Amipotentiality and the Sacrament of Service
By B. Keith Putt
Thomas Jay Oord’s amipotence and Richard Kearney’s anatheism of divine possibility offer complementary interpretations of Christian sacramental service.
A few years ago, when visiting the Vatican, I joined a congregation of about three hundred worshippers celebrating the Latin Mass in the area just below the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter in St. Peter’s Basilica. Although a Protestant of the Baptist persuasion, I still found that traditional Catholic service to be particularly worshipful and spiritually meaningful, especially in its conclusion. The service ended in the traditional manner with the dismissal formula, Ite, missa est— “Go, it [the congregation] is dismissed.”
One of the various interpretations of that formula concerns how the Mass (a word directly derived from missa) concludes with the “missionary” imperative, “Go.” At times, this interpretation has relied on a particular association of missa with the Latin verb meaning “to send,” from which we derive the English word “missionary.” That root has now been called into question, resulting in the formula simply meaning “to be dismissed,” as in “the sacramental ceremony is adjourned.” Nevertheless, remnants of the notion of mission remain in that official closing of the service since the word “dismissal” (dis-mittere) itself includes the idea of being “sent away” or “sent forth.”
Not surprisingly, Pope Benedict XVI in the papal document entitled Sacramentum Caritas (The Sacrament of Charity) continues to connect the observance of the Eucharist to the missionary vocation of the church (Sec. 51).[1] He qualifies the Eucharist as a sacrament of love and joins the final imperative “to go” with the church’s responsibility to communicate the good news of divine love and grace. In doing so, he sustains the connection between the experience of God’s presence in the sacrament and the dispersal of that presence into the world through Christian service. He actually claims that “in the sacrament of the altar, the Lord meets us, men and women created in God’s image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:27), and becomes our companion along the way” (Sec. 2).
One might paraphrase the pope here and claim that Jesus and we become partners in fulfilling the great commission of evangelizing through both word and deed. In our partnership with God, we participate as doers of the word of redemption and not merely hearers (James 1:22). Likewise, we genuinely impart the gift of divine presence through obedient acts of loving neighbors and enemies (Mark 12:31; Matt. 5:44), of responding to the “least of these” who are in need (Matt. 25:40), and of revealing our faith through our ethical works of compassion and justice (James 2:18). Perhaps, in fact, those obedient acts are the genuine sacrament through which human beings encounter and impart the real presence of Christ. As partners with God and imparters of God’s gracious presence, therefore, we transform the world by morally engaging it in order to approximate the Kingdom of God. We strive to avoid reducing the kingdom to some “not yet” reality that lies in a future time and in an other-worldly place. On the contrary, we prefer to interpret the kingdom as an “already, but incomplete” reality that literally transforms individuals and societies into better approximations of God’s powerfully-redemptive intent.
Now, were one to use an Oordian lexicon to paraphrase the post-Eucharistic dismissal as a mission to actualize the sacrament of love, one could properly classify it as an expression of divine amipotence. Oord relentlessly insists that God’s power should not be explained using the metaphysical concept of omnipotence, which leads to variants of theopanism, i.e., God does it all, or a divine determinism that preempts any genuine significant human freedom. He supplants that “unbiblical” supposition with his notion of amipotence, derived from the Latin for “power of love.” He asserts that love always comes first in the criteriology of God; consequently, it legislates over all other characteristics, especially over the genuine meaning of divine power. For Oord, amipotence necessitates that one comprehend divine power as working frequently in tandem with human capability; that is, God exercises influence over reality both directly through various acts of God and also indirectly through cooperating with human activity, what he terms the “indispensable love synergy” between God and humanity.[2] This synergy, this “cooperating” and “collaborating” together,[3] indicates that “the uncontrolling Lover [God] requires the beloved’s [human’s] responses in the work to save the world.”[4]
Although God is, indeed, the “source of might for all,”[5] God does not directly exercise divine might in order to accomplish events in reality. Indeed, God cannot exercise a universal controlling power according to Oord’s reading of scripture. One might say, therefore, that God “woos,” not coerces, obedience. God motivates human action through a Spirit of grace that empowers humans to actualize the amipotentiality inherent in the gospel kerygma.[6] Although the amipotent God needs human beings to effect redemptive changes in reality, that need does not extend existentially to God Godself. In other words, God does not need human beings to exist as God but does frequently need human beings to accomplish divinely-desired acts of mercy and grace.[7] Indeed, Oord intentionally and consistently defends the position that the divine amipotent need for a love synergy between creator and creation results in God’s experience constantly changing in reaction to human responses. In no way, however, does this insinuate a “theontological” transformation of the immutable essence of God’s identity.[8] “Who” God is remains unconditional and incapable of modification.
