A Womanist Liberative Response to Oord’s Theology of Amipotence

By Karen Baker-Fletcher

What difference does Oord’s theology of amipotence make to communities of color?

Thomas Jay Oord’s theology of amipotence opens possibilities for freedom from theologies that harm. It opens freedom to theological thought and action that heals. Previously, Oord introduced the word “amipotence” in his book, Pluriform Love where he connects it with eros, God’s passionate love for the whole of creation. In The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence Oord makes a sustained and concise argument for “amipotence.” Ami is Latin for love. Potent comes from the Latin word potencia. Potencia means power and potential. Put together the two terms mean the power and potential of love.

What manner of power is the power of love? For Oord, God who is the giver of life synergistically shares creative power and agency with all creatures from quarks and stardust to human beings. All creatures are imbued with freedom and agency to love. Amipotence contrasts with omnipotence. Omni means “all” in Latin. If God is all-powerful, God is controlling, and creatures are not imbued with freedom and agency. Controlling “love” is not actual love, because it exerts tyrannical power over creation. Omnipotent “love” is not mutual love. Actual love in Christian scripture is an action, not a static substance that is distant from creation. Love is mutual, intimately relational, and respectful. In Oord’s open and relational theology, as in other forms of neoclassical theology, omnipotence is a false philosophical concept that is inconsistent with the Christian biblical witness.

I respond to Oord’s The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence as a Christian theologian, a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, and a womanist neoclassical theologian. As a womanist I draw on Alice Walker’s cosmology and organic philosophy for its openness to plural discourses and internal experiential ways of knowing. I appreciate Oord’s theology of amipotence because he, too, participates in plural internal, experiential forms of knowing. He employs a symbiosis of postmodern science, biblical interpretation, and neoclassical philosophy. Further, I resonate with Oord’s theology of amipotence because it is informed by the real-lived stories of local and global people who question the notion of an omnipotent God in experiences of evil and suffering. Finally, I appreciate Oord’s work because he turns to poetics in his creative use of language. He employs a new word, formed from two ancient words, to overcome limitations in the English language. His creative use of language opens embodied minds and hearts to novel ways of seeing, knowing, and understanding God and the world.

Oord and Amipotence

Oord’s theology of amipotence resists, deconstructs, and challenges various forms of oppression in evangelical traditions. Like womanists, he does not hesitate to talk back to and deconstruct harmful biblical texts. He shares with womanists a common aim to free the church and scripture from theologies that harm individuals and entire communities. Because of his Christian activist commitment to the power of love for all of creation, he has been defrocked and excommunicated from his home tradition, the Church of the Nazarene. He walks the talk. He lives what he preaches.

This is what womanist and liberation theologians call praxis. Praxis is embodied thought and action. I only would like to see Oord’s writing engage more “poetics in color,” to use the terminology of Olumatusin Olayinka Oredein. Such poetics claim an unabashedly colorful and intentionally liberative aim. It would be tragic to not notice and openly admire all the colors Alice Walker writes about. I miss sustained attention to color and freedom from racism in Oord’s work.

At the same time, I am inspired by Oord’s scholarly, Latin-based poetics. He creatively proposes one word that names the nature, name, and power of God: “amipotence.” Amipotence is risky and demanding. It is liberative, because it is freeing. It is, in my opinion, the power of liberative love in action. In womanist theology, God created color and that includes the beauty of skin color. Womanist theology unabashedly addresses the evil of racial hatred against darker human bodies. The notion of omnipotent love that Oord deconstructs has perpetuated harm and violence in its will to control human bodies, including darker colored bodies. Positively, Oord’s theology of amipotence is open enough to appreciate womanist theology and praxis. Whether Oord intentionally includes theopoetics of color in his work or not, his emphasis on pluriform love means that others are free to do so. Therefore, I find it mutually helpful to be in collegial relationship with Oord and his writings.

Oord’s theology of amipotence further open hearts and minds to the reality Alfred North Whitehead calls “the poet of the universe.” Christian process-relational and open and relational theologians alike call this poet “God.” What manner of poet is God? Oord answers that God is amipotent. If this amipotent God is the Poet of the universe, then God is creative. This creative God must be the same God who created the universe in a plethora of color. Coining a new word for theological discourse is an embodied theopoetic action. The poet of the universe precedes the Christian tradition and scripture. If so, this poet is open to interfaith poetics as well. What might womanist and Zen Buddhist poetics contribute to a theology of amipotence? In Ruben Habito’s Christian theology and Buddhist philosophy we are all God’s kin. “Kin” is a translation of the Sanskrit word maitri. All of creation is kin and we are all beloved, he explains in Healing Breath. Freeing the embodied mind and heart to see this is the intent of poetics.

Amipotence, Womanist Theology, and Poetics

In her book, The Face of the Deep, feminist neoclassical theologian Catherine Keller quotes and resonates with some of my womanist theopoetic explorations on oceanic memory and God as dust and spirit from Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation. Influenced by Keller, my next book, Dancing With God, wove together biblical and womanist poetics, postern science, and neoclassical metaphysics to reflect on the goodness of God in a world of crucifixion. Poetics enriches postmodern science’s findings on the relational nature of reality by attending to the internal, experiential knowledge of all sentient beings. Like Zen Buddhist koans, such poetics precede Western postmodern science. Their contextual particularity and relationship with the cosmological story of the whole creation are a constant reminder of impermanence, becoming, and perishing. Ruben Habito, in Be Still and Know, sees distinctions and similarities in Zen koans and biblical poetics.

