Amplifying Amipotence Through a Theopoetic Re-Reading of Creation
By Matthew David Segall
A reinterpretation of Genesis expands amipotence by emphasizing co-creation and relational theopoetics.
“Omnipotence is not born of scripture, and it dies a death of a thousand qualifications in philosophy. Evil buries the corpse six feet under. But the death of omnipotence is not the death of God.”[1] -Thomas Jay Oord
Thomas Jay Oord’s The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (2023) offers a profound critique and reconstruction of the idolatrous idea that God is all-powerful. Oord shows not only that the notion is unbiblical; he demonstrates that human reason in its theoretical and practical modes is unable to find a convincing logical account of nor a moral justification for divine omnipotence. The God of Absolute Power is dead, and our own capacities for simple logic and selfless love have killed Him.
The doctrine of omnipotence is arguably the source of contemporary Christianity’s biggest credibility problem. In the ancient world, comparing God to an imperial autocrat may have been more compelling. In our world, political power has for the most part been wrested free of kings. Archaic analogies continue to tempt those of an authoritarian bent, but an increasing number of people find themselves ethically and intellectually repelled by the idea of a divine dictator who—despite planting the ideal of freedom in the souls of his favorite creatures—nonetheless determines everything in advance. Many would rather face the existential uncertainty of a godless universe than insult themselves by believing such a sadistic Creator could exist. By resolving the problem of evil and offering a more coherent and inspiring account of God’s relationship with creation, Oord’s process-relationally inspired amipotent approach makes Christianity believable again. I wholeheartedly affirm Oord’s project to identify the Alpha and Omega of divine power with Love. This theological move is especially important because of how our images of God’s power affect the ways we exercise our own.
Given the brevity of this essay and the extent of my own ignorance, and because of the Biblical focus of Oord’s book, what follows is directed primarily at Christians and anyone else whose deep psyche (whether they like it or not) has been shaped by a Christian cultural milieux. My aim is to amplify Oord’s amipotent intervention into theology by dwelling on the cosmogonic significance of the doctrine of amipotence. In what follows, I draw upon the Whitehead-inspired theopoetics of Catherine Keller, whose re-reading of the book of Genesis allows us to relate to God as the Love luring the whole cosmic process deeper into living communion.
Whitehead singles out what he believes to be the most ontologically suggestive contribution of Christianity, the aspect that “does not fit” with the dominant images of God as ruling Caesar, ruthless moralist, or unmoved mover. Instead, Jesus Christ is said to personify “the tender elements in the world which slowly and in quietness operate by love…[finding] purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world.”[2] How might Christians reimagine cosmogenesis in light of such a tender and quiet love? Many ancient texts have attempted to depict the beginning of the world. Aside from Genesis, other examples include the Babylonian Enuma Elish and Plato’s Timaeus. Others, like Aristotle in his Physics, argued for the eternal, uncreated nature of the world. Even earlier cultures engaged in place-making rituals not simply in an attempt to describe but to reenact and sustain the creation of the world.
The modern scientific equivalent of such a place-making (or, in this case, space-making) ritual technology, the Cartesian coordinate grid, was intended by Descartes to raise the human animal beyond the playful eros of imagination into the logical heights of disinterested reason. Modern technoscience, armed with analytic geometry and other mathematical tools, plays the part of conqueror—orderer of chaos, imposer of determining laws, securer of certain knowledge. Chaos, for this Cartesian tradition, is coded as threatening, as the unruly unknown that needs to be subdued and controlled. Chaos even comes to be erased, replaced by “nothing”—the nothing out of which the omni-God of Descartes and Newton created the world by fiat.
But what if chaos could be recoded—like Gregory of Nyssa’s luminous darkness—as an infinite fecundity rather than mere nothingness: a prima materia or world-womb from out of which all form emerges and reverberates? What if creation could be re-storied as the poetic interplay of chaos and cosmos, never one or the other reigning supreme, but a continual cocreation?
