A Divine Marriage
By Sharon L. Baker Putt
Amipotence married to Catherine of Siena provides a beautiful image of God at work in the world through us.
In his book, The Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard begins with a prayer reminding believers in Jesus Christ to love their neighbors as themselves.[1] Christians throw these verses around quite a bit, quoting them in sermons, teaching them in Sunday school lessons, and using them in conversations with those we think need to hear them. These are wonderful commandments from Jesus, ones that the world desperately needs to obey—I say “the world” but truly, what would the world be like if just Christians obeyed Jesus’s command? I know that is a rhetorical question, but think about its answer for a second. Might we see a world profoundly, significantly, transformed, for God’s glory, in the name of Jesus Christ?
That said, I resonate with the certain lawyer who, potentially hoping to limit the scope of who counts as a neighbor, asks Jesus, “and who is my neighbor?” It seems that he wants to know who he can leave out of the command to love others, who doesn’t count, where his responsibility stops. While Jesus tells a now famous parable about an injured man whom no one would help except for a despised Samaritan, driving home the point that anyone needing care is your neighbor, Kierkegaard simply answers the lawyer’s question by saying “everyone is one’s neighbor.”[2] Family, friends, those we like and those we don’t like, those who like us and those who don’t, those who live next door and those who live on the other side of the tracks or, really, on the other side of the world, no exceptions, everyone is our neighbor. And we most closely resemble God, most profoundly reveal and revel in the image of God, when we love our neighbors, for God is love.[3]
Long before Kierkegaard wrote on love, another theological “great,” the 14th century women, deemed a “doctor of the church” by Pope St. Paul VI in 1970, Catherine of Siena, not only talked the same talk, but also rigorously and relentlessly walked the walk. She, too, believed that in order to reveal God to the world, those who follow Jesus must get off the couch, out of their homes, and into the streets and live out that love in the lives of others, serving, helping, caring, healing, reconciling, restoring, transforming. And as a member of the Mantellate, Catherine dedicated her life to serving the poor and the sick.[4]
Catherine considered herself as clothed with the “wedding garment of charity,” uniting herself to Godly virtue so that she could effectively serve her neighbors with love.[5] Through long moments of prayer and contemplation, Catherine shed the selfishness of ego and desire, gaining in the process the humility of Christ and the deep ability to love first God and then others. Indeed, for her, the love of neighbor begins first with the love of God. God says to her, “if you do not love me you do not love your neighbors, nor will you help those you do not love. . .I count whatever you do to them as done to me.”[6] God tells Catherine that “the service you cannot render me you must do for your neighbors.”[7]
Catherine’s love for God finds its outlet in her action-filled love for her neighbor. Whatever she does for an other, she really does out of love for God. In loving God, Catherine will realize love for her neighbor.[8] In her stages of the spiritual journey toward perfection in love, Catherine describes a union with God that gives birth to charity for the neighbor, which graces her with the fourth and final stage in which the birth of charity unites with the works of charity. The perfection of love for God and others impels her to love her neighbor by which she truly loves God.[9] She cannot love God without loving her neighbor.
