An Amipotent God is Both the Poet and the Poetry
By Bill Tammeus
The idea of God’s omnipotence has many sincere supporters,
but they miss something more important—God’s amipotence.
In his compelling book, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, Thomas Jay Oord sets for himself an imposing, against-the-odds goal. He wants to convince all of us to believe that God is not omnipotent and that we’re misguided fools to refer to the deity that way. Still, as I wrote on my “Faith Matters” blog (https://bit.ly/3GVoXrt) when I reviewed the book there, Oord “makes a persuasive case.”
The word persuasive, of course, does not mean he has persuaded everyone—maybe not even, at times, including me. So let’s consider what Oord is up against.
As you read along here, feel free to listen to a recording or a YouTube version of the hymn “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” which calls God “most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, almighty, victorious” and other unfettered adjectives. Or perhaps you might sing the 17th Century Isaac Watts hymn, “The Lord! How Fearful Is His Name,” verse 3 of which says this: “A word of his almighty breath/Can swell or sink the seas;/Build the vast empires of the earth/Or break them, as he please.”
Much of the church’s hymnody clearly leans—distinctly so—toward the concept of divine omnipotence. So there’s that.
But what about the great confessions of the church? Isn’t there some succor for Oord’s anti-omnipotence campaign there? Well, maybe not so much. For instance, the 1560 Scots Confession quickly uses these adjectives to describe God: “eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible.” There’s that omnipotent word again. It seems to be, like God, both omnipresent and persuasive (in the sense that I used that word earlier here).
If we turn to the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, God gets described with such words as “the greatest good, living, quickening and preserving all things, omnipotent and supremely wise, kind and merciful, just and true.” Clearly Oord finds no support there. Beyond that, the same confession quotes St. Augustine as saying this about God: “But he who is good would not permit evil to be done, unless, being omnipotent, he could bring good out of evil.” Maybe Oord could make some hay out of the irresolute word “unless” here, but that looks like pretty thin soup.
There is more in the confessions, but they seem pretty committed to divine omnipotence. Despite that, Oord insists on this point in his book: “Christian scripture does not support omnipotence. It doesn’t teach that God has all power; it says there are many things God cannot do.”
Oord then provides an impressive list of things he contends that God cannot do, starting with the absurd, such as creating a stone so heavy that God can’t lift it, then moving on to more practical things: God cannot die. God cannot sin. God cannot lie. God cannot change the past. God cannot do pushups. And on and on. As I say, the list is long and impressive, though it’s unclear why or how Oord is so certain that God can’t do pushups. I personally wouldn’t put that past God, whose sense of humor has always seemed infinite to me. Why else would God have created pigeons in such a way that they cannot walk without moving their heads like a pointing and retreating arrow without also moving their butts in a counter rhythm? And as Larry the Cable Guy used to say, “Now that’s funny.”
Oord seems to me to be on much more solid ground defining and defending amipotence than trying to deconstruct into nonsense the concept of omnipotence.
We need, for instance, to look no further than to I John 4:16 in the New Testament to find the declaration that “God is love…” Which means, of course, that love is God, and that Oord is right to suggest amipotence is a pretty fair word to capture that sprawling idea.
But, oh, how much better the world would be if all of us learned from that idea how to reflect it in the way we live. Clearly, however, the idea that God’s amipotence is transferrable in some way to humanity is aspirational in the same way that America’s founding documents were aspirational when they described the created equality of all people, considering that at that time some people were chained in slavery and women were denied the right to vote.
But let’s remember this as we think about whether Oord got something right about God being amipotent or is simply a hopelessly optimistic dreamer: The stories of creation do not say God labeled the creation “perfect.” Rather, God labeled it “good” and, eventually, “very good.” Perfection is an impossible standard that I think both Oord and I would contend is unnecessary to have a world in which an amipotent God can show us how to love.
