John E. Sanders - Biography

Biography

Sanders was born to Methodist parents in Central Illinois in 1956. He earned a doctoral degree (Th.D.) at the University of South Africa in 1996, a master of arts degree in theology from Wartburg Theological Seminary in 1987, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Trinity College (Illinois) in 1979. He currently serves as professor of religious studies at Hendrix College in Arkansas and previously taught at Huntington University in Indiana and Oak Hills Christian College in Minnesota. He was the Frederick J. Crosson Fellow at The Center for Philosophy of Religion (1997–1998) at the University of Notre Dame. He and his wife have five children, two of whom are biological and three are adopted from India.

In The God Who Risks, Sanders tells the story of how he began to reflect on divine providence. The watershed moment was when Sanders, a photographer for the local newspaper, stopped at the scene of an accident between a semi and a motorcycle. As it turned out, the motorcyclist who was killed was one of Sanders’ older brothers. Sanders went home, sat down at his bedside, and prayed, “God, why did you kill my brother?” Yet, later when some Christian friends suggested that God had ordained his brother’s death so that Sanders would become a Christian he rejected that idea. Additionally, in college he read some theology books which asserted that God was strongly immutable and impassible such that our prayers never affect God. This made Sanders wonder whether his understanding of prayer (prayers could affect God) was correct. He spent a good portion of the next twenty years seeking to resolve such issues. Eventually, he became a proponent of open theism and contributed to the scholarship on the topic along with other open theists such as Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd, and William Hasker.

His publications on both open theism and the destiny of the unevangelized were well received in some evangelical circles. However, conservative Calvinist evangelicals sharply criticized his work and he, along with Clark Pinnock, became controversial figures in evangelical theology. Pinnock and Sanders sought to reform evangelical theology, advocating what Brian McLaren calls “a generous orthodoxy.” Some referred to them as “postconservative evangelicals” or “postmodern evangelicals.” The lightning rod issue was Sanders’ and Pinnock’s affirmation of “dynamic omniscience” which denies that God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge of future contingent events. In 2002 Roger Nicole, a conservative Calvinist and founding member of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), put forward a motion to expel Sanders and Pinnock from the Society on the grounds that their affirmation that God can change the divine mind is incompatible with doctrinal basis of the Society.

The Executive Committee of the ETS held formal hearings with Sanders and Pinnock and decided that they had no problems with Pinnock but said that they could not approve of Sanders’ belief in “probabilistic prophecy”, which claims that some biblical predictions about future events are not guaranteed since they are conditional upon what beings with free will decide to do. At issue here is the truth value of statements about the future actions of free creatures. At the 2003 annual ETS meeting the membership voted overwhelmingly to affirm Pinnock’s inclusion but fell 25 votes short of the 2/3 majority necessary to expel Sanders. Also in 2003 several Calvinist pastors in the tiny denomination which owned Huntington University put pressure on the Administration to remove Sanders from the faculty (he was professor of religion and philosophy). Even though William Hasker (one of the authors of The Openness of God with Sanders) had taught at Huntington for thirty years and some other faculty members affirmed open theism, only Sanders was examined by a “denominational commission.” In November 2004 the President of the university announced that the Board of Trustees had decided to dismiss Sanders. The President informed the faculty that the problem does not seem to be Sanders’ beliefs (since other open theists remain in the school’s employ) but rather his notoriety in promoting them. Despite advocacy on his behalf by a Huntington student group called “Page 6” (referring to a statement on page 6 of the university catalog protecting academic freedom), Sanders was terminated from the University. Subsequently, he was hired at Hendrix College.