Keller’s book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming[3] provides a stirring example of how, in light of the shift from omni- to ami-, we might try to re-weave the living word of a particular tradition into contemporary relevance without getting tied in literalistic knots of monolithic meaning. From her Whitehead-inspired point of view, creation of any kind, divine or creaturely, always takes place in medias res—right in the messy middle, where we never have full knowledge or ultimate control over the outcome. It follows that when we engage in speculative theology, we can’t claim to have a God’s-eye view. More to the point, not even God has such a view! All theorizing, whether theological or scientific, arises from within the world, just as God is, from a process-relational point of view, within the world. But this is not just pantheism. The world is also within God. This paradoxical panentheistic vision calls us to loosen the grip of the logic of non-contradiction to also acknowledge a more feminine, Sophianic way of knowing. Seeming opposites can co-inside or dwell within one another. Indeed, the tension generated by such coincidentia provides the prime engine of creation.
Keller’s book is a meditation on the first few verses of Genesis. Specifically, she contemplates the meaning of the Hebrew phrase tohu va’bohu, which occurs in the second verse. Keller disputes long-established interpretations of these lines by some church fathers, who claimed that they described an omnipotent God’s free creation of the universe from absolutely nothing—creatio ex nihilo. Keller argues that there’s actually no, or very little, biblical basis for this ex nihilo doctrine. She shows that Genesis, in fact, describes a far messier, polytonal, and co-creative event. She calls it creatio cooperationis—creation by committee, by co-creative invitation, rather than divine decree.
Keller invites us to reimagine biblical theology free of patriarchal overcodings, drawing on the mysticism of negative theology and the science of chaos and complexity theories. The first verses of Genesis are usually translated: “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth…” But, the 11th-century French-Jewish exegete Rashi, whose translation of bereshit preserves its literal meaning as “beginning” without an article—in other words, not “in the beginning,” but “in beginning”—implies that God’s beginning is not an absolute start, but a beginning again.
Keller also draws on Ilya Prigogine, who was inspired by Whitehead and won a Nobel Prize for his work on far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems. In their book Order Out of Chaos, Prigogine and his collaborator Isabelle Stengers point out that if we’re going to do process theology, we have to recognize that divine creation may require multiple drafts. They quote the French Jewish philosopher André Neher, who speculates that “twenty-six attempts preceded the present genesis, all of which were destined to fail.” Neher continues, “The human world has arisen out of the chaotic heart of the preceding debris. ‘Let’s hope it works,’ exclaimed God as he created the world.”[4]
Keller, building on Neher, suggests that even divine creation can only take place from preceding debris. Keller emphasizes that any human hope we have in the world working out must reckon with God’s limited, non-coercive power of persuasion, and the radical uncertainty of our shared history of co-creation with God. As Oord also argues, the open and relational vision of creation and of divine action is one wherein God lacks omnipotence. God is not the sort of creator who might contend tit-for-tat with physical forces. God can’t. Whatever sense we might make of the idea of divine creation has to forgo the idea of a domineering deity who reaches in from beyond to overpower physical creatures.
