An Amipotent God is a Mad God
By Rose Sharon
Connecting Deleuzoguattarian-inflected mad studies to Oord’s amipotent God, we find both a loving God and the power of love’s madness.
The Mad Theologian
A nondenominational Christian, an agnostic, a philosophy student, an aspiring Jesuit, a queer and non-binary person, a mad trans woman… in short, this has been my journey of faith over the past thirty years. Excursions, missteps, roundabouts, eternal returns, madness, and endless becoming in the face of a mystery that I have yearned deeply to resolve, and yet have learned to embrace in its inherent inconclusivity. When I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type 1 in the Spring of 2016, six months after first identifying as a nonbinary person, I didn’t have the words to articulate that I was experiencing the emergency of spiritual emergence. What I did know was that my friends and family thought that I had lost my mind and that I would spend an unknown amount of time in a psychiatric ward in Kirkland, Washington. Over the course of the next three years, I would be involuntarily hospitalized roughly ten times for fourteen days at a time. The manic episodes, tangling psychosis with mystical awakening, lasted from March to July each of those three years. It was only when I began taking feminizing hormones in 2019 and changed my name that the episodes stopped. And it was only in 2023 when I would finally have my diagnosis — a construct, helpful in the right hands — changed to Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type.
When philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari wrote in their joint 1972 text, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, “What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production,” they identified something that, as a schizo, I find to be fundamentally true: both schizophrenia and nature are inherently productive forces. They argue in this text that it is not the nature of schizophrenia as process that leads many schizophrenics into catatonic clinical states, but rather the repressive and reactionary elements that hold the capitalist system together. They describe this as the paranoic-fascist pole of capitalism, which uses the nuclear family, various forms of chauvinism, and social institutions to control the twin flows of matter and mind — a process they call reterritorialization.
Meanwhile, the nomadic-revolutionary pole of capitalism tears apart all traditional forms of living, dismantling and scrambling past codes and norms — a process they call deterritorialization. As the territory of our collective lives are deterritorialized on the one hand, they are once again reterritorialized to maintain some semblance of stability so that the system may continue to function on the other. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari describe fascism as an inherent defense mechanism within the capitalist process. The catatonic schizophrenic is a victim of these dual, simultaneous processes; and yet at the same time, the liberated schizo takes the deterritorializing element of the process within and beyond themselves to its full potential: the co-creative fabulation of the future and the eternal resurrection of all that is bastard, strange, orphan, and free. Where capitalism stops, turning its heel toward fascism, the liberated schizophrenic continues onto strange, more distant horizons.
In this essay, I would like to explore the ways in which I find Thomas Jay Oord’s concept of amipotence as a key element of a mad theology. By putting amipotence in conversation with Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of schizophrenia as process, I hope to put into words something that I have come to experience as a phenomenological truth: the non-coercive love of God is a co-productive force in the life of the liberated schizophrenic. I argue this knowing that it may seem odd, mad even; however, I write this as a mad person enjoying the fruits of an unavoidable relationship with a mad and amipotent God.
The Paranoia of Omnipotence
The One, All-Powerful God… leaves us to worship and excuse Him? Is God nothing more than One, All-Powerful Leader, a Führer of Faith? A dictator who “doesn’t care enough to rescue the hurting from horrors and holocausts” — and not only doesn’t care, but actually enacts these terrors as part of some divine plan, a plan that cannot be questioned, a plan in which every ego must fall in line with the supreme ego Himself?(4) And isn’t that the ultimate structure of the Omnipotent God’s divine plan? A hierarchy of egos, chastising and condemning one another, keeping each other in their proper place, ruling over the dissolute multiplicity of damned drives and Dis-Order?
The picture I’m attempting to paint here is the God of reterritorialization, the God of paranoia. Since the Fall, humanity is said to be in a state of sin, corrupted by chaos, driven into a state of dissociation from the Heavenly Host through the endless temptations of the manifold world. Our original state, the territory of innocence and the garden, is constantly being deterritorialized by the fruits of this world’s principalities and powers. In our historical progression from innocent childishness to complicit conspiracy, we have all become victims of Satan’s illusions, the shadowy deceptions masquerading on the cave wall, deluding us into believing in the many things of this world as we forget more and more the One, True, (yes, Platonic) God.
Thus, if deterritorialization — the anarchic overcoming of all that is stable and unitary — is sin, then would that not make reterritorialization holy? In other words, can we understand the fascist impulse of hierarchy under the One to be “God’s Plan”?
Uniting the world under God, the church under Peter, the earth and its creatures under man, the family under the father, and the self and its drives under the ego… this is the hierarchy of the God of reterritorialization, the One God, the Omnipotent God. As Oord shows throughout The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, this vision of God is troubled on three fronts: firstly, it is not scripturally accurate, but rather the amalgamation of a series of convoluted translations. Second, it requires so many qualifications that it results in absurdity. And finally, the most compelling reason in my eyes, is that the Omnipotent God cannot survive the test of the problem of evil (i.e. no theodicy worth coming up with can truly justify or reconcile the aforementioned horrors and holocausts with an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God).
