Amipotence in the Gospel of Mark
By Russ Dean
Like the parables Jesus told, the real meaning of the Story is for the human heart.
As a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1980s, Dr. Frank Tupper made two comments in his course in Systematic Theology that changed my theological thought-world, which in turn have changed my entire world. I have shared the pulpit of the Park Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC since 2000 with my wife, Amy Jacks Dean, and my preaching and teaching might be described as one long, ongoing lesson, expounding and exploring those two statements. My book, The Power of the God Who Can’t, is an exposition of the first statement: “God always does everything God can do.” The topic of this chapter, which deserves a book of its own, is the second: “I believe in God, because I believe in Jesus.”
When Dr. Tupper (who later became “Frank,” a friend and colleague) made those statements, a little air went out of his classroom—and something inside me took a quick backstep. I took a little reactionary inhale as I responded to what seemed to be backward in each of his beliefs. I thought: God can do anything, and I believe in Jesus because I believe in God. (Right?) The mark of a good teacher is that their words will not let you go. I have been processing both declarations for nearly four decades and have come to believe Frank had both statements right. I believe God is not omnipotent—all powerful—but, as the Power of Love, I still believe God is the greatest power there is (limited though love will always be). I believe “God always does everything God can do.”
In The Power of the God Who Can’t, I try to articulate the reasons for my belief.[1] Those reasons involve logic and rational thinking, my pastoral experience, especially in times of tragedy, and a careful reading of the Bible. Central to this rejection is the affirmation that I have also come to believe in God because I believe in Jesus—and not the other way around. As Frank said it, “This I know, without the story of Jesus I would not believe in God, or more probably, God simply would not matter.[2]“
As Frank further elaborated in class that day, to believe in God without Jesus is to open oneself to a host of unfortunate potential definitions and descriptions of “God.” God, without Jesus, might be any kind of God. God, without Jesus, might command you to fly a loaded commercial jet airliner into a crowded New York City skyscraper, killing indiscriminately. God, without Jesus, might give you permission to abuse your wife, beat your children. God, without Jesus, might convince you the hurricane was sent to punish gay people, unbelievers, other deserving reprobates. God, without Jesus, might justify all the sad and sordid examples of oppressive power and abuse that fill religious history. To paraphrase the feminist theologian, Mary Daly, “If God is power, then power is God.”[3]
If we believe in Jesus, however, none of that violence and dangerous foolishness should be justifiable. The argument I am making is that if we affirm, in whatever manner our theology might let us affirm Paul’s ancient declaration, “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1.15), the Jesus Story cannot be made to justify the abuse, the violence, the oppression that has been predicated on “believing in God.” The life and death of Jesus, properly read, will justify none of those abuses.
“Believing in Jesus” has a particular freight in the evangelicalism of my upbringing. It is not the purpose of this chapter to evaluate all the implications of such a claim—though I suspect the penal substitutionary atonement theory at the heart of that evangelicalism, which sees in the death of Jesus a so-called “redemptive” use of violence to satisfy God, is the theological perspective that leads many Christians to justify violence in the name of Jesus. The heart of Franks’ affirmation, on the contrary, is that “believing in Jesus” requires a way of seeing and understanding, a way of “believing in God” by focusing on a way of seeing and understanding the Jesus Story.
“Believing in Jesus” means evaluating any claims of scripture through the lens of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It means understanding God in the light of what Jesus taught us about God. It means recognizing that the way God would have us to live has been revealed in the way Jesus demonstrated God in Jesus’s own living. For Christians, “believing in Jesus” mean what we can and cannot “believe” about God must be based on what have already seen in Jesus.
“I believe in God, because I believe in Jesus” brings us to the Bible, and having arrived here, we may need to extend our affirmation to include, “I believe in Jesus because I believe in the Bible.” I believe in God because I believe in Jesus because I believe in the Bible because I believe in a particular way of interpreting the Bible. Read backwards, what kind of God I believe in is dependent upon a particular way of reading the Bible.
