A Threefold Critique of Thomas Jay Oord’s Model of Divine Amipotence

By Manuel Schmid

Manuel Schmid appreciates Thomas Jay Oord’s theology but critiques his concept of “amipotence” for inadequately addressing theodicy and resurrection.

Note to a dear friend:

I met Thomas Jay Oord in 2013 at a conference on “Open Theology and the Church”—and took him to my heart from the very beginning. Tom is an outstanding networker and an extraordinarily creative theologian. Since the turn of the millennium, he has made a significant contribution to the progress of open and relational theologies as editor of numerous books, conference organizer and founder of the “open and relational theologies” unit at the AAR. As a bridge-builder, he has also been involved in numerous encounters between open theists and representatives of process theology. For 30 years, he has kept the academic conversation on love as the ultimate definition of God alive with his numerous publications. His accessible and often provocative contributions motivate many to take part in the discussion. And of course, he has also become a reliable, trustworthy friend to me personally.

With this personal and academic appreciation of Tom in mind, I would like to present a critique of his model of God’s amipotence. I do so not to tear down his achievements, but rather in the conviction that Tom is following very promising leads. His theology deserves to be taken seriously enough to be criticized. Anyone who knows me knows that I would prefer Tom’s theology to a conservative Neo-Calvinist approach any day of the week. Yes, I actually share almost all of his intuitions and basic convictions. I just think his claim to have solved the really big problems of theology with his model is overstated.

I’m going to dive straight in, because I assume that the basic lines of Tom’s approach have already become sufficiently clear:

The semantic problem: Why do without the term “omnipotence”?

Firs, Thomas Oord’s critique of omnipotence in favor of the idea of God’s “amipotence” provokes me to contradict him on the semantic level.

Oord presupposes a deterministic, controlling understanding of God’s omnipotence as normative: “omnipotence” denotes the omnipotence of the monarch, even the autocrat, who keeps his creatures under control and is the ultimate cause behind all events in history. (This is precisely why he cannot discover an omnipotent God in the biblical writings: from the observation that the “Biblical writers never explicitly say God acted alone to bring about the mighty deeds” he directly concludes that “there is no evidence for omnipotence” [The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, 144; = DO hereafter]. This is only consistent if one defines omnipotence as deterministic and controlling in the first place). This concept of omnipotence is Oord’s declared boss enemy.

The problem is, of course, that such a deterministic understanding of God’s omnipotence was at best a niche product for much of the history of theology. Even in the Middle Ages, it was emphasized that an omnipotent God cannot contradict his own nature and cannot achieve the logically impossible—and it was made clear with reference to God’s love and relationality that an omnipotent God cannot simply control a world with free creatures if he does not want to fall into a logical or essential contradiction. An uncontrolling rendering of omnipotence in this sense has also long since become mainstream in European theology after Bonhoeffer, Pannenberg, Moltmann, etc.

Oord is now convinced that such a moderate, non-deterministic concept of omnipotence dies the death of a thousand qualifications and is better replaced by the idea of “amipotence”: a neologism that marks Oord’s attempt to reinterpret God’s omnipotence as consistently as possible in terms of the power of love [DO, 120].

But why surrender the widely held concept of omnipotence to the determinists without a fight? Why submit to an authoritarian, tyrant understanding of omnipotence and therefore abandon the concept instead of reclaiming it in the name of love? Especially since hardly anyone considers a controlling omnipotence of God to be attractive or worthy of worship anymore, except for a few hardcore neo-Calvinists—a species that flourished in the 1980s and 90s but is now threatened with extinction.

If I am not mistaken, Oord still holds to the Anselmian determination of God as “that beyond which nothing greater can be thought.” He simply interprets the perfection of love as the greatest thing that can be thought about God. This love determines and governs all other attributes of God. God’s “amipotence” is the unsurpassable, perfect power of God’s love, which has brought forth all created things, which permeates all reality and will lead to its ultimate fulfillment [DO, 138-140]—why then do we not call it the omnipotence of God’s love?

This is all the more true as Oord does not proceed in the same way with regard to God’s omniscience: He doesn’t get carried away into dismissing God’s omniscience and speaking of an “amiscience” simply because there is a prominent deterministic understanding of omniscience, which includes God’s complete definitive knowledge of the future and thus jeopardizes the freedom and love of creatures. Rather, he reinterprets the traditional confession to God’s omniscience and understands it as God’s complete knowledge of reality at the respective point in history: for the future, this means a probabilistic knowledge of open possibilities.

