites…Go up to the land…