The Bible is our source for information about Jesus. The Gospels and the letters to the first-century churches provide virtually all the information known about the first-century itinerant rabbi. So, if Jesus is our lens for God, and the Bible our lens for Jesus, where do we turn to make a case for amipotence? Will the Bible validate our unconventional assertion that God is fitted only with the power of “uncontrolling love,”[4] rather than “all power”?
The Gospel of Mark has long been my favorite of our four Stories of Jesus. A decade ago, my wife and I took a year to preach through this Gospel, and in doing so, I came to know and appreciate the contours of Mark’s Story better than the other three biblical accounts. The briefest of the four gospels, Mark’s tale moves in a rapid tempo. He charts the ministry of Jesus, omitting a birth narrative, beginning instead with the calling and baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. From there, the writer moves rapidly through the ministry of Jesus, who appears and acts “immediately,” in scene after scene. That word appears 38 times in 16 chapters.
According to most biblical scholars, this action-packed tale is the oldest of the four biblical Gospels, dating to around the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. So, if it is our oldest Gospel, used by the other Gospel writers as foundational material, Mark puts us as close as we can get to the life of the first century man who is the center of the Christian faith. What better source, then, to evaluate our hypothesis? If God is amipotent, not omnipotent, and Jesus reveals God to us, wouldn’t the oldest source for the Story of Jesus have to make that crucial distinction clear?
We could only hope it was that easy.
In preparing to write this essay, I re-read the Gospel, and, using an online source, I copied and pasted the entire text into a Word document, highlighting the paragraph headings. I was confronted immediately (there’s that word again!) with the overabundance of miracle stories in the Gospel. Pulling a commentary from the shelves in my office, I learned that I had chosen the Gospel that records the most miracle stories. “More than any other Gospel,” says Lamar Williamson, “Mark emphasizes the miracles, healings, and exorcisms of Jesus. Of the hundreds of verses in Mark (678), approximately one-third (198) recount miracles. About one fourth of the Gospel (18 units) belongs to the literary type “miracle story”: a problem, a solution, and evidence of cure or resolution…[5]
“Miracles, healings, exorcisms…” This is the Gospel I had chosen to make my argument for amipotence over omnipotence!
In the very first chapter of the Gospel, Mark’s Jesus heals a man with an “unclean spirit.” Later, Jesus cleanses a leper of his disease and heals “many” at the home of Simon’s mother-in-law. The ministry of Jesus might read like the report of a sweeping faith healing crusade. Crisscrossing Galilee, he restores paralysis, a withered hand, a fever, and a hemorrhage. The miracles just go on and on—he even raises the dead! (Mark 5.35-42).
If that is not enough (and for many, it certainly is enough), Mark’s Jesus even demonstrates control over the forces of nature. First, in a feat (pun intended!) that defies the laws of physics, he demonstrates his ability to walk on water (Mark 6.45-51). And then, with just one word, he controls even the winds and the waves (Mark 4.35-41).
What more do we want? What more proof could there be? If Jesus reveals God to us, and Jesus has the power to control the wind and the sea, isn’t this a demonstration of omnipotent power on bold display?
I have called this chapter “an honest appraisal,” because if we want to be honest—and we need to be honest—we will have to admit that the case for omnipotence is a much easier case to make using the Gospel of Mark—if not the entire Bible. If Jesus healed Simon’s mother-in-law, God could also heal me. Right? If Jesus calmed the raging sea, maybe God does direct the path of tornadoes and assassins’ bullets, and send hurricanes to punish us. Right? If Jesus raised that little girl from the dead, what can’t God do today? Right?
This is the problem with the Bible—and let us be clear that we have a problem with the Bible. The problem is that, without a good education in hermeneutics (and who even knows what that is), people almost invariably read “literally” and not literarily. Those quotation marks are intended to indicate that no one reads anything literally. There is no such thing. Every text is interpreted. Every text will be interpreted.
Introducing interpretation into the mix, however, is a dangerous allowance. It puts us on that proverbial and forewarned “slippery slope.” You can hear the skepticism: “Are you saying the miracles did not literally happen? So, if Jesus did not literally heal the lame, raise the dead, still the storm… Then what about the resurrection? And if the resurrection isn’t literally true…” Well, you see where this leads.
