(AgapePress) - A former president of the Southern Baptist Convention is concerned that the doctrine of open theism is gaining appeal among churchgoers. He says the growth of that doctrine in evangelical circles could one day be threatening to Southern Baptist churches.

"Open theism" essentially rejects God's foreknowledge; it holds that His knowledge is limited to the past and the present. Dr. Paige Patterson is president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He says the teaching of open theism is currently not very common in Southern Baptist churches, but it has had a somewhat meteoric growth in the evangelical community in general.

Patterson says advocates of open theism have generated this following because they are good with rhetoric.

"The progenitors of this particular idea are very winsome, charismatic individuals," Patterson explains. "Clark Pinnock, my old professor, is up in Toronto -- and anything he does, he does with a flair. It's going to be interesting, and it's going to be pretty well argued."

Patterson says Pinnock and others who share his views have basically joined hands with Karl Rahner and his position of "the anonymous Christian," which makes just about everybody in the world a Christian. Unfortunately, Patterson says, there is a certain political correctness about that which some people find appealing.

But Patterson says any denial of God's foreknowledge undermines the deity of God and Jesus, and must be confronted.

"We must counter it with a good presentation of the doctrine of God and of the Trinity, which we probably haven't done very well with," he says. "We have always assumed that everybody understood those and knew what we were talking about, so most of our discussion has been about Christ, salvation, the Church, and things of that nature.

"The good side of this is that it probably drives us back to some good, solid biblical teaching on the nature of God Himself and of the Trinity."

Patterson says it is highly unlikely that all the great theologians of the past 2,000 years missed a doctrine of such great import that was supposedly discovered to be "true" in the last ten years.

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