Reddit mentions of The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God

It's called Open Theism. If you're at all serious about your inquiry, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God is a good academic place to start. It's not light reading though. I respect Greg Boyd enough to suggest God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God as well, though I haven't read it myself.

It's difficult to talk about a biblical God that doesn't have all power or know all things. That sort of language is employed often enough in the Bible.

Openness talks about God choosing to not exercise the power that He could, limiting himself in creating creatures with actual libertarian free will.

Since, the argument goes, true libertarian free will is incompatible with determinism, the future doesn't exist.

It isn't that God doesn't know the future. God knows everything. The future simply doesn't exist yet to be known.

When God or God's prophets make a statement about the future, it isn't due to knowledge of what will be, it is primarily due to God's knowledge of what he will do.

Say I tell you that next Wednesday I'm going to go to Walmart. If next Wednesday I'm at Walmart, it isn't because I had some special insight into the future, it's because I knew what I planned on doing. My truck could break down, I could catch cold, or any number of things might prevent me from going; but in all likelyhood I'd be there.

Now, consider God, a being who even in the most open views of God is 'most powerful'. When he says that next Wednesday he is going to be at Walmart; he's going to be at Walmart.

Also, Open Theism raises a lot of questions about God's immutability and impassibility. These are the ideas that God is unchangeable and therefore never the recipient of actions and only ever the subject of actions.

A lot of the ideas we have about omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, impassibility and immutability actually find their roots in Greek philosophy. That isn't necessarily bad though, at least not in and of itself.

There are a good handful of places in the Bible where God "repents" and changes his mind about things. These are often looked at as anthropomorphisms, but the argument for those instances being anthropomorphisms usually don't get much more deep than, "it isn't consistent with the picture of God I have, so therefore I refuse to accept that God could change".

I bought into Open Theism completely a couple of years ago, now I'm in the process of going back through and reevaluating things.

The Openness of God

It's a great summary text by five of the "founding" proponents of Open Theism and goes into numerous aspects (theology, philosophy, practical implications, etc) of the open position.

The problem with pain and evil is that we don't really know.

I firmly believe that the Creator didn't intend for any of this, yet that unhinges a whole bunch of presuppositions about what the Creator is like; such as immutability, impassibility, even omniscience.

For me the root question was "If GOD knew the outcome of creation before creation, doesn't that make GOD ultimately responsible?"

There are no definitive answers for theodicy. There are guesses and suggestions, frameworks and world views.

Our conception of GOD; that primary view of GOD's attributes will influence so much of how we understand suffering and pain.

The best framework for me is Open Theism.

Here are some awesome resources for what has proved so vital for my faith regarding pain and suffering:

1)The Crucified GOD - Jurgen Moltmann - an awesome book (if not a little on the academic end) thinking through Jesus and suffering.

2) Is GOD to Blame? - Greg Boyd - a much easier to read book exploring these very questions.

3)The Openness of GOD - Pinnock et. al. - for me this is the gold standard. It isn't too dry and heady but isn't weak on research either.

Awesome question and I love that quote from your brother.