This skepticism of the “true believer” notwithstanding, however, every reputable, academically based biblical commentary I own offers at least subtle caveats to a literal-only reading. The ease of “literal reading” is difficult to overcome, and the weight of the so-called literal stories, along with the traditional comforts and assurances they supposedly provide, is weighty, indeed—but we do need to teach people to read the Bible. We need them to understand that the discipline of study will be required to properly understand. We need to expose them, on a lay-person’s level, to biblical criticism. We need to explain that discerning metaphor and seeing symbolism and relishing a literary reading will only deepen our understanding and appreciation of the text. And we need to recognize that teaching this kind of literary reading will also be a hard case to make.
So, where does that leave us? Where do we go from here? Taking a cue from Julie Andrews, who made it so memorable: “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”[6] Let’s start with Jesus. “I believe in God because I believe in Jesus, and not the other way around.”
Let’s start with Jesus—but we first need the honesty to admit that we do not derive our beliefs only from the Bible, essential though it may be to faith. Even the most ardent “literalist” is dependent upon a host of factors to determine her/his version of what “literal” means, so, we would all do well to accept some form of that “Wesleyan Quadrilateral,” which acknowledges that our values and beliefs cannot be based on scripture alone, but that scripture, tradition, reason and experience all influence our beliefs.
Let us return to Jesus—with a broadened vision, as William Sloane Coffin says, “What finally counts is not what biblical texts or church doctrines tell us we may believe, but what humanity, reason, justice, and Christ’s love tell us we ought to believe.”[7] While a surface-only reading may allow us to see all-power, an in-perspective-reading will have us to see that Jesus never used his power in “omnipotent ways.” “All power” quite literally means the power to do anything, anywhere, anytime, for any reason—and the “all-ness” of that omni-power introduces the dangerous corollary of evil. The power to literally control all suffering—contradicted by the obvious reality of immense suffering all around us—logically and rationally, the power necessarily implicates the one holding it. God could stop rape and child abuse, but chooses to allow such evil. God could have prevented the holocaust, but there is some justifiable good in the death of six million innocent victims. (We just don’t understand?) There is a dark side to all-power, and the only way to fully affirm omnipotence is to admit that all the evil that exists, exists relative to that power, in relationship to that power, ultimately because of that power.
In Jesus, however, we never see this dark side. We never see Jesus holding the ability to heal over someone’s head, and then withdrawing that power with no explanation, leaving them helpless and confused, alone and fearful, struggling in their pain. We never feel the threat of all-power in the actions of Jesus. We never sense that Jesus might… or that he could have… We never hear “If only…” or “You just don’t understand.”
The Story of Jesus is not the Story of omnipotent power, with all the good—and all the sinister implications—of that power. The Story of Jesus, all the lessons, all the healings, all the “power” is used only in the service of love, which Thomas Jay Oord defines as acting “intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being.”[8] This is the Jesus we read about in Mark’s miracle-laden Gospel—Jesus, acting not with capricious power (power held over, to do or not to do), but acting out of love, enacting love in powerful ways, intentionally promoting the overall well-being of those he encountered. If we can dig below the sensational surface of the miracles, we can see that love drives the life of Jesus, not power.
Perhaps the greatest expression of Jesus’s amipotence in the Story is the sacrificial love, the self-giving death that comprises nearly half of Mark’s Gospel Story. The end of the Jesus Story, his “passion,” is not the powerful overthrow of Rome, with its nearly-all-powerful occupation and oppression. It is not the smackdown of a corrupt religious system. It is not a justified retribution enacted on all of Jesus’s enemies. The best picture we have of God in the Gospels (perhaps the best picture we have of God anywhere), is sacrificial love, the life of Jesus, laid down freely, given for the sake of teaching us a “more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12.31).
My friend, the late Dr. William E. Hull said so many times in his sermons and lessons, “Suffering is not redeemed by being explained; it is redeemed by being transformed.” The suffering and death of Jesus are not redeemed by an explanation, whether atonement or providence. That suffering is redeemed by life, his and ours, transformed by love, transformed for love. If he can teach us the power of love, not the love of power, we can truly say he died “for us.” When we have seen it—that kind of love—when we have learned to believe that only love changes the world, not the force of controlling power, then maybe we can begin to read again, by asking the right questions.