In any case, I would not want to repeat the levity with which Charles Hartshorne rejected the concept of God’s omnipotence in his famous essay “Omnipotence and other theological mistakes.” If a term has been used to describe God for over 2,000 years of theological history in all eras and denominations, there must be more serious reasons for rejecting it than the deterministic, controlling appropriation of this term by a few (vociferous) neo-Calvinists.

The theodicy-theoretical problem: The amipotent God can do too much to relieve him of responsibility for suffering…

Oord speaks of God’s “amipotence” to indicate that we are dealing with the power of God’s love, which is never metaphysically compelling, but always works in co-operation with creation. His central concern here is to solve the problem of theodicy: amipotence aims to interpret or relativize God’s power in such a way that God cannot be held responsible for the suffering of this world [cf. DO, 120]. If suffering happens to creatures, then the believer can be sure that God wanted to prevent this suffering, but simply could not do it due to the co-operative, synergetic, relational quality of his power: because God cannot intervene in a metaphysically compelling way [cf. Oord’s book “God Can’t”].

On closer inspection, however, Oord’s framing of amipotence is useless for solving the problem of theodicy in two respects.

On the one hand, the transformation of the almighty God into an “amipotent” God does not provide a satisfactory explanation to the question of why God does not more frequently prevent the suffering of this world. Because Oord’s amipotent God can still do too much. The only thing an amipotent God is denied is the exercise of “metaphysical control” (or “metaphysical coercion”). Oord defines this as complete and total external determination: “This involves unilateral determination, in which the one coerced loses all capacity for causation, self-organization, agency, or free will. To coerce in this metaphysical sense is to act as a sufficient cause…” [The Uncontrolling Love of God, 182f]. This definition is so radically narrow that it excludes almost (and we will come back to this almost) nothing from God’s repertoire of possible actions:

An amipotent God, who cannot act metaphysically compellingly in this sense, is still capable of all the miracles attributed to the men and women of God and, of course, Jesus Christ. And he would be able to prevent all the accidents of this world, heal all illnesses and restore all the injured. Because, of course, no metaphysical control in Oord’s sense is necessary to perform the aforementioned miracles and deeds of power: accidents can be prevented, and illnesses can be healed without depriving those affected of any form of self-determination in the process.

But why doesn’t God do all these things more often? The “problem of selective miracles,” which Oord blames on all models that attribute “supernatural control” (or “metaphysical coercion”) to God, falls back on his own approach. Even without metaphysical control in Oord’s sense, an amipotent God could do pretty much anything that Christians have always believed him capable of.

In order to keep the burden of responsibility for suffering away from God and “get God off the hook”, Oord is therefore dependent on additional assumptions—above all the assertion that God has no body of his own to directly influence physical objects: although he can try to draw the attention of an adult to a girl who is about to run in front of the truck, he cannot get the girl off the street himself (even though he does not need “metaphysical control” to do so). However, this restriction is not imposed on God because of his uncontrolling love, but because of his incorporeality. The reason why God cannot prevent a large part of the suffering in this world lies in the fact that God has no body: an attribute of God that is not grounded in his love. Therefore, the explanation regarding God’s lack of a material body undermines Oord’s commitment to the primacy of God’s love – and provokes the question: If God could protect his creation from suffering so much more by having a body of his own and thus also love it more, why didn’t he take on a body (or, say, a billion bodies) from the beginning?

The Christological problem: The amipotent God can do too little to be credited with the resurrection of Jesus…

The much bigger problem, however, is not what an amipotent God is still capable of even without the use of metaphysical coercion, but what he is no longer capable of. I have said that the exclusion of metaphysical coercion from God’s repertoire of actions still leaves almost all actions that are commonly attributed to God on the table. But only almost.

There are specifically three creative acts that are inconceivable without the unilateral intervention of God. I am of course talking about the creation of the world as the beginning of all life, about the new creation of heaven and earth at the end of time—and centrally about the resurrection of Jesus, which is the undisputed pivotal point of the entire Christian understanding of reality. Even the talk of the “essential kenosis” no longer makes sense if Jesus has not been resurrected: only the resurrection identifies the tortured and killed Nazarene as Lord of Lords. Only the resurrection turns a failed travelling preacher into the Son of God, who laid down his life for mankind and won the victory over death.

