Christians have often wrestled with questions of unanswered prayer. Most Christians have had at least one prayer that was never answered or have witnessed the illnesses or deaths of people that they believed to be devout Christians in rightstanding with God. How can the concept of a loving God who longs to help His children be reconciled with unanswered prayer? Gregory A. Boyd's book Is God To Blame? Moving Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Evil purports to provide answers to that burning question. Boyd's book explains God's will from the perspective of open theism, which asserts that "insofar as God gives freedom to agents, the future is composed of possibilities that are known by God as such," a view that "conflicts with the traditional view that God is eternally certain of all that will come to pass, including the decisions of free agents" (202). In other words, much of the future is "open" for God in the sense that He does not yet know what it holds (Ware 18).
Open theism has implications for the theological ideas of free will and prayer, as well as how one approaches the issue of pain and suffering. While Boyd addresses some of these issues with impressive discernment, his perspective toward others is problematic, as it reveals the image of a God he views as limited. In this respect, a book by Bruce A. Ware-God's Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism-provides an excellent foil to Boyd's book and a basis for comparison and contrast, particularly since Ware and Boyd were colleagues and since Ware's book is specifically aimed at debunking Boyd's. This paper will examine the issues of open theism, free will, pain and suffering, and prayer from the perspective of Boyd's book and informed as well by Ware's book to arrive at a view that analyzes their differences and incorporates some of both.
Boyd (125) asserts that God is bound by two variables in terms of what He is able to do or not d...