Zen koans provide gates to experiential knowledge of truth and authentic self in compassionate relationship with the whole of reality. Koans are short stories that press the analytic against a wall. They open the “right brain” to awareness of the authentic self’s relatedness with everything. Habito sees koans in biblical poetics that inspire lived-experience of the interdependence of the authentic self with the whole of reality. If God is “the poet of the universe,” as Alfred North Whitehead wrote, an important question arises. Oord answers that God is amipotent. This one word embodies a story of God and the whole universe. This one story may be told in pluriform ways. As Oord explains, amipotence is pluriform at the core of its nature.

Some critics of neoclassical theologies, like Olumatusin Olayinka Oredein, argue that Western neoclassical theologies fail to employ theopoetics that embody a liberative agenda. Accordingly, she makes a distinction between the liberalist aim of neoclassical theology, with its focus on the death of a distant and disinterested God, and the relational theopoetics in color of womanist theologies. Yet, one finds influences from liberative theopoetics in Oord’s open and relational theology Moreover, some neoclassical womanists, like Monica Coleman and I, employ liberative “theopoetics in color” to illustrate God’s aim for activist love, freedom, and justice.

On the other hand, there is room for growth in Oord’s c theological work, particularly on the matter of racism. Race is a tricky social construct. Nonetheless racism and its real-lived impact need to be directly addressed. Womanist theologians face the problem of racism head-on. In contrast, Oord’s work still bears traces of race-talk avoidance that is characteristic of white evangelical discourse. One wonders if Oord has more to say about the problem of racialized oppressive ways of thinking and being.

Oord and Walker bear visible marks of kinship in their attention to God loving people of diverse sexual orientations and genders. Unlike Walker, Oord shies away from discussing color oppression. The beauty of color, along with the rich cultural productions of communities of color are an indelible aspect real-lived human experience. Our creative responses to the problem of evil and suffering is rich in their embodiment of the power of love to survive and thrive in situations of racialized oppression. The beautiful power of color and the evil of racism affect God and every aspect of creation. My sense is that Oord would agree with this. I am less certain that he is ready to give explicit attention to the liberative aim of theopoetics in color.

Another area that I am curious about in reading Oord’s work is interfaith conversation. Walker invites interfaith conversation and action. She does not limit herself to one religious traditions way of knowing God and creation. In addition to attending to the struggle to see color and free it from the evil of racialized oppression, I wonder if Oord could also say more about interfaith possibilities in open and relational theology? If amipotence is pluriform love, this suggests the potential to say more about interfaith ways of thinking, being, and practicing. Again, whether Oord engages in interfaith conversation or not, his understanding of the pluriform nature of amipotence describes a God of freedom who respects human agency to participate in multiform ways of knowing and participating in the power of God’s love. Therefore, I feel free to understand and participate in amipotence from a Christian, Buddhist, and womanist neoclassical perspective.

Concluding Thoughts

Oord’s theology of amipotence is an important contribution for those who wonder if God cares about them. If God is all-controlling, then God causes and is responsible for evil. If God is amipotent, in keeping with 1 John 4’s poetics on God as love, then God is affected by our suffering, cares about all of creation, is intimately present with us in suffering and joy, and by no means causes suffering and evil. The freedom of all creation to participate in amipotence or not is at the root of the problem of evil.

In classical theism God is not affected by us. God is “impassible.” If God is unaffected by us, God would be like the deaf and silent God Celie prayed to before befriending Shug in Walker’s novel The Color Purple. After listening to Shug’s theology, Celie develops a relational experience and understanding of God in creation. I wonder what word could replace “infallibility”? Eros, which feminist and womanists have been writing about for decades comes to mind. Discourse on eros has been influenced in part by Black feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde, who defines it as a passion for life from the core of one’s being. Eros, erotic, “passion,” “compassion,” and “passionate” are related terms. They interweave through fluid feminist, womanist, liberative, and postcolonial theologies. Oord has written about eros in his corpus of writings. Like amipotence, Eros and passion have already been born. Impassibility is already dead, because amipotence is born and eros is resurrected. I’m open to novel poetic ways of naming the resurrection of eros, including combining words from another language.

Bio: Karen Baker-Fletcher is Professor of Systematic Theology at Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology. She enjoys walking on trails near rivers, lakes, and oceans with her family. She is the author of Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation and Dancing With God: A Womanist Perspective on the Trinity.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Karen Baker-Fletcher draws on both womanist and Buddhist perspectives to explore the meaning of amipotence. I gained valuable insights from her essay, as I’ve long been drawn to the womanist viewpoint. Her use of Zen koans and poetry also deepened my understanding. The image of a God of vulnerable passion, empowered by divine eros, seems far more worthy of worship than the God of classical theology. While I tend to focus on precise definitions regarding love, God, and related concepts, I recognize that precision doesn’t always bring clarity. Overall, I’m deeply grateful for the wisdom Karen’s thoughtful essay offers.

For more on Oord’s view on the wide tent of open and relational theology, see this article.

* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.