Personally, though I could be wrong, I think he is merely focusing on "human responsibility." Too often, we act as though God is simply a Mechanist and our lives are as robotic and determined as the caricatures of Calvinism that abound. The question was and continues to be:
how are our free or contingent acts of second causality brought into connection with the necessary acts of second causality, in order to flesh out the divine decree?
Here's Pratt from that .pdf file:
To begin with, the future is certain only to God. Beyond this, our assessments of contemporary events are too inadequate to complete such a project. Instead of looking for how actions today fit within a fixed future, we should explore how actions today effect the future. In a word, we should be less concerned with foreknowledge of the future and more concerned with the formation of the future.
If we ask whether or not we do participate in the formation of the future, the answer, I think quite properly is "yes, certainly, from our own standpoint--the standpoint within history." When Pratt speaks of the framework of God's providence, control, decree, one can study that from the macro-level down to the micro-level. And like good scientists, one is still going to say, "the deeper in I go, the more of the structure of things I understand, the more inexplicably complex it seems."
There was a time when I am certain it was believed all the really big questions of, say, Mathematics had been raised and answered, and all that was left were the details. Certainly that was also true in physics--after Newton solved gravity, there was nothing left, right? Wrong. Quantum mechanics followed. Now, they've come round to multidimensional geometry, which some are hailing as the key to finally unlocking the perplexing relationships between the many (and bizarre) subatomic particles. I predict less certainty, not more, as the data flows in.
And for the same reasons. On the one hand, Newton gave us the Watchmaker, and Einstein gave us Relativity, and the oscillation now heads back to determinism--because God's order rules, his decree is minute; his freedom is absolute, and creation's is contingent.
Getting back to Pratt, I think he just affirms that
from a certain standpoint, things could have been "otherwise", just as from another: God
would not have them otherwise. Our affirmations lie with the knowledge that God is in minute control, and that he has an elect company he is gathering--a number that is fixed and upon whom all his good purposes find fulfillment in Christ. But those affirmations can never exclude the knowledge that our lives are indeed either "hasting" the Day (2 Pet. 3:12), or retarding it.
Pratt states that he agrees with Hodge here:
7 We agree with Hodge when he says, “If He [God] has not absolutely determined on what is to occur, but waits until an undetermined condition is or is not fulfilled, then his decrees can neither be eternal nor immutable.” C. Hodge, Systematic Theology 1. 540.
That seems pretty unequivocal in support of thoroughgoing determinism. The problem with open theism is that it denies God's decretive priority entirely, in favor of radical contingency, that God merely "expects" to be able to overcome all obstacles and opposition to the accomplishment of his plans. For the open theist, however, there is always the possibility that there is a "bigger" (and more malevolent?) God or event still hidden to the One we know, who (or which) has as alternative direction. His theology of divine ignorance, to be consistent, must leave this option open as well. This idea I do not think Pratt shares.
