This conference is not unlike summer camp—summer camp for open theologians. Conference co-organizer Tom Oord opened today by remarking that the point of the three weeks they spend here is not just to learn, debate, and eventually write big impressive papers to appear all together in a book, but also to build friendships. And while we didn’t sing “Kumbaya,” there will be plenty of opportunities to connect and network at afternoon activities, which include trips to the beach and baseball games.

But first, participants got down to business, sharing their many ideas for potential chapters in a future book. (Or, as open theologians would say, a book that has the possibility of coming into existence, but not even God knows if it’ll actually happen.)

And then it was John Sanders' turn to talk. Sanders was almost removed from the Evangelical Theological Society and was asked to leave Huntington University because of his notoriety in promoting open theological beliefs, and all he has to show for it is this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sanders

(It seems he is not the only one involved with this conference that you can wiki: Clark Pinnock , Greg Boyd, Tom Oord, Karl Giberson, Robin Collins, Richard Rice, and Michael Lodahl all have entries)

Titled “Open Theology: It’s History and Diversity,” Sanders’s talk went through the evolution of open theism and where it is today.

Some highlights:

-“God doesn’t micromanage the universe, so some things happen that God doesn’t want to happen.”

-There is a free-will family that open theology fits into, and among open theologians there are different ideas.

-Some distinguishing characteristics of OT: God is temporally everlasting, God has knowledge of the past and present and he creates the future as time moves on; God knows all that can be known

- Linguistic differences make a big difference. For instance, Sanders prefers “dynamic omniscience” to “presentism” because presentism gets confused with issues of time and evangelicals like the word “omniscience.” And rather than saying “God is surprised,” Sanders prefers to say, “God can’t be caught off-guard.” In one of his books, he said God can make a mistake, but now thinks his phrasing of that statement is mistaken.

Greg Boyd of Woodland Hills Church made an interesting point regarding the ways Westerners speak of the future. Other cultures, he said, think of themselves as backing into the future with the past spread out before them, rather than leaving the past behind and moving into the future. This is a good way of conceptualizing openness; the future doesn’t yet exist, so you can’t move into it. But you know the past and that influences your actions, so that is what you’re looking at when you make decisions.

-Heather Ciras