Catherine took God’s command to love others so seriously that she asserted that the selfish love that deprives the neighbor of charity and affection is the” principle and foundation of evil.”[10] Consequently, she set her sights on her neighbors and for her entire life worked in slums, cities, and villages, taking care of the sick, feeding the hungry, helping the helpless, teaching them, and praying for them constantly, even to the detriment of her own health—Catherine died young at the age of thirty-three.[11]
You may be asking, what do Denmark (Kierkegaard) and Siena (St. Catherine) have to do with Sarasota, Florida and Northwind Theological Seminary (Thomas Jay Oord). While Kierkegaard and, especially, Catherine suggest that we love God by loving others, that to serve God is to serve others, Thomas Jay Oord takes that concept several steps farther. While Catherine of Siena believes that we cannot love God without loving our neighbor, and therefore, doing the works of love, Oord asserts that God can love us, but cannot do works of love without us. He contends that since God is incorporeal, God cannot perform physical work in the world without physical creatures, creatures with bodies—us. So “God needs creaturely cooperation” to get anything done, to love the neighbor actively and, actually, to stop evil. Oord also points out that, as “a universal and amipotent Spirit” . . . “God always lovingly influences everyone and everything” in an “enspirited creation” that chooses whether or not to lean into the urging and luring love of God.[12] Oord indicates that human beings can do nothing without the empowering of the Holy Spirit. And with his notions of amipotence and denial of God’s omnipotence, it seems he also suggests that God can do nothing without the embodiment of human beings. Whether or not I agree completely with Oord’s ideas is unimportant. The import of his assertions, however, have significant repercussions for what it means to love our neighbor and how we, with the empowering of the Spirit, navigate that responsibility in our lives.
If “divine love is the most powerful force in the universe” and if “amipotence is maximal divine power in the service of love” and if humans, through the empowering of “the universal and amipotent Spirit” do God’s work on earth, and if “without the empowering Spirit, creatures could do nothing,” then God serves all creation, engages with all creation, and loves all creation through neighbors serving and loving neighbors.[13] Neighbors (we are all neighbors) partner with God in Christ to transform the world for God’s glory. Neighbors, who can say with the writer of Philippians “to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21) and with the writer of Galatians “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me” (Gal. 2:20) truly enact the divine will on earth – God acting in Spirit and neighbors acting in body – to redeem evil with love. It truly is a partnership (a marriage if you will) made in heaven and on earth.
Consequently, if Thomas Jay Oord is correct, when Kierkegaard and Catherine accomplished works of love by serving their neighbors, it was not they themselves loving the neighbor, it was actually God in them doing the work. Likewise, if we obey the commandments of Jesus to love God and love our neighbor, the Christian community of “little Christs” can work in partnership with God to bring about that final transformation into diving glory. We can then take Julian of Norwich’s visionary promise to heart and believe with her that “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”[14] According to Oord, the wellness of the world depends on us as we allow the Spirit of God to work in and through us to love and serve our neighbors.
Bio: Sharon L. Baker Putt is Professor of Theology and Religion at Messiah University. She holds a Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University and is the author of Razing Hell, Executing God, and A Nonviolent Theology of Love. She and her husband love to travel.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Sharon L. Baker Putt uses the marriage analogy and draws on Catherine of Siena’s work to explore amipotence. I was both surprised and delighted by the connections she makes between Catherine’s theology and my own. Sharon emphasizes that God serves all creation and loves it as neighbors love and serve one another. I would highlight a necessary synergy—neither God alone nor creatures alone are solely responsible for loving and serving. Without clear distinctions, we risk imagining God does all the work or, conversely, that creatures do it all. Yet without clear synergy, we may fall into the same confusion.
For more on Oord’s view on love as working with God, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Howard and Edna Hong, trans. (NY, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1962), 20; Matt. 22:37-40; Lk. 10:25-29.
[2] Ibid, 58; Lk. 10:29.
[3] Ibid, 74.
[4] The Mantellate were women, most likely widows, who affiliated with the Order of Saint Dominic. The wore the order’s habit, but lived in their own homes and worked under the direction of a prioress and the friars of St. Dominic. See also Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, Suzanne Noffke, O.P., trans. (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 4.
[5] Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 26.
[6] Ibid., 33, 141
[7] Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 36, 144.
[8] Ibid., 38.
[9] Ibid., 137, 141-144.
[10] Ibid., 35-6.
[11] St. Catherine of Siena also spent time traveling throughout Italy to persuade church leaders to live lives of virtue.
[12] Thomas J. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (SacraSage Press, 2023), 109, 122-3, 138-9, 146.
[13] Ibid., 123,138-39.
[14] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ch. 28.