And it is precisely at this crucial point that an amipotent God comes up against his limits. Thomas Jay Oord does everything he can to explain the resurrection of Jesus within the matrix of his co-operative, non-coercive understanding of power [cf. The Nature of Love, 150-152]. The result, however, is an almost desperate attempt to point to the last remnants of self-efficacy in Jesus’ dead body in order to maintain the idea of a synergy between God and the incarnate Son of God. This not only massively overstretches the process-theological idea of divine influence on creation, but also strategically misses the crucial point of the resurrection.

Firstly, the process theological idea of divine luring and wooing is about uncovering and promoting possibilities that are inherent in the corresponding entity. God can entice human embryonic cells not to activate certain defects lying dormant in the DNA, but he can hardly entice them to suddenly form wings instead of arms. And God may persuade a person to jump over an obstacle, but he will not be able to persuade the person to fly away. Why? Because the former examples are referring to the creaturely possibilities of embryonic cells or persons, while the latter are not.

The resurrection of Jesus is infinitely more demanding than forming wings and flying away, though. It is about a corpse that has already been dead for two days and whose decomposition has already begun. Its cells are supposed to awaken to new life (or consent in their remaining self-efficacy to be awakened again) and reverse the signs of decomposition. Nothing in the human body is designed for such a process.

And even if all this were possible—and that is an “if” the size of the state of Alaska—the result would not be the resurrected Christ of the New Testament, but a resuscitated corpse. The Christ who is the basis of our hope for the completion of the world is not a revived but still mortal human, but the firstborn of the new creation, the guarantor of the ultimate victory of love over death and suffering. How could any remaining activity of the cells of the dead Nazarene have anything to do with this fundamental transformation?

Oord is certainly right that the biblical testimonies nowhere explicitly state that the resurrection is the result of a metaphysically controlling action of God—but this argumentum e silentio does not go far. On the one hand, it is of course anachronistic to expect ancient texts to distance themselves from philosophical positions that were only formulated in modern times. On the other hand, the New Testament accounts do indeed state in their own terminology that Jesus’ resurrection was a creative work of God and God alone. Christologically, the crucial point is precisely that Jesus did not raise himself from the dead but was awakened to a (also qualitatively) new life by an act of God. This is why the New Testament hymns and Christian confessions prefer not to say that Jesus has (actively) risen, but that he was (passively) resurrected.

The Son gives himself to death and surrenders himself completely and unreservedly to God. And the Father raises him to new life and confirms him as the Son of God and Lord of lords. This is also the theological point of the Philippians hymn, which underlies Oord’s model of “essential kenosis.” And I am not convinced that Oord has succeeded in making the resurrection of Jesus plausible under the premises of his own model.

Reason to think ahead

Let me say once again: I share the central motifs of Thomas Jay Oord’s theology and hope that an open and relational theology will make an even greater breakthrough in global Christianity than it already has. I believe that a viable Christian theodicy must take the path of free-will-defense and natural-law-defense, as Oord does. It is worthwhile to continue researching on these fronts, and I am infinitely grateful to Tom for all the valuable impulses in this direction. I fear, however, that his concept of the amipotence of God cannot (yet) fulfil its promises.

Bio: Manuel Schmid works as a theologian and podcaster at www.reflab.ch. This is a pioneering project of the Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich in Switzerland. He wrote his dissertation on open theism (God in Motion) and continues to do research on relational theology and philosophy. He lives with his family near Basel.

OORD’S RESPONSE

My friend Manuel Schmid offers a threefold critique of Amipotence. His first criticism is that I too easily give up on the word “omnipotence” rather than fighting to provide it a new meaning. He rightly notes that I’m willing to salvage omniscience rather than abandon it. My response is that omnipotence as a word and concept has done far more damage than omniscience. And while I think the basic idea of omniscience is found in scripture, the basic ideas of omnipotence are not. When a word has no biblical support, leads to widespread damage, and seems to many at odds with love, I think we should abandon it.

Manuel’s second criticism asks why God does not do more to prevent evils in the world. My answer is that God always does the most God can do in any moment to prevent evil. The most God can do never includes controlling others, however. Manuel also wonders about my appeal to God‘s incorporeality. He asks, “If God could protect his creation from suffering so much more by having a body of his own and thus also love it more, why didn’t God take on a body?” I answered that question in the book when I said God cannot shapeshift to become a body. And God can’t roboticize creatures.

Finally, Manuel worries that a God of uncontrolling love could not resurrect Jesus. I have addressed the resurrection in several writings, and I believe God resurrects Jesus from the dead without entirely controlling him. See the link below to part of that essay.

For more on Oord’s view of an uncontrolling God resurrecting Jesus, see this article.