As Whitehead explains in the final part of Process and Reality, Creativity in some ways transcends God. Creativity is that ultimate relation through which God and world co-create one another. He claims, again paradoxically, that it’s just as true to say that the world creates God as to say that God creates the world. In process theology, God can’t prevent evil. Evil becomes a byproduct of cosmogenesis, of an always ongoing, always unfinished world-in-process. Evil is a symptom of the fact that there is an evolution occurring—something new is always being born, meaning something else is always dying. And God is as caught up in that process of life, death, and rebirth as any creature, “a fellow-sufferer who understands.”[5]
Returning to Keller’s references to Rashi and his translation of Genesis, she notes that Rashi also preserves the plural noun Elohim, which is usually translated by anxious monotheists into the singular, into just “God.” Some interpreters, like the 11th-century Spanish-born poet Abraham Ibn Ezra, have claimed that Elohim refers to God’s angels. Keller’s Whiteheadian understanding of divine persuasion shines through when she expands on the implications of God’s angelic plurisingularity:
“Crowding and complicating the hermeneutical time-space, the turbulent swarm of godhood has always transgressed any possible boundaries between the One Original Creator and the many derivative creatures…According to this imaginary of bottomless process, the divine decision is made not for us but with and through us. Amidst the chaosmic committee work of creation, what work remains for a creator to do—aside from its decisive delegations (“let the earth bring forth,” etc.)? Can we say with process theology that the creator emits an eros…to which every creature willy-nilly responds? …Some respond more responsibly than others to the cosmic desire. Committees and democracies make a lot of messes… Our responses … generate our own plurisingular inter-subjectivities—out of the multiples of elemental energies, codes, socialities, ecologies that any moment constellate our cosmoi…Elohim arises out of those unruly depths, over which language catches its breath. The creator, in creating, becomes. In singular plurality.”[6]
Rather than traditional commentators who point to the monotony of Genesis’ refrain of “God said, God said, God said” as evidence of the divine act of creation’s utter transcendence over any other merely mythic event, Keller focuses on what she calls the “flirtatiously alliterative wordplay” of these same verses.[7] The monotonotheism (Nietzsche) of the ex nihilo tradition is replaced in Keller’s reading with the participatory eroticism of Elohim’s creative persuasiveness. Genesis reads, “Let the Earth produce [the Hebrew tadse] vegetation [deshe]” (1:11). Then, “Let the waters teem with [yisresu] sea creatures” [seres] (1:20). Tohu va’bohu is read by Keller with the shining wake of its animistic origins intact, such that the pre-creation elements are read not as “formless and void,” but as active participants, responsive to God’s angelic call to cosmos. In effect, Elohim had to ask permission before creating. The God-poet, no matter how genius, always sings with a chorus, remaining forever placed in the chora, as Plato referred to it, always located amid the cocreative matrix of chaosmic imagination. No creative act is ever “from nothing.”
Keller’s process-inspired theopoetics is an attempt to replace dominant readings of the Bible marred by what she calls “the light supremacism of the western spirit”[8] to resuscitate a more chthonic, relational, Sophianic reading—patient enough to let its eyes adjust to the luminous darkness, courageous enough to let love outshine the lust for power and control over what we do not understand, even and especially in the face of evil. In our secular age, theology of the traditional sort may be impossible because incredible, but an open and relational theology of amipotence remains indispensable, lest we default to the god of the market or worship of the nation or some other secular replacement for religion.
Amplifying Oord’s concept of amipotence through a theopoetic re-reading of creation invites Christians to embrace a vision of God as a loving co-creator. By moving beyond the archaic notion of a dictator deity, we are not only enabled to reimagine the beginnings of the cosmos: we become more aware of our own responsibilities in an unfinished world. Theology then becomes not just an intellectual exercise, but a lived practice of engaging with the divine in the messy, unpredictable, and infinitely generative process of creaturely co-existence.
Bio: Matthew David Segall, PhD is a process philosopher, transdisciplinary researcher, and associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of Crossing the Threshold: The Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore, 2023). Follow his work at Footnotes2Plato.substack.com.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Matthew Segall draws from Alfred North Whitehead and Catherine Keller to expand the concept of amipotence. He reimagines chaos not as threatening nothingness but as fertile ground for creation. Through a theopoetic rereading of creation, Matthew portrays God as a loving co-creator rather than a cosmic dictator. This vision calls us to rethink the beginning of the cosmos and embrace our shared responsibility in shaping an unfinished world. Theology, then, becomes a lived practice—an ongoing, co-creative engagement with God and creation. I found these ideas deeply helpful, offering a rich and inspiring way to think about divine love and cosmic participation.
For more on Oord’s view of the world being eternal, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1] Oord, 80.
[2] Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (The Free Press: 1933), 172.
[3] Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2002).
[4] Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (London: Verso, 2017), 313.
[5] Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1929), 315.
[6] Keller, Deep, 178-182.
[7] Keller, Deep, 116.
[8] Keller, Deep, 201.