HAMILTON, Ontario (ABP) — Clark Pinnock, an influential theologian whose spiritual pilgrimage led him from a fiery fundamentalism as a young professor to an openness that caused some to brand him a heretic, died Aug. 15 of a heart attack. He was 73.
Pinnock, longtime professor of systematic theology at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, had withdrawn from public life since announcing in March he had Alzheimer's disease, but his death was unexpected.
Clark Pinnock
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Pinnock, the grandson of British Methodist missionaries to Nigeria who switched their affiliation to Baptist when their understanding of baptism changed, grew up in a fairly liberal home congregation, Park Road Baptist Church in Toronto. But as a youngster he wasn't particularly interested in church. Through influences including Youth for Christ and evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer, he began his theological career in the context of "post-World War II fundamentalism."
Teaching at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary from 1965 until 1969, Pinnock became an influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention's battles over biblical inerrancy. Among his students was Paige Patterson, today president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and co-founder with Houston layman Paul Pressler of what became known alternately as the "conservative resurgence" or "fundamentalist takeover" of America's second-largest faith group.
In his first book, A Defense of Biblical Infallibility in 1967, Pinnock said the doctrine "is a necessary, not merely an optional inference from the Biblical teaching about inspiration" and that "Sola Scriptura cannot be sustained apart from Biblical infallibility."
A year later, in New Reformation: A Challenge to Southern Baptists, Pinnock accused professors of Southern Baptist seminaries and related Baptist colleges of holding a "scaled-down" view of Scripture and called for "a new reformation" in the denomination.
After moving on to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1969-1974; Regent College in Vancouver, 1974-1977; and McMaster, 1977-2002, Pinnock's views on the Bible softened. At a 1987 conference on biblical inerrancy, Pinnock said that moderate Baptist scholars were never far removed from the biblical theology of rank-and-file church members. He said Southern Baptists' approach to the Bible was really not inerrancy but rather a "simple Biblicism," and that the "inerrancy controversy" was invented as a political weapon.
Pinnock's evolving views on inspiration were controversial to his former disciples, but it was nothing compared to his theological journey regarding the nature of God. Originally a Calvinist who emphasized God's sovereignty and foreknowledge, Pinnock gradually embraced a theology giving greater weight to human free will.
Pinnock was an early proponent of "open theism," which focuses on God's self-imposed limitations in dealing with humanity.
"The Christian life involves a genuine interaction between God and human beings," Pinnock wrote in his 1994 book, The Openness of God. "We respond to God's gracious initiatives and God responds to our responses … and on it goes."
That means the future is not entirely settled. While God knows all possibilities, God does not know with certainty what human beings will do until they act. "If choices are real and freedom significant," Pinnock argued, "future decisions cannot be exhaustively known."
Those views nearly got Pinnock kicked out of the Evangelical Theological Society. In 2002 members of the group for academic professionals voted 388 to 231 to retain him as a member.
The Southern Baptist Convention rejected open theism in the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message with a statement declaring that God's "perfect knowledge extends to all things, past, present and future, including the future decisions of His free creatures."
In his 2001 book, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness, Pinnock linked the SBC's statement on God to other statements in the confession of faith that the Bible limits the pastorate to qualified men and that wives should submit to their husbands in the home.
"I get suspicious when the same people who want to protect God's sovereignty also want to keep women in their subordinate place," Pinnock wrote about the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message. "Why do they not see that the Father whom they claim to exalt is not the 'father' of patriarchal power but the God of Jesus Christ who woos us through his self-giving love?"
Despite his influence in Baptist affairs, in his later years Pinnock was a member of Little Bethel Community Church in Hamilton, Ontario. His funeral service was scheduled there for Aug. 18.
Assessing Pinnock's sometimes-contradictory legacy, Russell Moore, theology dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said conservative evangelicals owe him a debt of gratitude.
"A list of his former students during that time is amazing to anyone with any grasp of the history of Southern Baptists and the inerrancy controversy: Paige Patterson, Jerry Vines, Adrian Rogers, and on and on," Moore wrote in his blog. "I cannot think of a single figure of crucial importance in the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention who is more than two steps away from Pinnock's direct influence."
"As I write this, I’m about to go into a classroom to teach 150 future pastors and missionaries," Moore continued. "We're in an institution committed to biblical authority and the centrality of the gospel. This would not be possible if Clark Pinnock hadn't taught Adrian Rogers and Paige Patterson and Jerry Vines."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.