To press on this third issue, the problem of evil, I want to note its inherently paranoiac nature. To assume that any suffering is akin to some kind of punishment, or at the very least part of some greater good, is to make the same error as Job’s friends. It requires either placing blame on a person/group for their suffering, or passing the buck up to a God who cannot be questioned. From this lens, we can see how genocides occur so very easily under ideologies of this kind: the dominated group, seen as inferior, are blamed for their suffering while the dominating group are seen as enacting the will of God, making them a holy, superior people. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “All paranoiac deliriums stir up…historical, geographic, and racial masses.”[1] The God of Omnipotence calls us to go to war with His enemies, to become the avatars of His spiritual cause. This cause, when all is seen as set in stone, hierarchy is inherently justified, and the ability to question is denied, ends only in blood.
A God who cannot be questioned ultimately results in people who cannot ask questions. Those, like myself, who are prone to asking questions of our God, are viewed as heretics or troublemakers. When one loses the ability to ask these types of questions in a community, you either leave that community or fall in line. And if the latter is your path, it doesn’t take long until you yourself take up the crusade of stealing someone’s right to question. You begin, in other words, to see those who should be kin — that is, if we’re truly coming from a place of universal love — as the outsider, as the heretic, as the enemy. In pursuit of order and unity, we find paranoia and violence.
Pluriform Love is Revolutionary
But what if this isn’t the end of the road of God? What if Oord is right when he writes “Fortunately, killing [omnipotence] does not mean killing God”? (116) Oord’s answer to this is the idea of the Amipotent God, which presumes that if God is love, “Love can’t be omnipotent.” (122) He writes that, “The love God and creatures express. . .acts with intention, relates with others, and aims to promote flourishing. And because love is inherently uncontrolling, neither divine nor creaturely love controls.” (122) A God who doesn’t control is, in my eyes, a God that empowers difference, embraces dissent, and enhances dialogue. As a mad person, I see this vision of God as inherently revolutionary, whether we discuss this on global, local, or individual levels. For instance, if I didn’t believe in a God that did all of these things without controlling the outcome ahead of time, I would never be able to enter into good faith dialogue with the multiplicitous differences I find within my own psyche, let alone among my community or around the world. Because to truly empower difference and embrace dissent, one cannot know in advance where the interaction will go. Instead, we must proceed moment-by-moment, assured that in dialogue, even to the point of conflict, we are both not alone and not controlled.
While I truly want to emphasize that the Amipotent God is a friend to us mad people, it is also worth noting that Oord has made clear the connections between the Amipotent God and sexual and gender diversity, a topic he has fought tirelessly for in recent years. He writes that, “The variations in the bodies and desires of both LGBTQIA+ and straight and cisgender people fit a theology that says God works alongside creaturely agency, chance, environment, genetics, histories, and more. This God wants multifarious beauty and pluriform love.” (114) In other words, he says to “Let a thousand, healthy flowers bloom.” (114) Likewise, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand.”[2] In the latter’s work, the transsexual nature of relationships, both human and non-human, is deeply entwined with the schizoid element of nature as an inherently productive force. What they find in each case is a revolutionary potential in the way mind and matter, conjoined in bodies, interact with each other and produce novel moments, experiences, and possibilities in an ever-changing world. Love in this sense, to use Oord’s phrase, is “pluriform.”
Oord’s own work for the LGBTQIA+ community has inspired my own in mad studies. As a trans, queer, and mad person, I understand quite intimately the difference between omnipotence and amipotence: it will ultimately determine whether my own difference will be loved or chastised, embraced or enburdened. The question we must ask is this: Will we accept the fear that comes under an Omnipotent One or celebrate the wildness that comes from the Amipotent Many? In other words, are we willing to go a little mad for the sake of love?
When I speak of a mad theology, I speak of a politics founded on a theology of love. A theology in which the Godhead is hidden in the ever-present, ego-dissolving process of entering into relationship. A Mad God is a loving God. A God that cannot work except through the hands of creatures, that speaks the Word as love through so many vessels, that completes itself in a diversity of incarnations. In our loving, we move beyond the reality of a godless world and into the madness of shared hospitality. Via love, we create the center that would otherwise not exist. And is love anything less than the mad dream of creatures made of matter and mind, thrown into the world without consent, connecting themselves across a circle that had no center until they extended to one another their ever-distant welcome?
Bio: Rose Sharon (she/they) is a PhD student at Drew University, where she studies Theological and Philosophical Studies in Religion with a concentration in Decoloniality and Critical Theory. Her work focuses on the intersections of decoloniality, posthumanism, queer and trans studies, mad studies, and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze. She lives in Seattle, WA. Find her work at https://ingoodfaith.vision.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Rose Sharon explores what it might mean for an immanent God to be mad, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of schizophrenia as process. She seeks to dematerialize God, using this framework to address the problem of evil. According to Sharon, the amipotent God is a friend to mad people and those with sexual and gender diversity. I’m delighted that amipotence has inspired her work in mental health. Her vision reveals profound connections between a theology of love and a God deeply present with those who experience madness, affirming divine solidarity with the marginalized, queer, and neurodiverse in meaningful ways.
For more on Oord’s view of what it means to love queer people, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 89.
[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 296.