Theopedia

Clark Pinnock

Overview

Clark H. Pinnock (1937-2010) was an evangelical Baptist theologian and proponent of open theism, the view that God does not exhaustively foreknow the future because he has bound himself to respond to creatures’ genuinely free choices rather than foreordain them.1 He began his career defending biblical inerrancy and moved, over four decades of teaching, first toward an Arminian doctrine of grace and then to open theism, annihilationism, and religious inclusivism.2

Life and Ministry

Pinnock earned a B.A. in ancient Near Eastern studies from the University of Toronto in 1960 and a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1963, where he studied under F. F. Bruce and wrote his dissertation on the concept of spirit in Paul’s epistles.2 He taught at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (1965-1969), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (1969-1974), and Regent College in Vancouver (1974-1977) before settling at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario (1977-2002), where he remained professor emeritus until his death.2 Craig Carter, who later became a critic of open theism, studied under Pinnock at McMaster in the early 1980s and recalled him as an example of how “drastic theological changes usually occur gradually in stages rather than all at once.”3 Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in early 2010, Pinnock died on August 15 of that year at the age of seventy-three.2

Theological Contribution

Pinnock set out his mature doctrine of God in Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (2001) and, with several co-authors, in the earlier The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (1994).1 Craig Carter places Pinnock’s open theism alongside process theology and social trinitarianism as one of several twentieth-century departures from the classical doctrine of God, though a “slightly less radical” one: in Pinnock’s theology, “God waits to see what creatures do and then responds because God has made ‘a kind of covenant of non-coercion with creatures,’” which means there are “certain metaphysical constraints that God cannot avoid.”1 Because the limits on God’s power are self-imposed rather than metaphysically necessary, Carter judges open theism closer to orthodoxy than process theology, even as Pinnock himself described his own position as “a species of free will theism” opposed to “the strong immutability central to the Thomistic model.”4

Reformed critics traced open theism to Pinnock’s earlier move away from a Calvinist doctrine of grace. Matthew Barrett’s dissertation on monergism and regeneration groups Pinnock with Bruce Reichenbach and Jack Cottrell among Arminians who deny total depravity and human spiritual inability outright, distinguishing them from Wesleyan Arminians who affirm total depravity but hold that prevenient grace universally mitigates it.5 Barrett quotes Pinnock’s own account of the mechanics of saving grace: God tries his hardest to “win our consent,” but “the final decision and right of refusal, he has vested in us.”6

Alongside open theism, Pinnock argued for annihilationism, the view that the unsaved cease to exist rather than suffer everlasting conscious punishment, and for a form of inclusivism holding that salvation, while grounded in Christ alone, is not restricted to those who hear and believe an explicit gospel proclamation, a thesis he developed in A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (1992).2 Herman Bavinck, addressing the same question of salvation apart from gospel proclamation, states the older Reformed caution that Pinnock’s inclusivism went beyond: rather than affirming that such salvation occurs, Reformed theology “refused to establish the measure of grace needed for a human being still to be united with God” and instead “abstain[ed] from a firm judgment, in either a positive or a negative sense,” while still holding that salvation comes through Christ alone.7

Historical Significance

Pinnock’s departures from inerrancy, classical theism, and eternal conscious punishment drew sustained evangelical criticism in the early 2000s. Roger Nicole, a founding member of the Evangelical Theological Society, brought charges that Pinnock’s and John Sanders’s open theism violated the Society’s doctrinal statement on biblical inerrancy, and Norman Geisler pressed the same objection.8 At the Society’s 2003 annual meeting in Atlanta, members voted on a motion to remove both men from membership; a two-thirds majority was required, and the motion narrowly failed, allowing Pinnock and Sanders to remain.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 137, quoted in Craig A. Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Justin Taylor, “Clark H. Pinnock (1937-2010),” The Gospel Coalition (blog), August 17, 2010, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2010/08/17/clark-h-pinnock-1937-2010/. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Craig A. Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). ↩

  4. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover, x-xi, quoted in Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism.” ↩

  5. Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 317-355, 318: “there are Arminians like Pinnock, Reichenbach, and Cottrell who deny total depravity and spiritual inability.” ↩

  6. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover, 163, quoted in Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism.” ↩

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 25, “The Consummation,” sec. “The Wideness of God’s Mercy”: “In light of Scripture, both with regard to the salvation of pagans and that of children who die in infancy, we cannot get beyond abstaining from a firm judgment, in either a positive or a negative sense.” ↩

  8. Doug Koop, “Closing the Door on Open Theists?,” Christianity Today, January 1, 2003, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2003/01/closing-door-on-open-theists/. ↩

  9. Jeff Robinson, “Is Open Theism Still a Factor 10 Years after ETS Vote?,” The Gospel Coalition, 2013, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/is-open-theism-still-a-factor-10-years-after-ets-vote/. ↩