In fact, one could make a strong case for the idea that the creation, including humanity, sometimes seems not to be either “good” or “very good.” Think of human bigotry, wars and crimes. Think of disease and nature’s occasional deadly explosions such as earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis. Think of prime-time TV, which a federal official decades ago declared to be a “vast wasteland,” and of our unrealistic hope today that it would rise again to being merely that awful.
So I completely understand the charge that perhaps the world was God’s science fair project—on which God got a D.
But none of that means we can or should dismiss the concept of a holy creator who embodies and transmits love and is, thus, amipotent. Indeed, it is—or can be—a much more attractive and generative concept than omnipotence, which, as Oord points out, “leads some to unbelief and despair. To those who suffer intensely, a God who can eliminate pain is asleep on the job. Or this deity doesn’t care enough to rescue the hurting from horrors and holocausts. Fervent prayers for healing go unanswered; cries from the abused elicit few divine rescues; children are not protected. Consequently, many people have no desire to live forever with a God who allows evil now.”
Bad God. Go to your room and think about what you’ve done and not done that you should have done. And when you’re feeling repentant, write “I will not create any more worlds” 500 times on the blackboard. Also, God, unless divine judgment (about which scripture says a lot) is a redemptive tool of amipotence, scratch that off your to-do list, too.
But perhaps the problem is not God but us, who treasure (and worship?) the divine gift of free will, who know what love, generosity, kindness, compassion and mercy are but choose instead what eventually must be called evil. And not because of some kind of personified devil, a being named, say, Satan. That concept is often just a way of excusing the banality and ubiquitousness of destructive human behavior.
Which leads us to where theology always leads us—to the ancient theodicy question about why, if God is good and powerful (and especially omnipotent), there is suffering and evil in the world. But the open wound of religion is that no one has ever found a fully satisfying answer to that question. In many ways, theodicy is the very question with which Oord is wrestling because there simply is no other question if we are to take seriously the claims of Christianity that God is all about love and redemption.
Redemption from what and for what? That’s the follow-on question, of course. But there’s no reason even to ask it if God really is omnipotent because divine omnipotence puts an end to all useful theological discussion and exploration.
Omnipotence is the quintessential parental answer to the question that all children ask: “Why?” And the inevitable answer is, “Because I said so.” Which may convey the image of power but is completely out of sorts with the idea of love.
Author and poet Christian Wiman, in his book Zero at the Bone, considers the enigmas of theodicy, but finally writes this: “Perhaps the question, with regard to suffering and what it will mean in your life, comes down to this: What will be the object of your faith, and what will your act of faith look like?”[1]
If, like Job and, well, like Oord, too, we make an amipotent God the object of our faith, one of our acts of faith will look like what it looked like for Job after he had rebuffed his know-nothing friends who were full of sound and fury reflecting the idiocies of biblical literalism: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.” (Job 19:25, NRSVue)
In that way, we will take God the way God seems to want to be taken—as both the poet and the poetry itself. In “The Sound of Music,” a key song asks these questions about the flighty but irresistible Maria: “Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”
You don’t. Nor do you “solve” God. Instead, you simply luxuriate in the divine and amipotent moonbeam that is the Holy One, source of all love, meaning and mystery. And that, surely, is enough.
Bio: Bill Tammeus is a former Kansas City Star columnist and an elder in a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation. He’s authored or co-authored seven books, most recently The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith and Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Tammeus’s essay on the challenges to amipotence. He rightly observes that traditional hymns and confessions depict God as omnipotent, which leads to serious conceptual issues. Scripture and major theologians have long acknowledged that there are things God cannot do, often due to logic or divine nature. Yet Bill’s central focus is love. To meaningfully address why a loving God allows real evil, he suggests rejecting omnipotence. The alternative he proposes closely resembles the amipotent God—one who is both poet and poetry, shaping life not through coercion but through loving, creative presence. I found his insights profound.
For more on Oord’s view on the worship of authoritarianism, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, by Christian Wiman; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2023; page 267