The right questions cannot concern whether a miracle literally happened. There is simply too much difference in our 21st century world view and their 1st century view. What was “natural” or “supernatural,” “miraculous” or “scientific,” the normal routine of the world or something well beyond, our understanding of the world is just so completely different. When we ask, “Did it happen?” we are imposing a foreign set of assumptions onto their story. These are just the wrong questions to ask, but what was important, then and now, the heart and purpose of the miracle stories, is not that something happened, but what that happening (as it was told) really meant.
Bringing our 21st century understandings to a 1st century text, we do not deny the validity and value of miracles to ask these right questions (Mark 3.1-5). Those include questions such as “What goodness am I preventing by my own hardness of heart?” and “What disability is keeping me from reaching out in love?” Or “What fear keeps me unsettled about my own insecurities, or the anxieties of the world?” and “Do I believe the storms of life really can be stilled by the voice of love?” And even “What self-inflicted wounds need to be healed?” Or “Have you heard your name, ‘the beloved?’” There are still more questions, “How have I laughed in the face of hope or belief or possibility?” “What is dead in the world, or in my own heart, that can only be raised up by love?” And “When have I been silenced by fear? What good news am I afraid to share?” Or even “Do I have the faith and courage to die to self, to die for something greater, trusting that in love there is always the promise of new life?”
Let’s admit that amipotence is a hard case to make in the Gospel of Mark—but we should not be surprised by this. In a world so obsessed with, and possessed by the love of power and the desire for control, self-giving love will always be a hard case to make. When we see it, though—that kind of love—when we finally believe in the logic of love, the Story changes, and everything sounds different, reads different, feels different. The Story changes. The stories change. Everything is different. Like the parables Jesus told, the miracles will never be enough on the sensational surface, because the real meaning of the Story is for the human heart.
I believe in God because I believe in Jesus. The Story tells us the “more excellent way” of the truth of the power of love. It is a Story of amipotence. We just need to learn to hear it.
Bio: Russ Dean has been co-pastor of Park Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC, along with his wife, Amy, since 2000. He holds degrees from Furman University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Beeson Divinity School. His latest is book The Power of the God Who Can’t. Russ is active in social justice ministries and interfaith dialogue and enjoys woodworking, playing and listening to jazz, slalom and barefoot water skiing, hiking and camping.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Russ Dean draws from the Gospel of Mark to argue for amipotence. He credit Frank Tupper’s influence in his overall thinking, and this is evident in Dean’s book The Power of the God Who Can’t. Russ examines Mark’s miracle stories through an amipotent lens, concluding that God’s power is rooted in love, not control. He says the question “Did it happen?” imposes modern assumptions on ancient texts. Instead, Russ urges us to ask about the stories’ heart and purpose. Miracle accounts call us to reflect on our lives, our need for healing, and most importantly, the centrality of God’s uncontrolling presence.
For more on Oord’s view of miracles, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. See also God Can’t and The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (Thomas Jay Oord), Theology of Consent (Jonathan Foster), and On the Mystery (Catherine Keller), among many titles rejecting God’s omnipotence in favor of an even more powerful understanding of God’s work in the world.
[2]. These were not Frank’s exact words in class that day. This quotation is from the introduction in his book A Scandalous Providence: The Jesus Story of the Compassion of God (Mercer University Press, Macon, GA, 1995, p.10.). The quotation, however, echoes his message to that class of seminarians.
[3]. Mary Daly says, “If God is male, the male is God.” Beyond God the Father: toward a philosophy of women’s liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985, p. 40.
[4]. Thomas Jay Oord regularly refers to the “uncontrolling love of God,” in contrast to the omnipotence of God. See his book, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence.
[5]. Lamar Williamson, Jr., “Mark,” in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 1983. P.20.
[6]. In the movie, “The Sound of Music,” Julie Andrews sang these words at the beginning of the song “Do-Re-Mi.”
[7]. Coffin, Credo, p.142.
[8]. Thomas Jay Oord, “The Import of Defining Love,” https://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/
archives/the_import_of_defining_love.