Of course, Oord is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness announcing the good news of open theism. A choir of saints surround him polyphonically voicing counterpoint melodies that sing of a God other than the traditional deity of classical theism, of a creator who does not micro-manage creatures but frees them to serve as unequal colleagues in the realization of redemption. One such voice comes from Boston College in the person of Richard Kearney, whose anatheistic perspective on God harmonizes with Oord’s amipotent theism at several salient points, not, however, without some occasional dissonance! Furthermore, Kearney even positions his theology of the weakness of God within a broader Eucharistic context by acknowledging that his anatheism always includes a sacramental dynamic. He confesses that as the presence of Christ in the Eucharist entails a movement of flesh into elements, then the dismissal commission post-Eucharist requires a transformation of that elemental presence back into flesh, specifically the enfleshment, or incarnation, of Christ in the doing of the Word that is Christian service.[9]
The embodying of Christ’s presence through sacramental service illustrates for Kearney God’s creational intent for human beings to be co-creators and ambassadors of the ministry of reconciliation, an intent that may be discovered in the first creation narrative in Genesis. In that narrative, he identifies the Sabbath motif as directly addressing God’s desire for human beings to join God in the continuing work of creation and re-creation, with “re-creation” being understood as an “ana-creation,” a “second creation” that takes place again and again.[10] Kearney directly associates this perpetual co-creation with what he terms a “sabbatical cleft” within God Godself that allows for each human to be a “creative vicar of God.”[11] This sabbatical cleft opens a place within the divine, something similar to the Kabbalistic notion of zimzum, in which human beings can participate in God’s creative and redemptive expressions of love, thereby accomplishing realities that God alone cannot.[12] God rests on the Sabbath not out of fatigue but out of a desire to allow human beings to live out the ongoing seventh day of creation through consistent service. This service, however, is what Kearney interprets as “play.” He accepts that humans are homo ludens, the playing creature, who transfigure the world as they imaginatively reveal the image of God as Deus ludens, the playing deity who consistently establishes the grounds for new possibilities in reality. Precisely through the divine gift of imagination, humans may engage in imaginative variations of self and world so as to open themselves to God’s agapic desires for creation. After creatively envisioning how the world might be in response to God’s non-coercive revelation of amipotentialities, humans who heed the divine vocation to instantiate the gospel may alter reality through the power of their actions.[13] That power, therefore, becomes a proxy for the divine power of redemption, or to use an Oordian phrase, the power of a “love synergism.”
Yet, Kearney routinely notes that God as Deus ludens cannot be the traditional God of metaphysical theism, since the “omni” God as self-subsistent being does not play but dominates, does not defer to the power of the creature but predominates and subjugates in order to force God’s will. These two distinct ways of naming God provoke Kearney to engage in “anatheism,” since the “ana” prefix denotes “again” or “after.”[14] What comes after the God of omnipotence, immutability, impassibility, and aseity? Can one return to God again when one no longer believes that the divine father revealed by Jesus is the God of the philosophers? Kearney answers that one can, indeed, return again to a God after the God of metaphysics by heeding the call of the God who discloses Godself in Christ as a God of weakness, a God of passion and compassion, a God essentially affected by the divine relationship with human beings. The playful God is a vulnerable God, a God of unconditional love without absolute sovereignty, a God who is not immutable but who is always the God who may be, the God of “perhaps,” the God whose identity awaits human responses to what God potentiates out of unconditional divine love.[15]
As he testifies in one of his recent works, Kearney’s God of the Sabbath, the God who may be, is “one of non-sovereignty, vulnerability, fragility, and unknowability,” in other words, an anatheistic God that appears in many ways to resemble Oord’s amipotent God. There may be, however, elements of dissonance between their two positions, and here may be one of them. As noted above, Oord considers God’s mutability to focus on divine experience and not on divine essence. God’s being may not be legitimately transformed by human responses. But for Kearney, God is the God who may be, a God whose essence could honestly be changed by human love and human suffering. To limit human effects on God to divine experience alone could well be too epiphenomenal for Kearney, too much God pro se and not enough God in se. Nevertheless, Kearney would most certainly agree with Oord’s motivation for his position; neither ever wants to intimate that God could ever transform to something other than love because God is love, period. Or as Kearney would put it, God is the “loving possible that possibilizes humanity,”[16] which I think may be properly translated into “God is the one whose power is exposed in the amipotentiality of human sacramental service.”
Bio: B. Keith Putt (Ph.D. Rice University) is Professor of Philosophy at Samford University in Birmingham, AL. He works primarily in the areas of Continental Philosophy and Continental Philosophy of Religion. Although his publications include articles on complementary thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, he focuses his research on the radical hermeneutics and radical theology of John D. Caputo.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Keith Putt engages the concept of amipotence through the lenses of sacrament and service. He accurately summarizes my views, and I value his identification of Richard Kearney as a meaningful dialogue partner. Both Keith and I emphasize the vital role creatures play in God’s ongoing expression of compassion in the world. However, I part ways with Kearney on one key point: the mutability of God’s essence. I affirm that while God’s experience evolves moment by moment in relationship with creation, God’s essence remains unchanging. Divine love, as amipotent, is eternally constant even as it adapts in responsive, relational ways.
For more on Oord’s view of amipotence as cooperating love, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1] Sacramentum Caritatis: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church’s Life and Mission (22 February 2007) | Benedict XVI (vatican.va).
[2] Thomas Jay Oord, God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love After Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2029), p. 142.
[3] Oord, God Can’t, p. 153.
[4] Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2023), p. 109.
[5] Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence, p. 2.
[6] Oord, God Can’t, p. 110.
[7] Oord, God Can’t, p. 152.
[8] Thomas Jay Oord, Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2021), p. 39.
[9] Cf. Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 109, 152, 165.
[10] Richard Kearney and Matthew Clemente, eds, The Art of Anatheism (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), p. 3.
[11] Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 65.
[12] Richard Kearney, “Hermeneutics of the Possible God” Revista Portuguesa de Filosophia 60 (2004), p. 942.
[13] Richard Kearney, “Poetics of Imagining,” in Imagination Now: A Richard Kearney Reader, ed. M.E. Littlejohn (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020), pp. 23-25.
[14] Kearney, Anatheism, p. 3.
[15] Richard Kearney, Poétique Du Possible:Phénoménologie Herméneutique de la Figuration (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), p. 268.
[16] Kearney, Poetique du Possible, p. 229.