A church leadership who does not agree with open theism yet hires an open theist to work within their leadership expresses an apathy toward their belief about who God is. I know if I were to present my argument for the importance of the doctrine of God they would reply that professing Christ and what he did is most important, we shouldn’t get hung up in the details of who God is. The problem that should be obvious but apparently is not is that we worship a Triune God and Christ is God; all we affirm of the Son we affirm of the Father and vice versa. Thus their apathy toward the doctrine of God is a denial and rejection of the Trinity because they attempt to uphold Christ but not God as if they could somehow be separated. And if we are willing to redefine God at this point in the story due to our uncertainty then how can we claim certainty about Christ and his work?
This apathy makes salvation the chief concern and God merely the means to achieving it. Our relationship to God is important inasmuch as it provides a means to saving us from damnation but in regard to being a relationship in which we know the Father it is not important; God exists to serve us. They may not concede to this but it is in practice what they are doing and it is what a minimalistic theology always does. It’s a husband who gets married merely for the benefit of sex and food on the table without concern for knowing, serving, or protecting his wife.
Finally, open theists along with any other theologies that claim the necessity of libertarian free-will as grounds for a genuine relationship runs into problems concerning the Triune God. If we are the image bearers of God and our relationships bear the image of and find their meaning in the eternal relationship of the Trinity then libertarian free-will must not be the defining leg upon which relationship stands. If it is then we must be willing to accept the idea the Persons of the Trinity may rebel against each other but this denies the unity existent between the Persons of the Trinity.
